The Cybergypsies (Indra Sinha, 1999)

If you were to list the great popular historical books of the computer world, you’d probably hear The Cuckoo’s Egg, Soul of a New Machine, and then a smattering of books by Wired Magazine regulars, like Cyberpunks and Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Fire In The Valley maybe, though I imagine Cromemco gets less relevant every day. What I rarely see recommended, however, and what I think belongs on the podium along with Kidder and Stoll, is Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies.

The gibsonian flair of the first few chapters creates the impression of a novel, and I think this confused some readers. I had to check out several facts and, low and behold, they turned out true. Eventually I realized “Bear,” the narrator, was Indra, and it’s a memoir. Shades was a real place; you can see a YouTube video playing back a recorded (and very chaotic) session. What else confused people? The terminology is probably period, but it’s a period that was over when the book was published-it’s a story of the modem world and what we would now call BBSs running MUDs.

The characters are drawn with attention to their humanity. It would be easy to turn this story into a people zoo, but Bear never does, instead opting for empathy even when he’s relating outrageous behavior and hilarious drama. In a different era, with a different pen, it might have been delivered as a very long forum post. Nowdays, perhaps as the sort of YouTube essay Folding Ideas produces. Because it really gets to the heart of what it means to be terminally online. Sinha was terminally online before that was even a thing.

You also need to realize that Bear’s got a truly fantastical imagination, and this may have rubbed literal-minded hackers the wrong way. He describes playing online MUDs with a richness that helps justify the outrageous price tag of being online in those days. There’s one scene where you suddenly realize he’s playing Colossal Cave Adventure and you almost don’t recognize it because his vivid description doesn’t betray the spartan description actually given in the game. Indeed, it’s a really interesting appraisal of text adventure games in general and the power of imagination.

So why don’t we hear about it now? Well, for one thing, it’s got a slur in the title. That makes it a bit awkward to bring up. In 1999 the dot-com crazy world wasn’t interested in a book about BBSing; compare similar books and they’re associated with favored technologies like Unix and TCP/IP. It wasn’t associated with any big exciting well known company either. Also, the original dust jacket (NSFW) features a pixelated, suggestively posed woman. It is a mature adult story but not lurid; the cover probably didn’t do it any favors in getting a more serious audience. Oh, and it’s not entirely optimistic, indeed showing the dangers of being terminally online, but again it’s not sensationalized. A lot of reviews at the time latched on to this, selling it as a bit of a horror or anti-tech story. But I really don’t think it earned that appraisal, I just don’t think we had the words we now have to describe what he was writing about.

(Bonus: interview with the author https://in.rediff.com/news/2007/aug/22inter.htm)


October ’24 Web Links

Does Open Source AI really Exist? (tante.cc)

This is an important article and everyone who spends time in the open source community should pay attention to its contents. OSI is preparing to adopt a definition of Open Source specific to AI models which doesn’t fit the definition it uses for code. I assume this is to allow some open source AI to exist, but in effect it is allowing Facebook (and Stability if they don’t go under) to pretend that what they’re putting out as far as weights is the same as the faffing Linux kernel.

Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg (news.ycombinator.com)

Litigant commenting on social media. Always something interesting to see. I have no plans to switch off of WordPress, but that’s of course mostly about inertia and avoiding link rot. I’d be happy to switch to a fork not managed by… a litigant posting on social media.

Redditor linked some old internet resources (reddit.com)

I haven’t actually tried these out myself yet, but if you’re an old internet enthusiast you may be interested.

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/

I like sites that document old models and stuff like this. Been meaning to ask if they’ve seen anything like those unidentified Archie McPhee ships; when I tried to google for information about some similar stuff, I got there.

Opensourcing of Winamp goes badly (el reg)

A frequent complaint you’ll hear in the retro tech community is wishing that people would just open source beloved old software. Owners of said source code frequently say that that’s not as easy as people might think. This article is an illustration of why that’s correct; it’s not as easy as just throwing it on github and hitting publish, which the owners of Winamp seem to have done.

This awesome DnB clip made out of car noises (youtube.com)

Listen to it. Wish it was longer.

