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The Super Mario series of games is well known for how joyful it is usually portrayed. On most installments, an Italian plumber from Brooklyn goes to the rescue of a princess from the hands of a huge turtle. And it does this by jumping and running and wa-hooing along his way. Even on situations that seem dramatic, scary or hopeless, Mario remains persistent and joyful through his quest.

But Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii is a notorious exception to this. Even though Super Mario Sunshine was the first game of the series with a clear theme around the game world, Galaxy and Galaxy 2 are the games that fully embraced this concept, particularly the first game.

The stories of both of these two games is very similar: They tell the story of becoming separated from a loved one. However, the first one portrays this in a much more somber and straight to the point than the second, and in my opinion, in a better way.

Rosalina’s story

At the beginning of Galaxy, you meet a space lady called Rosalina, the central figure behind a massive spaceship, the Comet Observatory, which can soar space like a comet. As you progress through the game, you can enter the observatory’s library and listen to Rosalina reading a storybook to her “children”, some star shaped fellows called Luma.

In actuality, this storybook is a telling of her past. One night, she encountered a small Baby Luma, who was waiting for his mama to come for him. He tells the child Rosalina that she would come on a comet. This will become an important detail later.

Rosalina suggest him to go on his search, and so they soared through the stars in search for comets. Eventually, they reached several comets, but they couldn’t find her mama. When the pair began to think that the Baby Luma wouldn’t see her mother ever again, Rosalina promised to take care of him as if it was his mother, and decided to settle in on a comet.

But the story continues: Eventually, they found many other Luma and built a home on the comet. But they still waited for the little Luma’s mother. After seeing the 100th comet pass, she thought about checking up on home from the telescope, only to grow homesick, wishing to go back.

You see, prior to the beginning of the story, Rosalina’s mother passed away, and she once dreamt that should she leave, she would turn herself into a star to watch over her. But Rosalina was fully aware that she was being delusional. She knew that she was buried under the tree of a hill close to her home. She was dreaming that as a way to cope with the grief.

The next chapter after this can be quite confusing to some. The Baby Luma gets an idea, that he’d transform into a comet so that he could carry her to go back to her planet.

Galaxy’s storytelling and Mario’s quest

Music: Store music: Salsa A (Nintendo Presents: New Style Boutique)

Just what is Liquid Glass?

It is Apple’s new design language introduced in all software for Apple devices: iOS 26, TvOS 26, watchOS… You name it. This design language was meant to unify UI elements across all of their devices, which despite being fairly similar all around, have had their differences when you got specific in their functionality.

They managed to do this by using glassmorphism and crank it up to 11. When I hear that term, which reflects the look of glass to everything in the UI of an app, I usually retort with “I bet it looks worse than Aero Glass”.

Aero was first introduced in Windows Vista all the way back in 2007 and further refined in Windows 7 two years later, by turning borders of windows into translucent, frosted glass.

And from there, it just went worse, except for that time with the Wii U, which I believe it was the best iteration of that aesthetic. The “web” iteration that you can pull off with backdrop-filter often lacks contrast, and in some cases, the edges are too fuzzy to figure out the bounds of an UI element.

Which one do you see more clearly? I assume that the iOS one isn’t very clear. Aero and the Wii U have implemented certain techniques such as text shadows and outlines to increase the text contrast of their transparent elements.

At least, Apple seems to have tried to add some volume and edges to the design, but it’s clearly inconsistent between platforms and even between parts of the same operating system. Apple Liquid Glass seems to completely forget this and instead it changes from dark to light depending on what’s underneath. Impressive, but there are simpler ways of achieving universal contrast.

Gestalt-breaking content

Also, it doesn’t really help much that reflections and refractions tend to get a lot in the way of the content that you’re viewing, despite Apple marketing it as “putting content first”. I assume they refer to that as making everything more transparent and reducing everything to a bunch of windows, and removing divisions from sections altogether, which is fine for reducing clutter, but it may also introduce other problems.

The principles of the Gestalt list how human vision tends to follow certain patterns. These things include grouping elements by how similar they are and how spaced they are relative to each other, and it even knows how to keep continuity of things even though they’ve been broken apart on purpose. Usually, UI designers rely on these to intentionally direct the attention of the user or to instruct them what things do what, and how related they are to each other, and Apple is definitely making use of them, even on this iteration. But what they haven’t seem to have considered is how these principle can also work against you.

