The Hand had a long history of being paraded around at western festivals as a critique of Soviet authoritarianism, but its target was much broader. nice writeup in Animation Obsessive on its 60’s anniversary.
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More ➜video games didn’t start as an industry, they started as timetheft by programmers in university, government and military labs who were meant to be doing something else. While its entanglements with the military and technological control society which are pillars of capitalism are also strands of videogaming as a field that must be reckoned with, I would say it is shaped just as much by these illicit beginnings, as well as software crackers, personal computer users, and those who maintain their own strange gardens online – as its currently hypercompetitive commercial formation. […] Link
More ➜There’s a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM’s infamous character set Code Page 437. “Small house”—that’s the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for “Delete” (DEL) should logically exist. It’s cute, but a little strange. […] Link
More ➜The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models. […]
More ➜MacPaint is a monochromatic raster image painting program that introduced many people to mouse-driven controls, tool palettes, and copy and paste integration with other applications. […] Link
Kamal Boullata (كمال بلاطة), There is No I but I, (silkscreen), 1983 [Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. © Kamal Boullata]
link: https://www.barjeelartfoundation.org/collection/there-is-no-i-but-i/
Loving these videos about Slavic shovelware games of the early 2000’s and I can’t wait for the book they’re building up to. I stumbled into this when I was researching early Czech games and then wandered into reading about bizarre Russian and Crimean treasure hunters and associated weird slav worldbuilding/conspiracy theory/alternate reality fictions. This stuff wasn’t part of my original thesis writing but its been slowly creeping in to the stuff I’ve been writing since, because this sort of werid magic-circle alternate past stuff exemplifies the politicized, luddic, grey-zone-horizon between history and fantasy that I’m interested in lately.
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Some much deserved accolades at IGF awards this year for very longterm projects Caves of Qud and Fantastic Arcade alum Consume Me (Jenny Jaio Hsia and AP Thompson) as well as a best student game win by my friend and UCLA DMA co-cohort Vinny Roca for Slot Waste
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More ➜“If there are not enough homes, can we make more?” the authors ask. “If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy can we make more? If not, why not?” Their solution is for politics to take technology and innovation “more seriously” and to relieve them from the encumbrance of bad policy. “To have the future we want,” they helpfully summarize their case, “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” It’s hard to argue with that. Abundance is mostly hard to argue with, by design: Klein and Thompson have written a super-partisan sales pitch for a politics of new construction rather than a rigorous, methodical inquiry regarding the causes of national stagnation. The authors lament that America is “stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.” This third way is well trod, by everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to today’s Democratic Party insiders, and Klein and Thompson’s offering is among the most approachable attempts to map it of late. But their collation of columns is less than the sum of its parts, like a clip-show episode of a 1990s sitcom. […] Link
