The title screen for Super Mario Bros. features the options to start a 1 player game or a 2 player game, but pressing up or down on the NES’ D-pad does nothing; instead the select is used to select which choice the player will make before hitting the start button to begin. The NES controller has two different conceptual spaces, with the D-pad and face buttons for controlling gameplay, while the start and select buttons—relegated to the more out-of-the-way middle space of the controller—are for more metatextual, system-level inputs. The Famicon’s second controller didn’t even have start and select buttons, the second player being purely concerned with the gameplay space and not the system space.

This convention did not last long. As games became more complex and switching between different screens, different contexts and different levels of abstraction became a normal part of games, using the D-pad and face buttons to navigate menus and options became the norm. Select instead became a useful, general-purpose auxiliary button; something not used as part of normal gameplay rhythms but for things like opening a map or menu screen separate from the start button, which generally also served to pause and open a pause menu if one exists.

But despite being somewhat of a holdover the labels stuck, at least for a while. The NES, SNES, Game Boy, PSX, PS2 and PS3 all had start and select buttons. The Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64 and Gamecube all had start buttons. Even if different consoles had different conventions for how to label their face buttons at least everyone agreed on what to call the auxiliary buttons in the middle of the controller, whether there was one or two of them.

Microsoft broke this convention with the Xbox. Instead of a select button the Xbox had a back button, with a glyph of left-pointing triangle to mirror the one for start (itself borrowing from Sony’s use of a play button symbol). Select had long since stopped making sense as anything other than convention, but calling it the back button was hardly any better for how the second central auxiliary button is actually used in games and this divergence would be the start of a complete breakdown in convention.

Nintendo, the originators of the convention in the first place, started assigning + and - symbols to the start and select buttons, respectively, and then moved to simply calling the buttons + and - entirely. The PS4 moved to calling them options and share and the PS5 to options and create, while the newer Xbox consoles have gone with menu and view with Valve following suit for the Steam Deck and second Steam Controller (though they’ve gone with Sony’s conventions for labelling of shoulder buttons).

No one can agree what to call these things any more and while start and select were not ideal labels for what the buttons were actually used for I don’t think these other names are any better and I am probably just going to keep calling them start and select forever.

Also the shift to making face buttons monochrome is fascist I will not elaborate on this.

When I watched Iron Lung I remarked to some friends that it might be the first film adaptation of a computer game that is longer than the original game, but when I saw Exit 8 on the programme for the annual Japanese Film Festival I realised that it got beaten to the punch by at least a year.

This inspired me to make a Letterboxd list of movies that are longer than the game they’re based on. The criterion that I’m using is the official runtime of the film version versus what How Long to Beat gives as the median clear time for the main story mode of the game. How Long to Beat uses times self-sampled from the kinds of people who log game times on How Long to Beat which will skew those times down a bit from what a typical person might experience, but it’s the best metric available for this kind of thing.

The current list isn’t terribly long but the games represented in it fall into three categories. The first is recent indie horror titles. The two games that inspired this list fall in here. Five Nights at Freddy’s, another obvious contender that a few people have already suggest to me, doesn’t make the cut. How Long to Beat has the first Five Nights at Freddy’s down as two hours, just ten minutes longer than the 2023 movie’s runtime.

The second block is fighting games. I had thought about excluding fighting games from the list both because I thought that they would probably dominate everything else and because clearing the arcade mode of the likes of Street Fighter II doesn’t really feel like a reasonable judge of the “length” of a game that is intended to be primarily multiplayer. Even so, I eventually decided to stick to the rule I set and added them.

The third category is Super Mario Bros., which I think is a bit of an arguable case as the film is not really based on the game of same name so much as a taking ideas from the broad strokes of the series as a whole¹, but I decided to include it anyway because I love that movie and I think it’s a funny addition to the list.

Or maybe just luckier.

