Or should that be invasiveness? Persuasiveness? It’s no longer a distraction, it’s an addiction, it’s everywhere, and its aggressive promotion and passive acceptance is driving me crazy.

I’m walking around on campus where students don’t look up while walking but down—desperately trying to catch every single glimpse of their backlit screen. Its usage in and around classrooms is detrimental to their learning.

I’m trying to order dinner at a restaurant but can’t find the menu unless I scan a QR code while I purposely left my phone at home to enable social interaction, not massive distraction.

I receive emails written in smartphone-mode where not only questions are barely understandable thanks to hip abbreviations but punctuation and correct addressing guidelines seemed to never have existed. Sent from iPhone. Please excuse typos and brevity.

I browse through paper ads—you know, the ones dumped in your real mailbox—and again have to pull out my phone because leaflets are too lazy to put in opening hours or details and instead simply print QR codes with redirect links that have a 99% chance of fingerprinting.

I put on a local soap show and literally have to watch people typing away on their smartphone while an overlay interface for the viewer sees their texts. Then, during a break, I have to watch ads for faster and always-on internet and 5G mobile networks, because, 100% connectivity is what we all want. Bed sheet ads end with a woman in bed seemingly happily scrolling away to promote their always-open webshop. Food ordering services want you to install their app because their users have clearly become happier, snappier, and can manage more in life.

I want to take the bus to the station but don’t know their schedule. App, right? Or QR code? Why not both, as long as we make sure that the printed information on the bus stops is out of date so that people who actually use that service are confused.

I walk around in a store but people keep on bumping into me, mumbling sorry! because they prefer watching YouTube videos and scrolling through Yet Another Social Media Feed instead of just being present and trying to avoid collision with others.

I bike to work and have to listen to school kids’ boom boxes a.k.a. their smartphones. That’s not so bad (depending on the music), right? What about texting and biking next to the local canal? Or what about scrolling and speedy e-biking?

I talk to colleagues at the water cooler but halfway the conversation the colleague keeps on looking at the time giving me the impression that I’m boring them. Of course that watch is a smart watch and that incoming event is more important than actually talking to people. You were saying? Never mind. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with distracted people thanks to their “smart” things.

I try to facilitate a meeting and see people alternating between trying very hard to focus and pay attention, and the next minute digging up their smartphone from their pockets and scrolling. When I ask them a question, they might put it aside for a moment, but the answer is never a qualitative one.

I wonder out loud what kind of weather it would be tomorrow, or who that actor of that film we’re watching worked with before. Before I know it, someone has looked up the answer and proudly presented me the result. My wondering wasn’t looking for answers but just wondering, but clearly, the instant Let Me Google That For You feedback system is more important.

I walk the dog and cross other dogs—happily sniffling and looking around—and their owners—depressingly scrolling on their phones because of course you can’t leave that device unattended at home for fifteen minutes.

I take the stairs connecting the garage and the office spaces at work and cross people with their hands completely fused with their phones, refusing to let go in order to more easily open the door. A few minutes later, I cross them again at the coffee machine, still clutching onto their oversized gadget like Tolkien’s Gollum and his precious.

I propose to go to a new restaurant and want to let the menu surprise me but find my companions partially ruining the fun by immediately retrieving the menu online thanks to their super-connected phone and ridiculous data usage subscriptions.

I want to read a book and see my wife scrolling on her phone without paying attention to the TV, who, as soon as I reach for the remote to turn it off and have a bit of head space, starts complaining that she really was watching that show.

I stop at a red light on the way to the supermarket and notice other drivers next to me automatically reaching for their phones because they have two seconds to spare that apparently absolutely need to be spend on more distraction/addiction feeding.

I want to sell toys our daughter no longer plays with on an online second hand market platform but regularly fail to close the deal because others expect me to answer within 2 minutes while I check the platform once or twice a day, preferably without using the app.

I hate this digital world we’re suddenly living in.

By Wouter Groeneveld on 15 April 2024.  Reply via email.

