September/October ’26 Web links

This is like a Superbowl ad back when Superbowl ads were good, and it’s aimed squarely at Millennials.

A word on Omarchy (マリウス.com)

A good breakdown on why Omarchy is has no there there. Omarchy is a meme in the linux community right now. Also, sick unicode hostname.

Kiwibank is desperately trying to stop people saying they want to fuck its sheep mascot (thespinoff.co.nz)

Meanwhile in New Zealand. See also this followup coverage.

Weird Guys (drewdevault.com)

For one’s information.

Re: Return of the Obra Dinn (forums.tigsource.com)

Screen Space Dithering explanation by (?) the Return of the Obra Dinn developer. Interesting because I was looking into making a dithering shader to match the look of These old crunchy graphics.

Inner Join – Shiftlock Override (soundcloud.com)

Taking another shot at a Synthwave/Outrun track.

marginalia-search.com

Similar to Wiby, another retro search engine.

“I joined Apple in 1996 […]” (/r/VintageApple)

Interesting comment (well, interesting for Classic Mac fans) from someone who joined Apple from NeXT.

Corporate Gen-X Cyber (are.na)

Not sure how I missed this apparently fifteen year old domain hack, but turn your attention to this specific page and this very specific aesthetic.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism (matduggan.com)

One of the first and most classic examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech is the classic “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow written in 1996. […] Today the Declaration reads like one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law

We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not ‘directionally wrong’ or ‘wrong in the details.’ Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.

Today’s PHP Security Release, and How We’re Strengthening PHP Security (thephp.foundation)

This very blog was one of the thousands of sites that needed to be panic-patched on that fateful day. There is a fair amount of confusion around the release of this CVE and I advise anyone interested to go straight to the source and read the PHP Foundation’s statement.

rip.so

Nice little tech-graveyard site with pretty retro CSS.

AI Crisis

I guess we’re calling it ‘Black October’ now (see also the above PHP vulnerability.)

The Test (tante.cc)

An observation about the Klein/Huang interview that was making the rounds.

[…] in that interview, Klein could have pushed back on Huang. Really dug into how “I don’t know my address” is not about “some skills are no longer required” but about “I am rich and pay a bunch of women to run my life like my mother used to“. Could have challenged that completely disconnected statement to kinda force Huang to step down from abstraction land down to the real world.

It Breaks a Village (blog.fallible.net)

Another exhausted plea from an Open Source maintainer.

This has been almost entirely on hold for the last 5 weeks as trying to write Bevy-related code right now makes me feel fully nauseous. Stomach churning, I-want-to-throw-up. My mind cannot keep from racing about what it means to be a contributor to open source in this moment in time.

I may be alone in this specific feeling, but I am not alone in feeling that contributing to Bevy right now feels extremely bad.

Ghost in the Machine (youtube.com)

A documentary that covers some of the same ground as Palo Alto and Mismeasure of Man but worth a look if you need more convincing.

Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” (arstechnica.com)

I love-love-love that this came from someone actually sitting inside Microsoft. Love it. I might make stickers or tee shirts of this.

Software developers are not okay (baldurbjarnason.com)

Another case of the vibe being captured. I really can’t get enough of these if they’re good. See also the followup.

The responsibility does not lie with a piece of code (crookedtimber.org)

Good policy op-ed about the Australian chatbot breach/unauthorized scrape.

cocAIne [sic] (jwz.org)

Somehow I missed this when it was posted. Hilarious analogy.

Programming Isn’t Special (blog.glyph.im)

Decompilations, AI, the chase for clout, the value of caring, and the desire to consoom (jpeisach.github.io/blog)

While yes, making mods for the game, and porting it to other platforms is certainly a benefit (and don’t get me wrong, for some people it is their main driver), the main reason is, we enjoy doing it for fun! We love seeing the code that makes up our favorite games. We love seeing the decisions made by the developers. We love seeing that, wow, they used a ternary statement here instead of a normal if statement. We love being able to, at the end of the decompilation, have the equivalent of as if the entire game source leaked, just with comments and missing variable or function names that we have yet to figure out.

We love being able to see how developers optimized their game to run on the hardware of the time. We love to see the in-house game engines that were used! We love to see the developers’ ways of dealing with simple problems. We love seeing their practices for “initialization, deinitialization”. We love seeing how they made validation checks so that your game would not crash.

AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult In Berkeley, California (verysane.ai)

Another explainer that made the rounds. One thing I think this one does fairly well is bringing receipts with immediacy rather than relying entirely on footnotes (though there are many.) I do think it gets off in the weeds in a few directions and could have been broken up into a series of shorter more focused posts. But, for now, this is what I’ve got to gesture towards when someone says “should we take the Terminator thing seriously right now?”

Mood Machine (Audio, Pelly, 2025)

I was expecting another fairly journalistic-distant nonfiction experience here, but instead what I got was a gloriously opinionated fireball. The author is working in the music journalism rather than tech journalism tradition and the result is an excoriation of nobody’s favorite streaming service and the major labels (‘the majors’) who payola it.

The author is clearly passionate about independent music but takes pains to explore the culture of other genres and point out that there’s something there beyond just noises to put in the background. Muzak is a brutal accusation of any form of music, but it’s backed up with ample evidence here.

The Wintel Retro Landscape

I started this project before the massive boom in Claude-enabled decomps started rushing the scene, so this may now be mostly of historical rather than practical interest. I planned on comparing more applications but see little point now; I’m publishing more or less as it was last time I touched it. It should also be noted that when I wrote this, the Pi 5 was a lot more affordable!

Windows On Intel dominated the late PC era, and there’s a wealth of software available for the platform, especially from the 90s and 2000s, right in the sweet spot when desktop games had matured but not bet become totally entangled in Steam and DRM. Microsoft has done an impressive job keeping legacy applications running on the platform. It’s a platform I hoped you could keep stable indefinitely, even if WINE was required.

However, Wintel and desktop in general have been slowly falling out of favor. Apple, ever the trend setter, has switched away from Intel for its desktop machines. Microsoft has been shipping ARM tablets for a while. The Raspberry Pi is the common denominator hobbyist platform. People are hopping mad about Windows 11. And overall, computing has switched from something you do on a desktop with a keyboard and mouse running an Intel processor to being something you do with a mobile device with an ARM processor.

What do we do when platforms are retired and try to make us give up our software? We persist!

Meet the Test Applications:

I’ve tried to assemble a grab bag of applications you should be able to find if you look hard enough but nonetheless are personally nostalgic.

EV Nova (Windows Port) (2003)

The definitive 2D space trader. One of my favorite games and one of those “I want to be able to play this forever” emulation targets. Previous attempts to run in WINE have been difficult due to font weirdness, but with the advent of the CE binary patch have gotten within reach.

Space Invaders (Windows, 1999)

2.5d Shmup based on the ur-shmup. If you speed run it, it plays like a puzzle game.

Lego Loco (1998)

2d sandbox/toy. Charming pixel art graphics. Like a Lego Sim City but without any Sim elements; the only real ‘game’ is to hunt for all of the whimsical easter eggs they programmed in, including some that only appear on certain dates (for example, on Halloween all characters spawn as skeletons.)

Star Craft: Broodwar (1998)

The classic sprite RTS and once the most popular esport.

Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun

https://cnc-comm.com/tiberian-sun/downloads/the-game/installer

An eclectic mix of technologies and killer atmosphere create a memorable RTS experience.

Test Environments:

Raspberry Pi 4/5: Wine + Box64

PI 5 only: change kernel page size:

The PI 5 has a larger kernel page size than legacy programs expect. You need to downgrade your kernel to make it work. This is only a problem on the PI5. Be pretty cool if this could be emulated too though.

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/issues/993

Edit your config.txt:

sudo vi /boot/firmware/config.txt

(or sudo nano if you don’t like vi)

add the following to that file:

kernel=kernel8.img

Reboot.

Compile Box64

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/blob/main/docs/COMPILE.md

git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64
cd box64
mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -D ARM_DYNAREC=ON -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -D BOX32=ON -D BOX32_BINFMT=ON -D RPI4ARM64=1 #Change the last line according to your PI version
# This takes a while
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt

Install bundle libraries

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/blob/main/docs/BUNDLE-X86-LIBS.md

sudo apt-get install binutils coreutils curl rpm2cpio tar zstd

/box64-bundle-x86-libs.sh

Install x86 WINE

download wine here: https://github.com/Kron4ek/Wine-Builds/releases (wow64)

Run the program

bin/wine <program.exe>

Remarks

This setup isn’t too bad, but it required some knowledge of Linux, googling, and assembling multiple parts. Nothing I expect the average Raspberry Pi user to be intimidated by, not not something I can recommend to the general public in the way you can with Steam.

