The Bubbles Aesthetic

I’ve been vaguely reading the Bubbles RSS feed for the past month or so. Bubbles aggregates a bunch of “small web”/”indie web” blogs, which sounds like it should give you a variety of diverse, interesting things to read: Original, different approaches to writing and design and etc etc etc, right?

I don’t want to be mean, but it’s not working.

The above grid is pretty representative, and it’s striking how uniform the blogs are. OK, I’m being unfair. While going through the newest entries in the feed, I removed a couple that didn’t use this template. But this really is what you’re going to see almost all the time if you’re reading these blogs.

How did all of these people arrive at the same design? Well, many of these “indie” blogs are hosted on Bear Blog.

And that’s the colour scheme they use… so everybody’s who’s hosting their texts there are using something similar? That is, a kinda desaturated bluish-gray background, and then text that’s also kinda bluish grayish, leaving you with a pretty low contrast page. I guess it’s supposed to be soothing? “Less distracting”? Demure. Making you concentrate on the text?

No menus… no images… no header… Just one (wide) column of text.

But apparently you can choose your own colours… and almost everybody has chosen colours that are within three degrees of the default ones? And while a lot of these are Bear blogs, many of them aren’t, and they’re still using the same design.

There’s a striking lack of images on these blogs, but that’s more easily explained: Most of them are written in Markdown, which makes it really easy and streamlined to write the text. But images are a totally different thing that you have to arrange separately, so it’s just too much work to casually drop something in there. So people don’t?

(Here’s where the Markdown blogger enthusiasts are going to say “but you just snap an image on your phone, and then drop it in Dropbox, and you just sign up for an AWS account, and then you put your image in an s3 bucket, and then you use the AWS command line tool to determine the URL, and then you paste that into your Markdown file, trying to remember the syntax, and of course, add a descriptive alt text. It literally couldn’t be easier”.)

What about the texts themselves, though?

Well, half of them are about how awesome it is to blog, and that everybody should blog, and rah rah rah INDIE WEB whoho! And also that you shouldn’t worry about whether anybody’s reading anything, because that doesn’t matter. JUST WRITE DAMMIT

I’m all for enthusiasm, but it’s starting to sound more like people are trying to will Something Interesting into happening, and that’s not really how things work.

But perhaps things will be different this time?

While typing away at this blog post, a Twitter user linked to this article about Camille Paglia on the Madonna blog (because of course it is). I just mention it because I was just struck by how diametrically opposite it is to the Bubbles aesthetic: There’s lots of images; several columns; stuff that moves; and black text on a white background.

Some of the Bubblers talk about how they absolutely can’t read anything if it’s like that… which I just find strange. But perhaps this is just the way people are these days? Can’t read a text if there’s anything else on the screen?

Anyway, here’s a picture of the neighbourhood cat as a reward for reading all that. Or if you just skipped down here without reading; that’s fine, too. In fact, that might well have been a better choice.

Perhaps I should look up the statute of limitations

But surely they can’t be more than forty years?

Anyway, when I was like fifteen, I cracked a bunch of Commodore 64 games. Games came on tapes, and they usually had some sort of turbo loader thing. Most of the turbo loaders were straightforward, but some were heavily obfuscated as a form of copy protection.

So my methodology would be to create “friendly” versions of these turbo loaders, and then use that to get the files off of the tapes and save them to diskettes. Then I just had to write a little loader, and then everything worked fine.

Not very complex cracking, but I was pretty good at it, so people brought me bags of tapes. I remember having a little hand held tape deck that I used to give the tapes a brief listen first — I could often identify which loader had been used by how the tapes sounded. BBZBTBSBBZZZ vs BZBZBBTTTTTSSSS.

And yesterday I re-discovered the C64 image files that a mate had transferred back in the 90s from the floppy diskettes, so I thought it’d be fun to see how many games cracked by me were included.

And it’s… 34? I don’t think this is a complete collection — if I remember correctly, a bunch of the floppies had degraded by the time he did the transfers, but whatevs. (And some of these were done with the help of other people, left anonymous in case forty years isn’t enough.)

Looking at the loading screens brings back memories — I remember that we were quite amused at the beefing that was going around in the C64 demo circles, with people insulting and challenging each other. So we came up with an imaginary beef between us and an imaginary other cracking team, and you can see traces of some of that on the loading screens below.

I suspect that we grew tired of this pretty soon… or perhaps the rest of the saga is just on those missing diskettes.

