can i get a uhhhh burger???

you have my permission 🙂‍↕️

xiaolongbao and a walk around a cemetery with my girlfriend for lunch today 💙

food shitpost (non-vegetarian)

I resent the implication that I don’t love meat just because I want to savour the experience of one type of animal at the time

you can’t live in your peach and eat it too

I was thinking of making a post about the definition of a sandwich but that particular semantic argument has been done to death and instead I am going to write about the definition of a burger.

I promise that I am not trying to merely quibble over definitions here but highlighting an interesting geographical gab in communication I have encountered a few times: The term burger generally means something subtly different in America¹ than it does in much of the rest of the English-speaking world.

To an American a burger is a clipping of the world hamburger: A dish consisting of a ground beef patty in a sliced bun. The patty is a key component of the dish and without it it would cease to be a burger. The burger is, of course, the true and ultimate symbol of the United States of America and America, taking pride in the creation of her icon, her ideals given form, displayed to the rest of the world the humble burger, and the rest of the world said “Got it! A burger is when you put stuff in between a sliced bun.” The bread was taken as the key component. The ground beef patty is a part in the Platonic ideal of a burger—if I ask one to imagine “a burger” it will be there as the default filling—but not a necessary piece definitionally.

This linguistic chasm thus leading inevitably to me being bewildered by people getting mad at me on an internet forum as a teenager for talking about a chicken fillet burger that I got at a takeway, because it’s clearly a nonsense term because if it’s a fillet then how is it a burger and what you’ve posted is clearly a chicken sandwich². But the chicken fillet burger is a mainstay of the menu of local chippers across Ireland and for many years I have seen restaurants offer portobello mushroom or halloumi burgers as vegetarian options. A burger, to the Irish mind, is simply something in a burger bun.

One might argue (and has been argued to me) that seeing as the burger is the food of the United States that we should align to the Yank understanding of the term to which I offer the counterargument: No.

Does this post have a point? Also no. I simply find linguistics interesting.

Kasane Tayto

It would have been Ellie’s 43rd birthday yesterday. She had a fairly difficult life and it made her shy, reserved and awkward. Over the time I knew her I got to see start to shed so much of that, becoming more confident, more happy, more silly, more herself. It was absolutely marvellous to witness. It felt like her life was finally getting started before it was so suddenly cut short. She only told me about Kat a week before they died. There are many parts of her life I only knew the scantiest details of. So many little glimpses into her that I wanted to spend years learning more about. Sometimes I just wish I could just learn any little bit more about her. It would have been amazing to see her in five, ten years. To see her grow completely into herself.

If I want to turn this into some kind of positive message: It is a tragedy that it took until her forties to get to where she was, and an even bigger tragedy to have her life cut short just as that was happening, but she was still able to start doing that in her forties. To figure things out, to transition, to come to terms with part of herself, to love without shame. As long as you are alive there is still time.

I went out for dinner with some of our friends last night to the same burger place we went on her birthday last year. We talked about Ellie a little bit but mostly just enjoyed each other’s company. It was a nice thing to do to mark the occasion in a positive way. Caoimhe³ was there as well. She has been one of the people who has most helped me through the last few months and more recently we have started dating as well. She was a great comfort yesterday and she spent last night at my place after the dinner.

I brought the Zippo lighter to the dinner that I gave to Ellie as a birthday present last year. I lit for a while to warm it up and held in my palm for a little bit during the meal. She had had a running joke that what she wanted for her birthday was €200 worth of marsh­mallows, so I gave her €20 of marsh­mallows with the lighter as the initial deposit on that that she could toast and make s’mores with. €20 gets a lot of marsh­mallows it turns out. I don’t think that she had even gotten through them all by the time she died. After that dinner last year we went back to her’s and watched the trans episode of Dirty Pair (which she didn’t actually like that much outside of the transness and burgers, something I left out of the original post about it) and we also watched the first episode of the Chucky show together after she had been recommending it to me. It was a wonderful night, and, sad as it was, so was last night as well.

How common is non-UHT milk across Europe/the world? UHT milk is uncommon and generally disliked in Ireland but it seems to be the standard in mainland European countries that I’ve visited.

forgot to have tea before getting on the train this morning and I am suffering from caffeine withdrawal

ah lads not again

finally, they made a burger that can consent

You’ve seen them. The videos. The chocolate videos. There is a man out there doing things that were never meant to be done to cocoa beans.

What the fuck. That is not tea. That’s not even a kettle. What the fuck.

Look at this shit. This CANNOT be allowed to continue.

He doesn’t even set up his shitting fake chocolate chessboard correctly. THE BOTTOM RIGHT SQUARE SHOULD BE WHITE.

HE HAS TO BE STOPPED. This can’t be allowed to continue.