For CD ROM games

You’ll need to mount the ISO of the CD ROM:

“`mkdir ~/cdrom0

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 <my_iso>.ISO ~/cdrom0

EV Nova

PI 4: Runs albeit at a framerate slightly below the original OS9 play speed (and well below the default Windows play speed.) ~25 FPS.

PI 5: Acceptable performance. Fonts still slightly jank.

Space Invaders

PI 4: Runs stable, with some graphical glitches. You need to install it from the CD then run from Wine’s C drive (easy to find with winefile.) Couldn’t figure out how to make the window bigger.

Tiberian Sun

PI 5: Runs great. Initial startup was wonky and need multiple tries. Make sure you change the screen resolution asap because any space outside the resolution gets an awful flashing pattern (Photosensitive warning!)

Android: Winlator

Winlator is distributed as an APK here: https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator/releases/

Installing APKs on android requires clicking through several security warnings because it’s opening up your device to possible compromise in a way that most activity on an Android device does not. But, if you’re pretty sure you know what you’re doing, Winlator packages WINE, Box86/64, and several other tools together into an android app that lets you run some wintel programs on an android ARM device.

For best results you’re going to want an external Bluetooth keyboard and at least a stylus.

EV Nova

Can’t keep a consistent frame rate. Some text missing. Semi-Playable, but only if you’re a diehard fan.

C&C: Tiberian Sun

Way too slow to be playable. Radar didn’t work. Froze on campaign start, but was able to start a skirmish. LMB controls meant you could still sort of play slowly.

CD Games

Winlator is unable to run games that require a CD in the tray to run because it lacks CD emulation.

Remark

It’s simply not ready. Maybe never will be.

Linux on x86 (Virtual Box)

I consider WINE on Lin86 a mature enough technology that I don’t feel the need to discuss it here, instead I wanted to compare it to Virtual Box.

I used Lubuntu on an old ThinkCentre. Similar instructions are out there for other Linux distros. There are some well known Windows XP installs you can use. Make sure you enable virtualization in your BIOS.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

sudo apt install gcc make perl
sudo /sbin/vboxconfig

sudo rmmod kvm_intel

# You may need to configure these to run at startup
sudo modprobe -r kvm
sudo modprobe -r kvm_intel

But there are issues:

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=106674

After 6.x, Virtual box dropped support for 3d acceleration in WinXP guests.

Installing 6.x on Ubuntu 24.x turned out to be difficult as well, but your mileage may vary.

CD support is very nice; you just load each CD as a virtual dive. I’ve found this the most straightforward way to run non-game applications if you need them.

IBM’s Early Computers (Bashe et al, 1986)

The history of personal computers is something you can find covered in all manner of media. It’s beyond a cult following and well into mythmaking. What’s often lost is that there’s a history of computing that reaches much further into the past; most histories treat anything before minicomputers (and, increasingly minicomputers themselves) as a given and tell the story of the PC. But the minicomputer era relied on prior art, and this is what we hear about in IBM.

If you ever wanted to know how hard disc drives or magnetic tape were invented or how early architecture was worked out this textbook is actually a treasure trove.

From my perspective the most interesting section is of course the chapter on Programming featuring early assembly (etymology: related to the fact that they were writing programs for the so called “Test Assembly?”) and ‘speed code’, stuff that predates the history of programming languages as such.

July/August ’26 Web Links

Cape Cod homeowner sues, says bank should not have given him mortgage for $5.5 million mansion at risk of collapse

Headline of the bi-month.

Ev Nova Wiki (miraheze.org)

The EVN wiki recently moved off the awful ‘fandom’ platform. This is a thrilling development and I’m extremely grateful to the hard work of Sharky et al. Update your links to the EVN wiki, people.

Trinket Box Purveyors Are Melting Down (defector.com)

Some good old fashioned Hobby Drama. Some delicious one-liners in here.

Behringer td-3 Rechargable Battery Mod (ekartco.com)

Someone figured out how to stick a battery into into the TD-3

Archives (datahoarding.org)

A links page that lists a number of other online archive resources.