But I have to say that I had a surprisingly consistent design sense? Heh heh.

Commodore 64 Disk Image Hoard Found

tl;dr: I found a trove of C64 disk images, so I put them on the web. Have fun playing some bad old games!

OK, here’s the story: I’ve been digging through old documents, and I found the old charts for the game I was writing when I was sixteen. Which made me wonder whether I had the disk images for the work in progress…

And the answer was yes: Two decades ago, a friend ripped all my C64 diskettes from the 80s, and I was going to go through them, but then I forgot. And then the .d64 files went missing — until two days ago, when I remembered that I had a backup of a backup disk here, and did some searching. And there they were! 170 disk images!

Now what? OK, I fired up an emulator:

Err… OK… Sure… I mean, this works (FSVO “works”), but I’ve got 170 disk images, many with dozens of files. Using this to do triage would be weeks of work. And I’m lazy.

But then I remembered that Javascript-based emulators for C64 has been a thing for a long time now… so perhaps I could just whip up a simple web site to allow me to click through all the programs quickly, and then note in a data file somewhere what’s what and what works and what doesn’t and etc.

I.e., a simple package for doing triage of a large number of images.

Now, I’m sure there are a whole bunch of these things already — the emulator community is large and mature, apparently, but a few moments of googling didn’t show anything promising. They seems mostly geared towards people actually using the emulators to play games, which is understandable, and leaves triage to be done “manually”.

So I just asked Fable to make a web site that wraps EmulatorJS, along with a script to create a manifest.json file that has all the images/programs, and allows you to edit it to add categories/hide programs/etc. $50 later, here’s the results on Microsoft Github. You’re welcome I’m sure.

(Using LLMs for stupid projects like this is so… exactly what they should be used for. But it’s striking how different things are now: In the before times, I’d have to learn to work with EmulatorJS and figure stuff out and learn stuff; becoming more knowledgeable. With an LLM, it’s so much quicker… and I’m left stupider afterwards. I haven’t learned a single thing.)

So… play Space Pilot or something?

I haven’t actually tried playing many games — I’ve just observed that they actually start. You may have to go into the EmulateJS settings menu to tweak input methods and stuff. And I guess the vast majority of these games are already available on sites like c64online, so there’s no reason to use “my” version — until I finally figure out how to start the game I was writing when I was sixteen! It’s gonna be an exclusive for sure!

Hoarders, Inc.

Extremely observant readers of this blog may have noticed a preponderance of posts about ancient, random stuff over the past few months — and the reason is the above.

I’ve been living in this apartment for almost twenty years now. In the beginning, I kept this loft storage space somewhat well organised. It’s nice to have a place where you can dump stuff you’re not quite sure whether you’re going to use again or not, right? You can just put it somewhere out of sight and let it “mature” for a while: If you haven’t had any use for something in, say, five years, you’re typically not going to ever use it.

But… that means that you eventually have to do some triage and actually get rid of the junk. And that’s boring! Booooring! So boring.

So I’ve ended up with the situation above, where I’ve just dumped so much junk up there that I can’t even use it any more. And so my “temporary sorta-junk maturing area” has extended to my “home office”, too, and it was just getting kinda ridiculous.

This spring, I decided to finally tackle the loft storage area, and it’s taken me… it’s almost September now? And I see from the date on the pics above that they were snapped in May, so it’s taken me four months, but now:

Tada!!!

Behold! You can see the floor! Stuff’s sorted! I’ve gotten plastic boxes with things sorted inside! With labels on the outside!

I mean, when I say “four months”, it’s not like I’ve been putting in 120 Days of Loft, but every few days, I’ve been going up there, carrying things down, and then doing triage.

(And like projects like this tends to do, it expanded to also include various closets and the dreaded “drawers of miscellany”.)

Triage: First of all decide whether I want to keep it. If I do, it gets carried back up and sorted into the correct box/shelf.

But if not, there’s five different piles:

  • Junk to be thrown out.
  • Junk to go to the recycling.
  • Generally useful stuff that have little value go to the Reuse Tent. (You just pop things onto the shelves and then other people take what they want.)
  • More specialised things (electronics, etc.) or bulky stuff gets given away on a web site designed for that (so I’ve had dozens and dozens of people coming to take stuff).
  • Valuable stuff I’ve sold on a different site, and that’s been kinda amusing.

And now all those things are done — I’ve got a handful more things to sell, but it’s basically over.

