🐱 Some More Curated Curiosities 🐱
In a complete absence of rhyme or reason, I am dubbing the seventh Codex entry… uh, well, the second “Curated Curiosities” volume. Curiosity number one: our cat Lorelei flushes every time she uses the litter box. Also, she is super cute. Here she is with her brother, Lucifer.
Perfect Dark is Forever
I haven’t been playing any video games for several months, but this week I’ve been pretty hooked on the unofficial Perfect Dark PC port. It really looks great playing on an ultrawide monitor. I had previously played through Agent difficulty on 1964GEPD, an N64 emulator fine-tuned for playing GoldenEye and Perfect Dark that also supports mouse/keyboard controls. For most people, 1964GEPD is apt to be a preferable experience to running natively on an N64 – but I feel like the PC port is more effective at scratching that same sort of itch. The controls feel more responsive and the game less laggy – and a steady 60fps to boot. I’m certain the day will come where proper multiplayer and mod support is added, which is 100% something to get excited for.
On the greater subject of playing Perfect Dark or GoldenEye today, maybe not everyone will have this same luxury but I was simply not good at these games as a kid. As much as I appreciated the story and setting, especially Elvis in Perfect Dark and all of the “cyberpunk”-like imagery, I could barely scrape through on the lowest difficulty in either game. So what’s the luxury? Revisiting Perfect Dark this week, and GoldenEye earlier this year, both on the highest difficulty, has really breathed new life into these games for me.
In Perfect Dark especially, it’s not just more difficult or with slightly tweaked objectives, but some missions are so different to the point where the player starts in a different location, or the objective is the same on paper but is completed in a very different manner. In many missions, the player is not only seeing parts of the map they would never normally traverse to, but playing through entire sections that they never even had the chance to see prior to cranking the difficulty up.
The game is certainly easier with a mouse and keyboard, but it’s still a challenge (uh, Carrington Institute on Perfect Agent?) and still fun. The soundtrack is so, so good as well.
Internet Time Machine
I wanted to bring attention to a project known as the “Internet Time Machine.” If you’re unfamiliar with archive.org’s Wayback Machine, the best way to describe it is as a service that periodically captures “screenshots” of pages on the internet over the years; so if you were to visit something like cnn.com and select a date in the mid-2000s, you’ll be looking at cnn’s old website design with its old front-page stories.
The next “layer,” so to speak, is the WaybackProxy, a project on github written and maintained by richardg867. This allows you to proxy all traffic on your device(s) through the Wayback Machine, set to a specified date range. Once it’s set up, you can open a browser and visit cnn.com directly, and the archived copy of cnn will be served via http with the url in your browser reading http://www.cnn.com – no need to visit archive.org directly, and no need to use a modern computer that supports https.
The final piece to the puzzle is hardware that can directly provide internet, via the Wayback Machine, to an older computer; rather than a Python script running locally, it’s running on a Raspberry Pi, and even has a nifty little dial for changing the date on-the-fly. Here’s a video of everything in action.
Web Design Museum
Interested in the internet of the years gone by, but not so interested in fiddling with the WaybackProxy, or plugging random websites directly into the Wayback Machine? The Web Design Museum is a good place to get your fix. The Y2K Aesthetic exhibition might be the most interesting to me.
I’m not sure how much of a point I’m trying to make with this question but, don’t these sites look so much more inspired than websites of today? I’m thinking back to MySpace templates, where it seemed like everyone had their own unique profile page. From a usability standpoint, I can understand the point of view that, if every site or page is different, then the average user may struggle to get around. Do these pages seem that complicated, though? Alright, maybe some of them are less than intuitive…
A guide to t e l e p a t h
This will be a shorter Codex entry today, but I want to end it with a bang: a guide I stumbled across for telepath’s albums. The guide contains most of the “heavy hitters” but telepath fans are apt to immediately notice how sparse the selection is when compared to the sheer size of his discography. Either click or middle-click the guide to see a larger version:
Links to each of the albums provided by a user in the comments of the original thread:
1) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--12
2) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--20
3) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--23
4) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--25
5) https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/--19
6) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--28
7) https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/--21
8) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--33
9) https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/--24
10) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--35
11) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--40
12) https://catsystemcorp.bandcamp.com/album/building-a-better-world
13) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--32
14) https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/album/--42
15) https://trinityinfinity.bandcamp.com/album/-
16) https://trinityinfinity.bandcamp.com/album/--2
17) https://trinityinfinity.bandcamp.com/album/--3
18) https://tkxvault.bandcamp.com/album/--4
19) https://plus100.bandcamp.com/album/-
20) https://plus100.bandcamp.com/album/--6
21) https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/2814
22) https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/--18
23) https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/album/rain-temple
24) https://dream-catalogue.bandcamp.com/album/--10
25) https://noproblematapes.bandcamp.com/album/--2
Have no idea who telepath is or what this music is even supposed to be? I’d suggest to put this on in the background for a bit; it’s an unofficial “best of” compilation, and should leave you with a pretty good indication of whether or not it’s worth your time to explore the artist more deeply.
Until next time…
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