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

Oh it is has been a while since I posted one of these and I have built up quite a backlog of links.

Musical accompaniment for this volume chosen mostly to cause psychic damage against my partner.

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Da Web

The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users — Samuel Proulx

Interesting insights here into how the uses of text to speech for sighted and blind people are fundamentally different and how functionality for the latter is usually, unfortunately an afterthought.

Supertonic is slightly faster, as it can stream result audio as it becomes available, whereas Kitten TTS cannot start speaking until all of the audio for the chunk is fully generated. But for use in a screen reader, a text to speech system needs to begin generating speech as quickly as possible, rather than waiting for an entire phrase or sentence. Users of screen readers quickly jump through text and frequently interrupt the screen reader, and thus require the text to speech system to be able to quickly discard and restart speech.

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A tale of two Webs — Oblomov

A lot of the development efforts (both creative and destructive) in web browsers in the last decade+ has been going into fostering the “web app” vision of the web, to the detriment of the “web of documents” vision. From the removal of native support for RSS and Atom feeds to the introduction of JavaScript APIs like WebUSB or the Web Environment Integrity attempt I already discussed in the past, nearly all work done on browsers has been in this direction.

I feel this a lot. The web of documents now lives in the margins of the web of apps and with Google’s capturing of standards has made maintaining a web browser to keep up with the former impossible without the backing of Google or other huge companies who are increasingly hostile to users having any agency. I feel similarly about operating systems at this point, too. I abandoned Windows on my home computer years ago and since then it has become ever more hostile to users having control over what their machine does. This isn’t new, simply an acceleration of trends that have existed for a long, long time.

As much as I want the “A.I.” bubble to burst I do wonder if the push for “agentic” systems might actually stick simply from the obscene amounts of money being powered into trying to make users handing over nearly all agency and control of their machines to chatbots actually work or be desirable. Currently Windows still does allow itself to be used as an actual desktop operating system, but clearly Microsoft at this point want to push everything towards locked-down, controlled and monitored black boxes, possibly even worse than phones possibly are. How long till they think they can get away with amputating the shrivelled lump of the desktop operating system, cut off direct user access to the filesystem outside of what you have in Dropbox that you pay a subscription for and lock everyone into software from the app store for everyone but enterprise customers who can pay through the nose? Or at least just keep breaking core parts of the operating system until they’re barely useable.

On a more positive note this article also prompted me to add metadata to the site that will work with the Website Navigation Bar addon for Palemoon if you’re using that because I thought it was cute and it was easy to do as I was already using that information to render on-page navigation elements anyway.

And speaking of the web of documents…

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Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website! — The Virtual Moose

I know I’m going to be preaching to the choir with the kind of people who are reading a personal blog already, but still.

I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.

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Stolen Focus — Luna

I do still have to catch and reset myself with various bad computer and social media habits every once in a while. It’s easy to fall into when you are tired and sore and everything that would be interesting or engaging or useful just feels like a massive hump to get over.

By this time, however, I had become once again hopelessly addicted to social media. I wasn’t getting notifications, and I wasn’t fixated on numbers any more, but I was still compulsively checking and refreshing, desperate for the feed to give me another hit of dopamine. I lost hours each day to flicking through TikTok any time I had a quiet moment — rather to flood my brain with stimulation than have to sit in uncomfortable silence even for a moment. A partner and I would engage in a habit we called “TikTok time”, where we’d screen-share the videos we’d Liked recently with each other. Increasingly I was finding I had little to show for the hours I’d spent scrolling the feed. It had become akin to a slot machine; I kept scrolling and scrolling in the hopes that maybe the next video would be something I wanted to see — whatever that was.

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Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it — Elizabeth Lopatto

What else is there to say?

So why is X different? It’s run by Elon Musk. “He’s the richest man in the world, he has close ties to the US government, and he’s incredibly litigious,” says Pfefferkorn. In fact, Musk has previously filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate; in a now-dismissed lawsuit, he claimed it illegally collected data showing an increase in hate speech after he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter.

