#My beloved floppy disks....

[geeky-fuckery]

I remember seeing my first 1GB hard drive. The thing was the size of two 5.25" floppy drives stacked on top of one another (kids, that's like two CD-ROM... kids, that's like two DVD/Blu-ray drives stacked on top of one another). I remember thinking at the time that 1 GB of storage was *absurd*. Who would ever need that much storage? That would last you the rest of your entire life. You couldn't *possibly* ever use an entire *gigabyte* of hard drive space. That was Elon-Musk-money size (not that anyone knew who he was yet). *Ridiculous*.

Now *a-fucking-thousand* of those fits on a little chip that can rest on the tip of your finger, and there are hard drives that can store 26 TB. That would utterly melt teenage me's brain.

I can’t believe 1TB microsd cards are like a thing that exists, thats like crossing a line, thats alarmingly close to playing god, where the FUCK are they PUTTING it

[captain-evil-bastard]

"you can't run from me" ahh color scheme recognition

[bottleswithbottles]

im not a guy of date sim or visual novels BUT monster camp is KICKING MY ASS SO BAD

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a new Martin Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/07/weird-pcs/#a-mormon-bishop-an-orthodox-rabbi-and-a-catholic-priest-walk-into-a-personal-computing-revolution

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by @wilwheaton:

http://martinhench.com

This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling The Bezzle (2024) and Red Team Blues (2023). I wrote Red Team Blues with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, without writing the rest of the series? Turns out, the answer is: "Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!"

My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who's been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he's been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I. He's the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you'll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.

Which brings me to Picks and Shovels. In this volume, we travel back to Marty's first job, in the 1980s – the weird and heroic era of the PC. Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.

Silicon Valley in the early eighties was wild: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and man were the PCs ever weird. This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.

Marty's first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke's on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they've gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed). A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).

Marty figures out he's working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who've escaped from Fidelity Computing's cult: a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who's thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America's Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who's quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.

Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we're deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren't just scammers – they're mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It's an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That's my department.

Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I especially love the audiobooks for this series, because they're read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that's not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon's Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.

Here's how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they've illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn't for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.

But Amazon won't let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible's authorized players. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!

You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon's walled garden, I could go to prison for five years! That's a stiffer sentence than you'd face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It's a harsher penalty than you'd get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It's more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that delivers the CDs!

Amazon knows that every time you buy an audiobook from Audible, you increase the cost you'll have to pay if you switch to a competitor. They use that fact to give readers a worse deal (last year they tried out ads in audiobooks!). But the people who really suffer under this arrangement are the writers, whom Amazon abuses with abandon, knowing they can't afford to leave the service because their readers are locked into it. That's why Amazon felt they could get away with stealing $100 million from indie audiobook creators (and yup, they got away with it):

https://www.audiblegate.com/about

Which is why none of my books can be sold with DRM. And that means that Audible won't carry any of them.

For more than a decade, I've been making my own audiobooks, in partnership with the wonderful studio Skyboat Media and their brilliant director, Gabrielle de Cuir:

https://skyboatmedia.com/

I pay fantastic narrators a fair wage for their work, then I pay John Taylor Williams, the engineer who masters my podcasts, to edit the books and compose bed music for the intro and outro. Then I sell the books at every store in the world – except Audible and Apple, who both have mandatory DRM. Because fuck DRM.

Paying everyone a fair wage is expensive. It's worth it: the books are great. But even though my books are sold at many stores online, being frozen out of Audible means that the sales barely register.

That's why I do these Kickstarter campaigns, to pre-sell thousands of audiobooks in advance of the release. I've done six of these now, and each one was a huge success, inspiring others to strike out on their own, sometimes with spectacular results:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/04/01/brandon-sanderson-kickstarter-41-million-new-books/7243531001/

Today, I've launched the Kickstarter for Picks and Shovels. I'm selling the audiobook and ebook in DRM-form, without any "terms of service" or "license agreement." That means they're just like a print book: you buy them, you own them. You can read them on any equipment you choose to. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them to friends. Rather than making you submit to 20,000 words of insulting legalese, all I ask of you is that you don't violate copyright law. I trust you!