Why are unironic imperium posters so common? (Reddit.com)

Speaking of reddit, this was, embarrassingly, locked. But I think the following article may help answer it:

Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places (timcolwill.com)

Put much better than I could have, but a line of reasoning I’ve had to have with folks before. GW definitely wants to sell its exciting world but also get out from under the massive problem it’s created with its lore by calling it satire. Nobody can keep a joke going for that long, not even SNL. The jabs at the US armed forces stings of course, and I’m not saying I agree with all his politics here (remember folks, a link is not an endorsement), but he does an excellent job of laying out the tension of GW’s two sided “it’s a satire / please enjoy how cool space marines are” position.

And while we’re on this general subject…

Godot 5 Wish List

Godot has had some coverage, and over the course of a conversation, someone said something like “What would you even want in Godot 5.”

I made a couple of off-hand lists, but I think there might be something interesting here so I’m going to go back, edit them together, and add a few more.

  • Interfaces, and deep integration of interfaces. For example, I’d like to be able to create a Group with an interface and ensure that any node added to that group implements that interface and get editor support when I pull that group. Interfaces should be able to require methods and signals at least.
  • Improve large scale scene editing and navigation. The scene editor is great for something like a character, but it’s downright painful to move around a really large scene to try and use it as a level editor.
  • Built-in heightmap terrain
  • Split Code Windows (and better code window management in general. They seem to open and switch around at random.)
  • Much better asset import/export story. I’m mostly talking about Blender here. Getting an animation successfully exported and imported is an arduous journey.
  • More debug drawing primitives. Arrows and stuff.
  • Please make it less painful to edit dictionaries in the node inspector. Needing to click add and navigate a drop down for each key hurts. Should be easier now that we have typed dicts.
  • Print should use log levels we can toggle like we toggle drawing navigation and physics shapes. Bonus if we could expose our own log level checkboxes in the same menu.
  • Better debugging information during nav mesh baking. Understanding why the nav mesh turns out the way it does tends to be a lot of trial and error.
  • Demo projects replicating common multiplayer use cases in depth to demonstrate parity with popular multiplayer games.
  • Allow us to define custom variable decorators (like @export) so that we can, for example, annotate which variables need to be persisted in a save file.
  • Tuples, especially Tuple unpacking so we don’t need to return untyped arrays everywhere
  • Pack file explorer so we can debug our exports.
  • Linter integrated with editor. Gimmie green squiggles, including support for linter flags like “forbid untyped vars”
  • Improved VSCode plugin.
  • Make it easier to move subtrees from one scene to another. Right now it’s a bit onerous.
  • Scene inheritance is sort of a mess; clean that up. I don’t have a great proposal for how but it’s a core feature and still feels like an obscure edge case by how the editor handles it. My not-great proposal is to have scene superclass be a parameter you can change in the inspector with a ‘reparent’ dialogue.
  • vi mode for the editor.
  • Python style fstrings.
  • Input event names could be an enum or something like an enum so the editor is aware of the available options. Ditto for groups. This works very well for node paths, I’d like to see it in more places.

Some of this may already exist, which makes it more of a doc bug than a missing feature. If some or all of these are filled in by plugins, please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed any good ones.

September ’24 Web Links

America now has a centenarian ex president. But check out this statue in his home town:

Review: Videodrome (kevinsreviewcatalogue)

I was thinking of writing about how you could totally remake Videodrome now, but someone already wrote a much better review to that effect.

A meme about USB (lemmy.sdf.org)

This really captures what I dislike about USB-C.

sfdictionary.com

I was really hoping that something like this existed, and wouldn’t you know it, it totally does. This site cross references sci-fi jargon across the history or science fiction.

The best sports headline you’re going to see this month (Nola.com)

Best sports headline of the month.

Digital Terrain Models of Mars (uahirise.org)

I was looking for some heightmaps I could use (see the next link) and found these really cool scans of the martian surface.

Ceefax (nathanmediaservices.co.uk)

Replication of Ceefax, for retrocomputing enthusiasts.

Fandom Wiki Considered Harmful

Fandom has a major ongoing outage, tearing a not insignificant hole in the web. Seems like as good an opportunity as any to discuss what it is and the problems it presents.