By removing closure on some things, not only they’re removing one way to clearly add a separation between what some elements do and what don’t, they’re also adding new visual patterns that can disrupt the user’s attention. This has the effect when the bottom bar and its tabs were pulled apart in iOS 26, they started to behave like buttons now, which implies that they sort of work like “one-time actions” instead of “tabs to switch from one context to another”, in some cases.

But there’s something within this system that I just find truly hideous.

The “clear” theme

Whose idea was this!?

The clear theme on iOS clears out all the colors of app icons and turns them all into this odd, grayscale opacity cacophony. This is accessibility hell, and there’s nothing that reads loud and clear in this home screen. You can’t just remove the color information from an UI; it’s a key factor in its design that’s as fundamental as things like contrast, flow, shapes and hierarchy. Here, color has been sacrificed for uniform looks, allowing you to color the backgrounds of app icons as you please. But this trades out readability immensely.

White gradients are also sources of light, so if implemented incorrectly, the apparent 3D shape of an icon may change, which affects its shape. The Photos and Safari app icons have been seriously affected by this. Let alone the terrible contrast ratio that you could get in some icons. It almost feels like a personal attack to accessibility guidelines.

This is even worse than the already terrible themed icons on Android. At least those have clear contrast.

This is a big deal because, even for tech savvy people like me, sometimes I struggle finding the application I want to use because of the clutter of the home screens. I can easily tell them apart by their discrepancies between their looks, but with that being gone in these interfaces, the times I twiddle my finger trying to find the right app are going to increase. And if someone like me is already feeling like that’s a difficulty, imagine people who aren’t as tech savvy as me.

And even without the clear theme, there are certain UI elements that still try to emulate that look regardless, like the clock display (extremely important for watchOS, which by the way, has clearly shied itself away from the glassmorphism) and other widgets such as the quick controls panel.

Why am I so upset about this?

Normally I would just cringe when I see a design that I find it provides a bad user experience. But this is Apple we’re talking about here, a company who has always been a trendsetter when it comes to UI design.

In the mid 2000s, the Californian company brought skeumorphism to the world by designing icons and UI elements as if they were actual objects, from sliders and buttons taking the shape and even texture of their real counterparts, all the way up to imitating the color and texture of a notepad and a calendar, and designers from all parts of the world liked it so much that they wanted to emulate that photorealistic realism imitating real objects (among others) into their products and UI designs.

But when iOS 7 came out in 2013, a radical redesign changed everything for simpler, abstract designs. While controversial at its time, it quickly grew up with everybody, and it influenced other companies to do the same minimalistic makeover.

While Microsoft has brought several contributions to the new skeumorphism wave of the present with their Fluent design language, nobody really caught on it as much because they aren’t exactly known for setting trends. But Apple has embraced this trend of uniform looks and all transparency, so glassmorphism might start to spread in all places.

I don’t really have a problem with glassmorphism. And I’m aware that I’m mostly criticizing the iOS part of the design. From what I’ve seen, Apple TV seems to have the best iteration of this design, but that’s mostly because it hardly needs to have an UI at all times. As for Apple Vision and macOS, I still have my doubts, but I haven’t gotten in my hands neither of the hardware to make an opinion about it. Besides, there’s way more iPhones than Macs or Apple TVs in the market, so iOS is definitely the flagship of all of the new features from Apple.

Hopefully, it does seem like it might not live on to become a huge trend. Lately, Apple hasn’t been delivering a lot of enticing features and it’s clearly failing to both follow red hot trends such as AI, and trying to set themselves up in a niche where nobody is competing with VR and their horrendously expensive Apple Vision. But then again, I wouldn’t say it’s too much of a farfetched claim that design changes can be piggybacked by the coming of new features. In the case of the “modern skeumorphism”, it was VR at first, and then became more abstract with AI. So it may be that “glass” is the new face of AI. Who knows.

While I was adding a video player functionality to my blog, I came across the idea of making a stereoscopic 3D video to test on the Nintendo 3DS, since the Legacy version of this blog is compatible with the Nintendo Wii and 3DS.

So here are two 3D videos for you to check out! Both versions will work on the New Nintendo 3DS. Regular, older models of the console don’t support any way for video playback with its built-in Internet Browser.

Video: Kirby 3D test (side-by-side version)

Video: Kirby 3D test (anaglyph version)

How did I make them?

Basically, I made use of the stereoscopy features from Blender cameras. I seemed to have achieved better results when setting both cameras parallel to each other —this can be easily configured in Blender without fiddling with the cameras.