I mentioned winning the first game of Magic: The Gathering I ever played (against someone else who also had never played) and also winning game of Dandân immediately having it explained to me. On Saturday I won with a deck that I didn’t even look at before playing. I was meant to be playing a game of Lancer with Caoimhe and Tigris, DMed by the zombie enthusiast and when that fell through due to some technical difficulties we played a game of Magic instead. I did not have a deck with me but the zombie enthusiast had brought several. She started to explain each one and I asked her to stop and just hand me one and I’d figure it out. I think if I am going to lean into my bit of being a Yu-Gi-Oh! character I should approach card games like one: Knowing as little as possible, rolling with whatever surprises happen and relying on dumb luck the heart of the cards.

The deck, as it turned out was a proxy deck themed after Pokémon cards that she found online, with Pokémon Breeder as the commander. The zombie enthusiast was using a Chainsaw Man proxy deck she made herself with Denji as her commander. Caoimhe was using Tigris’ walls deck with Arcades the Strategist and Tigris was using another deck that I do not remember the commander of but had a lot of dragons.

For much of the game zombies dominated what was happening, with Denji on the field eventually equipped with a Chainsaw¹ and Tigris having cloned her own Denji using Will of the Temur, resulting in six zombie tokens being generated every round which constantly got wiped out and flooded cards into their hands. I was holding on to a Heat Wave for much of the game and kept looking for chances to use it to wipe out a zombie horde to multiply my own tokens but they would keep being blown away before it got back to my own turn every time.

I never actually got to generate any eggs with my commander and her ability to play creatures from the deck activated only once, when a Tauros died that counted as an egg due to being a ditto. That resulted in me getting a Zacian on the board, but without a 10/10 Zamazenta to back it up because it wasn’t cast, and which was killed before my next turn anyway. My game consisted of getting out strong pokémon (and my commander, twice) which my enemies promptly bapped away, but also without ever taking much damage myself and only occasionally getting to deal it out. My life never went below 40 and nearly reached 60 at one point due to a Venosaur.

In the end everyone targetted Chainsaw Man for getting too powerful and killed knocked her out, then Caoimhe used Slaughter the Strong to wipe out Tigris’ amassed dragons and all of my creatures other than a 4/4 Turtwig generated by Grotle, and soon I finally unleashed the Heat Wave to destroy Caoimhe’s Arcades, Floriferous Vinewall and my own Bulbasaur to multiply my Turtwig into a small army to wipe Caoimhe out.

I did quite enjoy just rolling with the punches and seeing where the deck took me. Learning the game is very fun to me and if I had a perfect idea of how everything should work and a huge knowledge of cards and builds and the metagame it would probably not really be that interesting to me any more. I have been struggling with the motivation to actually build my own decks following the Seto Kaiba one.

As you can see from my games of each year list I don’t play many games with character creators and when I do I generally don’t get particularly attached to the characters I make in them. I couldn’t really tell you anything much about the characters I made for Dark Souls and even when I went through the character creator in Baldur’s Gate III recently¹ I made a dark elf woman without any particular thought to backstory or much else. I honestly don’t even remember what I named her². I do not have the making OCs bone I think. But I do have two old custom skins and a custom character that I have lying around on my computer I’d like to share.

Minecraft

Back seven billion years ago when I was in university and Minecraft was this weird, new thing I wanted to make my own custom skin for it. Being mostly into first person shooters and real time strategy games at the time my first thought about making a skin for a character in a game where you mine was to try and recreate the mining suit from Red Faction:

Pokémon Crystal Clear

I haven’t played a new Pokémon game since I was a child, but during covid lockdowns (before, y’know, every government just dropped all health measures for a debilitating disease that is still rampant) I tried to revisit the series via a hack called Pokémon Crystal Clear³. Crystal Clear adds a lot to Pokémon Crystal. You can choose your starting town (in either Kanto or Johto), play gyms in any order (they scale based on the number of badges you have), it fixes various bugs in the original games, allows you to set any pokémon as an overworld follower with every species having unique follower sprites, adds new areas and battles, new music, a lot of customisation options, and has ways to obtain all 251 pokémon without trading or events.

Sadly all of that was not enough for me to get over the simple fact that these games are too repetitive for me to want to bother with any more. I do not want to do dozens and dozens of nigh-identical battles over and over again. I never got very far in the game but I did make use make use of another feature: The ability to inject custom player sprites and custom starters (I started with a sandshrew). I actually posted one of the player sprites on here before when talking about drawing it in Wplace.

