March 2026 – Page 2

Ten Weird Games

This has been a draft blog post since ~2019, with minor additions since then.

Perhaps it’s finally time to share these ten weird… “games” (or game-adjacent media)… that I’ve seen.

Maybe you’ll “get” them. If not, maybe they’re just for me.

1. It is as if you were playing chess

Where could I possibly start this list if not with eccentric games-as-art proponent Pippin Barr. Created in 2016, It is as if you were playing chess is an interactive experience that encourages you to mimic the physical movements of playing a digital chess game, without actually ever looking at a chessboard.

Years later I’d argue that the experience of its… sequel?… It is as if you were on your phone, is very similar. Especially to an outside observer, watching you tap and swipe at your mobile device as if you were using your mobile device: it’s almost like an alien’s guide to blending-in with humans.

Is is even a game? Pippin himself mused over this in a blog post¹. He went on to make several others in the same genre, of which It is as if you were making love is perhaps the most off-the-wall. Give that a go, too.

It really is almost as if I were on my phone!²

Whether or not they’re games, these are art, and they are compelling.

2. Hard Lads

Back in 2016, a video briefly trended on YouTube called “British Lads Hit Each Other with Chair”.

It’s a 67-second portrait video featuring four partially-dressed young men somewhere in what looks like Tyneside. Two of them kiss before one of the pair swigs from a spirits bottle and takes a drag from a cigarette, throwing both onto the floor afterwards³.

Finally, the least-dressed young man (seemingly with the consent of all involved) repeatedly strikes the drinker/smoker with a folding chair.

It’s… quite something.

In his blog post Hard Lads as an important failure, the game’s creator Robert Yang describes it as “neorealist fumblecore”, and goes into wonderful detail about the artistic choices he made in creating it. The game is surreal, queer, and an absolute masterpiece.

3. Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself

Let’s sidestep a moment out of video games and take a look at a book.

Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself, edited by Sam Gorski (founder of Corridor Digital) and D. F. Lovett and based on an original series of gamebooks written pseudonymously by “J. Theophrastus Bartholomew”, initially looks like exactly what it claims to be. That is, a selective reprint of a very-1980s-looking series of solo roleplaying game prompts.

Except that’s clearly a lie. There’s no evidence that J. Theophrastus Bartholomew exists as an author (even used as a pen name), nor do any of the fourteen books credited to him in the foreword. The alleged author only as a framing device by the actual authors: the “editors”.

Superficially, the book presents a series of ten… “prompts”, I suppose. It’s like reading the rules of a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook, or else the flavour and background in an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module.

Each prompt sets up a premise and describes it as if it would later integrate with a ruleset… but no ruleset is forthcoming. Instead, completing the story and also how to go about completing the story is left entirely up to the reader.

It’s disarming, like if a recipe book consisted of a list of dishes and cuisines, a little about the history and culture of each… and no instructions on how to make it.

But what’s most-weird about the book (and there’s plenty more besides) are the cross-references between the chapters⁴. Characters from one adventure turn up in another. Interstitial “Shadows and Treasures” chapters encourage you to reflect upon previous adventures and foreshadow those that follow.

There’s more on its RPGGeek page (whose existence surprised me!), along with a blog post by Lovett. They’re doing a horror-themed sequel, which I don’t feel the need to purchase, but I’d got to say from what I’ve seen so far that they’ve once-again really nailed the aesthetic.

I have no idea who the book is “for”, but it’s proven surprisingly popular in some circles.

4. Mackerelmedia Fish

I reviewed this game shortly after its release in 2020 by the ever-excellent Natalie Lawhead. At the time, I said:

What is Mackerelmedia Fish? I’ve had a thorough and pretty complete experience of it, now, and I’m still not sure. It’s one or more (or none) of these, for sure, maybe:

A point-and-click, text-based, or hypertext adventure?

An homage to the fun and weird Web of yesteryear?

A statement about the fragility of proprietary technologies on the Internet?

An ARG set in a parallel universe in which the 1990s never ended?

A series of surrealist art pieces connected by a loose narrative?

…

What I can tell you with confident is what playing feels like. And what it feels like is the moment when you’ve gotten bored waiting for page 20 of Argon Zark to finish appear so you decide to reread your already-downloaded copy of the 1997 a.r.k bestof book, and for a moment you think to yourself: “Whoah; this must be what living in the future feels like!”