Music: Multiplayer Mode (Call of Duty: Black Ops II | Jack Wall)

A simple case of anti-cheating

Let’s say you want to buy the most powerful weapon you can get at a shop in an MMO game. An interaction without any anti-cheating would work like this:

This is just a simple example of an interaction between the client (the player) and the server (the shopkeeper). In practice, a lot of other metrics are considered for other situations, such as checking for speeding or performing abilities that could only be done in higher levels.

Now, it may be actually possible for a player to get that amount of gold in a legitimate manner. Regardless, the oblivious shopkeeper will think you can pay for it and the purchase goes through. But do you think the player really did get the gold fair and square?

An anti-cheat is basically a lie detector, and it scans for something coming from the player to detect if they are answering truthfully or not. In some cases it may choose to just reject the purchases, and in others it may ban the player. The key of the fuss, however, is in how the lie detector works by design.

There are three kinds of anti-cheat, depending on how their work, and each have their own pros and cons.

The “doing the detective work” approach

Press X or □ to doubt.

A lie detector doesn’t have to be a machine. A human can also detect cues on when a person is lying or not, such as voice and nervous ticks, and they can also refer to evidence to prove someone is lying. Detectives do this in all kinds of criminal investigations.

This is what server-side anti-cheats are doing: Corroborating records of the game with the player’s actions and using the intended game rules as a way of detecting whether they are cheating or playing legitimately.

But they aren’t very reliable, because they rely on intuition and the evidence gathered, and they may often get too biased with false positives or, worse, false negatives when detecting a cheater. It all depends on how capable it is, and how good is the player at concealing their tactics.

But if there’s one thing in which they shine is that they are the least invasive anti-cheat software. If the anti-cheat gets compromised in any way, it doesn’t pose a threat to the player —at least not directly— resulting in merely a ruined game experience.

The scanner approach

I’ll ask you a few yes or no questions and you just answer truthfully.

When people think of a lie detector, they usually think of a device that scans brainwaves or checks the heartbeat of a person. When it comes to detecting a cheater in a game, this is what’s called client-side anti-cheat.

You see, when you download an online multiplayer game, you’ll often get what’s called a client of the game, which is the program that sort of handles the game from a player’s perspective; the game master has the server version, and depending on the type of game, you may be able to download it and make your own server on your own computer. This is a bit of a simplification, of course, but it gets the gist of it.

Inside the client, there may be some code that will check what’s happening within the game client, a bit like checking your heartbeat when you’re being questioned. This can give a more accurate reading of what the player’s doing at any given moment while you run the game.

However, you trade off a bit of security. If the lie detector is compromised, it could be harmful to the person being questioned, but because it’s not directly connected to an organ, the worst they can get is a bad burn on their skin. Likewise, hackers can’t do much harm on your computer by hacking the anti-cheat. In fact, the actions that can be done are so little that it’s generally used for bypassing the anti-cheat and not much else.

Still, this is much better, but it’s not infallible, either. This kind of anti-cheat is very regional; just as how a brainwave probe can’t check for a heartbeat or if the person started sweating, an anti-cheat of this type can’t reliably check what’s happening outside the game. This allows for people to run external programs to bypass the anti-cheat, simply because the anti-cheat is overlooking those things.

But what if we could be able to check everything?

The implant approach

Now you can have advertisements in your dreams!

Kernel-level anti-cheat is a hyper-strengthened version of the client-side anti-cheat. Instead of putting on a lie detector, you get an implant into your brain that works as a lie detector.

When you install a game with this kind of anti-cheat, you give full consent for the installer to place a driver in the kernel of your operating system. This is the “brain implant”.

A kernel driver grants full access to what’s going on in your computer, even things that you, as an user, can’t normally have control of, regardless of whether you’re playing the game or not. In brain implant terms, it allows for it to check your memories and thoughts, and also body functions like your hormonal balance and digestion.

Giving access to everything that’s happening on the player’s computer makes for this type of anti-cheat to be the most effective: Nothing can be overlooked. But this also brings a lot of security concerns. The operating system (your brain) trusts that the driver will work perfectly. But if it starts failing and the operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc) doesn’t know how to or simply can’t fix the errors, it will panic and proceed to reboot the system. Something like this was the cause behind the CrowdStrike outage that caused millions of computers across the world to go Blue Screen of Death in July of this year.

The driver itself could have its own security vulnerabilities. If hackers do find one, they can get unprecedented access to your computer, and not even a privileged user such as “administrator” users in Windows could possibly have clearance to fix this.

Once a hacker breaches to the kernel of your PC, they can literally do whatever they want, from stealing all your personal and sensitive information, to putting a program that sends screenshots of your screen to the hacker, or a keylogger that makes a log of what keys you press in your keyboard, allowing the hacker to see what you’re typing. And you would probably have no way of knowing this. So once they gain control of the kernel, they essentially hold your PC hostage.

