Honestly I just wanted to play around with gradients. But gradients without anything on the horizon lack something, so I added horses. Since I can’t draw horses, now you
can draw them. And watch them parade across the screen alongside horses drawn by people you probably wouldn’t like. Or maybe you would, how should I know?!
…
I love a good (by which I mean stupid) use of a .horse domain name. I’m not sure anything will ever beat endless.horse, but gradient.horse might be a close second.
Draw a horse. Watch it get animated and run wild and free with the horses that other people have drawn. That is all.
This is a blog post about things that make me nostalgic for other things that, objectively, aren’t very similar…
When I hear Dawnbreaker, I feel like I’m nine years old…
…and I’ve been allowed to play OutRun on the arcade cabinet at West View
Leisure Centre. My swimming lesson has finished, and normally I should go directly home.
On those rare occasions I could get away1
with a quick pause in the lobby for a game, I’d gravitate towards the Wonderboy machine. But there was something about the tactile
controls of OutRun‘s steering wheel and pedals that gave it a physicality that the “joystick and two buttons” systems couldn’t replicate.
The other thing about OutRun was that it always felt… fast. Like, eye-wateringly fast. This was part of what gave it such appeal2.
OutRun‘s main theme, Magical Sound Shower, doesn’t actually sound much like Dawnbreaker. But
both tracks somehow feel like… “driving music”?
But somehow when I’m driving or cycling and it this song comes on, I’m instantly transported back to those occasionally-permitted childhood games of OutRun4.
When I start a new Ruby project, I feel like I’m eleven years old…
It’s not quite a HELLO WORLD, but it’s pretty-similar.
At first I assumed that the tedious bits and the administrative overhead (linking, compiling, syntactical surprises, arcane naming conventions…) was just what “real”, “grown-up”
programming was supposed to feel like. But Ruby helped remind me that programming can be fun for its own sake. Not just because of the problems you’re solving or the product
you’re creating, but just for the love of programming.
The experience of starting a new Ruby project feels just like booting up my Amstrad CPC and being able to joyfully write code that will just work.
I still learn new programming languages because, well, I love doing so. But I’m yet to find one that makes me want
to write poetry in it in the way that Ruby does.
When I hear In Yer Face, I feel like I’m thirteen years old…
…and I’m painting Advanced HeroQuest miniatures6 in the attic at my dad’s house.
I’ve cobbled together a stereo system of my very own, mostly from other people’s castoffs, and set it up in “The Den”, our recently-converted attic7,
and my friends and I would make and trade mixtapes with one another. One tape began with 808 State’s In Yer Face8,
and it was often the tape that I would put on when I’d sit down to paint.
Advanced HeroQuest came with some fabulously ornate secondary components, like the doors that were hinged so their their open/closed state could be toggled, and I spent
way too long painting almost the entirety of my base set.
In a world before CD audio took off, “shuffle” wasn’t a thing, and we’d often listen to all of the tracks on a medium in sequence9.
That was doubly true for tapes, where rewinding and fast-forwarding took time and seeking for a particular track was challenging compared to e.g. vinyl. Any given song would loop around
a lot if I couldn’t be bothered to change tapes, instead just flipping again and again10.
But somehow it’s whenever I hear In Yer Face11
that I’m transported right back to that time, in a reverie so corporeal that I can almost smell the paint thinner.
When I see a personal Web page, I (still) feel like I’m fifteen years old…
…and the Web is on the cusp of becoming the hot “killer application” for the Internet. I’ve been lucky enough to be “online” for a few years by now12,
and basic ISP-provided hosting would very soon be competing with cheap, free, and ad-supported services like Geocities to be “the
place” to keep your homepage.