…

Mackerelmedia Fish is a mess of half-baked puns, retro graphics, outdated browsing paradigms and broken links. And that’s just part of what makes it great.

Mackerelmedia Fish reports: WARNING! Your Fish have escaped! — Historical fact: escaped fish was one of the primary reasons for websites failing in 1996.

Just because I wrote about it before doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play it now, especially if you missed out on it during the insanity of Lockdown 1.0.

5. Ha-bee-tat

It’s a bitsy game thrown together in 9 days for a game jam, by Cicada Carpenter.

Three-colour pixel-art square game screenshot showing a bee flying amongst flowers and butterflies. — It *looks*… well, like a pixsy-to-bitsy game. But it’s got more going for it than that.

I wouldn’t even have discovered this game were it not for the amazing-but-weird blog post “Every bee videogame reviewed by accuracy”, by Paolo Pedercini, who wrote:

As an amateur beekeeper, semi-professional game designer, and generally pedantic person, I decided to play all the games I could find on the subject and rate them according to their “realism”. The rating goes from one (⬢⬡⬡⬡⬡) to five (⬢⬢⬢⬢⬢) honeycomb cells.

I intentionally avoided all the games in which bees are completely anthropomorphized or function like a spaceship, and games in which bees play a secondary role. I did include short and semi-abstract games when they referenced the bees actual behavior. Realism is not a matter of visual definition or sheer procedural complexity. In my view, even a tiny game can capture something compelling about this fascinating insect.

Ha-bee-tat is one of only four games to which Paolo awards a full five honeycombs. And Paolo is picky, so that’s high praise indeed for the realism of this game, which is – get this – also surprisingly educational on the subject of different species of bee! Neat!

6. Shadows out of Time

This Twine-based adventure was released for my last Halloween at the Bodleian, based mostly upon the work of my then-colleague Brendon Connelly. We were aiming for something slightly unnerving, slightly Lovecraftian… and very Bodleian Libraries.

Splash screen showing a woodcut of the Radcliffe Camera at some point in its history, titled: Shadows Out Of Time - A Bodleian Choose Your Own Destiny Story. — The Bodleian’s Comms team and I came up with all kinds of imaginative and unusual ways to engage with the wider world, of which this was just one.

Obviously I’ve written about it before, but if I can just take a moment to explain what we were going for, which didn’t come out in any of the IFDB reviews or anything:

The story is cyclical: the protagonist keeps waking up, completely alone, in a seemingly abandoned world, having nodded off half way through The Shadow Out of Time in a Bodleian reading room. As they explore the eerie and empty world⁵, the protagonist catches vague glimpses of another figure moving around the space as well, always just out of reach in the distance or beyond a window. There are even hints that this other person has been following them: a book left open can be found closed again, or vice-versa, for example.

Eventually, exhausted, the character needs to rest, waking up again⁶ in order to continue their explorations, and it gradually becomes apparent that they are the ghost that haunts the library. The shadows they’re witnessing are echoes of their past and future self, playing through the permutations of the game as they remain trapped in an endless and futile chase with their own tail.

7. Metropoloid

When I first wrote about this video, I remarked that it was sad that it was under-loved, attracting only a few hundred views on YouTube and only a couple of dozen “thumbs up”. Six years on… I’m sad to say it’s not done much better for popularity, with low-thousands of views and, like, six-dozen “thumbs up”. Possibly this (lack of) reaction is (part of the reason) why its creator Yaz Minsky has kind-of gone quiet online these last few years.

Screengrab from Metropolis as the workers riot. — I always thought that this staircase looked like something out of an early *Zelda* game. Now it can sound like it too.

So what it is?

Well, you know how you’ve probably never seen Metropolis with a musical score quite like the one composer Gottfried Huppertz intended? Well this… doesn’t solve that problem. Instead it re-scores the film with video game soundtracks from the likes of Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Doom, Kirby, and F-Zero, among others.

And it… works. It still deserves more love, so if you’ve got a spare couple of hours, put it on!

8. Wolf

Like Ha-bee-tat, this is a realistic, pixelated, educational video game about nature. It came out in 1994 but I didn’t get around to playing it until twenty-five years later in 2019, when I accidentally discovered it while downloading Wolfenstein to my DOSBox.