Sonic Forces

The last one is the closest thing that I have to a Sonic the Hedgehog OC: My avatar from Sonic Forces who I decided to call Blitz the Cat, both because she ended up being a little lightning-themed (and I used the lightning whip as my main weapon for a lot of that game) and to keep the alteration going with Blaze the Cat and Big the Cat⁴. I do not have any backstory for her but I like how she turned out.

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

I posted a diorama I made for Caoimhe³ yesterday. I like to make little things for partners sometimes.

My other partner has a strong fondness for the pokémon goomy and I have learnt that your partner identifying with an extremely marketable pokémon makes putting together silly little gifts pretty easy. A couple of years ago I got a little 3D-printed goomy figurine from an Etsy shop (that doesn’t seem to sell it any more), painted it myself and and paired it with a love ball from a more official toy as a gift for her.

She has also been, more recently, getting back into Magic: The Gathering and had put together a ooze deck which she used my printer to make proxies for. While I was doing that for her I threw in some little custom cards for the deck.

For the Slurrk card I used Poké Card Generator to fill in the basic rules then made more modifications in GIMP. For the token card I used Card Conjurer and put a photo of the goomy figurine over a swamp background made by Aveontrainer.

For over a decade the Louvre has offered an official guide for the 3DS. A very cute meeting of games technology and art.

Ellie had wanted to go on a trip to Paris together and back in May, just over a week before she died, I had joked about needing to go before September when I read about the Louvre 3DSs being discontinued. That trip never ended up happening and as of today the service has officially ended.

I had completely forgotten about all of this until seeing a post about the Louvre 3DSs again just now. Funny the things that can send one into floods of tears. Echos of plans that never came to pass and reminders of what could have been. I had been considering doing the most cliché thing in the silliest way possible and proposing to her in Paris with a fidget ring I was going to get off of Etsy. Rose gold with symbols of the moon on it. I ended up getting one in my size instead that I have worn occasionally as one of my mementos of her.

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.

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon was a fascinating coda to Sonic Frontiers, a very experimental expansion to a game where Sonic Team was already going outside of their comfort zone to do new things with the series. The world map threw together Only Up!-esque climbing challenges, playable Tails, Amy and Knuckles very different movesets to how they have worked in past, an absurdly fast and powerful dropdash for Sonic in 3D and wildly more difficult combat than the base game. I streamed it to some friends when it came out and one of them remarked “this is the least designed game ever made.” I couldn’t really disagree with her. So much of this is janky and half-broken in various ways and it was incredibly fun. It made me hopeful that Sonic Team was happy to keep experimenting with what worked for the series and keep allowing more player freedom in future games¹.

In keeping with this, while the levels in the base Sonic Frontiers were almost entirely reused from previous games the ones in The Final Horizon were much more experimental, being very clearly thrown together with very basic assets rather than having their own sculpted level geometry but also with much fewer guardrails and much less guided than a normal Sonic level and with new, bespoke mechanics and side missions, some of which required more slow, careful exploration than high-speed platforming.

Early on, while playing one level, 4-D, I noticed an exclamation mark appearing over Sonic’s head in certain locations, accompanied by a beeping. You cans see it at about a 1′18″ in in this video. It would turn red and beep faster as I approached a certain spot. When I saw this the first thing that came to mind was Knuckles’ emerald-hunting missions from the Sonic Adventure games and thought it might be part of one of the level’s optional missions. I actually had a bit of trouble finding the source of the beeping but once I zeroed in on it and finally found it I was greeted to Sonic being blown up into the air by a mine, his hands held down protecting his singed arse. This was a very sudden gear-shift in my head and in my confusion, still processing what I was seeing, I screamed “I’M MARIO BURNT ASS?!”² into my microphone, which caused myself and my friend Ruby who was watching to double over laughing till we couldn’t breath and then Ruby set my display name on the Discord server to Mario Burnt Ass for a month. It was funny.

That’s the story.

Thanks.

Picmix is a website for making GIF collages. If you’ve seen square GIFs of anime characters drowning in glitter and surrounded by rapidly animating icons and text it was probably made with Picmix. The typical aesthetic leans extremely girly and overloaded; the digital equivalent of a scrapbook page covered in magazine cutouts, glitter and stickers. It is very charming (though sadly the current front page of the site seems to be flooded with AI art).