Nowadays, even with a hugely-expanded toolbox, virtually every corporate homepage fundamentally looks the same:
Logo in the top left
Search and login in the top right, if applicable
A cookie/privacy notice covering everything until you work out the right incantation to make it go away without surrendering your firstborn child
A “hero banner“
Some “below the fold” content that most people skip over
A fat footer with several columns of links, to ensure that all the keywords are there so that people never have to see this page and the search engine will drop
them off at relevant child page and not one of their competitors
Finally, a line of icons representing various centralised social networks: at least one is out-of-date, either because (a) it’s been renamed, (b) it’s changed its
branding, or (c) nobody with any moral fortitude uses that network any more14
But before the corporate Web became the default, personal home pages brought a level of personality that for a while I worried was forever dead.
2 Have you played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds? The first time I played it I was overwhelmed by the speed and colours of the
game: it’s such a high-octane visual feast. Well that’s what OutRun felt like to those of us who, in the 1980s, were used to much-simpler and slower arcade games.
3 Also, how cool is it that Metrik has a blog, in this day and age? Max props.
4 Did you hear, by the way, that there’s talk of a movie adaptation of OutRun, which could turn out to be the worst
videogame-to-movie concept that I’ll ever definitely-watch.
5 In very-approximate order: C, Assembly, Pascal, HTML, Perl, Visual Basic (does that even
count as a “grown-up” language?), Java, Delphi, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, ASP (classic, pre-.NET), CSS, Lisp, C#, Ruby, Python (though I didn’t get on with it so well), Go, Elixir… plus
many others I’m sure!
6 Or possibly they were Warhammer Quest miniatures by this point; probably this memory spans one, and also the other, blended together.
7 Eventually my dad and I gave up on using the partially-boarded loft to intermittently
build a model railway layout, mostly using second-hand/trade-in parts from “Trains & Transport”, which was exactly the nerdy kind of model shop you’re imagining right now: underlit
and occupied by a parade of shuffling neckbeards, between whom young-me would squeeze to see if the mix-and-match bin had any good condition HO-gauge flexitrack. We converted the
attic and it became “The Den”, a secondary space principally for my use. This was, in the most part, a concession for my vacating of a large bedroom and instead switching to the
smallest-imaginable bedroom in the house (barely big enough to hold a single bed!), which in turn enabled my baby sister to have a bedroom of her own.
8 My copy of In Yer Face was possibly recorded from the radio by my friend ScGary, who always had a tape deck set up with his finger primed close to the record key when the singles chart came on.
9 I soon learned to recognise “my” copy of tracks by their particular cut-in and -out
points, static and noise – some of which, amazingly, survived into the MP3 era – and of course the tracks that came before or after them, and
there are still pieces of music where, when I hear them, I “expect” them to be followed by something that they used to some mixtape I listened to a lot 30+ years
ago!
10 How amazing a user interface affordance was it that playing one side of an audio
cassette was mechanically-equivalent to (slowly) rewinding the other side? Contrast other tape formats, like VHS, which were one-sided and so while rewinding there was
literally nothing else your player could be doing. A “full” audio cassette was a marvellous thing, and I especially loved the serendipity where a recognisable “gap” on one
side of the tape might approximately line-up with one on the other side, meaning that you could, say, flip the tape after the opening intro to one song and know that you’d be
pretty-much at the start of a different one, on the other side. Does any other medium have anything quite analogous to that?
11 Which is pretty rare, unless I choose to put it on… although I did overhear it
“organically” last summer: it was coming out of a Bluetooth speaker in a narrowboat moored in the Oxford Canal near Cropredy, where I was using the towpath to return from a long walk to nearby Northamptonshire where I’d been searching for a geocache. This was a particularly surprising
place to overhear such a song, given that many of the boats moored here probably belonged to attendees of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, at which – being a folk music festival – one
might not expect to see significant overlap of musical taste with “Madchester”-era acid house music!
12 My first online experiences were on BBS systems, of which my very first was on a
mid-80s PC1512 using a 2800-baud acoustic coupler! I got onto the Internet at a point in the early 90s at which the Web
existed… but hadn’t yet demonstrated that it would eventually come to usurp the services that existed before it: so I got to use Usenet, Gopher, Telnet and IRC before I saw
my first Web browser (it was Cello, but I switched to Netscape Navigator soon after it was released).
