Tag: twitter

Some Notes on Set Side B’s Linking Policy

Today it’s a big talky thinky post, that doesn’t have much to do, directly, with video games. Sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and wanted to get off my chest. If you leave things like this spinning around your head for too long they begin to fester, and I’d also like to give my reasons for having grudges against the likes of Fandom (the wiki company, with a capital-F).

Until recently I didn’t have a specific list of things I absolutely won’t give the privilege of a link from these halls. It was more an ad hoc judgement: “Oh, this thing is on Reddit. Do I really want to point people there?” It’s not that I have such a high opinion of ourselves, but that there are some internet entities that I don’t want to further in any way, whether it’s through added traffic or search engine rank. We may not have much influence on the web ourselves, but what we do have we should use wisely.

So now, in order to be consistent, I’ve started making a list, of places or things I don’t want to aid nor abet. Perhaps I won’t be able to avoid linking to them ever, depending on how available the content is from other sources, but we do try to veer away from these things. Maybe it’ll make you think about your own linking practices.

Remember, the thing that makes the internet great, always has and always will be, isn’t companies, it isn’t “AIs,” it’s the people on it, as commenters and linkers, as readers and as creators.

Generative AI

That leads us to probably the biggest of these things on the list: generative AI. I hate it.

I hate it, and I hate that so many people have uncritically adopted the moneyfolk’s naming it as if it were actual AI, the expert system type, decision-making neural networks and so forth. It has confused people on the difference between slop machines like ChatGPT and Claude, which work by constructing the semblance of actual work which may or may not be useful or even correct, and actual AI that does things like discovering new proteins. That kind of AI is doing real and important work; the text constructors that you ask to do homework for you, finish your presentation or write an app are not.

It’s true, a couple of years ago I made a couple of posts using “AI.” (Always use the scare quotes if it isn’t clear you’re talking about the bad kind!) One was a link to someone’s generated image of Kirby, which was funny for how uncanny it was; the other was a mocking sequence where I asked it as many ridiculous questions I could think of, including asking it repeatedly if Biden was a vampire. (The most interesting thing it said was the word moose repeated many times.) There may have been a third time way back then, for I kicked its tires as many others did in the early days of Teh Hype. I won’t be doing that ever again, even for the purpose of mocking it. It’d be better for all of us if it just died.

Twitter

Another thing, or rather place, that I won’t link to is Twitter, a.k.a. “X.”

What a stupid name. What a stupid thing. Its overlord, an incredibly insecure man whose loathsomeness is only exceeded by the one in the White House at this moment, has at least given us an acid test of human quality. Are you still on Twitter even now, in 2026? Is reaching whatever audience remains there worth legitimizing, enriching, this awful human being and everything he stands for? Why are you there? Are you waiting for some other shoe to drop? Haven’t enough fallen already? Your presence conspires to give all those other people who haven’t left yet their own reasons to remain. Stop doing that!

You might be concerned about abandoning others, an established following, friends, conversation partners. Some of those are at least slightly understandable. But come on, there’s no lack of other ways to communicate now! Here is a partial list: email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Medium, Blogger, TikTok, Youtube, text messages, forums, IRC (it still exists), and others.

What is more though, I would say you need to think about what digital life means. Without exception, every long-lived, corporate-based popular internet service has betrayed its users in some fundamental way. Every single one! There are good companies out there, you may argue, and it may even be true, but it isn’t true of any big one, and the big ones are the ones everyone knows, and do the most damage, because chasing money and size to the exclusion of all else paints a certain route for your organization that naturally leads to enshittification.

So what other choices are there?

  • The modestly-sized companies, who by definition are not trying to squeeze out every cent from users. They’re in a bit of a dilemma: people like them because they haven’t enshittified themselves yet, but the more popular they become the more tempting the drive to ruin their experience will be. Sooner or later they’ll fall: either they’ll just go out of business, the founders will betray their principles, they’ll get bought out or the people running it will just die.
  • Free or community-run services. These are pretty good for the most part, but you may not be able to rely on them forever either. They have less incentive to ruin themselves for cash money dollars, but nothing says the good folk will stay in charge forever. Even decentralized services have their drawbacks. Mastodon servers tend to emerge, enlarge then pop like bubbles in a boiling pot. My personal Mastodon account has moved three times. On that note….
  • Being a digital nomad. Never staying in one place for too long. Being ready to pull up stakes and transplant yourself to a new site at the first scent of shit. The plus: you can feel good about yourself, so long as you have the time and energy to do this. The minus: how will you ever build up a substantial audience if you keep having to move around so often.

