GAMES

• Have you heard of xlogo? If you use the X Window System, this is pretty neat.
• Ancient Clickhole of the week: These Elderly People’s Stories Of An Early, Unsafe Version Of Disneyland Will Terrify You.
• C gets a lot of shit on the Internet, yet still persists and thrives. Your operating system is running C code right now, for example. For all its cruft and quirks, there are just certain niches that C fills which languages like Rust unequivocally do not, no matter how many think pieces are written. It also requires discipline and planning. Here's a lighthearted Ten Commandments Of C.
• Incredible short film.
• A dog collar that converts all barks to emails.
• Valve is a company that went from rich to ridonculously rich due to a side project that was the product of their bizarrely relaxed organizational model. Their employee handbook is both interesting to read and very well-designed.

• Wiktionary has some excellent etymologies. Edit: of course some clueless idiot edited the charm out of it before this post dropped. Here's an archived copy.
• Every time I turn on Chrome it informs me that they're completely killing off flash, as in, not even allowing unsupported versions to run. This means thousands of free browser games, from the time before micro-purchases, are gone forever. Mobile and HTML5 have failed to produce even one game as good as Stick RPG 2, The Gemcraft series, Frog Fractions, Rebuild 2, The Burrito Bison Games, or countless others. We accidentally gave the internet and mobile to about five or ten companies and now the future fucking sucks!
• But that bad Internet news is slightly offset by some good internet news: who pays writers.
• I love Rails, but I wish there were a better, more simple reference. In the meanwhile, rails types and their underlying meanings in Mysql, Sqlite3, and PostgreSql.
• The Original Talking Moose, a forgotten classic Mac app.
• "Where did the phrase hubba-hubba come from?"

• The first song ever synthesized by a computer was Daisy Bell. I had no idea the song's use in 2001 was a reference to that.
• Machine-generated music that is actually really good. A lot like what they would play at night on the local university radio when I was a kid.
• A few seconds from various Youtube videos with very few views. Surprisingly interesting.
• I like computer games but I'm happy to call myself a 'casual', because gamers are the worst people in the world in every way possible. Extra-hilarious gaming controversies.
• One of the entries about mentions a guy having objects thrown at him for playing Jiggly Puff. Here is his defence of himself. "People don’t like it when I pop off after victories, especially when they come via Jigglypuff, and they definitely don’t like the methods I use to win tournaments. But that doesn’t matter to me. Every story needs a bad guy. In some ways, the role suits me nicely. After all, as far as I’m concerned, my destiny has already been written."
• KC Green has created another webcomic, this one being a very NSFW gag strip. My favourite is the ASMR lady.

• I haven't seen the new Alan Partridge, but I have seen this, and it is good.
• Weird Universe discovered these instructions for resetting a GE smart bulb, which seems like a parody, but is apparently totally legit. Laziness if often more difficult and tiring than alternative. I'm pretty happy walking over to the light switch.
• A story of a man who accidentally forged an ancient golden crown.
• Sega Channel and other early experiments in online consoles. I was a kid when Sega Channel happened. Lots of people had Segas but no one's parents were shelling out for Sega Channels. Those commercials, though.
• CSS pattern generator. Pixel art is fun.
• My new favourite 404 page.

• An arctic fox travelled 3500km in 76 days, ending up in Ellesmere Island (pictured, photo by Paul Gierszewski).
• The best/worst game ending of all time.
• Individually, they are useful and not much more, but covering a screen, these animations of katakana are beautiful.
• I didn't care about synthesizers, but someone made a kicking web app and now I care a lot.
• 2018 in review.
• This interview where Andy Warhol explains his art is as good as or better than his art.

I only played the Mass Effect games years after this was released, so the original incomplete ending wasn't a big issue for me. Super fun, much more consistent expansions, incredible atmosphere of war and finality. I hate to be one of those Canadians, but I loved starting the game in Vancouver (and the weird fact that Bioware is located in Edmonton, of all places). I appreciate that they would put so much effort into building such a complex universe and so many unusually well-developed characters, and end it so finally that there is no real opportunity for a meaningful sequel.

A game I got on sale years ago. Not bad for what I payed, and not bad for a game based on a property. A few parts were extremely fun, but the more tedious parts dragged it down enough that I never made to to the end, putting it off again and again until I stopped thinking about it entirely.

First you watch a bunch of great-looking cutscenes, then create a save slot (press one button, looks really cool), then sit back for some more cutscenes. Then walk for about 15 seconds, then talk to a guy who offers to show you a long cutscene (psychically). Then your character walks across a large field. Then, after nearly an hour invested, the gameplay finally starts and it is awful.

There's not much going on in terms of level design or game mechanics, so they just made the controls difficult - hyper sensitive and your aim is constantly dragging - to disguise the fact. This is what happens when you spend all your budget on cutscenes.