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• Post #3997192

  a few hundred tadpoles hatched in a mud puddle in my mother's back yard #frogs #quebec

• Post #3912247

  “He went up to look at the house, see how things were going, and somewhere along the line he learned that the house number was going to be number 19," he said. Cooper’s grandfather was flabbergasted. “I can’t have my house to be number 19!” he said. “That’s a shithouse number.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/no-19-st-johns-street-9.7269329 #canada #newfoundland #nfld

• Post #3805981

  once every few years a local ms-dos/win95 gamer cleans out their closet in my city and sells them for $100 that day finally arrived and i am beyond ecstatic 🙏 #dosGaming #win95 #retroGaming #msdos

• Post #3634466

  putting an ink pen to paper and drawing something is about the most terrifying thing to me (second only to a paintbrush). for that reason, it has been 13 years since i last sketched something. i suspect many painters feel the same way about programming. posting my drawing progress photos here under the #learningToDraw tag, so feel free to mute that one since you're going to see some painful stuff over the next few months. this time, i'm learning from Arthur Guptill's classic book o...

• Post #3615429

  our first peony of the year #florespondence #flowers #bloomscrolling

• Post #3615076

  today's thrifting treasure from the peak utopian scholastic period: Dorling Kindersley's Ocean (2008) while the scholastic period is usually associated with the late 90s and early 2000s, it lasted well into the late 2000s thanks to DK's amazing book layouts even better, these later books come with a cd-rom full of clipart. 😎 #utopianScholastic #books #art #design #cdrom

• Post #3572334

  found this hidden gem on the garden. it's a japanese hypercard game called Summer Vacation - Search for the Golden Beetle (夏休み・黄金のかぶと虫を探して, Natsuyasumi - kogane no kabutomushi o sagashite) the pixel art is just insane - such a careful balance of positive and negative space in each rendering. it plays very much like early Cyan games like The Manhole - pure exploration. thank you macgarden archivist baku for finding, buying, and preserving this incredible gem. https://macintoshgarden.org/...

• Post #3529376

  a few hours away from my home town, a flight of a half dozen AT-602 air tractors gracefully scoop up water from the mighty mackenzie river, and return to bombing a wildfire encroaching on Fort Simpson. safe hunting to the crews working this fire. we sadly lost 3 people in a Turbo Commander bird dog crash last week. hard to imagine a more dangerous job. 🙏 source: Scott Gordon & Liidlii Kue First Nation #wildfires #nwt #canada #aircraft

• Post #3475998

  this web front end for Dragon's Lair HD is ridiculously well put together https://dlremaster.web.app the best kind of lunch break game, next to beating your face against a brick wall 😆 #retroGaming #arcade

• Post #3056290

  after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures. when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction. the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn co...

• Post #2898400

  don’t hate me because i’m living life to the fullest #highlander #dvd #canada #yvr #bc

• Post #2485727

  i just fell in love with an extremely obscure piece of macintosh software that has a 10/10 ui: Calculator Construction Set by dubl-click software you drag and drop pieces of a calculator: pushbuttons, lcd screens, paper tape printers, and then wire them together using a wiring tool. then you can script in behaviours for every component. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/calculator-construction-set #macintosh #vintageApple

• Post #2471928

  an extremely underrated 2 hour interview with robyn miller by MossRC@social.mossrc.me several years ago they provide a walking tour through several of cyan's early titles such as the Manhole, Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx. a live art director's commentary. what i love the most is how much robyn makes it clear how these games were never built for "gamers" as we understand them now. robyn played very few games, and wasn't familiar with genre expectations. he...

• Post #2444503

  geocities banner from 1999 that loaded in a new popup window every single time you clicked on a link on a geocities page. 😬 https://web.archive.org/web/19990829171607/http://www.geocities.com/toto?s=76000011 #worldwideWeb #webPreservation #oldweb

• Post #2433940

  today’s thrifting find 😎 my heart warms at its sight after 35+ years. my best friends got this gem with their family 386 DX25 when I was a kid. i wrote several stories about this exact card in my memoir about the 90s ms-dos era: Mages & Modems. thank you to wonderful folks who have read it and told me stories of your own SBAITSO.EXE exploits. 😅 for those who have yet to read it: https://tomotama.com/books i can’t wait to get it home and try it out. it’s a CT1350B for all you fellow O...

