Link Dump: November With Shades of January
Stuff happened
If you’ve been following my shares feed you’ve probably noticed a rather irregular pattern over the last few months since I did a roundup. Events transpired, and I fell off reading the feeds I follow for several weeks—and then I caught up in a haphazard fashion, leading to mid-November posts being shared alongside those from December and even January. But it’s all much of a muchness, you all should have been out enjoying the spring and summer (such as it was) instead of reading anyway. And hey, still a month to go until Autumn!
The shares feed is great, and you should follow it for more good stuff, but there’s always a few I want to comment on. Given the timespan I’ve whittled those down to just, uh, 15. There was plenty more where they came from, let me tell you. Dates given are from my feed reader and in my timezone, UTC+13 at the moment, so often a day ahead.
Finished Link’s Awakening (GBC) | 7 November | Laura Michet’s Blog.
Fun fact: Link’s Awakening is the only Zelda I’ve ever finished, and much like Laura it was in 2024. I also didn’t have any kind of console as a kid, and so I’m missing out of a lot of context that this particular game filled in. If I’d done my own post at the time it would be very similar, though not as well written.
It was a really delightful experience! Link’s Awakening has so much personality - it really is as special and strange as people say. It satisfied my desire to have a “rosetta stone”-type experience with a Zelda game - I recognized so many things I’ve seen in the two modern open-world Zelda games on Switch.
Prior to this, those were the only two Zelda games I’d played. I was a PC gaming child; my parents considered PC games to be somehow “educational,” but forbid me from owning a console or handheld device because they would “rot my brain.” Frogger was okay, for some reason; Age of Empires was great; Link and his friends were forbidden. I simply do not have the kind of Zelda Knowledge possessed by many game devs. Nevertheless, I started playing Link’s Awakening with the aim of looking up as few solutions to puzzles as possible. I was derailed in, I think, the second dungeon. Some of the early game dungeon puzzles require you to know the names of some of the monsters… and some of the monster names are very strange.
The post goes on to talk about the inspiration the game takes from Twin Peaks, which is not something I have any context with but maybe I should change that. After I finished Link’s Awakening I went on to Oracle of Ages, but eventually fell off it. Currently I’m playing A Link to the Past which I might write about when I’m done. Stay tuned!
Lets make a website like it’s 1999! | 8 November | Thea’s Ramblings.
This is the first in a series of posts about personal websites and web-hosts, from back when your ISP included web hosting:
It’s 1999! You’ve just signed up for your first internet connection with your local ISP, TheaNET! Hey that’s your name as well! They’re a very modern ISP, supporting your new V92 56k modem, and you get 30 hours of connection per month for a very reasonable $29.95.
Looking through the signup pack they sent you, there’s a CD with Netscape Communicator and a bunch of trial apps, some pamphlets, and a letter with connection details on it. One part catches your eye:
All accounts come with complementary website hosting with 10MB of disk space and 100MB of traffic per month.
Not only can you browse all the sites on the internet, you can make your own. This is truely the future.
I remember these days, and I remember my family not really taking advantage of it—I expect few did, sadly. My own site today is trying to ape similar constraints: it’s currently up to about 12MB, including 9.5MB of images and half a megabyte of Vote Chess pgn archives.
Thea isn’t doing a completely accurate reconstruction, not least because a 1999-era server would be stupendously vulnerable to malware, but it’s philosophically accurate and I love it for that.
Take back the web: The algorithms are not your friend | 10 November | Fred Clark at Slacktivist.
Sharing an article about the importance of RSS in my RSS feed is a bit silly, so here it is again in another context. Unless you’re reading this post in your own RSS reader, of course.
It’s not the only such post I shared over the last few months, but I think it’s important to tautoko other people promoting a better web even if it is preaching to the choir.
Mixed-type arithmetic in C | 26 November | Luna’s Blog.
A niche one—can you figure out how it works?
Asks: Playing your own games, and wanderstop scheduling | 11 December | Aurambles.
Aura is asked by a reader: “As a gamedev, do you find yourself able to play games you worked on?” She replies: “NEVER.”
I have never even once been able to truly enjoy playing a game after I spent years working on it. I do a lot of playtesting, so obviously I tend to get that time in whether I want it or not, but I think there’s something fundamental about me that enjoys a sense of mystery and surprise when playing stuff and being on the dev team really robs a lot of that experience – there’s just no keeping secrets in game development, and for good reason. Inevitably, even if I find myself enjoying parts of the game, I end up critiquing every single bit of my own work, too, which is… stressful in aggregate.