It’s funny. None of those seem like perfect options! I don’t mean funny ha-ha; I mean it more like funny oh-no.

Fandom wikis

I’ve been making a list of alternatives to as many Fandom-based wikis as I can find, and I may share it with you some day.

Fandom got started as Wikicities (it’s old enough that, back then, having a Geocities-like name was considered an advantage), then it changed its name to Wikia, and now to Fandom. One of its founders was Jimmy Wales, yes, the guy on Wikipedia who’s always begging you to give them money.

You might not realize how far Fandom’s tentacles extend. They own Gamespot, GameFAQs, TV Guide, Metacritic, ComicVine and Fanatical!

The problems with Fandom are manyfold: they’re loaded with ads for one. For two their different wikis crosslink between themselves and give them all an artificially high Google rank, meaning one of their sites is much more likely to come up in search results than other people’s.

But probably their worst aspect is they suck much of the creative oxygen out of the web. Do you start your own website to tell the world what you know, or do you find one of their many tens of thousands* of innocent-looking Fandom sites, and contribute to that, thinking that you’re helping people out? But unlike Wikipedia, Fandom isn’t a non-profit, they’re owned by venture capital and are looking to put as many ads on your edits as they can. You’re giving of yourself, but they’re turning it into cash for their investors.

Back when they didn’t seem quite so rapacious they managed to shelter a couple of very high-profile sites under their umbrella, the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia, and the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha. Those two sites were probably the most prominent non-Pedia wikis on the internet, but now they’ve both been creatures of the Fandom empire for well over a decade. Imagine how much Google rank that gave them to spend.

* How many wiki sites does Fandom really have? Try this experiment. Take any even slightly famous entertainment media property you can think of, and search for it on Google. See if “fandom” is in the URL of one of the first page of results. I’d wager you’re very likely to find at least one, and that it’ll probably rank pretty highly. Fandom wikis seem to appear very readily, almost as if there’s an automatic process creating them.

A few other things that negatively affect my willingness to link to them

  • As I mentioned above, Reddit is another place that I won’t link to, but I’ll save my diatribe against them for another time. Many of the Fandom arguments apply to them too.
  • Paywalled pages are not completely off limits, but I don’t like sending visitors head-first into a paywall.
  • Substack also has its problems, oh yes,but it isn’t a completely hard no yet, due to the sheer number of them. Of course, there’s lots of Fandom wikis too.

Notably, Youtube is not on this list. There’s just too much content that’s only on Youtube. I’d love to wean us off of it some day, however. Something to remember, in case the opportunity comes.

On Finding and Preserving Discord and Youtube

This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?

This is a slightly edited version of a diatribe I emitted on mefi.social. I really want people to see it and think about what it means though.

A dismaying thing is how much of current gaming culture is locked behind Discords, and/or is revealed to the world only through Youtube videos.

These two phenomena are the result of the Myth of the Benevolent Corporation, which was largely started by early Google and their “Do No Evil” policy, which sustained the early web for a good while but itself did huge damage to online culture, and yet promises to do much much more, when they decided that profits mattered more.

When Youtube started, everyone saw it as a kind of miracle. In the early days videos were limited to 10 minutes, but even so they began attracting a huge amount of material. When they switch to just letting people upload anything for free, that exploded.

I love this page, at http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/icons/iconolog/pavilion/iconHall.html. I’m really sad that the world depicted within has shrunken so much, and of the list of links on this page only three survive.

It’s not just gaming stuff that I’m talking about really, although as a popular fixation for people it’s kind of a hint of things to come. Lots of information is currently exposed to the world through Youtube videos and minidocs.

