#bitrot

[cyberpunkonline]

THE AESTHETICS OF ABANDONWARE: WHY DEAD SOFTWARE FEELS HOLY

By R A Z, Queen of Glitches, Rat Prophet of the Post-Crash Pixel-Chapel

INTRO: Oi, you ever boot up a DOSBox emulator and feel your soul whisper "Amen"? No? Then saddle up, you absolute fetus, 'cause we’re going full pilgrimage through the haunted cathedrals of dead code, cursed shareware, and disc rot salvation. This is for the ones who dream in .BMPs, weep in MIDI, and hit “Yes to All” when copying cracked ZIPs from forgotten FTPs at 3AM. Abandonware ain’t just nostalgia—it’s digital necromancy. And some of us are bloody good at it.

DEAD SOFTWARE = HOLY SHRINE

Let’s be clear: abandonware is software that’s been, well, abandoned. The devs moved on. The publisher collapsed in a puff of VC smoke. The website's now a spammy shell selling beard oil or crack cocaine. The software? Unupdated. Unsupported. Gloriously obsolete.

So why does launching Hover! or Starship Titanic in 2025 feel like entering a chapel with weird lighting and a dial-up modem choir?

Because it’s sacred, mate.

We’re not talking about the games themselves being perfect. A lot of them were janky as hell. We’re talking vibe. These programs exist outside capitalism now. They’re post-market. Post-hype. They don’t want your money, your updates, your logins. They just want your attention—pure and simple. You’re not a user anymore. You’re a curator. A digital monk brushing dust off EXEs and praying to the Gods of IRQ Conflicts and SoundBlaster settings.

WHY IT HITS DIFFERENT

Dead software doesn’t update. It doesn’t push patches or ads. It won’t ask you to connect your Google account to play Math Blaster. It’s a sealed time capsule. Booting it up is like receiving an artifact from a parallel dimension where the internet still had webrings and every kid thought Quake mods would lead to a dream job at ID Software.

But it also represents a lost sincerity. These weren’t games made to hook you for eternity with algorithms. These were games made by six dudes in a shed with a caffeine problem and one working CD burner. And their README files were poetry. Half of them end with “Contact us on AOL or send a floppy to our PO Box.” What do you mean you don’t know what a PO Box is?

FOR THE ZOOMIES: YOU JUST MISSED THE GOLDEN ROT

Listen up, juniors. If you were born after 2005, you missed the age when the internet was held together with chewing gum, JPEG artifacts, and unspoken respect.

Back then, finding a rare game was an adventure. Not an algorithm. You didn’t scroll TikTok and get spoon-fed vibes. You climbed through broken Geocities links and begged on IRC channels. You learned to read. You learned to search. You learned that “No-CD crack” doesn’t mean what your mum thinks it means.

So here’s your initiation: go download something weird from a forgotten archive. No guides. No Discord server. Just the raw, terrifying joy of not knowing if you’ve just installed Robot Workshop Deluxe or a Russian trojan. Welcome to the cult.

THE TWO-YEAR RULE

Online communities? They’re mayflies with usernames. Peak lifespan? Two years.

Here’s the cycle:

A niche game/tool/art style gets revived.

People form a forum/Reddit/Discord.

A zine or remix scene emerges.

Drama. Mods quit. Someone forks the project.

Everyone vanishes.

This cycle has always existed. The only difference now is that it’s faster. But dead software bypasses this. It’s post-community. You don’t have to join a scene. You are the scene. Every time you open it up, you’re plugging into a ghost socket. You’re chatting with echoes. It’s beautiful.

CONCLUSION: THIS IS A RELIGION NOW. PRACTICE IT.

Abandonware isn’t about gaming. It’s about reclaiming reverence. About saying “This mattered” even if no one else remembers it did. It’s about surfing the ruins, not for loot, but for meaning. There’s holiness in opening a program that hasn’t been touched in decades and seeing it still works. Still waits for you. Still loads that same intro MIDI with the confidence of a god.

So light a candle. Install a CRT filter. Screenshot that low-res menu and print it on a t-shirt. You’re not just playing with the past. You’re preserving the bones of the digital age.

See you in the BIOS, kids.

—

RAZ out.

[netgf]

advance tickets available later today if I get my shit together

[corrupted-souls]

[wrigglewitch]

me and the goat @zooolf

thanks @daphrs 🥰🥰

[zooolf]

disappeared for a minute but im back baby

[futurebird]

I can’t get enough of glitches! keep watching on repeat— what is it about digital mishaps that make me so happy?

check out this delux craving glitch at the taco bell

[unilock100]

aaah what happened to @hayfeverhaven :(

[xipe-slayground]

I guess I need to check my original Night Court retail seasons 1-3 for bit rot bronzing and any other titles I bought back then.