But read the whole, etc. There was a followup post that’s also worth a perusal.
I’ve made a couple of small games, though not even remotely to a professional quality, and I actually have a pretty different perspective: I do enjoy my games, even when my behind-the-scenes knowledge amounts to cheating. There’s a couple of reasons for this, but one of them is probably because I’m not any good at it and so I don’t have the critical eye of a real gamedev.
Final Fantasy VIII is the most accurate any video game has ever been about libraries | 17 December | Phil at Final Fantasy VIII is the Best.
Let me tell you about working in an academic library.
Yes, our budget was always being cut. And yes, the first thing that got cut was our minuscule food budget, meaning we could no longer afford to get pizza for our student staff once a semester, which did affect staff morale. But the part you might not expect is that the part about having a separate budget to buy books is also correct.
(Cis)gender Dysphoria, Envy, Political Fear, Reclusive Dread | 20 December | Shel Raphen at The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim.
I went through a certain phase of my life where, whenever I walked through the railway station or another public place, I would pick random women and try to see if I could justify clocking them as trans based on this or that feature. Nobody looks their best at 9am stepping off the late train to work, and so I could always find a reason. I stopped doing that pretty quick, because that’s a very dangerous road to go down mentally, but it did also make me feel a bit better and that has endured. This post by Shel analyses a similar idea with much more insight.
The ideal woman, who “looks like a woman,” is the impossible western beauty standard. All women, cisgender or transgender, are comparing ourselves to this ideal woman, with the perfect cheekbones, the perfect forehead, the perfect chin, the perfect nose, and so forth. The biological diversity of the female face is far more complex than can fit inside that beauty standard.
A note: I’ve avoided where possible resharing stuff about the 2024 US election for obvious reasons, but this post exists unavoidably in that context. It is still worth a read, however.
One Dog v. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack | 3 January | Ninji’s Website.
During October I shared a post from Cathode Ray Dude called “640x480 was just the resolution your parents used” about how even in the early 1990s the standard 480 row VGA resolution was outdated, contra to many people’s memories today: operating systems from that time were perfectly capable of supporting much higher resolutions given the correct drivers and hardware.
Ninji though is doing something special: how do you get Windows 3.1 (from 1992) to work with the screen of an Eee PC from 16 years later, at its native resolution of 1024x600?
By default, Windows 3.x renders using the standard “lowest common denominator” of video: VGA 640x480 at 16 colours. Unfortunately this looks awful on the Eee PC’s beautiful 1024x600 screen, and it’s not even the same aspect ratio.
But how can we do better? The 3.11 installer includes a smattering of drivers for long-obsolete video adapters, but they didn’t have the prescience to support the Intel GMA 950 in my netbook. (For shame, Microsoft. For shame.)
The pictures of the result are beautiful—as are the glitches where it doesn’t work.
Linux Gaming in 2025 | 7 January | Lina at The Abyssal Sea.
There was a brief time, when I was a university student about 10 years ago and I had just got a new laptop, where I resolved to dual boot Linux and Windows. Linux was for work, as I’d already been using it for several years on my previous device, while Windows was kept around for games, mostly the recently released Cities: Skylines. This attempt at maintaining a mental cordon sanitaire can’t have lasted a month, as CS had a native Linux version and why bother switching to Windows? Eventually the pre-installed operating system languished and was ultimately deleted—I could game as much as I wanted on Linux, and Proton has only made it easier.
Yes, linux is different from windows. Yes, there’s a learning curve. But switching from Windows to MacOS, or vice-versa, with no previous experience in the new one will result in the same kind of confusion. Sure, it can be hard to pick a distro, but even that an overblown talking point.
As the years go on it’s really nice to see other people also having good experiences. Like Lina says, Linux is just another operating system.
Trans Literature Doesn’t Require Big Tech to Organize | 9 January | Bethany Karsten at The Transfeminine Review.
As it stands right now, the transfeminine literary community is heavily reliant upon centralized third-party internet hubs to develop, organize, and market their work. While websites like Bluesky are undeniably better than anything run by Meta or Xitter, they remain severely vulnerable to crackdowns by authoritarian governments, bad-actor corporations, and transphobic malfeasance. So long as transfeminine authors lack a viable business model without social media and its assorted apparatuses, their work and lives stand at a exponentially more severe risk of erasure.
Do you have a business plan for a total age-restriction or ban of trans topics on social media?