I’ve been known to (re)play old games—sometimes in new engines, sometimes on original hardware. The latest games to fit that bill are Duke Nukem 1 + 2 as part of the Duke Nukem Evercade Collection 1 where an amazing feat was pulled off by completely rewriting the engine to support smooth scrolling on the Evercade widescreen handheld. If you press SELECT, you can switch between classic and modern modes, neatly highlighting the improvements. Here’s a video I recorded for the review I wrote showcasing the effect:

The original source code has been lost for decades, but the initial DOS release never played smooth anyway: early PCs were never known to handle 2D sprite-based games as well as Nintendo’s (S)NES family.

Hopefully Blaze Entertainment wants to keep on pursuing the direction of Apogee game remakes. I know I’ll buy them in a heartbeat. But what games from my youth are already remade/remastered? I decided to compile a non-exhaustive list for my fellow 80486 comrades; in case they would be willing to play any of these without that yellowed mechanical keyboard and DOS prompt. For me, the joy of using the original hardware is part of the gameplay fun, but sometimes, I just want to waste a bit of time from my couch using whatever handheld device lies nearest. Besides, these remakes introduce a whole new audience to the great olds of yore.

Let me know if I missed big ones. Wikipedia houses a game engine re-creations and a remakes and remastered listing, and I found this awesome game remakes list on GitHub, but I’m only interested in DOS games and preferably proper remakes instead of source ports (emphasized in bold).

Adventure games

• Monkey Island 1 & 2: Special Editions¹ on GOG/Steam.
• Day of the Tentacle: Remastered edition on GOG/Steam.
• Alone in the Dark: Reimagining on Steam, Free In the Dark source port on GitHub.
• Another World: HD 20th Anniversary Edition on Steam
• Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded is a complete remake of the first episode with some new elements and modern replacements of original characters.
• Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Ed. on GOG
• Simon the Sorcerer: 25th Anniversary Edition versions with some interesting additions
• System Shock: Nightdive’s 2023 masterful remake was a critically acclaimed hit
• Flashback: 25th Anniversary Edition on GOG or consoles.

Shooters

• Wolfenstein 3D: ECWolf source port with a much-needed automap
• Blake Stone: Unofficial source port on GitHub (Win binary released)
• DOOM: What device doesn’t run a recent DOOM engine port?
• Duke Nukem 3D: it’s even ported to the Nintendo Switch lately.
• Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition on GOG/Steam/Consoles.
• Quake: KEX Engine remaster on any platform.
• Star Wars: Dark Forces: Another Nightdive super-conversion
• Blood: Fresh Supply, yet another KEX win.
• Shadow Warrior: The Classic Redux version doesn’t need an explanation

Platformers

• Duke Nukem 1 & 2: Remastered Evercade cart, see above
• Crystal Caves: HD Edition with level editor on GOG/Steam
• Secret Agent: HD Edition with level editor on GOG/Steam
• Monster Bash: HD Edition on GOG/Steam
• Jazz Jackrabbit: OpenJazz source port with increased resolution on GitHub
• Commander Keen games: Commander Genius source port on GitLab
• Cosmo’s Comic Adventures: announced & on the way
• Lode Runner: Mad Monk’s Revenge/The Legend Returns, a remake of the original
• Karateka: The Making Of Digital Eclipse docu-remaster, all platforms

Strategy

• Command & Conquer/Red Alert series: Remastered Collection on steam and OpenRA Engine available as well
• Dungeon Keeper: KeeperFX open source remake
• The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary remake on GOG

Role-playing

• The Bard’s Tale I/II/III: The Bard’s Tale Trilogy remake on GOG
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny 2013 Remake of the 1992 original
• Wasteland: There’s a Remastered version that received mixed reviews

By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 April 2024.  Reply via email.

What happened in March? Can you believe that my head feels like the Belgian weather of late: damp and very cloudy? I tried keeping my head above water in the complete chaos at work. I gave more talks about my creativity research. Kev and I exchanged lots of friendly emails as part of his monthly PenPal project. We talked about academia, baking, living in the countryside, board games, and more. I really enjoyed our digital conversation, thanks Kev!

Our daughter turned one, which is an unbelievably huge milestone for us. We celebrated our survival as much as as her transition from baby to toddler. It all feels very surreal, thinking back on the different life we had and the obstacles we had to overcome during and after pregnancy. We’re very thankful that she’s healthy now and are enjoying every little moment together.

Previous month: February 2024.