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Games (general)

Horses Is Tame — Chris Person

But of course, if you want to make art…

This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business.

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Alternative Games From The Fringes Of Cyberspace — Nathalie Lawhead

And a somewhat more hopeful view on being considering unmonetisable.

The games that exist outside the mainstream, and I think the type of personal empowerment they represent, is what makes them “controversial”.
Especially under the scope of mainstream culture where everything needs to sell, satisfy a commercial value, be consumer centric, or live up to such capitalist standards.

Unmonetized self expression is an act or resistance in today’s tech landscape.

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Why we are making Jank — Brendan Caldwell

Games journalists Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Graham Smith have launched a new games site called Jank that fails to live up to its name by functioning well and not being bloated with ads, tracking, affiliate links, chatbots and other crap that turns sites into a churn of advertisement-friendly sludge.

Perhaps less obvious is the kind of writing that disappears in the process. Articles about new games, niche games, and experimental work don’t get traffic, so off they go. Deeply researched columns from subject matter experts don’t get traffic, so they’re cut. Not many people read interviews, unless you can get someone to say something controversial and pull it out as a news story, so it’s rarely worth talking to developers about their work. Articles designed purely to entertain with daft jokes, such as diary series, don’t deliver numbers at scale no matter how much their readers adore them.

Will this work out? Can they make enough money doing this to actually make a living? I don’t know but I hope so, and I hope they make enough that they can round up a few other Rock, Paper, Shotgun veterans as well. They are also trialling a partnership with the Total Playtime podcast which I am a fan of as well. Supporting one will give you access to the membership perks of the other, at least for the next few months.

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The gamers hate generative AI — Laura Michet

Gamers rise up.

I’ve assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.

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Games (specific)

“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand — Joe Wintergreen

On the more technical side of games I always like reading Joe Wintergreen’s breakdowns of how systems work.

A scenario I’ve found useful to expose a lot of edges cases is a guy pissing against a wall and leaving a puddle of piss. Support this scenario with no aberrant behaviours and you are doing okay.

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Abstraction in Rhythm Doctor — Blueberry Lemonade

How are layers of abstraction perceived? What expectations do they set? At what point do U.I. elements stop being representational and start to become part of the fiction itself?

It sounds small (and it is), but it was a firm example in my mind of how the game was changing the longer we worked on it. Instead of characters simply appearing and disappearing in abstract space whenever they were needed for gameplay, we were now introducing the idea that they are real characters standing in real rooms that are connected to each other. They can walk, or run, from one place to another. They’re living lives of their own when they aren’t being treated.

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The Great Celeste Race 2026 — Caoimhe³

Caoimhe wrote a much better narrative of the annual Celeste race than mine.

This part was a delight. Ruby and I swapped the lead as we often did, but with microscopic gaps becoming the norm. A single death in a puzzle would swap the lead, and hesitating would throw away any advantage we may have had. I lose the lead at the end of the 1500 metres section, at a puzzle I know I hate, and pull it back cleanly at 2000 metres. At 2500 metres, I had a small lead, but here is where the dream ends.

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list animals until failure — Vivian

Here is a new blog with a strong, realistic, game plan for updates and a fun post about the suffering involved in defining how many animals there.

If you’re an entomologist, or an evolutionary biologist, you might say “well, bees and ants are just wasps, really”, and I respect that. But colloquially, bees and ants aren’t wasps. If this game insists on a purely phylogenic approach, then it’s like, come on, I can’t get a point for saying wasp and ant? That’s unreasonable. If I ask a 2-year-old to list animals and she lists wasp and ant, I’m not gonna break out the DNA sequences like “Ohh well evolutionarily ants are technically wasps”. I’m gonna say yeah, good job, that’s two animals.

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Serious stuff (trans)

‘A Directive From Above’: Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-Trans Bigotry — Billie Jean Sweeney

A look into how hatred and transphobia gets pushed down from above in the media.