If a brain implant were to be hacked, someone could install a function in it to, for instance, make you puke anytime they wanted with the press of a button.

And we’re not even taking into account that the game developers themselves could use that anti-cheat software to do things that you weren’t expecting it to do, even if those things show up in the game’s EULA. For example, it could turn your installed game into actual spyware.

Worst of all, uninstalling the game that has an anti-cheat of this kind will not be enough to prevent hackers nor undo their effects. MiHoYo had a lot of controversy for a critical security vulnerability in Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat and leaving behind Honkai Star Rail’s anti-cheat even if the game was uninstalled, one that had a history of critical security vulnerabilities, even.

Another drawback of kernel-mode anti-cheat is that not every computer has the same kernel. Although most gaming computers use Windows NT for its kernel, a notable minority uses Linux kernel, the latter of which, being open source, can have some fine-tuned customizations.

Anti-cheat developers may choose to support whichever kernels they wish, and the vast majority will add support for Windows, while Linux doesn’t have as much widespread support. But even if the anti-cheat supports Linux, it’s ultimately up to the developers themselves to enable that support into their game. For example, EA —despite supporting Linux for 3 years— made a u-turn and dropped support for Apex Legends on Linux a few weeks ago.

Due to their extremely powerful capabilities, Windows and Mac OS kernel drivers/extensions have to be signed by Microsoft and Apple themselves, while Linux kernel modules have to be signed through a different but secure process. Passing the tests to get that signed driver should mean that these drivers won’t compromise the integrity of the operating system, and are also safe for the user. However, it’s not perfect; MiHoYo’s anti-cheat was bypassed and even exploited to disable any anti-virus the user may have on their computer.

Personally, I find kernel-mode anti-cheat too powerful for what it’s worth. If there are lots of cheaters, I can quit the game and move on to something else, hoping that things turn a bit fairer in a few hours. But if I get hacked because of an anti-cheat, that would pose a serious compromise to my security.

Valve has recently raised concerns about this kind of anti-cheats, and now they are enforcing game developers to disclose what anti-cheat they are using on all their games on Steam that are using a kernel-mode one, and heavily recommend to do so even if it’s not.

This is a very welcoming change, and one that I hope other games and app stores end up copying from Valve. I still think a user-mode client-side anti-cheat (the scanner lie detector ones) are probably the best anti-cheat software in terms of balancing reliability, performance, privacy and security, so if you are making an online game, I hope you choose this kind of anti-cheat solutions.

Windows

This covers the following versions:

• Windows 9x: Windows 95, 98 and Me.
• Windows NT: 4.0, 2000 and XP.

Windows 9x and NT4.0 (online)

Although currently in a very early state, it is possible to add support for East Asian languages through the archival project called Windows Update Restored. These are updated versions of the offline installers provided below, and are applied in nearly the same way as the days when the Windows Update feature was first introduced with Windows 98.

Windows Update Restored running under Windows NT 4.0, with the East Asian language support installed

Note that there are many versions of Windows Update, each compatible with a set of different versions of Windows, and only Internet Explorer 4 through 6 will work. You will have more luck finding the language installation files in the English versions of Windows.

Windows 9x and NT4.0 (semi-offline, recommended)

This customized installer of Internet Explorer 5.5 comes with a copy of the updated versions of the language packs as shown above.

1. Mount the ISO image in your system and extract the files on the specified path. Do not change this.
2. If prompted to remove the current language version, ignore it and press “Yes” to continue.
3. Select “Minimum installation, or customize your browser…” and click on Next.
4. Scroll all the way down and check the boxes for Display support for Japanese, Korean and Chinese (Traditional) and (Simplified). Do not tick on anything that is in bold text other than the language support.

Windows 9x and NT4.0 (offline)

If the method above doesn’t work, I have uploaded an archived version of the East Asian language installers for Windows 9x and NT 4.0, although I only tested it with Windows 98, it should also work on 95 and NT.

1. Mount the ISO image in your system
2. Run the installers one by one.
3. Restart the system.

These aren’t as updated as the other online methods

Windows XP

1. Insert the Windows XP installation disc in your system.
2. Head to Control Panel > Date, Time, Language and Regional options and select the Regional and Language settings. In the classic view, look for the latter.
3. In the Languages tab, check the Install files for East Asian languages.
4. Reboot.

Mac OS 9

This guide is taken from Nisus.com, so that you can check it from your legacy OS. This should also be possible in Mac OS 8, but I haven’t tested it.

