The Awl and The Hairpin were the Good Blogs. Sad to see them go, excited to see what replaces them.
Tag: history
What a zany thing to have existed:
This is the instructional video that was bundled with the Singer IZEK sewing machine/Game Boy Color combo. Hopefully this will help others who may be struggling to set up or operate their IZEKs or for those who just want to enjoy awesome VHS goodness!
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The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits
From the indispensable blog of Jess Nevins:
Still another Gopher of distinction was Happy Jack Mulraney, so called because he always appeared to be laughing. However, his smile was caused by a partial paralysis of the muscles of his face. In reality Happy Jack was a verjuiced person and very sensitive about his deformity; when his chieftains wished to enrage him against an enemy they told him that slighting remarks had been made about his permanent grin. Happy Jack was finally sent to prison for the murder of Paddy the Priest, who owned a saloon in Tenth avenue and was a staunch friend of Happy Jack’s until he asked the gangster why he did not laugh on the other side of his face. Happy Jack then shot him and for good measure robbed the till.
Yahoo! are about to delete all user-generated content on Yahoo! Video and that is really busting my crank, as well as the crank of a lot of people that have joined Archive Team to rescue it. We’re now to the point that the whole process is pretty smooth, and we’re getting in the end-time amount of stuff left to do, but we need your help, UNIX-knowing person with a server having more than 500gb free. Oh, you know who you are.
The Archive Team do important work that is worthy of your money and time.
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Video Game Ephemera
Old documents, unreleased game reviews, and more from a games reviewer. It’s a formatted simply, easy to read, and made up of neat little bits and bobs.
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Game Developer Research Institute
Doctor Sparkle, the mad genius behind Chrontendo, mentions the GDRI several times in his videos, and it’s an awesome resource for information on… game developers. The bent is toward older companies and projects because those are the ones we generally know the least about.
Historian Jason Scott walks through the many-years story of software piracy and touches on the tired debates before going into a completely different direction – the interesting, informative, hilarious and occasionally obscene world of inter-pirate-group battles. A multi-media extravaganza of threats, CSI-level accusations and evidence trails, decades of insider lingo, and demonstrations of how the more things change, the more they still have to keep their ratios up.
Jason Scott’s talks are all required listening if you’re into the real history of the internet and the social aspects of computing. Link via Andy Baio.
Describing the technical workings of the Atari 2600, it is not an emulator, or even really a “how to,” but more like a… Documentary App. I love this kind of thing.
It is Volume One in what will become a series, and if you don’t buy this you are an asshole.
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Goodnight, Sweet GeoCities
You were responsible or many of the most retch-inducing websites on the internet, and you only got worse with time. We’ll miss you.
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Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad
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Jason Scott: Saving 4Chan
Jason’s acquired about 5 years worth of expired threads from the internet’s House of Awful Shit and Meme Factory, 4chan. Yes, this is culturally important. Just trust me.
via Andy Baio.
Woof, this is a big deal. There is a lot of culture and history in these sites.
Our literary culture is impoverished when every idea is stretched or amputated to fit the Procrustean bed made up by magazine and book publishers. When an author runs out of relevant stuff to say after 20 or 30 pages, that’s how long the essay should be.
Quoting the same passage that Gruber did, but fuck it. Bravo, Philip.
WebRing was started by a co-founder of DreamHost. Then sold to GeoCities, which was then sold to Yahoo, and, well, read the article. Josh thinks it’s a sort of micrososm of the web:
It went from a tiny ad-free community service, to hyper-growth, to showing ads, to being acquired for an INSANE price, to being forsaken, to doing anything to survive, to “social networking”, to “web 2.0″, to today!
They’re also offering free hosting for 1000 GeoCities users, should any be found.
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Sonic The Hedgehog Series Bible
The Sonic Bible was an internal document created by SOA to provide a localised history and overall philosophy for Sonic and the Sonic universe. It is apparently not based on the Japanese history.
The series bible for Sonic The Hedgehog from Sega’s launch of the first Sonic game in the US.