Speaking of print books: I'm also pre-selling the hardcover of Picks and Shovels and the paperbacks of The Bezzle and Red Team Blues, the other two Marty Hench books. I'll even sign and personalize them for you!

http://martinhench.com

I'm also offering five chances to commission your own Marty Hench story – pick your favorite high-tech finance scam from the past 40 years of tech history, and I'll have Marty bust it in a custom short story. Once the story is published, I'll make sure you get credit. Check out these two cool Little Brother stories my previous Kickstarter backers commissioned:

Spill

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

Vigilant

https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/

I'm heading out on tour this winter and spring with the book. I'll be in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Burbank, Bloomington, Chicago, Richmond VA, Toronto, NYC, Boston, Austin, DC, Baltimore, Seattle, and other dates still added. I've got an incredible roster of conversation partners lined up, too: John Hodgman, Charlie Jane Anders, Dan Savage, Ken Liu, Peter Sagal, Wil Wheaton, and others.

I hope you'll check out this book, and come out to see me on tour and say hi. Before I go, I want to leave you with some words of advance praise for Picks and Shovels:

I hugely enjoyed Picks and Shovels. Cory Doctorow’s reconstruction of the age is note perfect: the detail, the atmosphere, ethos, flavour and smell of the age is perfectly conveyed. I love Marty and Art and all the main characters. The hope and the thrill that marks the opening section. The superb way he tells the story of the rise of Silicon Valley (to use the lazy metonym), inserting the stories of Shockley, IBM vs US Government, the rise of MS – all without turning journalistic or preachy.

The seeds of enshittification are all there… even in the sunlight of that time the shadows are lengthening. AIDS of course, and the coming scum tide of VCs. In Orwellian terms, the pigs are already rising up on two feet and starting to wear trousers. All that hope, all those ideals…

I love too the thesis that San Francisco always has failed and always will fail her suitors.

Despite cultural entropy, enshittification, corruption, greed and all the betrayals there’s a core of hope and honour in the story too.

-Stephen Fry

Cory Doctorow writes as few authors do, with tech world savvy and real world moral clarity. A true storyteller for our times.

-John Scalzi

A crackling, page-turning tumble into an unexpected underworld of queer coders, Mission burritos, and hacker nuns. You will fall in love with the righteous underdogs of Computing Freedom—and feel right at home in the holy place Doctorow has built for them far from Silicon Valley’s grabby, greedy hands."

-Claire Evans, editor of Motherboard Future, author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

"Wonderful…evokes the hacker spirit of the early personal computer era—and shows how the battle for software freedom is eternal."

-Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Facebook: The Inside Story.

What could be better than a Martin Hench thriller set in 1980s San Francisco that mixes punk rock romance with Lotus spreadsheets, dot matrix printers and religious orders? You'll eat this up – I sure did.

-Tim Wu, Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Captures the look and feel of the PC era. Cory Doctorow draws a portrait of a Silicon Valley and San Francisco before the tech bros showed up — a startup world driven as much by open source ideals as venture capital gold.

-John Markoff, Pulitzer-winning tech columnist for the New York Times and author of What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

You won't put this book down – it's too much fun. I was there when it all began. Doctorow's characters and their story are real.

-Dan'l Lewin, CEO and President of the Computer History Museum

[fakeuwus]

UNDERSTAND | park jongseong smau (ongoing)

now playing ☾⋆⁺₊🎧✩°｡ understand by keshi

"maybe we could try, if you let me"

PAIRING: idol!jay x idol!yn (femreader)

SYNOPSIS: coming fresh off your debut, you get invited to be a part of the revival for the beloved variety show 'We Got Married'. what happens when you find yourself falling for your "husband", as he's the perfect partner on and off screen?

FEATURING: enhypen, son jiwoo, moon chanelle, choi jihyun, bang jeemin, + other idols!

GENRE: smau, crack(ish?) (its just me trying my best to be funny but i have the humor of a 12 y/o boy), fluff, angst, idol au, fake dating?

WARNINGS: suggestive jokes, suggestive content(just making out and lots of TENSION!), couple stuffs, will specify in chapters if needed, ignore timestamps and dates!!!

MESSAGE FROM NIC: ahh my first smau!!! sent this prompt to @enmayz on anon and now im bringing it to life :3 IM SO EXCITEDD it's my first smau and im getting the hang of things, so pls be nice!! feedback is always appreciated as well :D

TAGLIST: OPEN (send a ask or comment to be on it!)