“Fandom”, formerly Wikia, is a hub for anyone who wants to make a wiki but their subject matter isn’t a good fit for ur-wiki Wikipedia. It’s the perfect place for cataloging every detail of beloved media franchises and games. Notable Fandom wikis include Memory Alpha (Star Trek), Wookiepedia (Star Wars), and one for almost every video or tabletop game, from the popular to the obscure. It’s sort of replaced GameFAQs, and often your only alternative if you don’t enjoy watching a lets-play to get you unstuck.

There’s a huge amount of useful content on Fandom and I have nothing but respect for the editors who devote their time to maintaining these resources, but I’m here to argue that Fandom is bad for fans and bad for the web.

Intrusive Ads

Fandom devotes only a small section of the screen to content. The rest is intrusive, animated ads that move around the page, pop over content, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

Browsing fandom is an utterly hostile experience. On mobile, it just gets worse:

Lousy Performance

I don’t know if it’s the ads or the auto play videos, or what. I’m not going to try and profile the site. But someone should; performance is a frequent complaint and it’s one of the few sites that will actually crash a tab; you don’t see that very often these days!

Why not just use AdBlock?

I refuse to participate in a two-tiered web of the power users who get to use free services uninterrupted and the bulk of everyday users who have to pay for it with ad garbage. Empathy is a critical skill for engineers, indeed it’s one of the things that makes good engineers good, and the lack of it is what has lead to the worst excesses of tech. As someone who still sometimes develops web things, I need to be able to see the web as users see it, not as some elite cadre of tech enthusiasts gets to enjoy it. Call it penance if you want to, but I think that power users using ad block (and subsequently tech failing to realize just how garbage top google results have become) is part of the problem, not the solution. I have an inkling that the people who have the pull to actually change things have hidden the problem from themselves instead.

What are we to do?

This would be an awesome article if I could end it with a call to action, a viable alternative with a great onboarding story that you could pick up and use. This isn’t that article. I do not have a neat solution.

Host your own?

Some Wikis are self-hosted. This allows for total control by interested parties, but can also be a burden for the hosts to administer. It also puts the (not insignificant) burden of SEO entirely on each individual wiki. Fandom is perhaps best understood as an SEO spam operation that crowd sources its content. Without the ability to share infrastructure and maintaience costs, there’s a major advantage in Fandom’s favor here. Not to mention the oft-underestimated hurdle of users needing to create yet another login (and expand their attack surface by one more some-day-compromised account.) Wiki.gg exists and is trying to centralize off-Fandom wikis and may be addressing this problem that way; one can hope they themselves don’t fall prey to the same perverse incentives that created Fandom in the first place.

Licenses as a solution?

Most Wikis use CC-BY-SA for their content, even when the content is directly copied from, for example, in-game text. This allows Fandom to monetize while still maintaining a facade that they’re merely hosting free content. You could take all of the text and images from a Fandom site and start your own, but because of the aforementioned economies of scale that isn’t a winning move. Likewise, if you create a wiki off-site, Wikia authors can happily copy all of your content into their own competing wiki. Perhaps it’s tome to write a new license for wiki content, one similar to AGPL or CC-NC, which would be impossible for Fandom to comply with; one that disallows commercial use or mandates releasing your source code.

I don’t expect this overnight

Wikia’s reign is entirely up to the folks who decide to put words on the internet. I don’t think it needs to be a one-site race to the bottom. But there’s massive inertia, even on days like today when it’s rendered entirely unusable by technical issues.

But examples exist! Check out the Sarna.net, the BattleTech (MechWarrior) Wiki. It’s using MediaWiki, but the ads aren’t nearly as intrusive.

August 2024 Web Links

Sorry for the shorter link list this time.

Dubsnatch (DarknetDiaries.com)

Darknet Diaries is often carried by its host’s boundless enthusiasm about cybers ecurity, but this episode features one of the strangest moments: the host insisting that there’s a pattern of featuring dolphin noises in Dubstep music. When the guest doesn’t play ball and politely tries to beg off the conversation, the host keeps pressing-he’s apparently a huge fan of dolphins. If you’re old enough to remember the heyday of Brostep, you might get a kick out of the artists referenced in this episode.

Battletanx Covers (youtube.com)

Had battletanx on the mind (it’s a perennial fascination) and wanted to see if anyone had done any decent covers. Turns out the answer is an emphatic yes!