1. Double click the Mac OS Install icon on the Mac OS 9 CD.

2. You will see a “Welcome” window. Click “Continue”.

3. Choose the hard drive on which you want to add the Language Kits. Make sure you uncheck “Perform Clean installation” in the “Options…” menu!

4. Then click “Select”.

You see, the installer has checked and found that you already have Mac OS 9 on the system. You want to add software features to your System.

5. Therefore, you click: “Add/Remove”. Now you see the “Custom Installation and Removal” window.

You have a lot of options here. But, all you want (now, for our purposes) is to scroll to near the bottom of the list where you’ll see “Language Kits”.

6. Check “Language Kits” and notice that the pop-up menu to its right becomes enabled:

7. Click the pop-up menu and choose “Customized Installation…”:

A new window opens in which you can check off the specific language kits you want to install (in this case, Japanese, Korean, Chinese using simplified characters and Chinese using traditional characters):

8. After you check off the ones you want, click OK and then you’re ready to install the software.

About ruby text

Ruby text are annotations that are placed on top of Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters to aid in reading them. However, among the browsers that support the legacy OSes mentioned above, only Internet Explorer 5.5 supports ruby text.

If your browser does not support ruby text, it will appear in this blog to the side of the CJK text.

Here are a couple of examples:

• 東京(Tōkyō) is how Tokyo is written in Japanese.
• 北京(Běijīng) is how Beijing is written in Simplified Chinese.
• 臺北(Táiběi) is how Taipei is written in Traditional Chinese.
• 서울(Seoul) is how Seoul is written in Korean.

Music: Diagon Alley (Harry Potter EA Games | Jeremy Soule)

Internet Archive has seen better days. Last month, they lost a case against Hachette Book Group (and others) that was around since May of last year. The printing companies alleged that Internet Archive was allowing people to infringe copyright when they lifted borrowing restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and will have to pay several millions of dollars in damages, maybe up to $400 million.

And on May of this year, they were the target of another DoS attack, albeit to a much lesser degree than this one. While I’m not well informed in digital security to discuss about how they got hacked and if the security measures they had in place were good enough or not, the fact that this has been going on for nearly a month now goes to show that the hackers are not planning on stopping for the time being.

The Internet Archive is mostly known for its WayBack Machine, a comprehensive archive of over 866 billion webpages since 1996, and while to some people it’s just a way to reminisce how websites used to look like in the past, it does have its usage as a very valuable resource for legitimate use cases such as documenting about legacy software, or retrieving data that no longer exists in the present —sort of like a preventive solution to link rot.

However, archive.org also has a repository of many types of media, mostly digitized books, but also music, movies and software. This is also part of the rationale behind the debate of copyright infringement, as the borrowing system is only applicable to books. Still, the Internet Archive does accept takedown of personal data if someone wishes it rather not appear in the archive.

My take on this is that attacking a public project of this scale equates to a crime against humanity itself. Let me explain why with a bit of history.

Music: Happy Hogwarts (casual variation) (Harry Potter EA Games | Jeremy Soule)

The concept of a digital archive represents our most recent level of advancements in storing knowledge. Throughout history, texts had been etched and written onto many kinds of surfaces. Some are durable, while others are reusable, but all of them are subject to being defaced, altered, or destroyed by both natural and humane causes because they are physical objects.

Plus, before the printing press was invented, scribes had to be employed to make copies of documents of any kind and medium, and were very predominant in many cultures from all parts of the world. There’s even a branch of science that studies how writing systems have contributed in shaping other aspects of culture, among other things.

The ability of representing knowledge using concepts such as numbers like 0s and 1s allows people to store it in a more abstract way, protecting them from most of the natural causes. And as it turns out, computers turn out to be very good at copying information flawlessly. In order words, digital information grants people with the ability to share knowledge easier than ever before.

However, knowledge still is —and will always be— susceptible to human damages. And we’ve seen this with attacks and boycotts to libraries and museums alike. Not even the digital repositories are safe from this.

And this is where the similarities between the incidents of the Internet Archive and the Library of Alexandria start to run out. To provide some historic context, the Ptolemaic library wasn’t destroyed by the infamous fire. In fact, the Museion, a somewhat independent institution but in which the library belonged to, still remained active centuries later. Historians still argue about several contradicting details, but what’s clear to most historians is that it didn’t disappear all of a sudden, rather, the library had a slower and steady decline.