PROFILES: worst group ever | ENHA ENHA ENHA

CHAPTER 1: ill choke you in your sleep

CHAPTER 2: we live in a Society . 😕

CHAPTER 3: that's not very pride month of u

CHAPTER 4: u mean *OUR girlfriend

CHAPTER 5: jay pookie nation???

CHAPTER 6: mentally physically weak .

CHAPTER 7: im a sensitive little fella

CHAPTER 8: the eyes chico, they never lie 😔

CHAPTER 9: bros got attachment issues idk!

CHAPTER 10: JAYYN NATION RISE

CHAPTER 10.5: see you loverboy!

CHAPTER 11: copium 💀

CHAPTER 12: omg i love jungkook sunbaenim

CHAPTER 13: eunchae... 😡😡😡😡😡😡

CHAPTER 14: call that idgafism

CHAPTER 15: ch*emin happend

CHAPTER 16: floppy disk or balls

CHAPTER 17: the dots are connecting...

CHAPTER 18: he's MENstruating

CHAPTER 19: a lovers quarrel 😟

CHAPTER 20: —

© fakeuwus 2023 do not repost, translate, or plagiarize

[cat-mermaid]

ok so i've blown that whole ark = ARC thang wide open....

but somthing is still bugging me....

an ark is a boat. boats float on waves. an ark is traditionally portrayed as a sanctuary-

-in case of a flood (insert image of Gerson saying somthing about black ink spilling across a page HERE because i am too tired to go find it) (imply dark fountain flooding/biblical flood HERE because i am le tired)

so you wanna know one of the reasons my brain paid so much attention to that "ark" part of Raise up your Bat, besides the whole math and delta stuff thing was on my brain anyways?

the word "ark" is also in the japanese lyrics right?

and what made my brain put a little check mark next to that is seeing a lot of japanese comments about how awkward it made the song, as though it didn't flow lyrically. Knowing how dedicated the localization team and Toby Fox are to making the translation sound natural to japanese players, this stuck out to me

because because because in the past, Toby has insisted on certain things in english staying the same in japanese if they were plot important:

so when i was looking up "ark" in japanese, i found the following:

the article in question that the responder linked to?

translated:

a ship with a square shape huh

a square boat huh

a square boat meant to be a shelter and sanctuary, a place for people/creatures to go to survive a disaster huh....

it was at this moment i think back to how i used to play Creatures 2 and how i would save my chosen, my fortunate favorites, to a floppy disk (which is square) to protect them forever from death....

....or at least true death. They were always going to die of old age no matter what but at least i had copys of them i could bring back again and again....

say

you know what else is like a long square boat that exists to save things

a digital ark, not unlike that one at the end of SOMA, that you can save all your beloved favorite Deltarune characters in. A shelter and sanctuary where they'll be safe no matter what, no matter how badly you fuck up

a place where you can keep them frozen in time so they'll never have to face that terrible end of the game

[spookfished]

media roundup jan 2024

hey whats up!!! its me again!!! happy valentines day :3 finally caught up to patch. and by patch i mean "talking about things that i remember reading." finally got around to reading/playing a bunch of things that were really hyped up!! that ive been really looking forward to :3 yippee also, one of my new years resolutions was to play all of umineko? which according to most people ive seen, does in fact take An Entire Year due to being 1. fully voice acted 2. a little over 1 million words. so uh, please look forward to that.

books:

camp damascus by chuck tingle: horror ya. a girl on the cusp of adulthood belongs to a strict and isolated christian sect, living in the town with the us' most famous conversion camp. things get weird quickly.um ok i was really hyped about this! its the first chuck tingle thing that ive actually read (lol) but ive been following his stuff for a while. its an interesting look into what its like to be uh, really christian and also (SPOILERS) gay, but the whole time i was like man i wish i was playing [we know the devil]. which is a really good game please play wktd :3 there were some really cool and chilling body horror parts!! which i liked a lot!! but overall it was more inspiring (?) than scary, which wasnt really what i was looking for personally

the way spring arrives and other stories: translated chinese scifi/fantasy anthology, written and translated by a team of women + nb writers. really solid!!! took me a while to get through, but theres such a wonderful variety of stories here--some are creepy, some are heartwarming, some are silly, some are elegant. i particularly enjoyed some of the essays about translation itself, as well as the titular stories and A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language. definitely check it out!!

