Easóg is going ballistic because there is a bug on the ceiling that she wants to kill but cannot reach

sometimes you have to be a little evil

sometimes you have to be a wittle weevil

speak of the weevil

I can be your bestie 😇 or your beastie 🍤

made a friend tonight

I’ve been playing the “open network test” demo for Sonic Racing: Crossworlds and having a good time. I am not much of a kart racer gal but I did really like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and that is going to be my main point of comparison. The quick version is that it’s fun but I am not spending 70-bloody-€ on this.

One thing that is immediately apparently compared to Transformed is that Crossworlds is much more chaotic. The game is a constant sensory overload. The central gimmick is that the second lap of each race sends you to a random other track and the last lap of each track also adds new items, hazards and shortcuts to the track, so things are constantly changing every race and items feel more powerful and far less easily dealt with than in Transformed. That game’s blue shell created a minefield in front of the lead player, something that is going to slow you down a little but was avoidable with some care, while Crossworlds has two different items that directly target the lead player and seem nigh-undodgeable. The three different homing attacks also feel significantly harder to get away from with a well-timed boost than they did in Transformed (or perhaps I am just very rusty) with the constant sensory overload of the game not helping there. There are also three different catchup items that automatically send you forward in position on top of the monster truck super transformation and regular boost powerups which also help anyone who has fallen behind rejoin the clusterfuck in the middle of the pack.

Of course my impressions also being coloured here by the fact that I mostly played the single-player mode of Transformed while this demo of Crossworlds, being a network test, has very limited singleplayer options with only one grand prix with three tracks¹ to play singleplayer and many more tracks available to experience in online play so I have mostly been sticking to that. I am a bit disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be much character dialogue when playing multiplayer. The grand prix mode assigns you a rival character who will banter with you as you race other racers might talk to you as you interact (i.e. attack each other). I can understand that people eventually get sick of repeated dialogue in online matches but I wouldn’t mind the option to toggle it on and maybe even toggle on assigning other random players (or friends that you are partying up with) as rivals for a race.

The character I’m most interested in terms of these voice lines is Sage, who was only introduced in Sonic Frontiers and hasn’t interacted with most of the wider cast at all yet. I’m curious as to how they handle the context that she exists in outside of the plot of that game. She is not available in the demo, though, and I have been playing almost exclusively as Cream (because Blaze also isn’t available in the demo).

One thing that Crossworlds does have over Transformed is the vehicle customisation. It’s done a little strangely and there’s not a huge amount of depth to it—you are not swapping out spoilers or other individual parts, only the front and back halves of various vehicles—but it’s still fun to play around with. Layering decals on top of the paintjobs does give you some more freedom but even this is pretty restrictive – you can’t overlap decals and they tend have a large transparent zone around the main image that stops you using them to create more detailed shapes. I imagine that this might be intentional to try to stop people making anything offensive with them but I did try my best on my extreme gear design to combine some basic shapes to make a depiction of Rocky behind where the rider stands.

One criticism I have of the car customisation is that when it comes to horns and decals they don’t seem to have given much thought to the Sonic the Hedgehog theming. The horn options sound like they came unaltered from a stock asset pack. There is one labelled “spring” and it is not the Sonic spring noise, just a generic cartoon spring. There is a decal in there of Sonic’s face (which looks quite funny) but really none for rings or Chaos Emeralds? None of the other characters’ silhouetted extra life icons? The “auras” you can apply to the cars also all look like shit and just add to the visual noise of the game.