Except that I had a number of boxes with old papers (university things, notes from old games, etc), and I just couldn’t make myself throw them away. I mean, I’ll never actually look at them, but… If I could scan the papers, I’d have the PDFs I’ll never actually look at, and that’ll take less space!

So I went ahead and bought me a Brother MFC-L2960DW: It’s a mono laser printer with a double sided sheet feed scanner. It’s something I’ve always wanted to have, but I’ve just always thought it would be kinda silly to have it since I basically just print out something once a year, and….

I’ve had an inkjet printer for that, but you know inkjet — every time I used it, the inkjet cartridges have dried up, and I have to buy new ones. Just to print out that single page. Looking at the prices of the inkjet cartridges, I estimate that over the years I’ve used more money on the inkjet cartridges than this printer cost me now. *sigh* I should have bought this thing a decade ago — laser printers are forever.

(Micro review of the Brother’s scanning function: The feeder works very well — a couple of paper jams with very thin or shiny paper, but nothing major. The stupid thing about it is if you put in too many pages, it’ll scan them all… but then the resulting PDF just doesn’t happen. The scanner has 256MB RAM, so if the PDF is bigger than that, it just fails silently. With colour scanning, 200DPI, that’s about 50 double page sheets, so that’s annoying…)

But with the papers triaged (I kept postcards and stuff like that and scanned and threw away the rest), the attic is now functional. It’s about two thirds full, I guess, so now I can start dumping new stuff up there with impunity! Mua ha ha!

While I’m at it, perhaps I should take a look at the cellar storage unit, too. I’m sure everything is perfectly spic and span there.

Tu plaisantes ! Quelle horreur !

Oh well… Good to know that I have a project for next year, too, I guess?

I GUESS!??

Me, A Commodore 64 Computer Programmer

I think this is probably the last post in this series of blog posts resulting from me digging through boxes and boxes in the attic (and other cupboards and drawers), looking for things to get rid of.

But I’m keeping some of the above, because I just have to.

I traced this from an issue of Love and Rockets to use in a Commodore 64 video game I was writing with some friends. And the reason it’s on graph paper is because we had to convert it to numerical values, right? So we took turns (in some class in high school; probably biology because that’s the most boring one) converting this to numbers. Good way to memorise that a dot in bit 7 is 128, and in bit 4 is 16, so if there’s a dot in bit 7 and bit 4, then the byte is 144.

It would probably have been easier if we did the math in base 16, but for some reason or other that escapes me, we didn’t?

Hey, we were … 16? 15?

So here’s part of a map to the adventure game I was writing. I remember working at it day and night for several years — staying up all night long during the summer holidays, plugging away at it. And then we tried to have a hackathon where we’d hack away at it together, but I think that broke down pretty quickly — no pair programming for us.

The Commodore 64 Reference Guide sure got a lot of usage, eh?

An overview of commands and their locations, and also strings and where they were. I was writing the game using Zoom, a disassembler — I did not have an assembler, so no symbols for anything — keeping track of where stuff was had to be done manually like this.

Let’s see…

Here’s a picture of Zoom in action that I found on the intertubes. So I would be typing away in this — the only way to get rid of an instruction would be to NOP it out (NOP was just one byte, so you could always NOP out any instruction by adding the correct number of NOPs), and if I had to add a new instruction in the middle, I first have to move the instructions below it down (by entering new addresses and hitting RET a lot) and hope that I’ve reserved enough free space below the sub to allow doing that.

Ahhh… proper programming! That’s the way to do it!

These pages had to be particularly important… Hm… raster IRQs…

Heh, I think I was working out how to do that trick to extend the screen area?

More command overviews?

This was the other C64 book I had. Not as much used as the reference manual, but let’s see where it flips open by itself:

I guess that makes sense.

I think that’s a map of the entire game? It had a lot of sub games and stuff.

Heh, it’d be fun to fire it up under an emulator some time, but I seem to have misplaced the disk images — a friend of mine went through all the diskettes, like, twenty years ago and sent me the image files, but now I can’t find them.

I don’t think I ever finished it, but I remember stitching together the pieces I had into a “playable” whole. It was about ten mini games, and then a lot of Hobbit-inspired adventure-walking in between the mini games?

I was never into actually playing games, so I’m sure the game play was totally horrendous.

Oh, well.

[Edit: *gasp*

I FOUND THEM ON AN OLD BACKUP DISK!!!!1!

]