spark joy by marie kondo: an appendix of sorts to marie kondos super big book the life changing magic of tidying up, with a couple more practical tips and some anecdotes. ok to get kinda personal, konmari stuff appeals to me bc i grew up surrounded by detritus. from where i sit in my childhood bedroom, i can see a stack of floppy disks, old checkbooks, and a copy of The Lost Treasures of Infocom--a game from 1991. almost none of it is ever touched. so the idea of having a space full of only joyful things is really appealing.. honestly i think the best bit of advice from the book was that if you have things that are necessary but dont necessarily elicit joy (eg screwdrivers, coffee makers, whatever) that you try and take a bit to appreciate/praise those items and what they do for you? and they may become more beloved :3 anyways probably not worth reading unless youre already into the whole konmari thing

ninefox gambit by yoon ha lee: space opera. kel cheris, a freshly promoted general, has been sent to suppress a rebellion lodged in a fortress. but her greatest enemy is also her greatest asset: the implanted consciousness of the prodigy traitor-general, shuos jedao. famous for winning impossible battles--and infamous for killing his entire fleet. its kind of in a trio of "lesbian sff about empires and stuff" with machineries of empire and traitor baru cormorant. well for one i really liked it. i do have a lot of hours in um games like civ 5 and starcraft but i usually dont like Reading books about military stuff. this is obstacle number 1. obstacle number 2 is that ninefox gambit has some really intricate worldbuilding, and unlike some other lesbian bodysharing scifi novels out there, our protagonist is not a newcomer. you dont get the assist of getting to learn about the world as the same time as her. but the thing is that ninefox gambit makes you Want to pick apart everything thats going on and get into it, and once you have a good idea of all the factions and stereotypes and tensions, etc it feels really rewarding :3 and the world is grounded in how you get to see what feels like every single level of this one infiltration/siege, from the general at the top to the infantry at the bottom even to the servant robots who clean! yay robots :3 when youre jumping to someone completely different, doing something totally unrelated, its pretty easy for that to be… super jarring? (hi sanderson) but it was not that <3 although it took a bit for me to get it, i also liked the intermittent correspondence that we get to see from the enemy side as well. how humanizing! it also balances a large cast of characters very well. characters with bit parts still feel memorable to the extent they need to be? idk how to say that correctly. obviously between cheris and jedao, jedao has the upper hand conversationally pretty much always but they have a good dynamic and its cool to see her strengths come through in other ways i think one of its strengths/weaknesses is that its very focused on this One siege in One point in time. i would love to hear about the anden in the sequels for example. also like does everyone have to be in a section or are there real (non conquered) civilians. how do yall grow food. also yeah sorry democracy beign the ultimate heresy made me laugh ninefox gambit is kind of a tricky read; its probably not a good idea to try reading without a stretch of uninterrupted time + brain energy but i liked it 👍 i thought it was good 👍

raven strategem by yoon ha lee: sequel to ninefox gambit! yoon ha lees ability to balance lots of different povs works really well for this book :3 it really ratchets up the tension! i also really liked seeing all of the exotics lol (magic wepaons that do crazy stuff). unfortunately the tension didnt pay off in a way that was really satisfying to me personally, however.. it didnt really help that i didnt like one of the main pov characters (brezan.) the first book is still worth reading though as a standalone!

comics/manga:

mitsuya sensei no keikakuteiki na edzuke: m/m series about a cooking writer (older man) and his editor. ok i talked about this last time but im a big fan of romance with older people in it. the baggage comes preattached!! also the protag in this kinda looks really similar to shinji from kamen rider ryuki?? has some Extremely Delicious looking food art, as well as some really nice like. food + desire + eroticism type thing going on. (i started reading it bc tumblr user stella obstinaterixatrix was talking about it as an example of non explicit eroticism!) yay i love food manga :]

sonna me de mitekure: aka look at me with those eyes. m/m romcom that parodies a lot of common BL tropes (overbearing prince of the school falls in love with some rando!) but also has a lot of heart :3 definitely only worth reading if youre like. already sort of in the soup of romance manga though lol