The game itself isn’t what makes this item weird. The weird bit is this 2018 review of the game, which reads:

AWOO AWOOOO. AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO.

AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO. AWOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOO. AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOOO AWOO AWOOOOO. AWOO AWOO AWOOOOOOO AWOO AWOOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO.

AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOO. AWOO AWOOOOOO AWOOOOOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOOOO AWOO AWOOOOOO AWOO. AWOOOOOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO. AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO AWOO AWOOO AWOO. AWOOOO AWOOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO.

…

It continues like that for a while.

What you’re seeing is a review of Wolf… but for wolves. I’m not aware of any other posts on that entire site that make the same gag, or anything like it. That’s weird. And brilliant.

9. Real World Third Person Perspective

People have done similar thinigs in a variety of ways, but this was one of the most-ambitious:

As part of a two-day hack project, these folks put together a mechanism to mount some cameras up a pole, from a backpack containing a computer, connected to a VR headset. The idea was that you’d be able to explore the world with the kind of “over-the-shoulder cam” that you might be used to in some varieties of videogame.

Theirs was just an experiment in proving what was possible within a “real world” game world. But ever since I saw this video, I’ve wondered about the potential to make what is functionally an augmented reality game out of it. With good enough spatial tracking, there’d be nothing to stop the world as-shown-to-your-eyes containing objects that aren’t present in the real world.

Like… what if you were playing Pokemon Go, but from a top down view of yourself as you go around and find creatures out and about in the real world. Not just limited to looking through your phone as a lens, you’d be immersed in the game in a whole new way.

I’m also really interested in what the experience of seeing yourself from the “wrong” perspective is like. Is it disassociating? Nauseating? Liberating? I’m sure we’ve all done one of those experiments where, by means of mirrors or props, we experience the illusory sensation of our hand being touched when it’s not actually our hand. What’s that like when you’re able to visually step completely out of your own body, and yet still move and feel it perfectly?

There are so many questions that this set-up raises, and I’m yet to see anybody try to answer them.

10. Counterfeit Monkey

Finally, I can’t resist an opportunity to plug – not for the first time – my favourite interactive fiction game, Emily Short‘s Counterfeit Monkey, a game that started as an effort to make a tutorial on making a “T-Remover” like the one in Leather Goddesses of Phobos but grew into a sprawling wordplay-based puzzle adventure.

What makes it weird? The fact that there’s not really anything else quite like it. Within your first half hour or so of play you’ll probably have acquired your core toolkit – your full-alphabet letter remover, restoration gel, and monocle – and you’ll begin to discover that you can do just about anything with anything.

Find some BRANDY (I’m don’t recall if there is any in the game; this is just an example) and you can turn it into a BRAND, then into some BRAN, then into a BRA⁷. And while there might not exist any puzzles in the game for which you’ll need a bra, each of these items will have a full description when you look at it. Can you begin to conceive of the amount of work involved in making a game like this?

It’s now over a decade old and continues to receive updates as a community-run project! It’s completely free⁸, and if you haven’t played it yet, congratulations: you’re about to have an amazing time. Pay attention to the tutorial, and be sure to use an interpreter that supports the UNDO command (or else be sure to SAVE frequently!).

I remain interested in things that push the boundaries of what a “game” is or otherwise make the space “fun and weird”. If you’ve seen something I should see, let me know!

Footnotes

¹ The blog post got deleted but the Wayback Machine has a copy.

² Note you don’t get to see a video of me playing It is as if you were making love; you’re welcome.

³ Strangely – although it’s hard to say that anything in this video is more-strange than any other part – one of the “hard lads” friends’ then picks up his fag end and takes a drag

⁴ This, in case it wasn’t obvious to you already, is likely to be a big clue that the authors’ claim that each chapter was “found” from somewhere different can be pretty-well dismissed.

⁵ I wanted it to draw parallels to The Langoliers, a Stephen King short story about a group of people who get trapped alone in “yesterday”.

⁶ Until they opt to “stay asleep forever”, ending the game.

⁷ Or into a BAND and then into a BAN, maybe?

⁸ Counterfeit Monkey is free, but it was almost charityware: if it turns out you love it as much as I did then you might follow my lead and make a donation to Emily’s suggested charity the Endangered Language Fund. Just sayin’.

How far back in time can you understand English?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.