She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn’t jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document.

When I saw it, because we’re a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don’t know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage.

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I bear the scars of a healthcare system that fails trans people — Jenny Maguire

And another article on the Loughlinstown gender clinic being awful to throw on the pile.

“Oh wow,” she said. “Did you do this yourself?” Immediately, I felt her fingers running through my curls, as if I was a glamorous dog being poked and prodded. Still, I put on a smiley face and went along with this condescending charade. I knew what I needed, and I was not going to cause a fuss — as if I had any choice.

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Serious stuff (general)

Outlive The Bastards — Caoimhe³

May we.

There’s been several eye-opening moments for me in the past few years. Realisations that we can simply do things never before imagined. These rolling revelations haven’t stopped. I can live and love in ways I was never able to before, and nothing can stop this.

So we live. But only in a way that works for us. We dictate how we breathe, how we act, how we medicate, how we live and how we die. How long did I spend dancing to other peoples’ tunes, hoping and begging to be given basic respect, only to be thrown aside? Never again.

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TrAPPed: Arrested by Phone — Anand RK, Suparna Sharma & Natalie Obiko Pearson

Bloody fuck.

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shit i keep seeing: “conflict resolution” via gaslighting — Joe Wintergreen

I fear that I may been this person before but I know I have definitely worked with a guy who did this.

I guess what I’m seeing is guys who’ve never learned to resolve conflict, only to “win”, overcorrecting and becoming what might be termed “conflict-avoidant”, but their avoidance strategy is pretending, the moment there is a conflict, that there isn’t one. If they can get this past everyone in the moment, face is saved and they’re off the hook for a true resolution.

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We Don’t Need Any More Renewables — Adapt : Survive : Prevail

I am endlessly frustrated by people thinking that if we just have more renewable energy then everything else about our suicidal systems of exponential growth and resource extraction will be fine.

So in plain language, here is the actual claim: “We have no choice but to meet all electricity demands and doing so via renewable energy increases greenhouse gas emissions by a lesser amount than fossil fuels.”

Now that we have clarity on the actual claim, we can break it down. The reality is this: 1) We absolutely do have a choice because demand is politically, economically, and socially constructed, and 2) The choice between renewables and fossil fuels is a false binary, like telling a healthy person they must chose between losing an arm or a leg.

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Meaning, Memory and Christmas in Ireland — Seán MacBrádaigh

A brief dive into the complex place of Catholicism in Ireland.

A new state, born of revolution, civil war and counter-revolution, sought stability through moral uniformity. In doing so, it aligned itself closely with a powerful and highly conservative Catholic hierarchy, outsourcing social order, education, health and morality to the Church. This was not a neutral partnership. It produced an official vision of Irishness that was narrow and exclusionary - defining virtue and respectability in rigid Catholic terms.

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 G.A.A. 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

I have been rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and talking about it with friends a lot so here is my favourite of all the intros from it or Brotherhood (it’s just the first intro from Brotherhood).

Also just a small rant: I hate how the top results on Youtube for this kind of stuff is always horrible interpolated to 60FPS upscaled crap that ruins the animation.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have conflicting urges to want to write more and do more but also I know I need to rest more. Don’t expect me to be Blaugusting. I am actually trying to get as much off my plate as possible and not commit to things, including pruning my RSS feeds quite a bit so I feel less obliged to keep up with so much. Everything is difficult 👍🏻

But I have still been reading and have things to share. No particular order or categories to things this time.

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The Narrative Fallacy — Nikhil Suresh

On how a compelling narratives not just get people to buy into ideas, but obscure otherwise very obvious flaws, and how the use of narratives in this way is actually taught and enforced in university education.

No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years can’t pick up on it. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that you don’t know either.

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The Missing 11th of the Month — David R. Hagen

Why is the 11th of each month (other than September) consistently underrepresented in the Google Books database as shown in this XKCD comic? The answer is typographical.