Boeing will support SCAT Airlines (boeing.com)

I laughed at this for multiple minutes. It looks like a meme but it’s a real graphic put out by Boeing, go check.

Raspberry Pi as Alphasmart Dana Access Point and File Share (tinyhack.com)

This is another neat mod, interesting to see that Alpha Smarts are still used in some capacity. I would say I learned to type on those things but it would be more accurate to say that I tried to learn to type on those but didn’t ultimately succeed until I was shamed for my slow typing and spelling mistakes in Starcraft games.

dl.acm.org/

ACM digital library is now open access. This is something that I really enjoyed accessing back in college. This one’s my favorite: HOPL: The first conference book and subsequent conferences.

Some of my synths… and what i have been doing to them… (cykong.org)

Cool old-school site with some neat synths and technical specifics on mods for those synths.

cooldowns.dev

An intriguing approach to avoiding supply chain attacks, though I wonder if it’s going to cause a free rider problem and ultimately reach an equilibrium where it just pushes back how long it takes for supply chain attacks to get noticed and fixed.

vst.unplug.red

Now that is web design.

airwindowscheatsheet.aboni.dev

Airwindows is an audio plugin producer with slightly ideosyncretic documentation. Here we have a summary of what each plugin does.

How are images recorded in a hologram? (holocenter.org)

Holograms used to be everywhere. I have a vivid memory of someone swimming around with a pair of goggles with a pair of holographic sharks on them. but I’d never really considered how the effect was achieved. This helps one understand the surreal quality that holograms of this type tend to have; they’re often of a model!

Book Binding (tuxgraphics.org)

Bookbinding tutorial in immaculate HTML with retro graphics.

Alledged Dimethylmercury Incident (science.org)

Lowe in rare form on some local news.

Glades & Collier (soundcloud.com)

I’m finally back at it, now with way more music theory knowledge. I’m particularly pleased with this track.

AI Crisis

How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral (propublica.org)

Used to be in order to professionally google bomb something you had to make like Sue Sch*ff and create dozens of websites to push everything else off the front page of Google. Nowadays you just vibecode a slopsite and the google bot will spit it out as gospel. Excellent!

My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite (andrewkelley.me)

Suitably savage “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” from the Zig camp.

AI in 2026 (www.eamoncaddigan.net)

Another guy named Eamonn! One N though (the more common spelling.) A post that captures the feeling of working in this industry this year.

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making (ludic.mataroa.blog)

Another banger blog post from the “I will piledrive you” guy.

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs (blog.codeberg.org)

Codeberg’s blog publishes one of the strongest-so-far arguments against acceptance of AI in open source communities.

Okay, we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen (infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea)

It’s not every day that I link to a Mastodon post with an anime avatar. But! This one is fascinating.

Tech has gotten weird (overripe.net)

Another ‘state of the industry’ essay, don’t miss the followup. Spoiler for the conclusion:

if you’re like me and getting forced to gain fluency with this tech, defend yourself. Go to absurd lengths to protect and grow your skills despite the potential slopification of your day job. Read more. Code more. Write more. Complain more. At least that’s what I’m doing.

Rust is adopting an LLM policy (blog.rust-lang.org)

Another major foss project has set out a fairly restrictive LLM policy. Though much more diplomatic than the others, it’s clear that the community sees that its continued existence as a community relies on human contributors.

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say (www.scientificamerican.com)

This will of course not be echoed nearly as widely as the initial coverage was.

On AI Coding and Its Discontents (calnewport.com)

This last year has been exhausting. The PR departments of the frontier labs have done an excellent job convincing us that AI developments are occurring at an astounding, world-changing rate. But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data.

$TARFACE (pitchfork.com)

Nothing like a good old savage Pitchfork review.

Empire of AI (Hao, 2025, audio)

The AI Era (or, as I like to say, AI Crisis) can really be attributed to a single company: OpenAI. As such, it’s an important enough subject that I’m glad someone wrote a book about it before they vanish into a puff of debt.

The folly of OpenAI, thinking they could build a private nonprofit to create aligned AGI when they couldn’t even successfully align and control an Oligarch is an operatic tragedy and the meat of Empire Of AI tells that story. Hao manages to thread the needle between people-zooing the crazies as and the Hagiography of an Isaacson. Genuine appreciation for technological innovation is tempered with empathy for the people the process of its creation is harming. Its perpetrators are painted as human, not cackling villains, though you get the distinct impression of who gave interviews and who didn’t.