Last year on Cohost (RIP) Freja asked me what my favourite planet was and my reply was “♃”. This is mostly just vibes and associations with fictional characters that I have great fondness for: Lita Kino from Sailor Moon¹, Jupiter from We Know the Devil, and it would be nice to round this out with a third example but actually it’s only those two². But also the planet is cool and I like the astrological symbol.

But thinking on those vibes, that loose collection of associations that still resulted in an immediately clear preference it made me want to make something to tie together these Jupiters: The planet, the Sailor and the Devil-knower. And even though I had never actually used Picmix before that type of silly, sparkly, collage seemed like just the thing.

The Sailor Jupiter, rotating planet and glow around the edges were pulled from Picmix but I actually put it together using Aseprite. This is an artisanal GIF collage. The central Jupiter picture (that I also use as an avatar now) was made by putting the cover art for We Know the Devil through Luna Pic’s glitteriser. The little tin sample cube is because tin is the planetary metal associated with Jupiter in alchemy. I actually have a similar cube of copper in my house next to a replica Ea-nāṣir complaint tablet that I have on my wall. Perhaps I should get a tin one as well.

A little while later I decided to make a similar collage for Blaze the Cat, my favourite Sonic the Hedgehog character.

This one pulls from Picmix, The Spriters’ Resource and a GIF of Blaze running that I do not know the original source of that I cut the background out of frame-by-frame.

I never returned to making these but it was a lot of fun and perhaps the urge will strike me again at some point.

And let me know if there’s any other Jovian women that I should check out.

I don’t watch game streamers much but one of the few who I have enjoyed a lot is Videochess (a.k.a. Chess). She doesn’t stream regularly at the moment but she has wonderful chaotic energy and a propensity for “crimes”, a term she uses for playfully exploring the mechanics of and pushing at the boundaries of games and seeing what is possible if one strays from the designated path. This can manifest as things like impromptu sequence breaking but not for the purposes of speedrunning or anything like that, just to see where it goes and tease out the foibles of a game. And sometimes she does things like collecting every star in Super Mario 64 while playing the game with a DJ Hero controller.

There are two main places to find her videos, her own Youtube channel that has her streams up until 2022 and another unofficial but endorsed channel that has archived more recent streams. One of her most popular series is an Ocarina of Time randomiser with GGDG but below I will share some of her videos that have had the largest influence on me.

Snolf

Her truly Sisyphean streams of Melon’s Snolf hacks inspired me to make my own Snolf Robo Blast 2 mod for Sonic Robo Blast 2 as well as a chat control mod that Chess ended up playing herself.

Discovering new games

I have also learnt about games and mods that I have since played or are now on my (long) list of things I want to get around to.

Robot Alchemic Drive I still have not gotten around to playing but seems fascinating. I love games with weird controls and especially when there is a diegetic basis for them. Having to remote control a giant robot from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to watch it from a distance rather than getting a camera from the perspective of the robot itself or even a cockpit is an incredible concept. You may be familiar with the game from clips that get shared online showcasing the best value greengrocer or Nanao having a miserable time.

I had only vaguely heard of Cave Story before watching her play “Cave Story Normal Regular”¹, i.e. Sonic Story, a mod that replaces the main character of the game, Quote, with Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, I know this is a massively important and influential game. No, I never bothered looking into it at all despite having had the Steam version in my library for years from some Humble Bundle or another. I have played both Cave Story and Sonic Story since and I can attest that Sonic Story perfectly replicates the feeling of how Mega Drive Sonic games control. It’s not just a reskin it is is playing as Sonic the Hedgehog in the wrong game in a way that is wonderful and silly.

For the opposite she has played Mario put into a Sonic game with the SM64 Generations mod, which uses libsm64. She has also played some other games using libsm64 as well as other regular normal Mario 64 mods.