When I began this study, I was hoping to find a hidden taboo of holding events on the 11th or typographical bias against the shorthand ordinal. Alas, the reason is far is far more mundane: a numeral 1 looks a lot like a capital I or a lowercase l or a lowercase i in most of the fonts used for printing books. An 11 also looks like an n, apparently. Google’s algorithms made mistakes when reading the 11th from a page, interpreting the ordinal as some other word.

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So-Called “AI” Cannot Program — Natalie Weizenbaum

This really resonated with me. The most frustrating projects I have coded for are the ones where people have not thought through the meaning of what they are asking for, where they ask “make this work” with no clear definition of what working looks like outside of the most idealised possible scenario without consideration of real world use, let alone edge cases or failure states. I feel “a programmer is paid to refine semantics” to my bones.

Programming is the act of making a computer enact a semantic task. The computer’s silicon internals, its RAM and hard disk and even its pixels, are the syntax here. It has no intrinsic meaning, just a set of ones and zeros and a very complex set of rules for transforming them. The semantics are the human interpretation of what it’s doing and why, the understanding of those numbers and pixels as a map to the nearest ramen joint or a simulation of a puppygirl begging for treats.

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(a) cohost postmortem: life after death — Jae Kaplan

I still get far too emotional thinking about Cohost.

the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.

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Revisiting Chapters: Tyrion V, ACoK — Turtle-paced

I really love A Game of Thrones and I used to read a lot of fan analysis stuff and listened to a couple of podcasts just about the series. Turtle-paced is the one person in that sphere that I still follow and I still really enjoy reading her deep dive chapter analyses when she posts them. She does, as the name of her blog implies, post them at the rate of a testudine and it is a nice occasional treat for me.

This is just how it is, per Tyrion. His response is not to address the unfairness but to show gratitude for the benefits he enjoys. The idea that everyone should have those privileges does not cross his mind. It’s a way in which he’s like Cersei. Though again, and as usual for the Lannister siblings, this is also a product of an abusive home. Tyrion’s only protection against the various injustices he faces in life due to his disability come from being a Lannister. The idea that everyone should have Lannister-level privileges is a threat to him - which in turn is a belief born of despair that of course everyone will hate him for his disability, and this can never change.

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GameCube controllers in Sunfluffs — Azure

Putting native Gamecube controller in a new PC game, cool! Seen via Misty.

okay so, something that’s been bugging me for 15+ years but i never realized how to put it into words until recently: regular game controllers have different layouts depending on if you’re in gameplay or in menus.

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Moon Light Café — CD-ROM Journal

Another multimedia CD.

Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar… and sometimes it means something that’s only notable for being early. Today’s disc is one of those.

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What I’m Reading, Volume 3 — Caoimhe

My clone also shared some interesting links, including an article about the decline of bin stores, a type of business I didn’t even know existed and beautiful photos of industrial waste dumps in Russia.

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Ancient Globalism: Rome, India, China, & Beyond — Nathan Goldwag

Ancient trade is cool! The past was international!

Titianus himself was a Macedonian, as well as a Roman citizen, and reflects just how complex and multifaceted these exchanges truly are. We talk of “Rome” and “China” as unitary civilizations, exchanging speech and goods like two singular individuals, but of course both were mere representations of vast conglomerations of peoples, cultures, and nations, all of which were constantly in flux. At Shatial, in the Karakoram Mountains of the Punjab, more than 1,000 inscriptions and 700 petroglyphs were carved into the rock near a key pass, recording names, dates, and prayers from travelers. They appear mostly in Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Aramaic, Brahmi, and Kharosthi. Nine are written in the extinct Bactrian language, one uses Chinese characters, and one is in Hebrew.

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Rachel’s iPod — Luna

A short lament about erasing someone’s past from an old device.

Have you ever bought a pre-owned game cartridge or MP3 player or something, and the previous owner’s data is still on it — and for a brief moment, you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?