Books I’ve read

After finishing the fiction series of last month, I seem to have hit a reader’s block. I tried getting back into John Cleese’s Life And How To Survive It but the conversational form hampers my understanding and forming of aha-moments, especially if read just before going to bed. Chances are high I’ll be picking up something less dense.

My new role at work comes with a lot of challenges I plan to tackle by compiling and systematically working through a tech-related reading list. Perhaps one that could also be published as a blog post.

Games I’ve played

Two small ones that serve as an intermission: Goblin Sword, a port of a 2014 mediocre mobile platformer, and Shovel Dungeon: Pocket Knight—no wait, Pocket Puzzler Shovel Knight? No wait, Shovel Pocket Puzzle Knight? No wait, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon—a puzzler cleverly coated with Shovel Knight sauce to conceal its roguelike blandness. I tried my collector’s edition of Flashback yesterday and didn’t like it. High time for a decent one.

As for the board games played this month, I’ve again dutifully kept track:

The more my work requires me to stare at a screen, the more I’d rather play a(n offline) board game than a video game. Three Sisters is a new favorite of us and a recurring appearance. Those “roll/flip & writes” are getting quite popular and are very easy to get to the table, even on a tiresome weekday night.

Selected (blog) posts

• Ana Rodrigues wrote a short note about the browser’s intersection observer which I didn’t know about and can come in handy!
• Samantha Cole claims that Tumblr (and Wordpress) staff compiled users’ data as part of a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI to train data. Yet another disgusting AI report.
• Speaking of which… Hidde de Vries proves that AI-generated front-end components are anything but accessible.
• More great AI news: some LLMs hallucinate software packages potentially poisoned with malware. Good Luck Have Fun.
• Brandur prefers as little dependencies as possible in his software projects: he calls it the single dependency stack. I wish we’d do this at work: simplifying instead of over-engineering. On the other hand, his static site generation approach is far from simple. I don’t understand why a personal blog needs a CDN.
• Brit Butler shares thoughts on teaching versus the SaaS industry I can very much relate to:

I love the deep intentionality of teaching. I’m not trying to grow revenue, not trying to scale the hell out of something. I’m focused on deeply connecting with and enabling whatever students are under my care. In my experience, it is difficult to be intentional in the same way in a modern “growth at all costs” SaaS company. The focus on constant movement distracts from the reflection needed to chart a course efficiently. Or maybe we’re just poor at data-driven product development.

• On a related note: Growth is a mind cancer, writes Manuel Moreale. I agree.
• Tom Critchlow put forward the idea to share a desk with friends when working from home. Crashing at friends who’ve got a spare desk at their home office sounds like a great way to reduce loneliness.
• Ruben Schade got his retro KVM setup finally working! I’m so happy for him and the hardware stack looks very yellowy—like it should be.
• This is an older one but I stumbled upon it recently: Mark Rosewater explains Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, personas used to develop new Magic: the Gathering cards every new set.
• Ted Gioia sounds the alarm in The State of Culture 2024: art is being eaten by the entertainment industry who’s being eaten by the age of distraction who’s being eaten by the biggest fish of them all: addiction.
• I really enjoyed Gregory Szorc’s Rust is for Professionals post and really want to pick up the language this year.
• Alan Pierce shows us how to access unexported functions in Go using five different attempts. Reflection only works with structs, not top-level functions. The answer seems to be go:linkname.
• Zalando built their own Technology Radar back in 2018 and we’re using a variant of their open sourced project to spin up our own. Here is their public version of it.
• To top it all off, Carl Svensson wrote a great an extensive article on how DOOM didn’t kill the Amiga like everyone thinks it did. Highly recommended reading for retro enthusiasts.

Other random links

• Here’s a job queue for PostgreSQL written in Node in case you need it: https://worker.graphile.org/
• NuxtJS’s fascinating hybrid rendering technique sounds like I need to fiddle with it. This is in line with the composable frontend architecture trends.
• Pipedream.com sounds like the If This Than That system for developers?
• Sccache is a compilation cache for compiling C/C++/Clang and Rust code. If you’re building Go, use Bazel.Build as your build system—see this Uber engineering blog post for more info.

By Wouter Groeneveld on 3 April 2024.  Reply via email.