Willy Wombat

I also became obsessed with Willy Wombat for a while after watching her play it. It is a fascinating, experimental 3D platformer with an isomorphic perspective with maps that have the same limitations as a Doom level: There are no slopes and not only are there no floating platforms but it’s impossible to have a floating platform in this game. Like Doom the levels are defined by floor sectors with designated heights. There are pillars and walls that rise out of the ground for vertically, but you can never go under anything. It leads to some unique level design, especially as the game progresses to areas were the developers had clearly gotten much more comfortable with their tools. The only thing I can think of that is similar (though lacking the top-down perspective) is older versions of Sonic Robo Blast 2 and that is literally a fork of Doom.

It’s also one of those bygone ’90s games that is fully voiced in English with a script penned and directed by a Japanese crew, giving it a surreal quality that is aided by a post-apocalyptic setting with jarring name choices and very little up-front exposition. Above is a fan animation I adore of a cutscene of Notes and Mail talking about “the peace and eternal life of Prison.”

I have a page on this website dedicated to my cat Easóg where you can see a video of her trying to kill Willy while I am watching Chess play the game and mushroom32x made a fun little Neocities webpage for the game’s 20th anniversary.

There’s plenty more

That’s enough for now. If you want to watch more check out the official and unofficial Youtube channels to dig through yourself.

Steam Grid DB is a website that hosts artwork for customising game libraries. I learnt a little while ago that it has a tool called Boop that lets you apply art to Steam games much faster by clicking a button directly on the website.

This reminded me that I actually used to make quite a few custom banners for games on Steam myself and I decided to upload my old work to the website. You can find those on my Steam Grid DB profile and I will include a selection of them here:

Half-Life 2

Some of the first ones I made were a set of matching banners for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I’m still pretty happy with these.

Some classics

I made some for a few classic games, usually from a still of the title screen, sometimes with some variants.

Megagames 6

At the time I had a Retrode and would dump my own game cartridges. Two of the old Mega Drive carts I had were two different 6-in-1 game packs, so I decided to make custom artwork for them too.

ROM hacks

And of course some ROM hacks.

And a few others

Games that weren’t even in the database

Some games I had to submit to Steam Grid myself because they didn’t have the games listed at all. These all have links if you click on the banners. The Monokuro: From Here and Back is actually new and I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. The process of uploading these banners made me want to make a new one and I had the game added as a shortcut on Steam without any artwork. Somari 3D Blast 5 wasn’t accepted by Steam Grid DB, sadly.

One last joke

These are a pair of banners that I made for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube and Wii versions, respectively. It was a little private joke and I didn’t bother submitting them to Steam Grid DB.

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

A friend has been infodumping about Susumu Hirasawa and I thought I’d share her passion a little wider so have this live performance from him:

This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website — Sophie Koonin

One thing to warn is that if you do actually make your own website is that tinkering with it can be addictive in and of itself, at least to me. It’s like a model train set: There is always more you can tweak or add to it. I updated my homepage a few days ago to make each section stand out from each other a bit more.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it.

A Eulogy for Urban Dead — Adrian Hon

I played Urban Dead back in the day. It’s sad to see it go and infuriating to see it happen because of a regulator trying to target the likes of Facebook and Tiktok and not even being able to conceive of small, independent operations or how it could affect them.

Naturally, these player-generated events were chaotic and often hard to discover, though the ability for humans to graffiti messages helped spread the word. Zombies, being dead, were not permitted to communicate as freely – they could only use the letters a, b, g, h, m, n, r, and z – but this was sufficient to lead to four different zombie languages including terms such as armah baz (army base), zmazh anh grab (smash and grab) and my personal favourite, barhah (roughly “a spirit of zombie warriors in brotherhood”).

Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home — Laura Michet

I saw this because it was shared by Adamn Le Doux. How the restrictions of online pokémon trading evolved a market where the currency changes every time a new game gets connected to the system. The current one being a qilin giraffe thing. Also some followups: How to buy a Pokemon online and How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun.

Today, you'd list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you'll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You'll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.

I ordered a wheel of cheese in a can — Laura Michet

Also from Laura Michet: A type of cheese I now really want try.

The cheese is apparently one of a very small number of cheeses that can cure inside a can, apparently because it's made with a culture that emits less gas than other cheeses, so it won't bloat or pop the can. It is only sold in 30 oz containers. It is cheddar… you can get several flavors. Big time cheese fans or people from Wisconsin know and care a lot about it and I get the impression that it is quite popular here in the US, but I have never heard of this shit before.