ouji-chan no sukina hito: suuuper cute f/f oneshot about baby prince idolization

catch you catch me: another cute f/f oneshot :3

botticelli drawings exhibit: ok i just thought this was neat. it was an exhibit about some of the preliminary sketches that were made for some of botticellis famous pieces (he was a famous painter during the florentine renaissance in italy) i like how you got to learn more about how the Workshop Style worked like how a lot of paintings were actually made by lots and lots of apprentices.. also how botticelli apparently got really into this one super duper intense monk type guy and started making some kinda weird shit

movies/tv shows:

pokemon concierge: lighthearted family show about a stressed office lady who quits her job to work at a pokemon hotel. super cute!! very short!! you can watch it with your parents or kids or whatever its really not that deep but the stop motion was just soooo cute. slightly concerning in like idk the level of 'escapism from office culture' but you know how it is

dear ex: slice of life/drama? taiwanese movie. after his father's sudden death, song chengxi and his mother meet his fathers hidden male lover. dudee this movie is so fucking pretty and so sad. i almost cried and blew up and died. all 3 main parts of the cast are such good actors and the way it does grief and like the seamless sliding between memory and the present AUGH. so good

sousou no frieren anime: also known as frieren of the funerals! a slice of life/fantasy anime about what happens after you save the world. frieren is a long-lived elf who saved the world with her companions--but many decades afterwards, she still wanders the world the same as ever. bro this show is so freaking gorgeous and well made. it really makes me wish going outside was real. has a really nice sense of melancholy too.. its just a really solid adaptation :3

dungeon meshi/delicious in dungeon anime: cooking/slice of life/adventure anime set in a dnd-like setting that digs into a lot of fantasy worldbuilding. mainly about: can you eat the monsters!!!! i finished the manga a couple months ago so i was really hyped (and a little bit nervous) about this anime but studio trigger is doing a really good job!! its just a really good show ok please watch it

marry my dead body: straight police guy gets ghost-married to a dead man, and then is tasked with solving his murder. um ok so i watched this bc i misread neils text and thought it was by the same director as dear ex. spoilers this is very much not true lmfao its more lighthearted with a side of feelings about death and stuff. very silly! i think the gulf of expectation was so wide that i couldnt enjoy it that much.. also cops. why. some of the jokes didnt really hit for me esp the whole like ahhhh slag straight guy doesnt understand anything type thing? but its like not a bad light movie

percy jackson and the olympians: remake of the first percy jackson book. yeah this was fine i watched it with my mom while playing solitaire the whole time. the actors are very charming and the show is solid, but i think it really deserved to be like. a 20-episode series with 20 minute episodes, or something like that. like its oestensibly for kids but its Really trying to make that nostalgia cash grab so it exists in a slightly uncomfortable middle (writing is very basic and friendship-y which isnt necessarily bad but its not like That Deep, but also who is making a kids show 40 MINUTES LONG). anyways i think a longer pacing like that would have given more time for filler and replicating the road-trippy vibe that the original books had. its still solid though!

games:

umineko episode 1: its the classic murder mystery setup: a wealthy man on his deathbed still hasnt resolved the issue of his inheritance. he, his hateful children, and their own children are cut off from the world on a remote island. but the man still has unsettled debts….and something is deeply wrong on the island of rokkenjima 🤯ok umineko is infamous for 1. having fans who wont shut up about it 2. something something metatextual? 3. a very high bar for entry, featuring near-required modding, several hours of expository setup, and the fact that. well. its a visual novel. that aside, i enjoyed the first episode way more than i thought i would :3 the uroshimiya family is so rich and alive and shitty it felt like i was watching succession again lmfao. battler is a very endearing (if slightly stupid) main character, and there are some really strong characters laid down that make you excited to get into All That in the future. plus, once i got to the murder part it was genuinely so hair-raising? theres some phenomenal voice acting.. the scene with maria was so memorable i thought i was going to dream about it. also i loooove beatrice <3 anyways i would recommend but its not for the faint of heart. 99% of umineko-ers stop reading right before the love lets them see it, and so on.