The Library of Alexandria wasn’t the only large library of its time, either. The Library of Pergamum was claimed to have over 200 thousand volumes, and it has been rumored that Mark Anthony offered the entire collection to Cleopatra to restock the library, damaged by the fire 5 years prior. And its decline was not that much of a big deal anyway, as historians believe that most of the material within the library actually survived the demise, thanks not to other cultural centers such as the Library of Baghdad, but the many copies of the stored scrolls made by scribes over the centuries.

The Internet Archive, however, is probably the only archive of its kind when it comes to “archiving web pages in their entirety”, holding nearly 100 petabytes of data as of September 2024, and many other archiving initiatives are backed by their technology. In other words, it’s a centralized source of information.

This is why these attacks are actually a much bigger deal than other historic examples: We’re dealing with a totally new form of knowledge, one that we’re still figuring out how to effectively archive, despite modern advancements; I don’t know about any examples of “digital copyists” of old websites, for that matter. And there’s a lot in that archive, so if an outage and data loss does occur, it must rely on volunteers who have kept their own personal copies to restore it. Sure, we have a lot of people in this planet, but lost media is still a thing.

Regardless of their intentions and motives, it should be taken as fact that these hackers have proven that the current model of archiving the web is far from being “permanent”, and it can easily be brought down by factors such as hackers, or maybe even lack of funding (some historians argue that’s what brought the Alexandrian Library to its final demise). If we want to truly keep it that way, I believe we should try to decentralize our archives more, just like scribes used to do by copying tablets, scrolls and books in the past. Of course, this would imply a lot of backup copies and maybe even using decentralized networks such as IPFS, which will anger copyright holders, but further defining fair use and hopefully some court rulings in favor for archival could help in making this feat much easier to do.

Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal. — Ernest Hemingway

Music: JIVE.MID (Microsoft GS Wavetable) (Yamaha XG Sample MIDI | Sam Cardon)

Selecting the supported versions

This was a simple yet very hard choice to make. Ideally, I wanted to support as many operating systems as possible, but I knew this would be a very difficult task.

At the very least, I wanted to support the Windows 9x family of OSes, which meant that Internet Explorer 5 would probably be my target browser. The main problem with that it’s that IE5 came out at the very beginning of the standardization of the web. Which meant that whatever worked on this version would probably break in older versions. I ended up settling on IE5.5, which comes with Windows 98 Second Edition, and hopefully port to IE5. Of course, I also wanted to support other browsers from that epoch such as Mozilla and Opera —the latter of which is used quite often by retro web users.

Another motivator for supporting Internet Explorer 5 was that there was a version specifically made for some UNIX operating systems. But after researching on how to install the browser on Solaris, I quickly gave up because of the lack of expertise I had on Solaris to install it properly without resulting in system failures. To my knowledge, there is no script to do this automatically. I still have to figure out what to do about adding support to UNIX/Linux operating systems, as there were many distros with their own browsers. Konqueror and Galeon seem to come to mind, but there may be others that were used more (excluding Firefox).

I was also interested in supporting Mac Classic, which I have rarely used, but after not much research I quickly settled with Mac OS 9. I’m pretty sure Mac OS 8 also works, but version 9 was what I could get a hold of. I settled with Classilla as the target browser for this OS, but with how deeply disappointing and similar it seemed to be compared to Netscape 7 in functionalities, I also threw in the latter browser as one of my potential targets. Internet Explorer for Mac was a tempting possibility, but it was prone to crashing the Mac emulator I was using, so I set it aside for the time being.

Then there was Flash Player. If I wanted the music player in the Legacy blog while remaining cross platform, this was the only way to do so. Internet Explorer has a way to embed audio to a page, but it was non-standard and quickly deprecated in favor of HTML5 audio. Supporting Windows 95 and NT 4.0 meant that I had to stick with version 7 and ActionScript 2.0. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the source of a lot of headaches later on.

Understanding the fundamentals, once again

The Yonic Corner Legacy Version targets browsers that came about at a time where the W3C was just about 5 years old. To understand what that meant, we need to go back to that time, when Internet just started catering home consumers in the United States.

In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was a wild place: Everyone had their own way of displaying websites and doing things in them. Even if standards for communicating such as hypertext and its transfer protocol (HTTP) were being used, those standards weren’t yet fully completed. One of the most notable examples was JScript: Microsoft’s implementation of JavaScript for Internet Explorer, which, in an effort to gain influence over its competitors, added features that were totally incompatible with other browsers, a development stunt that was infamously named “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.

