Tag: nostalgia
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Beige Buttons
When was the last time you saw a computer with a reset AND a turbo button? Bet it's been a while. But now, thanks to a stupid web component I made, you can see one on my website... or your own. What does it do? Nobody knows!
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A chat with 19-year-old me
Giles Turnbull's written a wonderful piece, imagining a conversation with his 19-year-old self. I wonder what I'd say to myself at 19 if I bumped into him?
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Internet Services^H Provider
When you signed up with an ISP, you used to get Web space, email, shared FTP access, a nearby IRC node, newsgroups, and a software bundle. Nowadays you get a shit router, a voucher for a free month of a streaming service you didn't want, and crap customer service. Where did we go wrong?
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Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet.
Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.
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The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?
Fellow Nightline enthusiast James Buller has written a stirring piece about his decades of volunteering for and around Nightlines, and - as usual - underplays the importance and significance of his work. Here's my take.
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👋 Farewell, NLA
Highlights of yesterday's Goodbye Nightline Association party in Manchester: 👨💻🤝✍️🤞. Low points: 😢.
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Geocities Live
Geocities.live transforms any web page into a 90s-Geocities-style variant of itself, and it does a surprisingly good (if slightly "samey") job of it. Its take on DanQ.me got me thinking, though: are there things I can learn from 1990s web design and apply to the next generation of my theme?
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I've been playing Sean O'Connor's Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at "rewilding" the game world.
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Hex-based videogame board, entirely owned by the yellow player, but with only a single solitary soldier standing alone. The rest of the island is heavily forested in pine and, along one coast, palm trees, with the exception of the far North beyond a line of castles.
The rules of the game make trees... a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don't let anybody tell you there's a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?
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My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88x31 button representing "me" (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).
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88x31 animated GIF button in the Web 1.0 style, reading "DAN Q". The letter Q is spinning.
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The same image, but expanded so it's larger.
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INSULTS.COM
As a kid, I enjoyed a 1983 program that dynamically generated insults. So I found a copy of it, reverse-engineered it, and reimplemented it in Perchance. Who wants to be insulted?
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God's Adviser
When I was a young child I took part in a school nativity play, and was so insistent about picking holes in the theological inconsistencies implied by the script that I had to be expelled from the classroom. Here's how it went down.
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On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they'd made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.
It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.
Nowadays, that's an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart... well, this isn't exactly why, but it's a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:'d to a few friends.
It's not an exciting story. It's not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)
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Can AI retroactively fix WordPress tags?
My blog's tagging is a mess. With posts going back 27 years, an inconsistent taxonomy, and changes in focus, that's pretty-much inevitable. Perhaps an AI can help: reading through old under-tagged posts and suggesting tags that could be added? Let's try it...
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As the kids grow older... someday our final soft play session - something we used to do all the time, and now do only rarely - will be in the past.
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A mug of coffee held in front of a view of a multicoloured soft playground.
But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!
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3D Workers Island
Tony Domenico's 3D Workers Island is a clever application of the retro-Web as a storytelling medium, in sort of a "found footage" way but with webpages instead of, y'know, videotape. The story's not perfect, but the execution is great.