Category: Links

This one ended up music-heavy.

treelineterrains.com

Saw these in the Vermont building at the Big E. I absolutely love the idea. I actually tried to do something like this myself with a 3d print, but it came out way too warped and anyway you’d need a really big print bed and the amount of sanding required might destroy the topography anyway. Though if you want the look of topo lines maybe you’d enjoy the print lines anyway, a dry brush would make them pop.

onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

Search Engine for free ebooks. Academic focus.

Cheating scandal rocks world stone skimming championships (bbc.com)

September’s silly sports news story.

https://www.stilldrinking.org/stop-talking-to-technology-executives-like-they-have-anything-to-say

players just like you (mtglore.com)

So the Magic The Gathering trading card game used to have a website where people could comment on the cards. This was considered normal in those days. I was delighted to find out that someone had done something with the comments. I hate when worlds get deleted.

Message In A Laptop (wbur.org/endlessthread)

Endless Thread really living up to its potential here. This type of thing is a holy grail for retrotech/archivist fandom. Finding something unique that people find meaningful, which would have been consigned to oblivion if not for your intervention.

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-end-of-aol-dialup.html

Drum Rock (ctmq.org)

This is a fun relic from the time when you could really expect ‘the internet’ to ‘know’ everything. No detail of the world was too obscure to find in a Google search. It was a comfortable way for the world to be, but it’s rapidly declining.

The Sleuthers (snapjudgment.org)

I find this riveting radio story appealing not only because it gives flashbacks to the ouster of Westfield’s president but also because it reminds one of how gruesome the job market is right now.

What’s amazing too is that these students could have saved this superintendent from the massive embarrassment of sticking his neck out for an obviously fake hire, but he, for whatever reason, chose hubris.

I’m Not Here EP (analogicalforce.bandcamp.com)

Analogical Force is a very consistent label, but this one wowed me in a way they usually don’t. They’re really hitting Kraftwerk vibes with the first track off of this.

PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X (youtube.com)

Bonus music this month, because it seems like bands like Machine Girl and Health are releasing extra albums like it’s going out of style. Features some tracks like Rabbit Season that I think reach heights the previous record didn’t hit.

Confiture La Plage (rubymydear.bandcamp.com)

This album takes RMD in an interesting direction, and after the first few tracks of kitch you get a long stretch of brilliant breakcore with lots of interesting acoustic/vocal elements.

Gray Town (megadrive.bandcamp.com)

Another surprise release, so close to MegaDrive’s last release. This one hews closer to Boards Of Canada of all things. Recommending on the strength of the beginning alone!

Gonna keep this one short and sweet.

Zzurgoll Take The Wheel (penny-arcade.com)

Amusing comic to set the tone here.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen (colincornaby.me)

This article captures the zeitgeist of being a software engineer in the summer of 2025.

They’re putting blue food coloring in everything (blog.foxtrotluna.social)

And this captures how it feels to live in summer 2025.

Signpost 2025-08-09Disinformation report (en.wikipedia.org)

Wikipedia editor goes on a multi language deep dive to expose someone’s self promotion operation. I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.

The Scam That Duped Pokémon’s Most Obsessive Card Collectors (popularmechanics.com)

Article about a scam in the Pokemon card collector community with good flavor on the collectors themselves and an interesting resolution. Proper caper.

So we finished decompiling Lego Island (youtu.be)

It’s always fun to find out about a project after it’s delivered something rather than before.

Lego Island was one of the first 3d games I watched my PC fail to run back in the day. But even if you don’t have a strong affection towards this particular game, it’s really interesting to see what a practical decomp project looks like. Often decompilation is used in malware analysis-trying to rebuild a nontrivial PC game like this is rarely a successful project. Kudos to the devs.

isle.pizza

The aforementioned decomp has yielded a playable web build!

Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen (ft.com)

Funniest article I’ve read in a while.

Free Audio Plugins (docs.google.com)

Some enterprising Redditor has taken it up on themselves to log and review all of the free audio plugins they’re trying. There’s a vast ocean of free Audio Plugins out there, so this is useful. Over a hundred plugins reviewed. They have a YouTube channel here.

betterworldbooks.com

A site I didn’t know about. Pretty good deals on ex-library books. Not as good as library book sale deals, but a decent selection for the price.

