Previous iterations:

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3

Serious Reads

Let’s make up fantasy consoles for fun

If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?

I saw this a few weeks ago and loved the concepts. I've been on-off stewing over some ideas, but I think my first thought remains my favourite.

The DS and 3DS eras of Nintendo consoles had a stupendous long-term impact on console modding. Both, particularly the latter, are easy to bend to your will^[1], and can be supplanted with lovely choices of operating systems, software, and even emulation. This is a must - my dream console must have easily swappable hardware, and the software should be open to those who want to tinker away to their hearts content. Whatever a few hundred developers can achieve, the hundreds of thousands of fans should build on it in wonderful ways.

I'm also sticking with the split screen approach of the DS and 3DS. This was a radical design choice, and I have huge respect for games that experimented with this. Visual novels and other "passive" games could have the main activity on the top screen, and controls on the bottom, with the console providing an easy integration solution to avoiding screen clutter. Tactical and puzzle games often did similar. RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei^[2] also fucked around and found out. It's very charming to me.

Accessibility is also critical. Modern phones, gaming controllers, etc, all demand dextrous hands to operate. I'm floored by how creative people become in their modding of games to be achievable (examples 1, 2, 3, 4), and to enable this further would be amazing. I don't think any default button configuration will ever fit most people's needs, but to allow this configuration - both in terms of physicial hardware and how the software interprets it - absolute freedom would be amazing. Similar to how Framework laptops allow for modular ports and slots, having this integrated into the surface of a game console, to allow you to switch in/out control types, would be really cool.

Going back to the DS and 3DS playbook, I do not care for massive hardware specs. If you want to put Crysis on this thing, do it yourself. Capping the hardware capabilities also mitigates an arms race of higher resolution textures, processing, rendering, that simply does not benefit the end product any more. So we're going 720p and you will like it. Get creative with your graphics again.

The closest console to broach these ideas might be the Steam Deck, which I respect Valve a lot for. Still, competition is always good.

Miles from the ocean, there’s incredible diving beneath the streets of Budapest

You can usually see as far as your torchlight reaches,” Csaba says. “But if people touch the walls or kick up the silt on the bottom of the passages, visibility drops to zero very fast.

Another half-article, half-photoset, but a really cool one nonetheless.

(a) cohost postmortem: life after death

that's all I have for now. thank you for reading. if you used cohost, thank you for having used cohost. I'm told it was like a website in there.

Cohost is an odd area of interest for me. I was adjacent to it during its existence, creating an account in its opening weeks, dipping my toes in and out like an indecisive kid, never fully committing.

If I had taken the plunge, and landed among the type of communities I (eventually) found on Tumblr, I likely would have found yet more delightful niches to enjoy. I hear that they certainly did exist there, even ones I had never before heard of.

Cohost is now gone, and the lamentation over its passing fascinates me. There is a genuine loss of communities that I haven't observed throughout the Twitter migration, nor through various eras of Tumblr collapses.

What websites remain?

What AI can actually do to your critical thinking skills

In that sense, it’s not AI that will weaken every user’s critical thinking skills — but it might create a divide between people depending on whether it increases how much they engage with information, or reduces it. You can use AI as a springboard for ideas that spark creativity, or as a one-click replacement for creativity. Future AI agents may free up your working time to do more rewarding things, or it can embolden employers to demand that we “produce” more.

Every day I inch closer to being able to post my masterpiece on AI within Big Tech. This will do for now.

Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi

The feature that convinced me to start paying for Kagi was its Privacy Pass option. Based on a clean-sheet Rust implementation of the Privacy Pass standard (IETF RFCs 9576, 9577, and 9578) by Raphael Robert, this is a technology that uses cryptographic token-based auth to send an "I'm a paying user, please give me results" signal to Kagi, without Kagi knowing which user made the request. (There's a much longer Kagi blog post with actual technical details for the curious.)

