What I’m reading

This post is also available to read on my bog

As Cohost shuts down I have been making a fuss about moving away from social media and I am not the only one. We are in the final week before it goes read-only and people have been sharing blogs and websites and my RSS reader has been filling up. So here I will share some things I have been reading lately, both from Cohost people and just other interesting articles.

Makeup

vampy lipsticks — Tulip

There is going to be a lot of more typically nerdy stuff in here so let’s start with something else. I don’t wear makeup much these days but I am not immune to black lipstick recommendations.

as fall approaches, my craving for deep, dark lipsticks increases... my dark metamorphosis.

OK, well, technically it's Vampire Season year-round here - i don't need Halloween as an excuse to embrace black clothes and dark lipstick. but still! i thought it would be appropriate to showcase some of my favorite vampy lip colors from my personal collection.

Hardware

The Working Archivist's Guide to Enthusiast CD-ROM Archiving Tools — Misty

Misty digs through CD-ROM preservation and touches on why the history of the CD as an audio format first and data format second makes it more complicated than it might seem.

CD audio isn’t a file-based format, and instead uses a series of unnamed, numbered tracks. CD-ROM extends this by making it possible for a track on a disc to contain data and a filesystem instead of audio. Since CD-ROM extends CD audio, the two formats aren’t mutually exclusive: a CD-ROM disc can still contain multiple tracks, and it can even contain more than one data track or a mixture of data and audio tracks.

Hacking a Hitachi Magic Wand (Plus) — Kore

This is just cool.

So: the Hitachi Magic Wand is a very good device. It, however, has very little granularity in how strong it is. Even the newer Magic Wand Plus only has four, non-customizable settings.

I don't like this and want to fix it. In the process, I'll also be adding bluetooth connectivity, because I thought that was pretty funny.

Software

software rendering is awesome — erysdren

i fuckin love software rendering. the act of creating a fully realized 3D scene entirely in your own program, without the aid of OpenGL or DirectX or any GPU whatsoever. something about that is so charming to me. it leads to so many interesting technical design decisions and shortcuts taken to get it to run fast (if that is the goal).

Social media

RIP Cohost — Mike Egan

I had to have at least one R.I.P. Cohost article in here.

From a design perspective, compared to all other social media, Cohost was a paradise. No numbers, no algorithm, no global feed, no discover page, and a lot of really useful ways to curate what shows up in your feed. Having a reverse-chronological feed of only the things I wanted to see from the people I asked to see them from has done wonders for my brain.

It was never about the numbers — Aurahack

Also somewhat of a reflection on Cohost but also on how numbers and stats make you worse worse.

The close friends I made there motivated me to get better because they were further in their art journey than I was. I looked up to them not because they were my favorite artists but because they would create alongside me and it would inspire me! I wanted to grow like they were visibly growing. Over time, I did, and my following would start to outpace theirs and… I think that’s where it started getting kind of nasty.

Computer games

Everywhere and Nowhere: Emptiness in Level Design — Nat Clayton

Nat Clayton talks about in-between spaces in games both in her work and in other games. She has also made me aware of the Weird Maps series by Whomobile which is great.

There’s a dead-end I think about every single day, tucked away in the back of Half-Life 2’s airboat chapter. It’s a right turn where you’re supposed to go left, a gun turret and a headcrab ambush and some secret crates for those nosy enough to go scavenging. It’s one of a thousand dead ends in Half-Life 2, but this one sticks out to me. As the sickly golden twilight paints the concrete runoff, illuminating basic shanty structures, the sparseness of the space is unavoidable. The roar of airboat fans and chase music given way to gusts of wind and mechanical creaking. Some designer decided that someone once lived here, died here, and painted that scene with an absolute minimum of brushes and textures.

Listening, Watching, Gaming — Chris Hall in First Person Scholar

Not a million miles away from this but in the much more academic side of games writing here’s a piece the paratext created by submerging oneself in the soundscape and environment of a game level.

As I write this, I have open on another screen, as I often do, one of these ambient paratexts—in this case, an hour-long video from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. There’s no music, no avatar, only a first-person scene at the ground level providing a nighttime view of the exterior of the Graniny Gorki research outpost in Tselinoyarsk, the Soviet Union. Directly before us is a high fence, followed by patches of grass and the concrete façade of the facility. To the far right a guard patrols within the fenced area, as oblivious as the sleeping dog nearby. Presumably we perceive the scene through the eyes of the game’s protagonist, Naked Snake, lying prone, but we needn’t be aware of this, and Snake provides no signs of his presence. The peaceful scene is backgrounded by the ambient sounds of the southern USSR forest, the constant chirping of bugs punctuated by the faraway cries of nocturnal birds.

Doctor Who

Perverting the Course of Human History (War of the Sontarans) — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have been enjoying Elizabeth Sandifer ripping the Chibnall-era of Doctor Who to shreds as part of her long-running TARDIS Eruditorum series analysing the entire run of Doctor Who from the 1963 to the present.

You figure there’s got to be this entire shadow Chibnall era—the one that exists only in Davies’ head and perhaps some text messages to his mates. No more detailed than the Leekley era, perhaps, but undoubtedly there. Like poor Penny in Partners in Crime we can see its shadows—obviously The Timeless Children would have stuck larger and more mind-wrenchingly than the rest, with Davies at once transfixed by its potential and vexed by its production. Ironically, he’s the one person who seems to have been substantially influenced by the Chibnall era.

The Problem with Doctor Who — Luna

An older post but keeping with on the topic of Doctor Who: Luna points out a problem with the current Doctor Who intro segment that has been in place since the 2023 60th anniversary specials. We can only hope that they fix it by this year’s Christmas special.

But something is seriously amiss in the 2023 specials, and neither I nor my inner child can let it go. And it’s not the [whatever the bigots are angry about this time], nor even the [actually legitimate criticism here]. No, none of that. The probl-

Timing.

-em with the 2023 specials is... oh. Right.

Serious articles for serious people

AI and the American Smile — Jenka

In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine — Jason Koebler for 404 Media

“I don't know who needs to hear this but I'm scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what's wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what's wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can't have it because the infrastructure has failed and it's not available.”

The Third Sex — Talia Bhatt

Here is a morbid, maddening irony: anthropological scholarship, distinctly Western anthropological scholarship, that for decades has touted the maxim of ‘binary gender’ being an ‘imposed’, ‘colonial’ concept, has now been cited by an Indian court in an opinion that explicitly third-sexes the hijra and purports that recognizing them as women would ‘violate their constitutional rights’. It is seemingly only imperialism when populations who seek the technologies of transition and legible womanhood are granted access to them, while the opinions of Western academics shaping local politics is merely sparkling scholarship.