Contra Ptacek’s terrible article on AI (ludic.mataroa.blog)

Mataroa old school fisking an article with some real zingers. You love to see it.

The Arcade Fire Problem (hearingthings.co)

If you’re an Arcade Fire fan the question is probably not ‘Did pink elephant suck’ but rather ‘was Suburbs the last good album or Reflektor?) Not the single best article to come out about this record, but maybe the one that best captures the disappointment. The record feels, dare I say, court mandated.

Omnimax (computer.rip)

Deep dive on Omnimax, the IMAX related film format used by science museums to project films onto the interiors of planetaria. Good clean fun.

Airmass (magmasphere.bandcamp.com)

Amazing, pilotredsun vibes with a dash of Aphex Twin (Specifically 28 organ)

Should I write one of those email newsletters instead of posting?

A behind the scenes look [at viper race rave] (phlogios.itch.io)

The line between genius and madness is really in play here. I’m of course interested because it’s retromac and EV Nova related, but it’s also a shining example of people doing really interesting things in the retrocomputing space. Today’s technology isn’t the only valid technology to build for.

Hallucinated package names fuel ‘slopsquatting’ (The Register)

Now that’s a brilliant exploit. Wish I’d thought of it. Finally a use case for LLMs!

mirsoft.info

That site is a relic! you don’t see many sites like that around these days. I was looking for the EarthSiege music to remix, but found the MIDI already perfectly well arranged. You love to see it.

La Brea Tar Pits team clarifies more details about “dire wolf” DNA situation (reddit.com)

Been following this story, because not only do they seem to be deliberately disregarding the famous cautionary tale of Jurassic Park, they’re also doing it in a way that’s raising fraud-eyebrows, not just safety eyebrows.

Another good post about it here.

We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus (antipope.org)

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It’s because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They’re rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we’re not futurists, we’re entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it’s a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that’s why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.

Turbo Pascal 3.0 Compiler / Code Generation Internals (pcengines.ch)

When you’re as enthusiastic as I am for old school computing, you’re bound to run into people writing with fondness about Turbo Pascal. I had no idea someone had reverse engineered the thing.

Where the wood-wide-web narrative went wrong (undark.org)

This amounts to what you might call a retraction of the sensational wood-wide-web story you probably heard or saw a few years back, but I wish it was longer snd more detailed. Never heard of undark before, but will keep my eye on it.

Unauthorized Experiment Involving AI-generated Comments (reddit.com)

I almost wrote a whole angry post about this, but 404 Media did it better than I would have, so I’ll confine my thoughts to this little blurb.

This is yet another example of the AI community refusing to play by the rules and justifying their disregard for other people’s freedom of choice with self-aggrandizing platitudes about how what they’re doing is ‘so important’ that the cost to others doesn’t matter.

RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory (Ars Technica)

I’m glad that not only did someone finally write this explicitly, but they also slogged through enough material to find a smoking gun.

Colorsquad16 (colorsquad.bandcamp.com)

This is a treasure trove of IDM artists you may never have heard of. Iceleaps, Predawka, _ir and Utopia Cloak make great showings here.

I promise to eventually publish some stuff that isn’t links, but I really do want to keep doing links, so here we are:

The Terran Trade Authority, Traveller, and Setting Greebles (greatdungeonnorth.blogspot.com)

I really like the concept they name here of ‘setting greebles.’

thetruesize.com

A neat web application that lets you compare the size of different landmasses on a Mercator projection map by dragging them around.

Hindenburg Research shutting down (HindenburgResearch.com)

Hindenburg Research is shutting down. They’ve done some excellent investigations, and it’s a shame to see them go. I do worry that this is a canary for being able to say actionable, unflattering things about companies.

The sound of a meteorite striking the ground has been captured for the first time (Petapixel.com)

An interesting side effect of how surveiled the world is: now incredibly rare natural events are captured on film. Stands in nice contrast to bigfoots and the whole drone situation.

Continent-size blobs in Earth’s mantle are a billion years old, ancient crystals reveal (livescience.com)

New research on the exciting field of figuring out what the heck the deal is with LLSVPs.

Disappearing_polymorph (en.wikipedia.org)

Neat concept. Makes you wonder what molecules are floating around in quantities too small to do anything at the macro scale there are all around us.

EV Nova Walkthroughs (escape-velocity.games)

Have a new mirror it seems.

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…

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.