• Post #2427996

  good night Infinisys.co.jp, and thank you for your 35+ years of selling the official After Dark screen savers and modules. 🫡 here are a few snapshots of their After Dark pages over the past 30 years. #macintosh #vintageApple #japan #retroComputing #win95

• Post #2406939

  a 1995 issue of CD-ROM Today! has an article where parents review an edutainment game, and then have their kid write a oneliner review of it as well. SimTown 👌🏽 #retrocomputing #win31 #retrogaming

• Post #2347214

  this is some pretty obscure history for Ultima fans, but i thought i'd share it here in case it brings back some memories for someone else too. back in the mid-90s, finding any information about upcoming Ultima games was a worldwide treasure hunt. Origin Systems/EA hadn't figured out the internet as a marketing tool yet, so fans would root around through every gaming magazine for a morsel of info on Ultima IX. a single blurry, low-resolution screenshot appeared one day - I firs...

• Post #2307665

  official day of mourning to be announced. #hockey #hnom #olympics #canada

• Post #2286391

  tiny lua compiler: a lua compiler in a single file, that's well-documented, that was hand-crafted over several years, and made to teach you compiler/tokenizer/parser/lexer design. this is a crazy impressive project, and in a time when people are haphazardly slopcoding projects, is a standard to live by. https://github.com/bytexenon/Tiny-Lua-Compiler #programming #lua

• Post #2267251

  okay so i found something pretty awesome the 3d scenes in Myst were all built using a mac modeller/renderer called Strata Vision 3D. i bought a boxed copy of this program with the intention of trying to recreate a model or two in the game, using the original renderer. the box came with an extra disc - a library of shapes and textures. i noticed on the inside flap of the cd that it apparently included textures from Myst! unfortunately, it turns out the disc was a demo. you browsed through the...

• Post #2256186

  this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this - way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry. they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene...

• Post #2197625

  happy to discover this short talk by John Henry Thompson - the creator of the Lingo scripting language for Macromedia Director. JHT talks about the history of the language, from its inception through its various versions. it was one of my first OOP experiences as a kid, and left a huge impression in how i understood user-centred programming. love learning that it was deeply influenced by Smalltalk https://youtu.be/DvS4h-1Eyu4?t=161 #macromedia #programming #multimedia

• Post #2197619

  this is insanely impressive work, and i don’t think i’ve ever seen people talk about it. lots of us remember Broderbund’s Living Books series from the 90s - like Just Grandma & Me or Arthur’s Teacher Trouble. the cartooning was exquisitely well done, and the voice work was top notch. they completely disappeared in the late 90s because they were built for 16-bit Win 3.1, and compatibility problems only got worse with every revision of Windows into the 32-bit era apparently back in 20...

• Post #2172935

  i get excited about a new piece of software for a whole 4 seconds before i notice that the text editor is 500 megs. 475 of that is electron #macos

• Post #2099479

  anyone else obsessively play The Incredible Machine growing up? when i was a teenager, it was pretty rare to have games that ran in VGA/EGA hi-res modes. so whenever i came across one, it was a rare treat. TIM runs in 640x440 using non-square pixels. that's already a fairly uncommon graphics mode in its time. even weirder: the original diskette for it reads "256 color" on it. except..... the game isn't 256 colours! not even close. it is a *16 colour game*. it...

• Post #2007934

  til the english term 'scuttlebutt' (as in: 'So, what's the scuttlebutt today?') originated from the Age of Sail. it has literally the same expressive meaning as water-cooler gossip. thank you Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! compare this to the wikipedia entry for scuttlebutt - a dry factual kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttlebutt #multimedia #cdrom #edutainment

• Post #2005269

  when i was a kid with my first 2x cd-rom drive, buying a cd-rom in a retail box was a $100+ CAD affair. so at my house that never happened. all of my software on CD were either pack-ins that came with the computer, or from cheap multi-disc compilation packs like Sirius Software's 5ft10 pak. one of those pack-ins was a copy of Encarta '94. it had a nondescript jewel case without cover art - just a green MS certificate of authenticity. i never knew what the retail box looked like...

• Post #1990197

  really happy to have discovered something hiding in plain sight for several years: robyn & rand miller's original Myst pitch document from 1991. it's a succinct work of art in itself. i'm surprised at how much of the world design was already on paper. as all of the copies found elsewhere online are heavily compressed webp/jpeg, i've uploaded the robyn's original PNGs to IA here: https://archive.org/details/myst_proposal originally from robyn's site: http://www.ro...

• Post #1984949

  https://minidisc.pics #minidisc