Your custom paintjob also gets overriden in the game’s time-limited festivals, in which players are put into themed 4v4v4 teams in races with special rules, with the winning team for each race earning points. The festival for the network test is Persona 5-themed with Team Joker, Team Violet and Team Mona. This sounds like a Splatfest but it is not—it’s a battle pass. You do not choose a team you are randomly assigned one every race, making them utterly pointless other than what colour your car is going to be for the next five minutes and points simply go to unlocking Persona-themed decals that I will never use. Joker himself, one of the future DLC characters for the game, was also temporarily unlocked for this which just highlighted how much of a lazy cashgrab the cross-promotional characters are, lacking any voicelines or even a full set of animations. From what they’ve shown of the game so far the only voiced DLC character is going to be Hatsune Miku, the one that they don’t have to pay a voice actor for. Even the Werehog pre-order bonus doesn’t have any lines and he’s just Sonic with a gruffer voice. They have Roger Craig Smith voicing Sonic and Omega in the game already could they not have him do this too at least? But if you want to race as a completely silent Spongebob Squarepants be sure to buy the season pass.

Also the final lap music for a lot of stages is really bad.

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local GAA club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ

A roundup of some posts I’ve been reading that I thought I’d share.

Deus Ex Machina [1984] — Arcade Idea

I have been catching up on the sadly inactive Arcade Idea, a blog working through the history of video games through selected games that chart development of the medium. Unlike many such projects it does not focus only on console and arcade games or on games that are still famous.

Deus Ex Machina, whose entry I have linked, is a fascinating ZX Spectrum game/interactive movie/concept album that I had never heard of, designed and composed by Mel Croucher.

It’s actually on Steam and there is a playthrough available to watch on Mel Croucher’s Youtube channel. It has some pretty heavily strobing lights in some sections.

When the mouse dies inside The Machine, it takes its one final death shit. The turd drops into the test-tube babymaker. For the whole first act, and arguably the whole game, you play as this mouse turd.

COVID Denialism and Disability Justice — Natalie Weizenbaum

I have been also reading Natalie’s posts about setting up post embedding and reblogging and will have a look at doing that too, so maybe in future instead of these roundup posts I will directly reblog stuff into my feed.

Because this category myth isn't just incorrect, it's oppressive. All axes of oppression are wrapped around similar myths. This is why sexists are so threatened by transsexuals, why racists invented the crime of miscegenation. An oppressive mindset demands a clear and permanent division between oneself and one's victims; a mode of thought that relies on clear and permanent divisions is at high risk of enacting oppression, knowingly or not. Those who are unable (or unwilling) to imagine themselves becoming disabled are the ones who do the most harm to people who already are.

The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam — Luna

The NES Pictionary bot, was, as Luna describes, something that could almost have existed on any social media website. But it could only have worked how it did, and how well it did, on Cohost, where users were given much more of a blank canvas to work with than any other social media site.

This could have been achieved on Twitter via a two-account mechanism. The main account would post the image with the dashes, a secondary account would post a reply with the solution. Users could then mute/block the secondary account, or follow it if they wanted to always see the solutions.

Similarly, this could have been achieved on Mastodon using the Content Warning (CW) system, which allows you to put a post behind a warning and require action on the part of the user to actually view the post. The bot would post the image with the dashes, and then in a follow-up post, post the solution under a CW, making users interact to see the solution.

These solutions always seemed kinda clunky to me, and eventually I just forgot all about it.

Enter Cohost.

A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat — andi mcc

Speaking of giving users a blank canvas with HTML, this is one of the posts I saw circulating again towards the end of Cohost’s life, detailing the absolutely audatious way that Geocities HTML chat (which I had never heard of before) worked. Now that Cohost is shutting down she has returned to her blog.

Geocities HTML Chat was, from a technical perspective, a guestbook with a small twist. There was a chat for each of the "cities" (my home was SiliconValley, I think?). Each chat used (of course) frames to display two smaller webpages. One frame above (I don't actually remember, but let's say it was above) was a thin band containing a CGI input form. The lower frame was larger, and scrolled freely. This frame used a server-side trick; the server would tell your web browser it was sending it an infinitely long web page (or maybe it just claimed it was some impossibly large size, a gigabyte or something). It would send it the opening <html>, and then it would hang. It would keep the socket open. When a user in the chat room submitted a line to their CGI box, every user would simultaneously receive a new line on the bottom-frame open socket (which their web browser sincerely believed an ordinary webpage was actually really loading into, just very slowly).

pokémon cymraeg — Twitchcoded

A page where Twitch is documenting a project of translating pokémon names into Welsh. I had fun before coming up with Irish translations for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. It’s the kind of thing that lets you play with language in a cool way. Pokémon are great for this especially because of the multilayered and punny nature of their names. Draoi Aisteach</i> has actually already made full translations of Pokémon Red and Blue.