CD-ROM Journal: Crosscountry BC — Misty De Méo

A look at a Canadian edutainment game series.

It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player's driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it's not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it'll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It's that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.

The Most Mario Colors — Louie Mantia

Seen via Mike Egan’s post roundup. This is the ideal post. This is the type of thing that people should be researching.

Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.

This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.

a love letter to level editor icons — erysdren

Who doesn’t love some programmer art?

i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand.

dev scoops: vultures in Weird West — Joe Wintergreen

Joe Wintergreen talks bout the first thing he worked on in Weird West and shows how systems-driven game design allows complex interactions through fairly simple building blocks.

In the end, it ended up being just as well that I implemented the landing-and-walking-around behaviour for the vultures, because later we wanted chickens and there was already Flightless Bird Support – a chicken is just a flightless vulture who lays eggs, as any ornithologist will tell you.

As minor as these guys are, they’re one of the features I’m fondest of – my first task, omnipresent, occasionally chaotic, and shipping almost unchanged from their initial implementation. Good eggs.

Why Are Chronically Ill People Forced to Hide Their Pain? — Kelly

Oh no! You’ve scrolled too far and entered The Serious Zone.

Unfortunately most people can’t process the lack of choice in the matter. They genuinely believe that we either want to be this sick, or could get better if we really ‘tried’. They believe they wouldn’t be able to handle what we go through, because they’re convinced they will never NEED to handle it. They’re the exception. Chronic illness won’t happen to them.

This is the comfortable lie that most people tell themselves so that they can move through life without having to think about the precarious nature of the human condition. Without having to consider how quickly you can become disabled, homeless, an ‘other’. How quickly your life can change without your consent.

This need to cling to a lie makes people abandon us. Some will stay when you become chronically ill, but most have an internal clock. If you’re not better by whatever random and pre-conceived timeline they’ve set for you, they walk away.

Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women — Ryan Broderick

Ending the roundup again with a light dusting of fascism. I am far too online and read far too much about American politics and fascists but I was still taken aback by this description of a strain of hatred I wasn’t familiar with.

If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.

I really like Jellyfin. It’s sort of an open-source Plex. I run a server that is just on my local network that lets me watch films and television shows from my desktop, couch, phone or anything else on my home network and even simply organising everything is very pleasing to me. I spend far too long picking covers and artwork for everything, sometimes even making my own, like when I made an Irish logo and cover for Na Conriochtaí when I couldn’t find one to match the official Irish posters for the other two Cartoon Saloon folklore movies.

It has some other really nice features as well like telling you what time something will end at if you started playing now and letting you easily have multiple version of the same film under the same entry, letting you as easily select them as you would the right language for a movie with multiple audio tracks, so you can have both a bluray rip and the Morton Jankel cut of Super Mario Bros. together or the official black and white cuts of Fury Road or Johnny Mnemonic alongside the colour versions.

And of course you can also customise the artwork for all the different media categories, so mine look like this:

Easóg

Easóg is the Irish word for stoat and also the name of my cat. There are a couple layers to this name. The first is simply I find it funny to call animals by the wrong species and I have a fondness for the Irish language. The second is she is a thin, white thing and I think sometimes she somewhat resembles a stoat in its winter coat (though stoats in Ireland don’t actually have winter coats).

The final layer to this comes from the medieval Irish law, commonly known as Brehon law, or at least a little titbit about it in a book I read by Niall Mac Coitir titled Ireland’s Animals: Myths, Legends and Folklore, which says that for the purposes of determining legal penalties by offences commitid by a pet, a stoat was legally considered to be a type of cat. I sometimes amuse myself thinking about some exasperated judge who had to decide the original precedent about how to calculate damages when someone’s stoat killed a chicken.

I adopted her when she was, I was told, about eleven months old, though I never got a birthday for her. She’s a very timid creature and the morning after the first night I brought her home I couldn’t find her. I searched my flat top to bottom but she was nowhere to be seen. I was worried that she had somehow gotten out but suspected that she had found a hiding spot in the space under and behind the kitchen cabinets. I did have a look around outside and put up a few posters with my number on it in case anyone spotted her, but inside I left out food for her, sprinkled flour around it so that I could see any footprints she left if she went for it, and set up a webcam with some software to automatically capture video if it detected motion. Here is the first video captured of her.