From U Can Beat Videogames’s video on Shadowrun. It’s great, but some day it’ll be gone. How will people beat an ancient obscure SNES game like this then?

But Youtube has always been a time bomb for all this content. It’s inevitable that Youtube will someday begin deleting things. If not sooner, then later. Yet there are few entities capable of preserving all of it, or even most of it. All of this will [get destroyed] like [crying] in [a downpour].

Of course, it’s not like videos like these have any other hope as it stands. A collection of the incredible size of Youtube’s is so big that only a government could realistically do it, and most of those have their own issues when it comes to continuity of mission and funding.

But combined with Discords as a means of communication, and (bizarrely) information, a lot of online culture is currently a black box to outsiders, unless they sign up to dozens of miscellaneous Discords. And there is a limit to the number of servers you can follow, which is reputed to be 100. (It used to be that Google could get you a quick answer to a question like how many Discord servers can one user follow, but now I’m not sure.)

Social media companies, who all seem to be racing each other to make their services as crappy as possible to non-paying users, are no solution either.

There used to be a Mastodon search engine, at search.noc.social. This is what remains of it. (Yes, it’s just a white page with the text “project has been removed.”)

Fediverse to the rescue! But no, a lot of it is transitory, sometimes intentionally so! In some circles even suggesting that Mastodon be just searchable, let alone preservable, will subject you to a storm of criticism. It’s true that being opaque to general search helps protect vulnerable users, a noble cause, but it also makes Mastodon’s discoverability very low. (One solution, which I think I mentioned here before, is an opt-in search solution called tootfinder, but it currently only goes back three months.)

And I don’t see many other people talking about this, even though the sudden decay of Twitter and Reddit has made this essential problem more visible than its been for a long time.

I feel like going onto every Discord I follow, gaming research ones in particular, and ringing alarm bells, but it’s a task just to find them out, and really what good would it do. People use Discord because it’s free and easy and they even maintain the server for you. These kinds of spaces have always relied on some patron to uphold them; the only real differences are before they were visible to search and the Wayback Machine, and now, it’s a single company that will increasingly hold access to these places obscured behind a storm of pleas to subscribe to Nitro, and someday will delete them entirely.

The Zelda II Randomizer Discord. As a community, it works okay. As a way of storing information, well, it sucks rocks. As a way of preserving everything, it’s DOOOOOMED.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, there are vast swaths of online culture that are already lost permanently: the Compuserve forums of the era immediately preceding the rise of the web. Compuserve was once the biggest online presence. And AOL, which grew to eclipse it in size, likewise holds (still? I don’t know, it’s on AOL!) a vast amount of early internet culture.

Newsgroup archives are a bit better off because of their openness, although nowadays it’s mostly seen as just a way to enable piracy.

Still, essential web services are at least preservable. The Fediverse resembles those, at least in principle, so it’s immediately better off than Discords and Youtube, for making old information findable, even if it’s currently really hard to do it (and some people are outright opposed to it).

It is time to wrap this all up. I say things like this frequently these days. Maybe someday someone will listen. The power and reach of the internet doesn’t have to rely on big companies. I also have qualms about the ability of a even a horde of individual servers to keep things going, mind you. All those dead links on all those surviving old websites, they once represented living projects too.

I think what we ultimately need is an independent organization that can keep up old sites and communities, and provide a place for new ones, maybe supported by donations, without the explicit profit motive of the bigcorps. Something that looks like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia. There’s places where you can host plain websites even today, like the Tildeverse (but its individual pieces, like Fediverse servers, always feel like they could vanish at any time), ancient-yet-still-here Angelfire (of which, like the Lycos it’s a part of, it’s amazing still survives), or the newer, enthusiast-focused Neocities (which too has no guarantee of longevity).

Companies can live longer than people, or their interest cycles. It doesn’t feel right that something like a website require someone to dedicate their life to maintaining it, but due to the dysfunctional way our economic has come to see companies (involving the hateful words fiduciary duty) are also vulnerable to the winds of change. It feels like a non-profit, or at least a durable privately-held company that isn’t pushed by rapacious groups to chase every profit lead no matter how disastrous, may be a solution. I don’t know if it really is, though. I’m just watching this, mostly from the outside. I hope someone can do something though, to overturn the cold tides of entropy. I really do.