Reckoning (infrequently.org)

This is a good discussion of the failed promises of JavaScript Single Page Apps (SPAs), complete with real case studies where SPAs have sabotaged public services.

But I do think he’s missed something critical that was always hammered home at my first job when I learned about SPAs, back when we were building them out of jquerey: server conpute costs money. Client side compute is free. To you. This could be an appropriate attitude for a commercial outfit, but not one providing a public service.

The Dying Computer Museum (textfiles.com)

Another article about the LCM’s demise. This is textfiles at his best here, highly recommend giving it a read.

Blogosphere (mikegrindle.com)

Reading this article gave me some sort of warm-fuzzies and the desire to link to it, so here goes.

abortretry.fail

This substack author seems to be gunning for https://www.filfre.net/‘s spot, but for hardware instead of software.

A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (loriemerson.net)

This was pitched as a brief history of barbed wire communication. I of course assumed it would be about the way barbed wire sends a clear message to anyone planning to get to the other side of it, but it turned out to be stranger and more wonderful-a story about using barbed wire feces to carry telephony. A neat find for any fans of guerilla telephony.

The Modem World

(image from publisher’s site)

When I was younger, I occasioned to write an essay about the history of the internet. I don’t have a copy in front of me, but I do recall that it ended up being practically a book report on the classic Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon. It gave a strong account of the technical and social factors that took us from ARPANET to TCP/IP. But apart from an excellent digression into Email, it’s sparse on the question of what factors outside of the specific technology BBN was building lead to the internet we knew in the aughts. It was a fine enough essay, I’m sure I received a passing grade for it, but I think my teacher actually had the right idea that I should have instead focused on the movie War Games.

But now, a student in a similar situation wouldn’t have to settle for inferring people’s understanding of computer networks from a movie; now they could pick up The Modem World and get a serious historical account and analysis of the proto-internet, the internet shaped thing that existed before TCP/IP became the dominant communication protocol.

While the notion of BBSs isn’t new to me (I watched the BBS Documentary, read a bunch of Textfiles.com, and frequent SDF which is BBS adjacent) The Modem World was fresh in two important ways: insight and rigor.

Most accounts of the BBS world tend to be primarily sources; people telling their own stories. You’ll find them in the pages of 2600 and the like. The Modem World goes many steps further in teasing out the statistics, explaining how affordances shaped culture, and related the history to present concerns. In this regard it’s a standout book, comfortably sitting alongside a good Platform Studies volume, or Exploding The Phone.

As far as Rigor goes, look no further than the absolutely lavish end notes for a bibliography of BBSing. Never satisfied to rest on a hand wave, the author is relentless in finding actual contemporary sources for so many assertions. I thought that it was going to rely much more heavily on the BBS Documentary than it ultimately did, because the Author dug up so much contemporary material! I appreciate the serious treatment as opposed to what frequently is the type of rose-tinted retro tech light journalism you see out of outfits that shall remain nameless.

July 2024 Web Links

It was a crazy month for news, but this ain’t it.

Hobby pages are finally up (blog.eamonnmr.com)

Took me a while. I spend too much time documenting stuff on discord and not enough in places I can link. So here’s a bit of a remedy: photos of painted miniatures, organized by force.

The painting tutorial I learned the most from (YouTube.com)

This came up during a discussion of how to dealt with shakey hands while painting. I described a trick I learned a long time ago that reduces brush jitter. This is probably the painting tutorial that I’ve learned the most from. Watched it early in my wargaming career. Funny thing is, I’m just getting around to thinking about unloading my STAW ships. Ah well.

Pitchfork skewers a recent album (pitchfork.com)

Absolutely gruesome.

If Perry was willing to cop the built-in bad press of making a song about women’s lib with an alleged abuser, shouldn’t the song at least be a banger? Instead, it’s unfathomably tepid, irritating at best. In the immortal words of Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, uttered moments before she died: “Katy Perry, please stop.”

The Face Of Connecticut (70.91.221.154)

Yep, bare IP address. I won’t spoil my future review of it by explaining this one. It’s a forty year old geology book but it touches my heart in a unique way.

Bionicle’s original story guy set the record straight (alastairswinnerton.com)

Just though this was interesting. This guy’s contributions seem to sometimes eclipsed by Farshtey and Faber.