He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

…

Colin Gorrie, in How far back in time can you understand English?

It’s possible you caught this excellent blog post last month, but if you didn’t, you’re in for a treat. A long rambling “travel blog” story, except that every three or four paragraphs the author’s transported back a hundred years in time, which adapts not only the story but – more-importantly – the language the author uses.

For the last couple of hundred years the English language has been moderately stable and well-defined, although the stylistic mannerisms of authors have changed. But as you read beyond that, the language feels like it’s slowly mutating into something that, by the time you get to a thousand years ago, is nearly indecipherable!

Don’t just read the demonstration until you find you can’t understand it any more, though! After all of that, keep scrolling, and you’ll find that Colin Gorrie’s put together an explanation of what you just read. It describes the linguistic shifts you’ve now just experienced first-hand, the reasons for them, and how they were reconstructed in order to make this amusing distraction.

The footnotes are great too.

Also; it’s well worth watching/listening to the video that inspired it, in which you can hear (twice, the second time with explanatory slides) a linguist read a monologue that starts in the English of around 1,500 years ago and progress, jumping every few sentences, through to modern English. Absolutely fascinating.

With thanks to Ash for sharing.

Note #28497

A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing… and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.

It could be worse, right?

Cold Giraffe

My mum painted a cold giraffe onto a postcard and sent it to me. It’s been added to my collection.

She sent it to my “send me a postcard” PO box (even though she’s got my actual address), which I’m guessing was an indication that it was being “sent” to me “as if” she were a stranger on the Internet.

Or possibly it’s just because I’m, y’know, living in a variety of different places with only intermittent trips back to my actual house, while my insurance company and their contractors do their work to dry out our walls and floors, assess the damage caused after my house flooded, 24 days ago.

Whatever the reason, it was an uplifting piece of mail to receive.

In other things-are-improving news, our insurance company (finally! – after lots of checks and paperwork at their end) accepted liability for paying for the repairs we’ll need and for our temporary accommodation (including the places we’ve already been living for the last few weeks).

Horse Gym

My current temporary home – and, necessarily, office – is directly next door to some kind of “horse gym”: a contraption a little like a huge revolving door to encourage one or more horses to exercise by walking around it:

Every now and then my peripheral vision registers that there’s a horse outside the window and, for the dozenth time, I look up from my work and glance around to barely catch it vanishing off on yet another lap.

Dan Q found GC4MJRJ R’n’R #3 – Not Quite A Well?

This checkin to GC4MJRJ R’n’R #3 – Not Quite A Well? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Another quick find for the sharp-eyed geokid, once we found the right host. Three for three and that’s time for us to turn about and go have our brunch. TFTC!

Dan and a boy each throw a thumbs-up to the camera from a forest footpath. — Mission accomplished. Time for bacon! (Wait… where’s the dog gone?)

Dan Q found GC4MJRT R’n’R #4 – Changing Colours

This checkin to GC4MJRT R’n’R #4 – Changing Colours reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The woods made it hard to get a good fix, but eventually we were in the vicinity of this excellent cache. It took a few different tree hosts before eventually we were looking in the right place. The younger geokid insists that I log that he caught sight of it before me!

A boy reaches into an ivy-covered tree. — Reaching for the cache.

Dan Q found GC4MJX6 R’n’R #6 – what YOU looking at?

This checkin to GC4MJX6 R’n’R #6 – what YOU looking at? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Came out for a dog walk from New Yatt this morning. The GZ is deep within thick brambles, but the younger geokid was up to the challenge and soon the unusual cache container was in hand. TFTC!

A boy looks over his shoulder as be begins to walk into a bramble bush. — “I have to go in *there*‽”

I Am Experimenting with Blocking HTTP1.1

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Most of the traffic I get on this site is bots – it isn’t even close. And, for whatever reason, almost all of the bots are using HTTP1.1 while virtually all human traffic is using later protocols.

I have decided to block v1.1 traffic on an experimental basis. This is a heavy-handed measure and I will probably modify my approach as I see the results.

…
# Return an error for clients using http1.1 or below - these are assumed to be bots
@http-too-old {
    not protocol http/2+
    not path /rss.xml /atom.xml # allow feeds
}
respond @http-too-old 400 {
    body "Due to stupid bots I have disabled http1.1. Use more modern software to access this site"
    close
}
This is quick, dirty, and will certainly need tweaking but I think it is a good enough start to see what effects it will have on my traffic.