This worked but sadly it was the only way that I saw her for three weeks. She would hide during the day when I was around and only come out at night to eat, use the litter tray that I had left out, and slowly start to explore her new home. There was no real way of getting to her hiding spot without dismantling the kitchen and that would have terrified her more anyway. Eventually she started to venture out when I was around and would explore other parts of the flat during the day (I left the doors open for her) but would keep her distance and flee back to her hole if I motioned towards her or even moved very quickly or made any noise at all.

Once she was tolerating my (distant) presence more I decided to try and make myself as unthreatening as possible. When she stepped out into the hallway I lay on the floor of the living room and waited for her to come back. When she did she very, very slowly and very, very carefully stalked up ot me then sniffed my hand before running away. Then she slowly came up again and sniffed my hair and ran away. I continued to lay still to not scare her but she very visibly relaxed at this point. She had been deathly silent in those weeks but now started to meow and take some experimental swipes at a mouse toy that I had left on the floor and rubbing her head against the furniture.

She left the room again and I decided to sit up with my legs crossed and wait for her again. When she came back again she sniffed at my hand and experimentally rubbed up against me before running off a short distance. When she came back to me it was like a switch had been flipped. She started rubbing up against me in earnest while purring loudly before headbutting my hand affectionately and licking the hell out of me as I pet her. When I eventually moved over to my desk she jumped up in my lap and settled in. My clothes were absolutely covered in white hair that evening.

To this day she is extremely affectionate (and vocal) and while she is still quite timid and doesn’t like sudden noises or movements she has gotten much more used to people.

I do spoil her a bit, though.

Also a friend pointed out to me that the character I made in Sonic Forces several years before adopting Easóg, who I called Blitz, is also a white cat with yellow eyes. Perhaps they are sisters.

The rest is just a photo dump.

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

the little lies robots tell us — Melon

The longer we tolerate the little lies that robots tell us, the bigger the lies become, and the more difficult it becomes to untangle them from our everyday lives. This is not an inevitability, however; we can find in ourselves and in our connections with eachother the self-confidence to learn how these things work, to unpick the threads, to see through the smoke and mirrors that they are only barely veiled behind.

How To Post — Mike Egan

Always remember to Post Hog.

And yeah, sometimes I want to do that, if I'm writing about my experience playing a game or something, but I also have a HUGE list of ideas for blog posts that I plan to write "eventually" that I'm very much not posting because I think I don't have time to do it right. Because I think it has to be some level of "interesting" or "good" or "having a point."

I've forgotten the lesson of Post Hog.

TIL cool math. Also we need knowledge engines that we can trust (that is: not chatgpt) — Llaura

I am honestly mostly linking to this for the absurdity that is the comparison image that Open AI used to show how “DALL·E 3 significantly improves uon DALL·E 2”. Look at this:

The older one looks somewhat like an actual oil painting while the “improved” version is a cacophonic mess that fails to represent what it asked of it while being aesthetically ugly as shit.

It almost makes me think that perhaps generative AI could actually produce output that is meaningfully better than it currently does and is at least partially hampered by simple obstacle that people who are making and curating these systems have truly atrocious taste.

The cookie example doesn’t seem to be on the site any more but the comparison they’ve replaced it with shows the exact same problem.

My 6 Favorite HEPA Filters & Air Cleaners — Joey Fox

The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of clean air at 35 dBA. Nothing comes close.

Via House of Nettles. I am also still following Natalie’s posts about reblogging and keen to try my hands at doing similar with this site now that my rewrite to make posting easier is done. Also also from Natalie: This amazing look.

TERF Island — Sophie Lewis in Lux Magazine

A distilled history of the TERF movement and its roots in reactionary feminism.