This is how I got introduced to the infamous Internet Explorer box model bug. The box model in HTML is a W3C specification which defines that every HTML element can be represented as rectangular boxes, which can have content, padding around that content, a surrounding border at the edges, and margins to separate elements around. In CSS, you can control the overall sizing of the element with the width property, and the “bug” is caused by how Internet Explorer (and also Netscape, by the way) determined how to compute that width.

The traditional model used by Internet Explorer computed the width of an element as the sum of the widths of the content, its padding and border thickness to the left and right sides of the box. However, the W3C standard computed it to be only the content without the paddings and borders.

This meant that Internet Explorer and Netscape rendered the elements smaller than they should’ve been according to W3C. And here’s where my rant against W3C begins: The thing is, the W3C was wrong. When Internet Explorer 6 came out, many layouts potentially broke all over the web. The reason? IE6 switched to the W3C box model.

Take a look at this CSS code:

.one {
  width: 600px;
  border: 2px solid black;
  padding: 10px;
}

.one {
  width: 600px;
  border: 2px solid black;
  padding: 10px;
}

.one {
  width: 600px;
  border: 2px solid black;
  padding: 10px;
}

In versions of Internet Explorer before 6, the actual width of the element would be set to 600 pixels, and other elements would be laid out considering that size. But in IE6 onward, the content box is set to 600 pixels, and the padding and border are added afterwards; resulting in a width that would actually be 624 pixels! This may not be what the web designers intended in the first place. In order to truly make it 600 pixels wide, you’d have to subtract the extra 24 pixels to the width property.

The worst side effect that this had was that this change made flexible layouts almost impossible to make:

.two {
  width: 75%;
  padding: 10px;
}

.two {
  width: 75%;
  padding: 10px;
}

.two {
  width: 75%;
  padding: 10px;
}

When setting width to a percentage, it takes on the percentage of the content width of the parent container, so regardless of the box model, a percentage width less than 100% will keep it nicely tucked inside the container. But this breaks when you introduce padding or borders, because the W3C model will grow the two element beyond that width; if it’s set to a 100% with either a border or a padding, it will always overflow its container. Meanwhile, the traditional model keeps the correct size and no overflows occur! And what’s worse, the only way to fix this with CSS alone is with the calc() function, something that Internet Explorer did not support until version 9, which was already too late for reasons I will discuss later.

Thankfully Microsoft saw through this problem and introduced a concept called quirks mode. By using the DOCTYPE special tag at the beginning of the HTML document, you could instruct Internet Explorer to render the page in either standards mode, which would attain to the W3C box model; or quirks mode, which maintains backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 5 and older. Other browsers would quickly follow suit with this behavior, and eventually became a standard across nearly all HTML versions. I won’t go into detail about which settings for DOCTYPE triggers which mode according to each browser, but this Wikipedia article has a nice table with some possible combinations.

Unfortunately for me, however, Astro always generates pages with the DOCTYPE that suits HTML5 documents, forcing the browser to use standards mode or almost standards mode, meaning that I would have to deal with the layout issues introduced by W3C standards.

People would later realize that the new standard behavior by the W3C was prone to many problems, so in 2006, Mozilla introduced the box-sizing property, which controls what should count as the width of an element.

By setting it like this in CSS, you could sort of opt back in to the old behavior from quirks mode while remaining in standards mode:

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

This new property was so well received that even the W3C would end up capitulating and turn this property into a standard. I might be wrong on this, but we take the code above for granted so much that now it might be something that many web designers teach very nonchalantly: “Don’t forget to put this, it’ll make things work properly.” or something of the sort, without actually understanding the reason behind it.

But this is of no use to me! Remember, this was introduced in the mid-to-late 2000s and didn’t become a standard until several years later, and Internet Explorer only began supporting this with version 8. Like I said before, it was all too late. So with no other options, I’d have to deal with the quirks of the standard rendering mode.

Getting to work

Now that I was somewhat familiar with the basics, my first step was to create potentially suitable designs.

This is the first design that I came up with. At first I didn’t like it, but I still liked the layout so I might rescue it in the future for a possible feature I might add sometime.

This is the mockup of the final design (except for the player). I don’t remember how I came up with the “Stardom” name, but I ended up changing it to “Pixarcade” design later on.

Knowing that responsive 3-column layout was probably not going to be feasible, I went with a static, table based layout; an old-fashioned technique, but I am making a site for old browsers, right?

My game plan was to first cater the quirky browsers, and then apply CSS patches that would work for browsers that follow the standards. Normally, one would focus on the standard browsers and then patch up the quirks from older browsers, but I found this process to be much simpler the other way around. Although later on I would add specific patches for browsers that have a very quirky behavior and I don’t see any other way to fix it without compromising the other browsers’ stability.