SPRINGS? CHOCOLATE SPRINGS? We cannot allow this.

We all know what needs to be done.

Okay the above is a joke I do not wish anything bad on Amaury Guichon. I just kind of dislike his videos. There is something offputting to me about his overly clean, edited style. How his artisanry feels like artifice in his immaculate, minimalist kitchen-set that always looks like it’s never been used before. How he creates these things and starts eating them on camera immediately, demonstrating that they were never meant to be consumed as food, only consumed as content¹. It feels like watching a How It’s Made video for production a line that that was made only to be on the show, whose output is going directly into a landfill rather than something that is of use to someone.

Is this unfair? Yes. It would probably be more reasonable to treat these videos as a timelapse video of a sculpture being created or, being less fair, a preppy Epic Meal Time. It’s spectacle and art² and it’s just a particular popular artist I don’t care for. I am just being hater. It’s fine. Chocolate man is fine. I don’t like his videos.

I am normal.

My house is quite small and my kitchen is tiny, so when I moved in I set about optimising my space a lot. I sold my physical video games collection, most of my books, a lot of electronics and some of my small kitchen appliances. While both cupboard and usable counter space is limited in my kitchen there is a little 22cm alcove under my kitchen presses that, while not usable as part of the counter space, is handy for keeping small appliances. They do have to be quite small, though. With this in mind I went into Harvey Norman’s with a tape measure and replaced my kettle with a travel kettle and my toaster with one short enough to fit in the gap. I also got rid of my slow cooker and instead got a more squat rice cooker in its place.

Rice cookers are incredibly elegant little machines and I highly recommend this Technology Connections video on how clever the design is. And while dealing with burnout and general lack of spoons one thing that has been getting me through it has been that rice cooker. Rice, beans and Lao Gan Ma has has become a staple meal for me. They are amazing for low-spoons, ADHD-friendly cooking because as long as you put in the right amount of water you can simply set it going and walk away, not having to babysit the pot or worry about timing very much.

That said, I am usually just cooking for myself and the rice cooker I had, as much as I love it, didn’t do small batches very well, so I was generally cooking two cups of rice at a time and then having to refrigerate and reheat most of it over the course of several days to get through each batch.

The solution to this: I just got an even smaller rice cooker. Meet R1-C3.

I am not much of a Star Wars gal¹ but when some friends were over last month they remarked that the new rice cooker looked like a droid and I couldn’t disagree. It is a cute, compact, little friend. My friend Lena christened it R1-C3 and R1-C3 has been very faithful so far, making me nice meal-sized batches of rice to keep me going in these times.

rice cooker rice, microwaved baked beans and Lao Gan Ma is what’s getting me through it

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A friend has been infodumping about Susumu Hirasawa and I thought I’d share her passion a little wider so have this live performance from him:

This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website — Sophie Koonin

One thing to warn is that if you do actually make your own website is that tinkering with it can be addictive in and of itself, at least to me. It’s like a model train set: There is always more you can tweak or add to it. I updated my homepage a few days ago to make each section stand out from each other a bit more.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it.

A Eulogy for Urban Dead — Adrian Hon

I played Urban Dead back in the day. It’s sad to see it go and infuriating to see it happen because of a regulator trying to target the likes of Facebook and Tiktok and not even being able to conceive of small, independent operations or how it could affect them.

Naturally, these player-generated events were chaotic and often hard to discover, though the ability for humans to graffiti messages helped spread the word. Zombies, being dead, were not permitted to communicate as freely – they could only use the letters a, b, g, h, m, n, r, and z – but this was sufficient to lead to four different zombie languages including terms such as armah baz (army base), zmazh anh grab (smash and grab) and my personal favourite, barhah (roughly “a spirit of zombie warriors in brotherhood”).

Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home — Laura Michet

I saw this because it was shared by Adamn Le Doux. How the restrictions of online pokémon trading evolved a market where the currency changes every time a new game gets connected to the system. The current one being a qilin giraffe thing. Also some followups: How to buy a Pokemon online and How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun.

Today, you'd list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you'll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You'll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.

I ordered a wheel of cheese in a can — Laura Michet

Also from Laura Michet: A type of cheese I now really want try.

The cheese is apparently one of a very small number of cheeses that can cure inside a can, apparently because it's made with a culture that emits less gas than other cheeses, so it won't bloat or pop the can. It is only sold in 30 oz containers. It is cheddar… you can get several flavors. Big time cheese fans or people from Wisconsin know and care a lot about it and I get the impression that it is quite popular here in the US, but I have never heard of this shit before.

CD-ROM Journal: Crosscountry BC — Misty De Méo

A look at a Canadian edutainment game series.

It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player's driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it's not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it'll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It's that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.