For the twenty-first-century feminist who has never heard of this schismatic moment and has perhaps swallowed the narrative that transphobia and biological essentialism were intrinsic to feminism’s Second Wave, reading the movement magazine the Lesbian Tide is an education. Morgan’s keynote was reprinted in the May-June 1973 issue but placed at the back in small type, sandwiched between contributions that all criticize Morgan and oppose her sabotage of the gathering. MacLean’s diary conveys participants reactions to the conflict on stage: “This can’t be happening. This woman is insisting that Beth Elliott not be permitted to perform because Beth is a transsexual.” “That’s bullshit! Anatomy is NOT destiny!” In her own contribution, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Elliott testifies that the solidarity she experienced “kept alive my faith in womankind.” Concerning Morgan herself, however, she states with dignity that “I personally distrust those who hate men more than they love or do anything positive for women.”

the embroidery tips page that forgot to close its <h3> tags

Via the Internet Archive, via Emma Zhou, via Peter Krupa via a reblog from Sin Vega.

Fandom has toxified the world — Alan Moore in The Guardian

This fairly mild and nothing that hasn’t been said over and over again, but it’s still sort of nice to hear it directly from Alan Moore?

Soon thereafter, caught up in the rush of adolescent life, I drifted out of touch with comic books and their attendant fandom, only returning eight years later when I was commencing work as a professional in that fondly remembered field, to find it greatly altered. Bigger, more commercial, and although there were still interesting fanzines and some fine, committed people, I detected the beginnings of a tendency to fetishise a work’s creator rather than simply appreciate the work itself, as if artists and writers were themselves part of the costumed entertainment.

The V*mpire — P.H. Lee in Reactor

A short story about being groomed on Tumblr. Mind the content warnings.

Friendly reminder that not inviting vampires into your house is viviocentrism. Stop being viviocentric!

OP, I don’t want to demand more emotional labor from you, but I really don’t understand what you mean. Should I really invite in every vampire?

Disrespectfully, go fuck yourself. It’s not my job to educate you.

ᵃʷᵒ°

ᵃʷᵒ°

ᵃʷᵒ°

See, this is exactly the sort of bullshit that living “allies” always impose on us. OP made it extremely clear: Not inviting in a vampire is viviocentrism. INVITE IN EVERY VAMPIRE.

You may think that nested quote looks horrendous but I am just providing the genuine 2010s Tumblr experience.

Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine — Edwin Evans-Thirlwell in Rock Paper Shotgun

Edwin pulls together multiple articles that are worth reading in and of themselves to look at how Space Marines have been sanitised away from their satirical roots.

It's saying something about how accustomed I am to the ostensibly parodic figure of the Space Marine being portrayed as a hero that I didn't really question this desire to make you "like" and "get" the "fanatical killing machines" at the time. To be clear, I don't think Saber are deliberately and consciously trying to kindle empathy for literal fascist enforcers in Space Marine 2. Much of the above reasoning is grounded in ostensibly neutral, best-practicey questions of craft and characterisation.

A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II — S.R. Holiwell

An old classic that I think about a lot. I hope Stephy Rei Holiwell is still doing well out there. This and some other now-deleted writing of hers meant a lot to me.

Games about killing should probably make you uncomfortable. They shouldn’t be carefully crafted to be pleasant. Metroid II is openly about killing. It makes me uncomfortable with wordless specificity. This is one of the game’s saving graces.

This article was also, I believe, a large and overlooked part of the critical re-evaluation of Metroid II, being the basis for Game Maker’s Toolkit’s appraisal of the game when discussing its remakes.

Sex in the '60s in Cork… and the racy agony aunt who faced death threats — Teddy Delaney in Echo Live

An extract from someone’s memoirs published in a local paper. I don’t think the book would be the most interesting thing in the world if I’m being honest but I found some of the quoted letters to an agony aunt column amusing.

We are four worried 17-year-old teenagers. We are going to our first dance soon and a friend has told us to refuse a mineral from a boy because if you accept it you are supposed to spend the rest of the dances with him. We would like to know if this is true. Also, if a fellow asks you to go outside does this mean that he is bad? And what should you do if a boy asks you to go outside?

And to explain the terminology: An agony aunt is someone who pens an advice column and mineral here means soft drink or soda. Sorry if I ruined the picture in your head of teenagers in the 1960s exchanging rocks at a dance.

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!