This is a real threat, and not just to the community that The Transfeminine Review focuses on. I’ve boosted other posts that focus on RSS for this purpose; this one is about email.
I’m less fond of email newsletters than RSS-powered blogs, because email is much more controlled by large companies in the name of spam prevention, and commercial mailing services can be prohibitively expensive. I also take against them because I find the email client to be a terrible place to read things like that. But it is an important part of the toolkit, and many people have a different experience to me when it comes to UX. And, well, anything is better than Xitter.
Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose | 9 January | Rachel by the Bay.
I actually shared jwz’s share of this, A tale from the time_t mines—but of course, I’ve now subscribed directly.
The end of June approached, and it was time to do a full-scale test. I wanted to be sure that we could survive being a second out of whack without having the confounding factor of the whole rest of the world simultaneously dealing with their own leap second stuff. We needed to know if we’d be okay, and the only way to know was to smear it off, hold a bit to see if anything happened, then *smear it back on*.
This is probably the first anyone outside the company’s heard of it, but about a week before, I smeared off a whole second and left the ENTIRE company’s infra (laptops and all) running a second slow relative to the rest of the world. Then we stayed there for a couple of hours if I remember correctly, and then went forward again and caught back up.
A week later, we did it for real and it just worked.
This was 2015, when a leap second was added at the end of June; the last such meddling with Universal Coordinated Time was at the end of 2016 and who knows what will happen next time? When it does we will get six months warning, Let’s hope there are more people with the kind of ingenuity and foresight as Rachel.
Especially if, this time, it’s negative.
The forthcoming future of decent portions of America | 12 January | Alyaza Birze at Birze Blog.
A warning, this one is a huge downer: it’s about insurance.
one of the truths we are not prepared for in this era of climate change is that many parts of California; the Mountain West; the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts; and entire sections of states like Florida and Louisiana will—purely for economic reasons, not even factoring in other considerations—have to eventually be ceded to nature or left to fend for themselves. everything will be done to resist this (especially if this will be felt most by homeowners), but it will happen eventually.
if you believe that is exaggeratory, it really is not.
Personally I expect the current unsustainable path to continue for a while longer—that seems to be how the world works at the moment—but nothing lasts forever.
What if NUKEMAP had been made in the 1960s? | 18 January | Alex Wellerstein at Doomsday Machines.
NUKEMAP is a project originally created in 2012 by Alex Wellerstein that allows the user to plot nuclear explosions of specified sizes and types on real world maps. Try it out on your own city! Or don’t, it’s a bit grim.
But there’s no technical reason why such a resource could only exist in the 21st century—and it seems 50 years earlier somebody did try:
Computers are very good at math. Making a computer that can solve the above sorts of problems is not that hard. But making a computer that is easy to use in the 1960s was not easy, and making one whose output was intuitive and graphical was extremely difficult, especially at the time! And what they had in mind was drawing these effects on maps, which adds another gigantic level of difficulty to the problem.
The SDC report explains that they considered several possibilities. Wouldn’t it be neat if it could show you a crumpled house in the right blast area? Yes, but it wouldn’t be very feasible. Wouldn’t it be neat for it to be portable? Well, sure… but unless you consider a washing machine “portable,” it was pretty hard to do “portable computing” in the mid-1960s.
Ultimately they concluded that you could do it with the right combination of computational power, display technology, and specialized, analog controls that would be designed around the considerations of the end user.
I love early computing, they were so limited and yet could do so much more than you might think. I’m eagerly awaiting part II of this series.
How many Christchurchians got on their bikes in 2024? | 20 January | Chris Morahan at Talking Transport
The numbers are in and it’s a lot! The short story is that the number of people riding their bikes in the city continues to grow strongly, with 2024 recording more than ever before. Council did a press release here: below is my interpretation of the numbers using a more basic methodology.
I’m a lifelong resident of Pōneke, but the one thing that would attract me to Christchurch is the post-earthquake cycling culture. And the tram, don’t forget the tram. This, then, is great news.
Mandelbulber2 Renders | 28 January | xol at Home of Goat
I boosted some more arty entries over this period, though I don’t have nearly enough feeds in that category. To conclude, here are some beautiful renders of fractals made in some software called Mandelbulber by xol. I’ll have to play with it myself sooner rather than later.
I’m always looking for more blogs and feeds to follow, so if you have one let me know! And you can always follow the Shares feed yourself. Some downers, all bangers—that’s the shares feed guarantee.