38

ninetales

cadnaw

cadno (fox) naw (nine) cadnawes (vixen)

America a Prophecy — Elizabeth Sandifer

Last time I linked to Elizabeth Sandifer’s Doctor Who writing. This time I am going to link to another of her long-term projects: An annual series of blog posts analysing the American psyche through the lens of a bafflingly awful newspaper comic about the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I recommend reading the whole series and I look forward to next year’s.

As a practitioner of a magical/critical practice that I have coined psychochronography, it is my belief that one can position any cultural object at the center of one’s vision and, through sufficiently thorough exploration of it, understand the larger world in which it exists. To this end, I propose that we explore this genuinely astonishing work of comics art in order to understand the whole of America in the 21st century.

New Team, New Discord! — Spore in the News

For the sheer novelty of it: Spore’s official website and RSS feed updated this week. Spore. The game from 2008. Why not add it to your RSS reader too so that you can get updated on any new Spore news? Or I guess more likely join the Discord server they are using the news post to advertise.

Spore has a new team! You may notice some of our team members making the rounds throughout the Spore communities - RogueLyeshal (Rogue) and Reiliyn (Rei) are leading up our new community efforts. Speaking of… there is now an official Discord server, where you can keep up with the latest news from the development team, participate in contests, and get to know other players of Spore! Come join us!

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them — James O’Malley

A cry for help I saw via Tom Scott’s newsletter that also goes into recovering teletext data from tapes.

What Alistair realised though was that even though there were no complete teletext pages stored on his tapes, there were still fragments of teletext data captured and saved by the tapes.

So he wrote some code that does something mind-blowing. Using his software, if you play in a VHS tape to a TV capture card, it will take the raw recording data, pick out the nuggets of teletext, and like magic will stitch them back together into complete pages.

Like I say, it’s witchcraft.

Artificial Life: Insects — CD-ROM Journal

A blog from Misty De Méo that explores old multimedia CDs. Maybe some day she’ll cover Ring: 感×染.

Although the front cover and spine credit Harada first, and it's clear Harada's CG artwork is the real centrepiece here, the three works are presented as coequals. More than an art book, a novel, or a game, it's a project that shows how different mediums transform the same basic concepts. The three works don't just diverge because of different inspirations but because their mediums influence what kinds of interpretations are possible, what kinds of ideas can take root.

hot pepsi ☕ — Dr. Melon

I can’t say I agree with this but it’s certainly an interesting perspective.

I highly recommend trying it out if you haven’t had it before, especially on a colder or rainy day. There’s something great about the warm steam coming off the top combined with tiny droplets flying out of the drink due to the carbonation that leave a pleasantly-contrasty cooling sensation on the lips just before you take a sip of the toasty liquid within. Drinking it and feeling the warm fizz is a little alchemical, and a little rebellious, with the net effect of overall feeling like you’re sneaking some of a wizard’s potion while he’s out gathering herbs.

👨‍💻 Side By Side 👨‍🎨 — Mike Egan

A cute little motion design animation!

I was deep in the website building mines in April, both working on this site, and building Welcome to the Cyber World, my MMBN fansite that I made for the Critical Distance Fansite Jam.

So I wanted to make something celebrating the joy and creativity of the particular left-brain/right-brain cooperation present in using code to make what is essentially a piece of visual media.

It's called Side By Side because it was originally a horizontal piece with both windows sitting next to each other, but I found that to be too static, and the transition I landed on is more fun and dynamic. It also mirrors the actual experience of building a website, in that you often write the code not knowing 100% what the site will look like until you load it up in a browser!