13 On the rare occasion I close my browser, these days, it re-opens with whatever
hundred or so tabs I was last using right back where I left them. Gosh, I’m a slob for tabs.
14 Or, if it’s a Twitter icon: all three of these.
15 Of course, they’re harder to find. SEO-manipulating behemoths dominate the search
results while social networks push their “apps” and walled gardens to try to keep us off the bigger, wider Web… and the more you cut both our of your online life, the calmer and
happier you’ll be.
Scroll art is a form of ASCII art where a program generates text output in a command line terminal. After the terminal window
fills, it begins to scroll the text upwards and create an animated effect. These programs are simple, beautiful, and accessible as programming projects for beginners. The SAM is a
online collection of several scroll art examples.
Here are some select pieces:
Zig-zag, a simple periodic pattern in a dozen lines of code.
Program output is limited to text (though this could include emoji and color.)
Once printed, text cannot be erased. It can only scroll up.
But these restrictions compel creativity. The benefit of scroll art is that beginner programmers can create scroll art apps with a minimal amount of experience. Scroll art
requires knowing only the programming concepts of print, looping, and random numbers. Every programming langauge has these features, so scroll art can be created in
any programming language without additional steps. You don’t have to learn heavy abstract coding concepts or configure elaborate software libraries.
…
Okay, so: scroll art is ASCII art, except the magic comes from the fact that it’s very long and as your screen scrolls to show it, an animation effect becomes apparent. Does that make
sense?
Anyway, The Scroll Art Museum has lots of them, and they’re much better than mine. I especially love the faux-parallax effect in Skulls and Hearts, created by a “background” repeating pattern being scrolled by a number of lines slightly off from its
repeat frequency while a foreground pattern with a different repeat frequency flies by. Give it a look!
I think of ElonStan420 standing in that exhibit hall, eyeing those cars with disdain because all that time, energy, care, and expression “doesn’t really matter”. Those hand-painted
pinstripes don’t make the car faster or cheaper. Chrome-plated everything doesn’t make it more efficient. No one is going to look under the hood anyway.
…
Don’t read the comments on HackerNews, Adam! (I say this, but I’ve yet to learn not to do so myself, when occasionally my writing escapes from my site and finds its way over there.)
But anyway, this is a fantastic piece about functionalism. Does it matter whether your website has redundant classes defined in the HTML? It renders the same anyway, and odds are good
that nobody will ever notice! I’m with Adam: yes, of course it can matter. It doesn’t have to, but coding is both a science and an art, and
art matters.
…
Should every website be the subject of maximal craft? No, of course not. But in a industry rife with KPI-obsessed, cookie-cutter, vibe-coded, careless slop, we could use
more lowriders.
Generated a QR code as usual, minimising its size by making the URL uppercase (allows a smaller character set to be used) and maximising its resilience by ramping up the error
correction to the maximum.
Masked off all but the central 7% of each row and column, leaving just a grid of spots, and then re-adding the three large and one small square and the “zebra crossing” stripes that
connect the large squares, to ensure rapid discovery.
With a pink mask in place to help me see where I was working, drew lines, dots, and whatever else I liked over the black spots but not touching the white ones, to build a maze.
Removed the pink mask, leaving just black and white. Tested a bit.
It’s just about possible to scan this super-minimal QR code, but having the positioning elements in place to help the scanner identify that it is something
scannable makes a huge difference.
Obviously this isn’t a clever idea for real-world scenarios. The point of QR codes’ resilience and error correction is to compensate for suboptimal conditions “in the
field”, like reflections, glare, dust, grime, low light conditions, and so on.
Fellow Abnibbers and I, who see each other extraordinary infrequently in our diaspora, have a tradition of sharing a group selfie when we happen to
coincide. I forgot to take one when @garethbowker@infosec.exchange and I met today, and by way of penance I tried to draw what I
should have done.