…
Andrew Stephens, in I Am Experimenting with Blocking HTTP1.1

A really interesting experiment by Andrew Stephens! And love that he shared the relevant parts of his Caddyfile: nice to see how elegantly this can be achieved.

I decided to probe his server with cURL:

~ curl --http0.9 -sI https://sheep.horse/ | head -n1 HTTP/2 200 ~ curl --http1.0 -sI https://sheep.horse/ | head -n1 HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request ~ curl --http1.1 -sI https://sheep.horse/ | head -n1 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ~ curl --http2 -sI https://sheep.horse/ | head -n1 HTTP/2 200

Curiously, while his configuration blocks both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/1.0, it doesn’t seem to block HTTP/0.9! Whaaa?

It took me a while to work out why this was. It turns out that cURL won’t do HTTP/0.9 over https:// connections. Interesting! Though it presumably wouldn’t have worked anyway – HTTP/1.1 requires (and HTTP/1.0 permits) the Host: header, but HTTP/0.9 doesn’t IIRC, and sheep.horse definitely does require the Host: header (I tested!).

I also tested that my RSS reader FreshRSS was still able to fetch his content. I have it configured to pull not only the RSS feed, which is specifically allowed to bypass his restriction, but – because his feed contains only summary content – I also have it fetch the linked page too in order to get the full content. It looks like FreshRSS is using HTTP/2 or higher, because the content fetcher still behaves properly.

Andrew’s approach definitely excludes Lynx, which is a bit annoying and would make this idea a non-starter for any of my own websites. But it’s still an interesting experiment.

Dan Q found GCAABPG North Leigh Loop #7

This checkin to GCAABPG North Leigh Loop #7 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Completing our loop (minus a couple of DNFs, but plus a couple of nearby caches), this damp geopup and I were really happy to finish with this good-sized cache!

TFTC, and for the series, if which this was our favourite and so earns the FP.

Now we’d better go get cleaned and dry!

Dan Q found GCAABNW North Leigh Loop #6

This checkin to GCAABNW North Leigh Loop #6 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Tougher than we expected to find – not only is this a stealthy container but it’s hidden unusually-thoroughly too! TFTC

I’m increasingly regretting my choice this morning to wear comfortable but not waterproof shoes rather than my not-fully-broken-in walking boots. Between the muddy puddles and the long wet grass, my feet are soaked!

Dan Q did not find GCAABNV North Leigh Loop #5

This checkin to GCAABNV North Leigh Loop #5 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

No sign of this one, despite the geohound and I’s best efforts.

Maybe it washed away if the nearby drainage ditch broke its banks this winter?

Dan Q found GC1QY29 Can Rabbits Climb Trees??

This checkin to GC1QY29 Can Rabbits Climb Trees?? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Coming up from Evergreen/Loop #4 the geohound and I made a poor guess about which side the the hedgerow we ought to be on, and – to avoid having to backtrack – opted to cut through red thicket just East of this cache. The little pupper got stuck and had to be carried, which was when I discovered that her belly was completely caked in thick mud. Eww!

We got here in the end and were delighted to find such a nice cache. TNLN, SL, and took advantage of the concealment provided by a nearby tree to relieve our bladders before continuing North. (Well I appreciated the concealment; the doggo is happy to widdle anywhere!)

Dan Q found GCAABN0 North Leigh Loop #4

This checkin to GCAABN0 North Leigh Loop #4 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

An extremely easy find, although a bit of a spiky retrieval. TFTC!

Dan Q found GC1QYPN Back to Evergreen

This checkin to GC1QYPN Back to Evergreen reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geopup and I are out doing the North Leigh Loop from New Yatt, where we’re temporarily living while our house is dried and damage assessed by the insurance company following a catastrophic flood a few weeks ago.

Between Loop #3 and #4 we took a small diversion to find this cache, and I’m glad that we did! So nice to see a properly-sized (and tenured) cache still rocking it!

Lid was not properly attached by a recent finder, sadly, and the container spilled its contents as I picked it up. But once we’d reassembled it all we were able to sign the log and continue our loop.

TFTC to both the hiders and adopters. FP awarded for being the first decent-sized cache I’ve seen today.