My very first Ubuntu bug (bugs.launchpad.net)

I’ve been using Ubuntu off and on since the aughts (I’m pretty sure my first install was Hardy Heron back in ’08) but I don’t believe I’ve ever had occasion to file a bug report before. I was trying to get Sheepshaver running on a fresh OS install, and discovered to my dismay that the padsp binary has disappeared. If anyone knows where it went or where I can find it, leave a comment!

https://predawka.bandcamp.com/album/erynias

erynias (predawka.bandcamp.com)

Excellent melodic Drill’n’Bass record from an artist you probably haven’t heard of before. I sure hadn’t. Reminds me of Fine Primitive Sounds a bit. Great sound design, great melodies, and the timing is impeccable, with no element overstaying its welcome.

Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown (onehundredpages.wordpress.com)

Bit mean, but very funny.

Study Reveals location of starfish’s head (news.stanford.edu)

I was wondering recently if we’d made any progress on Starfish development, and was not disappointed.

Lead Testing wargaming minis

First, an apology. If I’d known I was going to write this up, I would have taken pictures of the minis and the lead test results. Lacking that, you’ll just have to trust that I read the test strips correctly. I encourage anyone to test any minis they’re concerned about, and don’t file or sand metal minis around kids.

Random weird knock off space marines of questionable origin: Lead

I tossed them, but they weren’t anything I’ve seen before or since. They resembled space marines but had vertical slats for face plates and resembled robots. May have been garage minis. Really kicking myself for not taking a picture.

Microworld Games: no lead

Agents Of Gaming: No lead

Brigade Models Starmada ships: No Lead

Scotia Grendel: Positive

Privateer Press (warmahordes): Positive (this is surprising because they’re a pretty big outfit.)

Old Questionable Fasa hex walkers: Positive

Cloud Nine’s Heavy Gear mechs: clean

Fading Suns A Call to Arms: Clean

I have a bunch of IWM things, so I tested a few

the Forestry mech labeled ‘Lead free pewter’ was indeed lead free

The Long Tom seemed clean, maybe the slightest positive?

But another seemingly new tank (probably a Shrek PPC carrier) had one of the strongest positive results I saw.

Lab Notes

I accidentally flicked a bit of vinegar/reagent mix into me eye. Owch. Washed it out pretty exhaustively… I hope.

June 2024 Web Links

Excellent This American Life episode (ThisAmericanLife.org)

If anyone could make AI spew sound good, it’s got to be Werner Herzog.

More info comes to light about the ill fated Titanic implosion sub (ArsTechnica.com)

It’s a Wired article, but Ars ran it too. Clears up a lot of the rumors and confusion around the event, such as “how was Boeing involved?”

Samples used in the C&C Series (Reddit)

The real win here though is the link to Methods Of Mayhem. Some really awesome samples and a ton I recognize from Red Alert and Red Alert 2, including many of the voice clips (including the infamous Brain From Outer Space clips used in the Yuri’s Revenge soundtrack.)

I will ****ing piledrive you if you mention AI again (ludic.mataroa.blog)

The title really says it all, this article made the rounds this month. Though it does slide in some AI X-risk stuff, so a good antidote is:

AI Doomers have warned of the tech apocalypse while doing their best to accelerate it (salon.com)

Someone put these pieces together. Admittedly, though, it’s basically doing the homework for that tweet where Altman said Yudkowsky needed a Nobel.

Penryn Space Agency

This was a great electronic music mix show. There are over fifty episodes to listen to. I don’t know the inside story but it sounds like they had difficulty getting to the studio during the pandemic. Their archives are a treasure trove of electronic music recommendations. Get them while they’re hot (and still hosted.) They do a great job of linking to the music they play so you can find new artists.

The Living Computers Museum Finally Isn’t (Old Vintage Computing Research)

This is unfortunate news for the retro-computing community. I’d always hoped to visit this place if I could ever make it out there.

Finding Deceit in the Chambers of Xenobia

A mystery reminiscent of Sour Grapes. Thanks to https://digipres.club/@ryanfb for posting this one on Mastodon.

I’m making a go of it on BlueSky (bsky.social)

I dunno, is this thing on?