Cool Things in the Internet, Feb 2025
Oof, it's been a while since I shared some cool links! But no matter, time to "reblog" some excellent articles, sites, videos and blogs I've been enjoying since the last entry. Now with vague categorisation!
Music
Pixeltune
As its creator describes it, Pixeltune is "a web VGM/chiptune player that plays songs in their original format, and features an archive of over half a million songs which I've been collecting through the years." While the video game music is cool and all, the real treasure here is all the demoscene material: a stunningly rich subculture of electronic music that's an endless treasure trove.
Tokyo's Coolest Sound
I've followed Tokyo's Coolest Sound for a while and if you're music-curious, I absolutely recommend it. The team behind it source all the latest new (mostly) independent releases from Japan across all kinds of genres and it's a place of endless discoveries.
The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify's plot against musicians
Everyone's read this by now but if you haven't... do it! A preview into a wider research on the ghost artists which have begun to take over Spotify's playlists, offering easy-to-listen-easy-to-forget filler music for the background while avoiding having to pay royalties to actual musicians. The follow-up book should be out now too, might give that a read at some point.
Gaming
The Gentrification of Video Game History
The fact that so much of gaming history, discourse and documentation these days is so heavily focused on a very specifically American perspective has long been a big bugbear of mine. Games that broke new ground, revealed new experiences to thousands of people and inspired just as many, are blankly disregarded simply because they didn't come out on a Nintendo console in the 1990s. The linked article deliberately looks at the subject from an even more underrepresented perspective than my Western European PC gaming lens and specifically focuses on how the Global South grew up gaming, but it's still a really interesting (and important) insight that video games did exist outside Final Fantasy and Zelda.
How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud
Speaking of gaming history with limited visibility these days, Sierra were one of the giants of gaming industry during the 1980s and 1990s and for a long time, seemed like an undefeatable giant. Sierra's eventual demise is often blamed on the waning popularity of the click 'n' point adventure games, which is what the studio rose to popularity with, but this really in-depth article shines a whole new light on the matter - as always, there's a corporate suit somewhere that ruins the fun for everyone.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais: A Thorough Look at Dragon Age (Revised)
Wake up babe, another 7-hour university course from Caldwell-Gervais has dropped. NCG calmly talks through the entire Dragon Age series to every last piece of DLC in great depth, occasionally offering a refreshing splash of dramatic wit in-between his hypnotic and thoroughly engaging monologue with not a drop of Youtube gimmickry in sight. I.e., exactly the kind of youtuber I love.
Miscellaneous
Fang, Feather and Fin: The Furry Code
The furry history blog Fang, Feather and Fin does an incredible job looking into the past of the fandom/subculture that's now old enough to have a past. I've been particularly delighted by their most recent article on The Furry Code, a descriptive string of numbers and letters which at one point and time was a quick way of showing where your interest lie to others who knew the code. It was already phasing out of common use by the time I fully delved into the fandom but I do remember playing around with the generator to create my own - and in the process perhaps seeing a wider perspective of the world I had found myself in. Anyway, it's just a great blog.
Think Outside the Box: Behind the Scenes of Deal or No Deal
This is a Guardian article from 2006 that I discovered through a random Reddit post and it's such a bewildering, fascinating read. Deal or No Deal is a worldwide game show format but I don't think any other version of the game, leaning 100% on pure RNG, inspires so much parasocial and almost cult-like behaviour among its contestants than the British version - and the host Noel Edmonds comes across like he was meant to run a cult. A heartily recommended read even if you have no interest in the topic in itself.