off game: wow im so happy to have finally beat off. i mean. hey whats up. off is a weird, abstract game about a 4th-wall breaking "Batter" whos self proclaimed goal is to purify the world. its often viewed as a spiritual predecessor to games like undertale :3 …actually, i played off a long time ago and then got stuck/intimidated by the very last set of puzzles so i Just Now gave up on actually finishing and just watched a letsplay lol. honestly one thing that ive figured out over time is that actually?? im really not that much of a fan of pokemon-style rpgs like this 0_0 i mean, the gameplay is just. not that fun? and the typical random encounter type thing is just not that nice. i think this is something that a lot of jrpgs/rpgs have figured out recently, but off is an older game without those QOL improvements lol. (also random encounter is easier to code probably) anyways!! the writing in off is so compelling…its so weird in a way that invites you to pick apart that weirdness, but also makes you feel like some mysteries might remain unresolved forever. its a video game that actually Has Writing In It. its one of those (free!) indie classics thats definitely worth checking out. also i love drawing the judge and valerie. weird cats for the win ok now im just going to talk about my theories about the game. so we know that the only real humans in the world are sugar, zacharie and the baby. however, the queen and the batter are parental figures for the baby. the wardens of each of the levels were created for the baby as it (in the absence of its parents?) longed for companionship, but they warped over time. whats healthy becomes sick and whats sickening becomes necessary etc. possibly mimicking how the baby, sick and alone in the hospital, also warped over time? becoming warped caricaturizes the babys creations and makes them cruel and so the batter becomes the ultimate heroic figure, who purges whats evil and rotten. but if it lives where i live then i guess the whole world has to go?? well idk

music:

take my hand by zerobaseone: ok whenever i listen to this imlike this is one of gods perfect songs. the production is like chefs kiss and theres just some really beautiful sounds in here? its so warmly dreamy and delicate feeling.. just like first loves… or whatever lmfao the fluttering hook-y thing at the beginning is just too good i ended up looking up a bunch of the producers. also big pop is nice bc you can tell they mixed it so it sounds good in a car OR in headphones lmfao

1,000,000 by nine inch nails: i forgot what genre nin is supposed to be ok this song came up when i was playing hifi rush (rhythm based action game!! so cool so stylish) and me and neil were like NINE INCH NAILS?! it was like that one comic you know. anyways i like this song its very adrenaline feeling. i looked up the real lyrics recently but to ME its about trying to escape emptiness thru adrenaline and danger and sex and stuff :P not that i do that but its still a fun song!! yippee

dark red by steve lacy: ok i found this song bc of a tumblr post i did not know he was the "i wish i knew" guy lmfao. honestly if people only knew like a 5 second songbite from my works id be so mad. but anyways its progressive rnb apparently? i just like this song :3 when you are kind of pathetic but basically chill with it but what if.

anyways if youre reading this: hi!!! ive been spending a lot of time recently doing the hard fisher quests in final fantasy 14. guys never do beast of brewers beacon ok the school year is just starting up but having to wake up early is kind of doing a number on me…… other than that i actually totally have my shit together! yay :3 if you read to the end (or even skimmed) thanks <3

[smytherines]

Curt Mega and Brian Rosenthal gave us such a gift with Floppy Disk Owen I swear to god

Obsessing over the floppy disc Owen art guys he’s my favorite character idc about real Owen Carvour he can die the same way he does in canon but FLOPPY DISC OWEN MUST LIVE FOREVER

[explosionshark]

Okay so after saying things were a bit hit and miss I got like 8 episodes in a row that I liked so things definitely picked up, first off yeah you were right Hush is so good and it's even more impressive that it's so good standalone rather than like I Will Remember You which stands on the shoulders of all that came before. 'obscenestake.gif, my beloved' is direct from my notes and yeah that whole scene was an all timer for sure. But even in general killer sound design, great physical acting on all fronts, also the Gentlemen great designs, and real unsettling. Also getting to see Tara for the first time was very nice. And I give it bonus points cause I was sure it was gonna kill off Olivia because she was expendable but she managed to live so good for her.

Loved Doomed it was great having prime Hellmouth stuff and Buffy death impacts. Everyone getting to go back to school. Spike also got some great stuff in this episode with him feeling doomed himself and getting that turn around loving fighting demons now. Also from my notes and my now rarely appearing Faith Watch portion Buffy unprompted invoking her in a comparison to Riley, mirror all the love interests go ahead.

