Studio Notes 6-18-25
Daniel Scott Snelson and I will be speaking remotely at DIGRA2025, Wednesday, July 2nd, about Soccerthon88, our artgame/documentary project in development. Abstract here.
Animation Obsessive- Revisiting Trnka's The Hand
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 60th anniversary.
More ➜Reframing Abundance
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
Glyphdrawing club, Why is there a 'small house' in CP437?
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
Adactio- Denial
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. […]
Zotz- Investigating MacPaint's Source Code
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 - THERE IS NO I BUT I
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/
A People's History of Slavjank
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.
More ➜IGF 2025 winners include Caves of Qud, Vinny Roca and Consume Me
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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