Empire also seems to set out to answer a nagging question I’ve had since the beginning of the AI Crisis: how serious are the folks at OpenAI about thinking they’re creating Skynet, and if so why are they doing it? What’s the backstory to the board coup? We get the inside story on both and the answer turns out to be that there were multiple factions within OpenAI (mirroring the opposing factions of accelerationists/safetyists) while still making it clear that both belong to a tiny subculture far out of step with the mainstream which suddenly has massive outsized influence on all of our lives.

A fine sequel to Weapons Of Math Destruction, incidentally.

A Talent for War (MacDevitt, 1989)

This novel would appear to be a fixup of two short stories previously published. The sections covering those short stories are the best parts, but the beginning drags a bit in actually getting us there.

The pacing is weird (I suspect it’s due to the fixup) with long sections which are flashbacks or quotes and most of the action happening in the second half.

Also, the summary blurb would be a massive spoiler if it wasn’t completely incorrect. Don’t read the back cover summary. It says something that really isn’t true. The real hook is: our hero Alex Benedict wants to know what his uncle (father figure?) was trying to find out when his space liner randomly misjumped out of existence. It’s National Treasure but instead of American history it’s the detailed fictional history of a far future human space civilization organized around common defense against aliens. I wanted a space opera and I suppose I got one in a slightly roundabout way.

I will note that I read this because I started Polaris and realized that it was actually book two in a series several chapters in. I’m going to restart Polaris and see if anything makes more sense, but it felt pretty self contained (and I think the author improved a lot in the intervening decade and a half anyway.)

The setting has some interesting space opera set pieces, but my favorite is that the center of the character’s universe is a planet called Rimway, Earth is an afterthought.

A Cutting Commentary of one’s own

One of the moments I remember well from the early aughts was a conversation I had with my dad about an article he’d written for the popular astronomy publication Sky & Telescope. The conversation I remember was about the reader response to his article: environmentalists up in arms about the deforestation of a Connecticut mountainside in the name of stargazing. What may have gotten lost in the shuffle was that at the time Dad had another hobby besides astronomy: building a yard! Perhaps I didn’t understand this clearly in my youth, but people don’t just create yards because chainsaws ‘go brr’ or because exercising control over a landscape is fun; he did it so we, his kids, would have somewhere to run and play. That yard has given us decades of good times, though it really was a spectacular spot for stargazing too, especially laying back on the rock for a panoramic meteor shower viewing.

Man driving an orange Kubota tractor with a bucket loader. ROPS not yet installed. Rock in background matches description in article.

Astronomy is an enjoyable hobby, but here’s another one: finding the real tangible objects that connect to you recollection. I wanted to hold this article in my hand and prove that this happened, and especially see this supposed reader response that he’d described. I didn’t have a year or a title, just an author, an era, and Google (and this research was in 2021, when Google was still good.) The article didn’t exist anywhere online, but an index of Sky and Telescope does! With that in hand, I was able to figure out which issues had what I was looking for. Naturally I tracked down a hard copy and scanned the article for posterity, like I do. Here it is in full:

My immediate reaction is that it’s hilarious, and it should have been clear from the tone that it’s not entirely serious. The influence of John McPhee is clear in the joy with which he recounts the geological history of our home (though I think it’s Plagioclase, not Marble, mixed in with the Quartz.) He ends it with a rousing call to action, to get out and interrupt photons on their aeons-long journeys with your own retinas. “Why not just look in a nice coffee-table book at photographs of Nebulae and planets? That’s not our way, is it?” Surely deforestation isn’t really a requirement for soaking up some starlight. It reads as a fun excuse to infodump about his favorite topics of the day: astronomy gear, landscaping gear, and geology. Its theme is to touch grass and pursue your passions; something still relatable today, a quarter century later!

The next issue does, as he claimed, contain some less-than-thrilled reader responses:

Apparently the letters were “Overwhelmingly negative” and Sky & Telescope felt the need to remind readers that this was an opinion piece and that they didn’t endorse clearcutting! One of them, however picked out that the article was run on April Fool’s day!