Randochrontendo

Chrontendo is, of course, Dr. Sparkle’s great and long-lived journey to document and discuss every Famicom and NES game. He’s made a lot of headway! He’s also doing Sega and PC Engine/Turbografx games!

We avidly, and a bit obsessively, link every Chrontendo episode as it’s posted. But what about the many days which don’t see a new episode?

On those days, you’ll just have to console yourself with Randochrontendo, on both Twitter and Mastodon, which posts random images from Chrontendo, usually screenshots, every thirty minutes. Sometimes you just want to look at a random 8-bit video game, and when those times arrive, Randochrontendo has you covered.

Randochrontendo on Twitter – Randochrontendo on Mastodon (botsin.space)

Apple Kracker’s Guide

Back in the days of the Apple II, there was a thriving scene in trading copies of commercial software. Means to prevent this, through copy protection schemes, were just as rampant, as publishers sought to protect their work from those who would use it without paying. The process of figuring out a disk’s copy protection and making it so it could be copied and run by others was called cracking, or sometimes, kracking.

Cracking was, and still is, a black art. There are many ways to protect a disk from being copied, and just as many to deprotect that data. Some disks remain uncracked to this day. It is the work of Apple II cracker 4am (Mastodon) to try to unlock the data on these rapidly aging pieces of media so they can be preserved. (On 4am, jump to the bottom.)

The Apple II Kracker’s Guide seems to have been written by a anonymous user known as The Disk Jockey. It’s a good overview of basic forms of copy protection and ways to defeat them. A copy is at the Internet Archive, but I encountered it in the collection at bitsavers.org, here. It’s like candy to someone of the right frame of mind. Like me!

Aside: If the name 4am sounds familiar, and you find yourself thinking “Didn’t he used to be on Twitter?” He was. He’s not anymore. This happened several months before the Age of Musk. Twitter’s automated processes decided somehow that a video he tweeted of Apple II software Super Print booting was revenge porn and banned him, even rejecting an appeal. He moved to Mastodon. Now that Twitter is missing half of its employees, situations like this will probably become more common. 4am is not the subject of this post, but if you want to read more about Apple II protection and its breaking, you should follow him on Mastodon. He has about one tenth of the followers there that he had on Twitter, which is a shame.

Hempuli Translates Finnish Super Mario Manual Back Into English

Hempuli is the creator of the brillian Baba Is You, as well as other games. He’s known to tweet from time to time, and lately he translated some of the text from the quirky Finnish translation of Super Mario Bros. back into English, making an effort to retain some of its distinctive weirdness. Here is that thread, unrolled for your convenience. Here’s a couple of highlights:

Hurry Mario and save Princess Chanterelle of Mushroomoom land!
“Willowherbs” is the translator’s attempt to do something with the “field horsehair plants” in the English manual that have mystified players for decades now.
Daddy-longlegs?

Phil Fish on Fez’s 10th Anniversary

Screenshot courtesy my own personal 209.4%, 64 cube, three heart-cube game

Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese got in contact with early indie superstar turned recluse Phil Fish, creator of the brilliant Fez on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the game’s initial publishing.

Fez was eagerly anticipated in development for several years, and Fish was one of the subjects of the movie Indie Game. It was the subject of tremendous applause when released, winning the both the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Eurogamer’s Game of the Year in 2012, as well as Indiecade Best in Show in 2011, . For some idea of how long ago that was, the 2011 winner of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize was freaking Minecraft.

But then, at the height of its popularity, Phil Fish got into an argument on the center of all internet strife, that place where sanity goes to die: Twitter. He would cancel Fez’s sequel and swear off game development. He returned briefly in 2014 at what would turn out to be exactly the wrong time, the shameful era of GamerGate, before going underground again.

It was something of a coup that Robert Purchese got an interview with him. If I had known it was something one could just do I might have considered it myself.

Phil Fish’s Fez remains one of the outstanding achievements of the early days of indie game culture, and his being basically hounded out of it during GamerGate remains an egregious travesty.