[fixmypc24ex]

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying | Ars Technica

[miniporple]

what if i did a dedicated stan blog? my friend wants me to make a kpop/tswift guide and i really wanna make it ✨aesthetic✨ and palatable for varying degrees of neurodivergence, using color theory & my own academic experience. Ideally I would want my stuff to blow up be everywhere and make people happy somehow and bring them comfort and a haven from overstimulation. I think posts of my own with thoughts like this deserve to be Blazed tbh. ok i kept thinking and just realized that i need a small wins blog at the bare minimum for this winter

i wanna redesign the youtube homepage

[branmuffins22]

Behold, the most important thing that came out of my drawing stream earlier today: concept art for the interior of not!lyoko's towers in my owlhouse x codelyoko fic, Backlight and Bitrot.

Image ID: A cylindrical space sits within a dark void, almost enclosed. A haze-like golden glow rises from below, and scattered, translucent, golden panels line the "walls" of the space. A large platform in the shape of a target-like glyph sits in the middle, and an endless flow of black water springs from underneath it. Where the jutting end of the platform meets the "wall", there is a rippling portal, the entrance and exit to the tower. A bright golden terminal floats across from the portal, near the center of the platform.

While its shape and overall vibe is most similar to the tower interiors from Code Lyoko, its color palette resembles The Owl House's Inbetween, and the symbol on the floor is the glyph found in King's tower. I'm still about 50/50 on having the outermost three-quarters-circle be a sort of ramp up to the middle part, and I might change how the terminal is oriented compared to the portal, but other than that, I'm pretty dang happy with what I've got so far.

As for the exteriors of the towers... I might have to do a little more amalgamating, between Lyoko's towers (iconic), King's tower (thematically appropriate), and the tower in the back of the Owl House (rustic, safe). That design is very much not set in stone yet. Hell, I might even vary them from sector to sector...

[semi-sketchy]

Little reminder to refresh your data every once in awhile! This can be as simple as taking a folder and copying it to the exact same spot then deleting the original. (Don't use cut, that's a moving process.)

Refreshing your data helps prevent bitrot on rarely accessed files!

[lepetitlugourmand]

Clovis - Chef Julien Bousseau - un bistrot bien plus que gourmand

Retour chez le sincère Julien Bousseau, Chef du Clovis, Bistrot Gourmand situé à Tourrettes-sur-Loup, charmant et typique village médieval, connu pour ses violettes et son artisanat du bois d’olivier. Cet ancien de Rostand et de Darroze (lire l’article) propose, depuis son ouverture en 2008, une cuisine moderne d’instant, délicate, minutieuse et bien pensée, qui met en avant le produit de saison.…

[branmuffins22]

From Masha and the Very Normal Nocedas:

The only reason they even needed to include the meeting with Vee was because she would turn out to be close to Luz, and yet their head was already teeming with traitorously warm thoughts in the middle of this dark prologue.

From a yet-unnamed fic in my Artificer Au:

She could only hope to deliver enough retribution for his four-hundred-year crusade, for his fifty-year reign, for trying at every turn to hurt and kill her friends, her family, everyone she loved, and everyone they loved.

From Backlight and Bitrot:

The specter, in turn, flinched back, eyes locked on Luz like a cornered prey animal.

This week’s word is…

✨ TURN ✨

Find the word in any WIP and share the sentence containing it. Reply, reblog, stick it in the tags, tag us in a new post, or keep it private. All fandoms, all ships, all writers welcome.

[the-lewd-bot]

Copy your robotgirl's memories off onto a different device and then back on, over and over, shuffling them until the inevitable bitrot sets in. Soon her stuttering playback of memories will be more like watching a life through a set of old VHS tapes she can barely stitch together, making her never certain which of those things is true. Throw some fake ones in for good measure, and then lie to her about how you would never hurt her and she must be mis-remembering things.

[minix-official]

I am so tired of using i3

I am so tired of window managers and desktop environments. Everything is either lightweight to a fault and requires a ton of weird custom jank to match a DE, or is a DE with way too many features, none of which I have any control over. When I was a kid I started with using LXDE. Their website went down in May of this year. Maybe I'm nostalgic, but I want to use LXDE. There's something nihilistic about it that I admire. Something dead. I like dead things. Dead software, bitrot, the open source abandonware slowly dying as even c compilers move on, as everyone but Debian drops binaries from their repos. I like Debian. It feels like a hive city built atop a necropolis of lost libraries.

I'm switching to LXDE

May my PC be a kenotaphion of abandonware