Same as above re. my thoughts. I'm at the level of jadedness (read: age) where paying for a search engine seems increasingly viable.

For some people, music doesn’t connect with any of the brain’s reward circuits

The first thing that’s uncertain is whether specific musical anhedonia is a stable trait. Is the disconnection in the brain that seemingly causes it permanent, or can it be modulated through some kind of training, therapy, or even pharmacological interventions? Pallarés and his colleagues are already busy working on these questions, having started by looking at our DNA.

I've read this article twice, and in both cases I had video game music playing in the background. Each time, I stopped and realised that the music did little for me.

Fresh from new thoughts after an autism assessment this week^[3], I've been thinking about repetitive loops that I put myself through; sometimes out of perceived benefit, and sometimes out of sheer routine that does nothing for me. I'm increasingly finding that music falls into the latter for me.

I wouldn't call it a deficiency or issue of any kind, more that it simply does nothing for me, and I don't care to push myself to enjoy what other people enjoy just to keep up. There's many examples of this for me, and it gets easier with age, practice, and good company.

Exposure to many new types of people and inclinations has been great in this regard for me. I wonder if an asexual person would read this article and feel any thread of connection to Pallarés' research. Would someone who feels no attachment to food feel the same? Might do a full post on this train of thought.

Cyborg rights depend on new and better legal protections

A new kind of technology is necessary to disrupt the status quo— one that further obscures the traditional distinction between body and device. The subject of my last piece, the heart-powered pacemaker (also called TECH), may do just that, potentially offering legal protections for cyborgs.

A key challenge is defining what constitutes that body and the corresponding rights it should be granted. Even when legal rulings feel black and white, the language underpinning them concerns nebulous philosophical questions. How do we compare the degree of embodiment between all of the different kinds of medical devices in a fair and precise manner?

Given my interests, I thought I'd have more background knowledge on this. But I don't, and it's a fascinating discussion that will only intensify into the future.

The varying needs and wants of technology implanted into the body is stunningly broad. I hold a diverse range of positions on this scale, depending on what my upcoming cardiac and MRI scans will report. Closer to the "wants" side of things, I would absolutely modify the fuck out of myself at the first opportunity^[4].

If, voluntarily or otherwise, I'm in a position where mechanical implants are essential to my continued wellbeing, do I still retain full legal control over myself?

A near-inverse thought - is there a risk that technology as a form of control could be strengthened by this movement? With the legal framework adjusted to protect "it" and not the host it's embedded into? There's very few real-life cases that come to mind. But I'm envisioning jobs that require augmented motor control (eg. exoskeletons for moving heavy items), or heightened senses (eg. a surgeon whose precision relies on perfected vision). If a corporation retains ownership of a device that's implanted into an employee, do they enjoy a higher degree of control over the individual via any future legislation?

I am confident in my view that there will eventually emerge a movement of people who wish to preserve the biological above the mechanical, holding a moral and ethical position that we should not be mandated to accept any kind of technological intrusion on the body. I strongly respect this position, and feel that this perspective is intertwined with the above debate. There are no easy answers.

Light Reads

Yearning for Meaning: Maddy Thorson’s Super Mario World Romhacks and the Metamodernist Impulse

Now you may be thinking: What is a title like that doing in the Light Reads section?

If personal things happening to Sonic is the theme of this sincerity amidst the chaos, then it is the most appropriate thing in the romhack that the final overworld event, after Sonic completes “Masterpiece” the level, is the revealing of letters spelling out “your gay.” Again humorous, especially with its purposeful misspelling, but also an honest revelation of the self. This is what we can take away: try to save the world and to make the perfect creation, but also know it’s enough to grow into and be yourself.

Yeah

List of English words containing Q not followed by U

I'm gonna be playing Scrabble with Rain again soon and need to learn this page off by heart.

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I don't really have anything else light to show off, so instead here's one of my favourite recent snippets of F1 radio banter (source):