Similarly in A New Man I appreciate whoever made the decision to have Ethan Rayne talk about how he and Giles are sorcerers who own the night while drinking together and then immediately cutting to Willow and Tara having their very romantic rose magic night together, what could this possibly imply about Giles and Ethan's past relationship? Also just like whenever Ethan shows up I have a great time love that guy, and especially that this time there wasn't even a larger plan it was just he wanted to mess with Giles. Plus demon Giles teamup with Spike, very fun especially the last shot of him in the episode was crashing Giles' car.

On the Angel front Hero and all the fallout that's been happening on that front has been great, like I knew Doyle couldn't have been sticking around forever but I didn't realise it was so soon that "Is that it, am I done?" At the end of the episode hit so hard, loved it. Parting Gifts with some fallout from that and the return of Wesley loved it. I enjoyed Somnambulist's look at Angel's past siring coming back on him, surely the most lesser member of Angel's family. I also enjoy that to be Angel's friend you have to promise you'll kill him. Anyway then Expecting broke my streak and She wasn't that much better so Angel really letting the side down there.

The Initiative stuff across I in Team and Goodbye Iowa was okay. I liked all the Buffy really doesn't fit into that style of operation, but I feel like it was a bit of lazy writing to just kill off Walsh immediately after her heel turn instead of dealing with the fallout of Buffy having a human enemy she can't kill or anything like Ethan had suggested towards in A New Man where the answer was him being carted off to an off grid jail which can't be done to Walsh. And Adam has a floppy disk drive on his chest which is pretty incredible and is his greatest strength for me so far they at least put him over physically strong so he's got that going for him. I am wondering if he's kinda a mirror for Spike with him being too human for demons now and obviously was always too demon for humans and Adam is made of Demons and Humans but that might be pushing it and he's just a mirror for Riley. But good for Buffy getting a good sexual encounter with Riley that might help her start working off the s2 Angel trauma even if things did still rapidly deteriorate soon after. Also lotta cute outfits for Buffy in Goodbye Iowa, her sushi pajamas that bandana outfit she was hunting in, the disguise that at first was just her with a pair of glasses on until she found a lab coat in the elevator.

I am really enjoying Spike now I said it last update but he's such good fun. I've got This Year's Girl up next so I'm very much looking forwards to that.

Hush is SUCH a good episode. I honestly really love it when Buffy leans more into its straight up horror elements. And I love when it spends a whole episode on a particular gimmick and it really pays off. Ethan is ALSO really fun and you're so right the juxtaposition of him and giles/tara and willow is very :eyes emoji: - love ethan, wish he showed up more.

and hard agree re: walsh. i think this is one of the key places where the entire s4 big bad falters hard. it's tough bc the master in s1 was iconic and really more about buffy vs mortality/fate, right? and it set the tone, worked perfectly. s2/s3 had a great one-two punch in angel and faith, deeply personal an emotional. so s4 is in a tough starting place! i think keeping walsh around and leveraging her relationship with riley would have been more effective than the pivot to adam. alas.

re: riley also - he has many critics but i DO think it's nice that after much agony buffy finally got just a big handsome boyfriend she could be horny with and have it not be totally traumatizing. she deserves this.

Expecting + She are like two of the worst episodes of television ever made. augh. and i've got some major issues with hero BUT you're right that "Is that it, am I done?" hits so fucking hard. god. what a moment.

[dinnickhowellslikes]

In addition to my beloved Apple II Plus I had as a kid, I eventually moved on to a Commodore Amiga, and it was amazing. The Amiga was heads and tails above the Apple II in terms of graphics and sound. I created a lot of strange digital art on it, and I had an amazing music program called Sonix, which I only just remembered, after all these years. It was fabulous and I tried to teach myself how to play all sorts of tunes on it, include the Escape from New York main theme.

Check out this guys video playing some stuff from Sonix , including James Bond (A View to a Kill), Axel F from Beverly Hills Cop, and Ghostbusters. You can actually hear it reading from floppy disk as he loads up songs - ha, what a treat.

[smytherines]

I also love this!!! I do miss OWEN.EXE though, because they idea of him being permanently stuck as executable is hilarious to me

So uh… I really wasn’t happy with how the first Floppy Disk Owen drawing turned out so I remade it.