Hell, I have felt sad in the past about clearing out my own childhood savedata from a cartridge. A few years ago I was able to boot my old copy of Soleil and was greeted with save files under my deadname as well as my brother and sister’s names.

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Let’s make up fantasy consoles for fun — Kyle Labriola

Seen via Mike Egan’s link roundup.

If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?

This is something I have actually thought about before. One of the myriad little ideas filed away that I will certainly never have time for (and would have to learn many, many new skills to ever do myself) and if I ever do get time for it the moment for it will probably have passed. But the idea of a Pico-8 style fantasy console with its own integrated development environment but 3D with an eye to creating PSX-style visuals in the way that been in vogue, especially with horror games with a Crocotile-style friendly editor for mapping and modelling has been fermenting in my mind for years.

And very importantly it would also be paired with a secondary, 2D, low-spec fantasy console similar to Pico-8 (some musings of this involved it being a Pico-8 clone that could run Pico-8 carts itself, but maybe that would be stepping on Zep’s toes too much) that could play its own separate games as well as link to main console to act as a simple secondary screen like a VMU, either running it in a separate window on the same desktop or else running on your phone linked via wifi connection. Have extra HUD info on the second screen, control a game entirely through your phone with a unique interface, pass it to a friend and allow extra asymmetrical co-op control, download a chao to your phone! I am aware that second-screen peripherals have been done a load of times and it has basically always bombed but I don’t care I love control and interface gimmicks and am eternally enamoured with stuff like the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope allowing you to use the VMU screen as an incredibly low fidelity scope and Zombi U’s gimmick of making you look away to the Wii U gamepad so much to divide your situational awareness in stressful situations.

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What My Hysterectomy Taught Me About Bodily Autonomy and Misogyny — Kelly

Medical misogyny is nothing surprising to me but this lays it out very strongly.

There was no medical reason to keep it. You don’t need your uterus to survive, it’s only function is to be a womb. If you keep your ovaries you won’t even go into early menopause. Yet they made it clear that saving my womb was more important than my life.

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Why are games scary? — Laura Michet

But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it’s trying to be.

I think this raises an interesting question of why anyone is bothered to take a game like No Mercy seriously at all. I do think there is an interesting idea in how games so very opaque to a lot of people that they don’t necessarily intuit the obvious difference between a shovelware porn game and something with the the actual cultural impact of, say, Call of Duty in the way that they obviously can between a Holywood movie and some random porn film but I do feel like it is something more culturally based than games just been too long and too much of an investment to experience.

Add Eggbug sunset to Cohost page when you play Love Honk

normal git commit message

One of the habits I had on Cohost was making some specific daily posts. I didn’t always get around to it, there were long stretches of times where I didn’t post any of these, but on my main account I liked to post a song of the day and I had a few side accounts too. One of them I posted intros to TV shows, games, movies etc. and another where I posted joke Sonic Heroes teams.

I don’t plan on continuing these but I have gone through the posts and made an archive of song of the day and intro posts in the form of Youtube playlists. I had to find alternatives to some videos that have been taken down or upload some myself that were not originally Youtube videos and they will continue to succumb to link rot but for the moment they are, I think, complete archives of what I posted.

They are also very long. The intros playlist is a little over nine hours and the song of the day one is technically over two days long but it includes a couple of joke ten hour videos and also an entire movie score but even discounting those it’s still almost twice as long as the intros playlist.

Due to the nature of Youtube playlists I can’t put warnings on the videos but some videos in both have some flashing lights and there’s at least one video in both that talks about or depicts suicide.

Also it looks like the embedded versions of the playlists below are limited to two hundred videos and some videos won’t play embedded so click through to Youtube for the full thing.

Introducing…

Song of the day

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

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!

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

As Cohost shuts down I have been making a fuss about moving away from social media and I am not the only one. We are in the final week before it goes read-only and people have been sharing blogs and websites and my RSS reader has been filling up. So here I will share some things I have been reading lately, both from Cohost people and just other interesting articles.

