Easy access to paint programs has unleashed a torrent of what-if 8-bit imaginary retro video game awesomeness where time-slipped console development meets films from the past, present and future. Personally, I’d like to see a Super Nintendo THX-1138—which would certainly be less ridiculous than the SNES Home Alone cartridge—but I guess I’ll have to do that one up myself. What I did find out was that there were these clever mock-ups, one of which is actually real. Which one?
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Technology and Its Discontents
The Spotify Effect
Music checks in, but it doesn’t check out
Who has made me a stranger to my iTunes music library? Spotify, it is you. Who has made it possible to summon full discographies of interrelated musical artists in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon hopscotch that I Just Can’t Stop Doing? It’s you again, Spotify.
- Gamer Christ at Easter Time by Kyle Silfer (03/27/2016)
- Images from the 1-bit era by Kyle Silfer (03/06/2016)
- King of Demons 95 by Kyle Silfer (02/21/2016)
- Hit the troll with the elvish sword (02/07/2016)
- Video games too awesome to be real by Kyle Silfer (01/31/2016)
- My terrifying nightmare about segmented file transfer on floppy disks by Kyle Silfer (01/24/2016)
Technology and Its Discontents
Gamer Christ at Easter Time
He has infinite continues
Everybody likes a revisionist Jesus, tailored for the times. I know I do.
[click to enlarge]
Technology and Its Discontents
Images from the 1-bit era
We got both kinds of colors here: black and white
Color might be fine for the average video game, but for the truly great, it just gets in the way.
Technology and Its Discontents
King of Demons 95
Back in 1995 the launch of what was possibly the pinnacle of beige-PC lameness was occurring in parallel with the development of one of the most visually demented video games on the face of the earth. Which just goes to prove the maxim that computers can imprison us or they can set us free.
Technology and Its Discontents
My terrifying nightmare about segmented file transfer on floppy disks
Last night I had a dream that man in a mask like the one in Zardoz ordered me to retrieve the data from a mysterious computer kept deep in a lightless cavern. The computer is connected via RF modulator to a CRT television set tuned to channel 3. The hard drive, if you want to call it that, consists of two massive bays where removable cartridges about the size of a stack of copy paper are inserted. The keyboard is a loud, clacky one with mechanical switches. There is no mouse.
Technology and Its Discontents
Distracted Devices
No wonder you can’t concentrate on anything
Humans are intensely distracted by their screens. There can be no quibbling about this fact. Some of us hate that, some of us like it and some of us are too distracted to have noticed.
Awesome digitized image by “B and J Williams”
Technology and Its Discontents
Star Wars … Nothing but Staaaaar Wars
Unlicensed video game goodness from the seventies
For a behemoth media franchise that has spawned SO many video games—some good, many wretched—it may perhaps be hard to imagine a time when there were no Star Wars video games at all.
Technology and Its Discontents
Why you don’t know where anything is
Because they won’t let you find out, that’s why
Computer searching is so awesome now that you can’t find anything without it, even if you wanted to.
Technology and Its Discontents
My old girlfriend ELIZA
“We were discussing you—not me.”
Joseph Weizenbaum’s problem child lives on in your iPhone.