The Most Mario Colors — Louie Mantia

Seen via Mike Egan’s post roundup. This is the ideal post. This is the type of thing that people should be researching.

Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.

This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.

a love letter to level editor icons — erysdren

Who doesn’t love some programmer art?

i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand.

dev scoops: vultures in Weird West — Joe Wintergreen

Joe Wintergreen talks bout the first thing he worked on in Weird West and shows how systems-driven game design allows complex interactions through fairly simple building blocks.

In the end, it ended up being just as well that I implemented the landing-and-walking-around behaviour for the vultures, because later we wanted chickens and there was already Flightless Bird Support – a chicken is just a flightless vulture who lays eggs, as any ornithologist will tell you.

As minor as these guys are, they’re one of the features I’m fondest of – my first task, omnipresent, occasionally chaotic, and shipping almost unchanged from their initial implementation. Good eggs.

Why Are Chronically Ill People Forced to Hide Their Pain? — Kelly

Oh no! You’ve scrolled too far and entered The Serious Zone.

Unfortunately most people can’t process the lack of choice in the matter. They genuinely believe that we either want to be this sick, or could get better if we really ‘tried’. They believe they wouldn’t be able to handle what we go through, because they’re convinced they will never NEED to handle it. They’re the exception. Chronic illness won’t happen to them.

This is the comfortable lie that most people tell themselves so that they can move through life without having to think about the precarious nature of the human condition. Without having to consider how quickly you can become disabled, homeless, an ‘other’. How quickly your life can change without your consent.

This need to cling to a lie makes people abandon us. Some will stay when you become chronically ill, but most have an internal clock. If you’re not better by whatever random and pre-conceived timeline they’ve set for you, they walk away.

Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women — Ryan Broderick

Ending the roundup again with a light dusting of fascism. I am far too online and read far too much about American politics and fascists but I was still taken aback by this description of a strain of hatred I wasn’t familiar with.

If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.

Reading .net on my Kindle.

suddenly feel like I‘d love a gua bao but I don’t think that there’s anywhere around here that does them

Went out with partner for fancy burgers last night and then went back to her’s and cuddled on the couch and I suggested watching the trans episode of Dirty Pair as I had started watching the show and while I knew that there was a happy couple in it where the bride was a trans woman I did not know that they were also burger freaks.

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.

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A roundup of some posts I’ve been reading that I thought I’d share.

Deus Ex Machina [1984] — Arcade Idea

I have been catching up on the sadly inactive Arcade Idea, a blog working through the history of video games through selected games that chart development of the medium. Unlike many such projects it does not focus only on console and arcade games or on games that are still famous.

Deus Ex Machina, whose entry I have linked, is a fascinating ZX Spectrum game/interactive movie/concept album that I had never heard of, designed and composed by Mel Croucher.

It’s actually on Steam and there is a playthrough available to watch on Mel Croucher’s Youtube channel. It has some pretty heavily strobing lights in some sections.

When the mouse dies inside The Machine, it takes its one final death shit. The turd drops into the test-tube babymaker. For the whole first act, and arguably the whole game, you play as this mouse turd.

COVID Denialism and Disability Justice — Natalie Weizenbaum

I have been also reading Natalie’s posts about setting up post embedding and reblogging and will have a look at doing that too, so maybe in future instead of these roundup posts I will directly reblog stuff into my feed.

Because this category myth isn't just incorrect, it's oppressive. All axes of oppression are wrapped around similar myths. This is why sexists are so threatened by transsexuals, why racists invented the crime of miscegenation. An oppressive mindset demands a clear and permanent division between oneself and one's victims; a mode of thought that relies on clear and permanent divisions is at high risk of enacting oppression, knowingly or not. Those who are unable (or unwilling) to imagine themselves becoming disabled are the ones who do the most harm to people who already are.

The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam — Luna

The NES Pictionary bot, was, as Luna describes, something that could almost have existed on any social media website. But it could only have worked how it did, and how well it did, on Cohost, where users were given much more of a blank canvas to work with than any other social media site.

This could have been achieved on Twitter via a two-account mechanism. The main account would post the image with the dashes, a secondary account would post a reply with the solution. Users could then mute/block the secondary account, or follow it if they wanted to always see the solutions.

Similarly, this could have been achieved on Mastodon using the Content Warning (CW) system, which allows you to put a post behind a warning and require action on the part of the user to actually view the post. The bot would post the image with the dashes, and then in a follow-up post, post the solution under a CW, making users interact to see the solution.

These solutions always seemed kinda clunky to me, and eventually I just forgot all about it.

Enter Cohost.

A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat — andi mcc

Speaking of giving users a blank canvas with HTML, this is one of the posts I saw circulating again towards the end of Cohost’s life, detailing the absolutely audatious way that Geocities HTML chat (which I had never heard of before) worked. Now that Cohost is shutting down she has returned to her blog.