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Makeup

vampy lipsticks — Tulip

There is going to be a lot of more typically nerdy stuff in here so let’s start with something else. I don’t wear makeup much these days but I am not immune to black lipstick recommendations.

as fall approaches, my craving for deep, dark lipsticks increases… my dark metamorphosis.

OK, well, technically it’s Vampire Season year-round here - i don’t need Halloween as an excuse to embrace black clothes and dark lipstick. but still! i thought it would be appropriate to showcase some of my favorite vampy lip colors from my personal collection.

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Hardware

The Working Archivist’s Guide to Enthusiast CD-ROM Archiving Tools — Misty

Misty digs through CD-ROM preservation and touches on why the history of the CD as an audio format first and data format second makes it more complicated than it might seem.

CD audio isn’t a file-based format, and instead uses a series of unnamed, numbered tracks. CD-ROM extends this by making it possible for a track on a disc to contain data and a filesystem instead of audio. Since CD-ROM extends CD audio, the two formats aren’t mutually exclusive: a CD-ROM disc can still contain multiple tracks, and it can even contain more than one data track or a mixture of data and audio tracks.

Hacking a Hitachi Magic Wand (Plus) — Kore

This is just cool.

So: the Hitachi Magic Wand is a very good device. It, however, has very little granularity in how strong it is. Even the newer Magic Wand Plus only has four, non-customizable settings.

I don’t like this and want to fix it. In the process, I’ll also be adding bluetooth connectivity, because I thought that was pretty funny.

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Software

software rendering is awesome — erysdren

i fuckin love software rendering. the act of creating a fully realized 3D scene entirely in your own program, without the aid of OpenGL or DirectX or any GPU whatsoever. something about that is so charming to me. it leads to so many interesting technical design decisions and shortcuts taken to get it to run fast (if that is the goal).

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Social media

RIP Cohost — Mike Egan

I had to have at least one R.I.P. Cohost article in here.

From a design perspective, compared to all other social media, Cohost was a paradise. No numbers, no algorithm, no global feed, no discover page, and a lot of really useful ways to curate what shows up in your feed. Having a reverse-chronological feed of only the things I wanted to see from the people I asked to see them from has done wonders for my brain.

It was never about the numbers — Aurahack

Also somewhat of a reflection on Cohost but also on how numbers and stats make you worse.

The close friends I made there motivated me to get better because they were further in their art journey than I was. I looked up to them not because they were my favorite artists but because they would create alongside me and it would inspire me! I wanted to grow like they were visibly growing. Over time, I did, and my following would start to outpace theirs and… I think that’s where it started getting kind of nasty.

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Computer games

Everywhere and Nowhere: Emptiness in Level Design — Nat Clayton

Nat Clayton talks about in-between spaces in games both in her work and in other games. She has also made me aware of the Weird Maps series by Whomobile which is great.

There’s a dead-end I think about every single day, tucked away in the back of Half-Life 2’s airboat chapter. It’s a right turn where you’re supposed to go left, a gun turret and a headcrab ambush and some secret crates for those nosy enough to go scavenging. It’s one of a thousand dead ends in Half-Life 2, but this one sticks out to me. As the sickly golden twilight paints the concrete runoff, illuminating basic shanty structures, the sparseness of the space is unavoidable. The roar of airboat fans and chase music given way to gusts of wind and mechanical creaking. Some designer decided that someone once lived here, died here, and painted that scene with an absolute minimum of brushes and textures.

Listening, Watching, Gaming — Chris Hall in First Person Scholar

Not a million miles away from this but in the much more academic side of games writing here’s a piece on the paratext created by submerging oneself in the soundscape and environment of a game level.

