Mad rush to get things finished for the end of the release cycle today. Well, some people are rushing madly; I'm just chugging along 
Happy invoicing!
- The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine, Part 2: Jack Is Back!, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They ****ed It Up - "The Amiga was the damnedest computer. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, then all crammed into a plastic case; that was the Amiga.” A great, detailed look at the business and technical history of the Amiga and the Atari ST, and the people who made those machines of blessed memory (Had to use a URL shortener for the last one, because of the naughty words filter…)
- 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators - Meanwhile, on the other side of the 16-bit computing divide, Trixter presents an incredible demo that runs on an original 8088-based IBM PC - and only on one: ”As of April 7th 2015, there are no IBM PC emulators in the world that can run the demo properly; they hang or crash before the demo is finished, and the colors are wrong. Same goes for anything that isn’t the target hardware… Because there are so many technological world-firsts in the demo, and because we’re bending the hardware in ways that people have never thought to do so, it’s only fair that we try to explain exactly how this was achieved.” Having programmed several commercial DOS games in 808x assembly language in the 1980s, I can confirm that there is no hyperbole in that description: I really am stunned that any of this is possible, and I was pretty good at this stuff myself.
- Photographer Eric Lafforgue takes pictures of North Korea that were asked by their government to be deleted. Needless to say, he didn't listen. - This gallery comes from a PDF on Lafforgue’s own site, where he explains: ”Since 2008, I ventured to North Korea six times. Thanks to digital memory cards, I was able to save photos that I was forbidden to take or was told to delete by the minders. No pictures of soldiers, poverty, malnutrition are allowed in North Korea.”
- Urban Cat Scan - As part of the work to open up the old Post Office railway beneath London, the network has been laser scanned, allowing beautiful 3D modelling of it: ”ScanLab now enter the frame as documentarians of a different sort, with a laser-assisted glimpse of this underground space down to millimetric details… The incredible teaser video, pieced together from 223 different laser scanning sessions, reveals this with dramatic effect, featuring a virtual camera that smoothly passes beneath the street like a swimmer through the waves of the ocean.”
- Thoughts That Run Through Your Mind While You're Stuck In A Subway Tunnel For Over An Hour - Chelsee Pengel has a rather less inspiring underground rail experience: ”What if we have to stay on this train for hours? Will people pee in their Starbucks cups?… I don’t want to die in a subway tunnel… Would someone give me their Starbucks cup to pee in if I asked nicely?”
- 2 Slow 2 Curious: What It’s Like To Visit The Ghostly, Decrepit Streets Of Need For Speed World - Turns out the worlds in driving games are bleak, unsettling places if you forget about zooming around and instead slow down and look closely: ”There’s something incredibly compelling about the idea of playing a game in the exact opposite way you’re supposed to, pausing to look into the windows of shops… a peculiar new brand of environmental storytelling takes the fore, whether or not it was intended by the designers. Our minds draw the lines between the scrawled labels on boxes, the factories, the barns, the rolling “Montezuma’s” sign and Rockport takes on a whole new character.”
- Unfreed: The man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early. - "Only after Rene Lima-Marin walked out and the gate of Colorado’s Crowley County Correctional Facility shut behind him, on April 24, 2008, did he finally decide he didn’t have to worry anymore. He was 29 years old and a free man, released after serving a decade of what had first been a sentence of 98 years." But, nearly six years later, somebody noticed that his parole was a clerical error - and they came and took him back.
- Why isn't there a cheese emoji? - Rhodri Marsden: ”The absence of an emoji for 'cheese' is a constant, niggling problem in the digital life of the average Western foodie. We’re way, way too busy to be typing “cheese” when we want to communicate the idea (or even the reality) of cheese… This year, however, a cheese wedge is finally due to be cemented into Unicode. Relief!”
- When Worf Met “Webster” – A Totally Real Crossover with “Star Trek: TNG” that Actually Happened on TV - "Dig deep enough into the history of any TV series, and you’ll find at least one crossover with another show, generally set up for shameless cross-network or cross-studio promotional purposes… The episode of Webster in question, allegedly titled “Webtrek”, really exists and originally aired on March 10, 1989.” Winston O’Boogie watches one of the more bizarre elements of the Star Trek canon, so you don’t have to.
- The Wormworld Saga: Chapter Seven - Fateful Encounters - The latest chapter of Daniel Lieske’s online graphic novel, published just last night. And, as I reprehensibly failed to include it here when it was published, here’s The Wormworld Saga: Chapter Six - The Smoldering Doom
Happy invoicing!
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