Once again credit to @smytherines for fueling this new floppy-disk-themed obsession.

[lionfloss]

What was/is your favorite computer game? Not video game, but like #tbt when they were called computer games?

omgggg okay: -Thief (legit scared the shit out of me and my brother & I would play it in the dark) -Diablo -Age of Empires -Elroy Goes BUGzerk -Rollercoaster Tycoon (my beloved) -Sims -The Oregon Trail -Dinosaur Adventure (floppy disk <3) Star Wars Episode I: Racer (came with a joystick that you plugged into the computer and raced pod racers omg this game FUCKED) -Adventures in Typing With Timon & Pumbaa (where i learned to type so fast from a young age) sorry i had to list most of the ones i remember cause i love this question lol

[inchling-prince]

We were talking about how dvd’s for the next generation are like what floppy discs are for us and..Is.. is this what feeling old is like… ;-;

Me when I tern elderly at 25: back in my day we couldn’t pause the tv. We could only pause what we were watching if it was on a DVD player

Some kid: what’s a DVD player??

Me: *crys*

Buddy. Sweet child. Most beloved of mutuals. I played my first video game on an actual floppy disk. Not a 3.5 inch floppy that was y’know. Hard. But a five inch floppy that were actually floppy. It was Oregon Trail.

[socks-pawn]

I blame both you and the anon who originally sent the ask, but since I couldn't get vampire!Mumbo and vex!Scar out of my head until I wrote this, and since it's now 4:30 a.m. and I just finished, you might as well suffer with me (I kid, I kid...)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/39446190

(I guess I might as well pick an anon name at this point so 💾 anon?)

Re: the previous ask: I had to send the ask from my phone to be able to include the link, and for good reasons I'm not logged in to AO3 on my phone, so hopefully the link is right. Should be a fic titled "Morsel" attributed to anonymous. -💾 anon

OH Floppy Disk Anon! I am holding you ever so tightly!!! This was delightful to read! Link works perfectly. I am eating it up! Just like how Scar is eating y/n up hehe

I love this au(?) vamp!Mumb and vex!Scar my absolute beloved!!!!

Thank you for writing this <333333

[trinkettes]

Early seasons Willow my beloved. I forgot that they made her teach ms Calendar's whole dang computer class. And that the soul restoring spell was kept on a floppy disk.

[dr-docktor]

FLOPPY DISK AU MY BELOVED I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVEN’T THOUGHT ABOUT IT RECENTLY

-does Owen do anything with his hands while talking to DC? Fidgeting with a memento, eating in front of his screen (a classic), etc.?

-where is Owen’s computer in his house? Does he have a study that he drags himself into in the wee hours of the night when he can’t sleep? Does he keep the computer in his room or even by his bedside out of clinginess?

-if Curt’s consciousness was ripped from his body, what sort of alcoholism-related stuff is going on with DC?? Is he in a constant state of withdrawals?? Is there some way for him to get ‘drunk’ or (if he died intoxicated/tipsy/with alcohol in his system) does he have a buzz forever?

OKAY HI HELLO I CAN FINALLY GET TO THIS!!! this has been sitting in my inbox since like... last month?

Owen deciding to take the disk was genuinely a moment of impulse for him. He doesn't know why he did it, nor can he find a way to rationalize it which is unusual for him. For a long time he keeps DC at an arms-length distance, only bothering to interact with the program if he needs to use his personal laptop.

Against his will he gets attached and it gets.... a little codependent to say the least. At a certain point, he'll do most things around DC if he can help it. Work, eating, etc.

And given the fact that he's covered most of his apartment with PCs and monitors for DC, it's not like they have much privacy between the two of them.

It definitely starts out as a single laptop but evolves to a mess of wires, screens, and computer components connected to each other around the already cramped apartment. I've been using this post as a visual reference for it in my brain.

Finally, I haven't worked out the details of how the project works because, y'know, putting someone's consciousness is a pretty big leap in logic and reality so of course things aren't gonna neatly line up. I will say that if anything has a chance of getting DC 'intoxicated' or at least induce that kind of feeling, it would be magnets.

The bad news is, putting magnets near your computer can permanently fuck up your hardware, especially the ones strong enough to actually have an effect.