While the readers of S&T back in the early aughts may not have appreciated it, I think it’s great at what it’s doing (using a humorous premise to explore different interesting subjects end encourage the reader to do the same) but I like it most as an echo of a particular place and time.

The Face Of Connecticut (Bell, 1985)

Where Hartford County intrudes into Litchfield County, that’s where I’m from. Just into the intrusion actually. Like, if we gave it to New Hartford as part of a grand rectification to repatriate the Southwick Jog, it’s difficult to say if we’d be part of the deal or not without squinting.

We lived high on a hill in the region of Connecticut’s Western Uplands, our yard rising to an outcrop of the Rowe Schist bedrock of Ratlum Mountain.1 Rocks there sparkle with mica, which is hard to capture on a camera but produces a dazzling effect in person.

That bedrock was a jungle gym for us kids. Though it looks rough, I mastered running straight across it, front to back. From there, especially in winter when the foliage thinned, there was a clear view out of the mountains, across to the mighty Traprock Ridges that split the central valley.

It was there, but also digging through rocky topsoil (“rock farming”), driving through winding hill roads and up the mighty Avon Mountain that set me up to appreciate that someone went out and wrote the perfect guide for a Connecticut-specific (lay) geology enthusiast.

Bell’s Book

The Face Of Connecticut is divided into two parts: a the first is a region-by-region description of the terrain with a history of land use. Of interest to uplanders like myself is the knowledge that the forests are in fact quite young. Local lore points out that in New England the oldest trees are the ones growing into stone walls, but I don’t think I really took that to heart, no matter how many stone walls I saw running abandoned through forests, or huge trees I saw along them.

The second section starts off slow with Connecticut’s ties to the history of geological science, used as a way to explain the history of the field. Having already read Annals Of the Former World–constituent volume Basin And Range is name-checked here–this wasn’t terribly new to me. What’s exciting, however, is the focus on New England specifically, especially of the creation of the mountain ranges and, perhaps most engaging, the story of the Central Valley (also called the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts.) The filling in of a rift that almost became the Atlantic Ocean, impingement by lava flows, and the tilting of those layers to form the awe-inspiring traprock (basalt) formation visible from miles away is an adventure on a geological timescale.

The Internet Mystery

The book was published in 1985 by State geological and natural survey of Connecticut as “Bulletin 110.” An exhaustive list of Bulletins wasn’t forthcoming. When I went to look for some maps I could use to try and locate my old stomping ground in the bedrock, I found something curious: the entire book, online, in immaculate HTML. There’s no about page explaining it and the archive barely knows about it. In fact I was so worried it would disappear that I immediately downloaded the whole thing and hosted it on Orbital Fortress and also on the the Internet Archive.

The mystery of who was hosting it, at least, was easily solved: the index page on the IP address told us that it was the Talcott Mountain Science Center And Academy’s “project and secondary server,” copyright 1998-present. That’s probably why the images are disappointingly small, I wonder if they’ve been hosting this site since then!

It was no small undertaking, I imagine, circa 1998 (let’s say) to create such web book. It’s got a fully working index with links! It’s broken up by page! Who created this relic and why? It’s presented (presumably) exactly as the 1997 printing of the book. The archive goes back to 2016, but how far back do links to it go?

It has since disappeared, Talcott’s server presumably receiving a new IP or going offline. Just goes to show: if you see a cool old website, save it!

1: Not, one might note, Ratlum Mountain Schist, which is on the western side of its namesake, not the summit.

Burn Rate (Wolff, 1998)

Dot Con was good but I felt it was lacking a lot of color, what it was like to experience the the bubble from the inside. Burn Rate has it in spades. This is the story of a single CEO in the midst of the dot com boom running around and trying to secure enough capital to keep his money-burning company afloat. The dialogue is worthy of a Max Barry or Ian M Banks novel. Especially his conversations with his wife/counsel.

Wolff is a bastard. He sells a grandmom-and-pop magazine company his lemon of a database, runs out of money, sells air like a conman and ultimately tries to screw his investors. He shows little or no concern for anyone but himself–not his wife, not his employees, and last of all his customers. His concern is singular: he wants a big payout.

What’s truly insane is that this book was out in 1998. This wasn’t some expose of the bubble nor did the account of numerous dotcoms being dead companies walking or outright ponzis serve to deflate it. It kept rolling for years.