As I write this, I have open on another screen, as I often do, one of these ambient paratexts—in this case, an hour-long video from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. There’s no music, no avatar, only a first-person scene at the ground level providing a nighttime view of the exterior of the Graniny Gorki research outpost in Tselinoyarsk, the Soviet Union. Directly before us is a high fence, followed by patches of grass and the concrete façade of the facility. To the far right a guard patrols within the fenced area, as oblivious as the sleeping dog nearby. Presumably we perceive the scene through the eyes of the game’s protagonist, Naked Snake, lying prone, but we needn’t be aware of this, and Snake provides no signs of his presence. The peaceful scene is backgrounded by the ambient sounds of the southern USSR forest, the constant chirping of bugs punctuated by the faraway cries of nocturnal birds.

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Doctor Who

Perverting the Course of Human History (War of the Sontarans) — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have been enjoying Elizabeth Sandifer ripping the Chibnall-era of Doctor Who to shreds as part of her long-running TARDIS Eruditorum series analysing the entire run of Doctor Who from the 1963 to the present.

You figure there’s got to be this entire shadow Chibnall era—the one that exists only in Davies’ head and perhaps some text messages to his mates. No more detailed than the Leekley era, perhaps, but undoubtedly there. Like poor Penny in Partners in Crime we can see its shadows—obviously The Timeless Children would have stuck larger and more mind-wrenchingly than the rest, with Davies at once transfixed by its potential and vexed by its production. Ironically, he’s the one person who seems to have been substantially influenced by the Chibnall era.

The Problem with Doctor Who — Luna

An older post but keeping with on the topic of Doctor Who: Luna points out a problem with the current Doctor Who intro segment that has been in place since the 2023 60th anniversary specials. We can only hope that they fix it by this year’s Christmas special.

But something is seriously amiss in the 2023 specials, and neither I nor my inner child can let it go. And it’s not the [whatever the bigots are angry about this time], nor even the [actually legitimate criticism here]. No, none of that. The probl-

Timing.

-em with the 2023 specials is… oh. Right.

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Serious articles for serious people

AI and the American Smile — Jenka

In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine — Jason Koebler for 404 Media

“I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’m scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what’s wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what’s wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can’t have it because the infrastructure has failed and it’s not available.”

The Third Sex — Talia Bhatt

Here is a morbid, maddening irony: anthropological scholarship, distinctly Western anthropological scholarship, that for decades has touted the maxim of ‘binary gender’ being an ‘imposed’, ‘colonial’ concept, has now been cited by an Indian court in an opinion that explicitly third-sexes the hijra and purports that recognizing them as women would ‘violate their constitutional rights’. It is seemingly only imperialism when populations who seek the technologies of transition and legible womanhood are granted access to them, while the opinions of Western academics shaping local politics is merely sparkling scholarship.

Cohost was the last social media site that was still fun to use. A place that I could actually enjoy and felt I was sharing and building something good with people, even just by making nonsense jokes. It was a place where I felt safer posting kink on main and genuinely learnt and explored new parts of myself. And a place where I shared silly Sonic the Hedgehog jokes and other silly Sonic the Hedgehog jokes, or post intros to TV shows or more silly Sonic the Hedgehog jokes.

Cohost was designed for people to use and have fun with. It allowed users a degree of freedom in creating posts that no other site like it does, leading to a proliferation of unique, shareable experiments and toys like NES Pictionary abd that we called CSS crimes. It’s a silly name but it felt genuinely transgressive in the face of the homogeneity of the social media giants. It gave people a taste of that “old internet” freedom and a lot of us found ourselves unwilling to go back to the endless churn of other social media sites in the same way afterwards.

So I built my own website, as did many others. It’s a little addictive, honestly, having this little project I can always tinker with, tweak and style how I like. A lot of people did go and make blogs, post twice about how they are still figuring things out and then never update again, but many are still posting and I now have a collection people in my news reader now who I have chosen to read, who I care about updates from and who I hope care about updates from me.

And most of all Cohost taught me to be deliberate about how I use the internet again. That what I do with it is a choice both in what I post and what I spend the time to read. So thank you, Eggbug.