Geocities HTML Chat was, from a technical perspective, a guestbook with a small twist. There was a chat for each of the "cities" (my home was SiliconValley, I think?). Each chat used (of course) frames to display two smaller webpages. One frame above (I don't actually remember, but let's say it was above) was a thin band containing a CGI input form. The lower frame was larger, and scrolled freely. This frame used a server-side trick; the server would tell your web browser it was sending it an infinitely long web page (or maybe it just claimed it was some impossibly large size, a gigabyte or something). It would send it the opening <html>, and then it would hang. It would keep the socket open. When a user in the chat room submitted a line to their CGI box, every user would simultaneously receive a new line on the bottom-frame open socket (which their web browser sincerely believed an ordinary webpage was actually really loading into, just very slowly).

pokémon cymraeg — Twitchcoded

A page where Twitch is documenting a project of translating pokémon names into Welsh. I had fun before coming up with Irish translations for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. It’s the kind of thing that lets you play with language in a cool way. Pokémon are great for this especially because of the multilayered and punny nature of their names. Draoi Aisteach</i> has actually already made full translations of Pokémon Red and Blue.

38

ninetales

cadnaw

cadno (fox) naw (nine) cadnawes (vixen)

America a Prophecy — Elizabeth Sandifer

Last time I linked to Elizabeth Sandifer’s Doctor Who writing. This time I am going to link to another of her long-term projects: An annual series of blog posts analysing the American psyche through the lens of a bafflingly awful newspaper comic about the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I recommend reading the whole series and I look forward to next year’s.

As a practitioner of a magical/critical practice that I have coined psychochronography, it is my belief that one can position any cultural object at the center of one’s vision and, through sufficiently thorough exploration of it, understand the larger world in which it exists. To this end, I propose that we explore this genuinely astonishing work of comics art in order to understand the whole of America in the 21st century.

New Team, New Discord! — Spore in the News

For the sheer novelty of it: Spore’s official website and RSS feed updated this week. Spore. The game from 2008. Why not add it to your RSS reader too so that you can get updated on any new Spore news? Or I guess more likely join the Discord server they are using the news post to advertise.

Spore has a new team! You may notice some of our team members making the rounds throughout the Spore communities - RogueLyeshal (Rogue) and Reiliyn (Rei) are leading up our new community efforts. Speaking of… there is now an official Discord server, where you can keep up with the latest news from the development team, participate in contests, and get to know other players of Spore! Come join us!

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them — James O’Malley

A cry for help I saw via Tom Scott’s newsletter that also goes into recovering teletext data from tapes.

What Alistair realised though was that even though there were no complete teletext pages stored on his tapes, there were still fragments of teletext data captured and saved by the tapes.

So he wrote some code that does something mind-blowing. Using his software, if you play in a VHS tape to a TV capture card, it will take the raw recording data, pick out the nuggets of teletext, and like magic will stitch them back together into complete pages.

Like I say, it’s witchcraft.

Artificial Life: Insects — CD-ROM Journal

A blog from Misty De Méo that explores old multimedia CDs. Maybe some day she’ll cover Ring: 感×染.

Although the front cover and spine credit Harada first, and it's clear Harada's CG artwork is the real centrepiece here, the three works are presented as coequals. More than an art book, a novel, or a game, it's a project that shows how different mediums transform the same basic concepts. The three works don't just diverge because of different inspirations but because their mediums influence what kinds of interpretations are possible, what kinds of ideas can take root.

hot pepsi ☕ — Dr. Melon

I can’t say I agree with this but it’s certainly an interesting perspective.

I highly recommend trying it out if you haven’t had it before, especially on a colder or rainy day. There’s something great about the warm steam coming off the top combined with tiny droplets flying out of the drink due to the carbonation that leave a pleasantly-contrasty cooling sensation on the lips just before you take a sip of the toasty liquid within. Drinking it and feeling the warm fizz is a little alchemical, and a little rebellious, with the net effect of overall feeling like you’re sneaking some of a wizard’s potion while he’s out gathering herbs.

👨‍💻 Side By Side 👨‍🎨 — Mike Egan

A cute little motion design animation!

I was deep in the website building mines in April, both working on this site, and building Welcome to the Cyber World, my MMBN fansite that I made for the Critical Distance Fansite Jam.

So I wanted to make something celebrating the joy and creativity of the particular left-brain/right-brain cooperation present in using code to make what is essentially a piece of visual media.

It's called Side By Side because it was originally a horizontal piece with both windows sitting next to each other, but I found that to be too static, and the transition I landed on is more fun and dynamic. It also mirrors the actual experience of building a website, in that you often write the code not knowing 100% what the site will look like until you load it up in a browser!