Unfortunately I can’t draw. He looks much less like a potato in real life! Think I got his dog right, though.
Brought the kids up Knipe Scar with limited and challenging art materials (huge sheets of paper and thick marker pens) for a lesson in drawing what a landscape makes you feel, rather
than focusing on what you can actually see.
As others have observed, this is a bit challenging right now owing to the hoardings that have been erected in the way. But like others, I found a gap in the fence through which I was
able to photograph the sculpture (while holding up a piece of paper with the geocaching logo and my username, to prevent reuse!). TFTC!
Being on your phone all the time and while also not being on your phone all the time has never been more important.
“It is as if you were on your phone” is a phone-based experience for pretending to be on your phone without needing to be on your phone. All from the comfort of your phone.
Relax and blend in with familiar gestures and realistic human behaviour.
When I tried this fun and experimental game, I was struck by a feeling of deja vu. Was this really new? It felt ever so familiar.
Turns out, it draws a lot of inspiration from its 2016 prequel, It is as if you were playing
chess. Which I’d completely forgotten about until just now.
It really is almost as if I were on my phone.
Anyway, It is as if you were on your phone is… well, it’s certainly a faithful simulation of what it would be like to be on my phone. If you saw me, you’d genuinely think that
I was on my phone, even though in reality I was just playing It is as if you were on your phone on my phone. That’s how accurate it is.
the world needs more recreational programming.
like, was this the most optimal or elegant way to code this?
no, but it was the most fun to write.
Yes. This.
As Baz Luhrmann didn’t say, despite the implications of this video: code one thing every day that amuses you.
There is no greater way to protest the monetisation of the Web, the descent into surveillance capitalism, and the monoculture of centralised social media silos… than to create things
just for the hell of it. Maybe that’s Kirby eating a blog post. Maybe that’s whatever slippy stuff Lu put out this week. Maybe it’s a podcast exclusively about random things that interest one person.
The pre-corporate Web was fun and weird. Nowadays, keeping the Internet fun and weird is relegated to a
counterculture.
But making things (whether code, or writing, or videos, or whatever) “just because” is a critical part of that counterculture. It’s beautiful art flying in the face of rampant
commercialism. The Web provides a platform where you can share what you create: it doesn’t have to be good, or original, or world-changing… there’s value in just creating and giving
things away.
I used to pay for VaultPress. Nowadays I get it for free as one of the many awesome perks of my job. But I’d probably still pay for it
because it’s a lifesaver.
Why must a blog comment be text? Why could it not be… a drawing?1
Red and black might be more traditional ladybird colours, but sometimes all you’ve got is blue.
I started hacking about and playing with a few ideas and now, on selected posts including this one, you can draw me a comment instead of typing one.
Just don’t tell the soup company what I’ve been working on, okay?
I opened the feature, experimentally (in a post available only to RSS subscribers2) the
other week, but now you get a go! Also, I’ve open-sourced the whole thing, in case you want to pick it apart.
What are you waiting for: scroll down, and draw me a comment!
Footnotes
1 I totally know the reasons that a blog comment shouldn’t be a drawing; I’m not
completely oblivious. Firstly, it’s less-expressive: words are versatile and you can do a lot with them. Secondly, it’s higher-bandwidth: images take up more space, take longer to
transmit, and that effect compounds when – like me – you’re tracking animation data too. But the single biggest reason, and I can’t stress this enough, is… the
penises. If you invite people to draw pictures on your blog, you’re gonna see a lot of penises. Short penises, long penises, fat penises, thin penises. Penises of every shape
and size. Some erect and some flacid. Some intact and some circumcised. Some with hairy balls and some shaved. Many of them urinating or ejaculating. Maybe even a few with smiley
faces. And short of some kind of image-categorisation AI thing, you can’t realistically run an anti-spam tool to detect hand-drawn penises.
2 I’ve copied a few of my favourites of their drawings below. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want early access to any weird shit I make.
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