Internet Explorer also has an incredibly handy feature to selectively apply patches across most of its versions (5 through 9) through conditional comments:

<!-- Anything inside here will be skipped by IE6 and above.-->
<!--[if gte IE 6]><!-->
<link href="standard_layout.css" rel="stylesheet">
<!--<![endif]-->

<!-- Anything inside here will be run by IE5 and IE 5.5 only -->
<!--[if lt IE 6]>
<link href="ie5only.css" rel="stylesheet">
<![endif]-->

<!-- Anything inside here will be skipped by IE6 and above.-->
<!--[if gte IE 6]><!-->
<link href="standard_layout.css" rel="stylesheet">
<!--<![endif]-->

<!-- Anything inside here will be run by IE5 and IE 5.5 only -->
<!--[if lt IE 6]>
<link href="ie5only.css" rel="stylesheet">
<![endif]-->

<!-- Anything inside here will be skipped by IE6 and above.-->
<!--[if gte IE 6]><!-->
<link href="standard_layout.css" rel="stylesheet">
<!--<![endif]-->

<!-- Anything inside here will be run by IE5 and IE 5.5 only -->
<!--[if lt IE 6]>
<link href="ie5only.css" rel="stylesheet">
<![endif]-->

Since most other browsers would play by the standards, I needed the standard CSS patches to be available for them as well, and this code above will certainly do the trick.

I also had the power of modern enhancements to CSS thanks to both SASS and, later on, PostCSS, to convert modern features such as calc() into hardcoded supported values by these browsers.

Slowly the elements of the website would carefully be integrated, one by one. Some were trivially easy to make. Others, not so much. 9-slice elements such as the text bubbles and the code windows were very painstakingly crafted with tables, but I think I may have put the browsers to their limit when developing these, because they seem to have some transient issues when displaying them sometimes. In situations which CSS couldn’t cover some of the edge cases, I could rely on jQuery as a last resort.

Once I finished porting the majority of the post components from the Modern version —and showing a warning for those that couldn’t be ported due to web limitations— I ended up with two different versions of the blog, even though the data and posts were mostly the same. Although not an easy conundrum, I was able to merge the data of both versions together, so that I only need to write a post in one place, and both the Modern and Legacy versions could fetch and display the new post on their own.

All in all, I’ve learnt quite a lot about some of the most obscure elements of CSS and HTML, and particularly even more quirks related to each browser and operating system, and despite the many, many, shortcomings and problems, I had a lot of fun making the Legacy Version of The Yonic Corner.

Here’s a list of some of the things I’ve learnt:

• You can adjust the position of the marker of lists with list-style-position.
• HTML4 properties have fallbacks in modern browsers using CSS, at least for the most part.
• Now I fully understand the concept of web safe colors, as not only they could change drastically in screens with limited color depth, but they also can have flashes of colors when switching between applications —a quirk of the process graphics cards and software do called “palette realization”.
• Despite not supporting it, jQuery does work on IE5.5. Although only like the very first handful of releases, and only a very limited set of functions, but it was still good enough to do the things I wanted it to do.
• Tables have two ways of being rendered depending on how you set the property table-layout: fixed and auto. I still don’t get how they work exactly, but auto seems to be the option that can come closest to a flexbox —although it’s also the most unpredictable and the most prone to layout breakdowns.
• Although all of my target browsers support PNG, the vast majority has only 1-bit transparency support (such as with PNG8), so they can only be either totally opaque or totally transparent. The only one that does seem to have a more robust support for partial transparency is IE5 for Mac… *sigh*.
• When an element overflows in IE5, it actually makes its container bigger than it should be, instead of the element just popping off the container.
• Flash Player 7 sucks. But that’s a story for another time.

I’ve also came up with a really elegant hack for overcoming the problem regarding elements getting wider with padding. The key is that the enlargement only happens when you’re setting a padding or a border to an element with an explicit size. But if the size remains intrinsic —that is to say, it takes on its natural sizing— it will behave like in quirks mode or border-box sizing.

By default, block elements such as div will take all the available horizontal space. So why not use one intrinsically sized container as a padding box for the content?

hack.html

<div class="container">
  <div class="padding-box">
    <div class="content">
      This will measure 500px exactly!
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

hack.html

<div class="container">
  <div class="padding-box">
    <div class="content">
      This will measure 500px exactly!
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

hack.html

<div class="container">
  <div class="padding-box">
    <div class="content">
      This will measure 500px exactly!
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

hack.css

* {
  box-sizing: content-box;
}
.container {
  width: 500px;
  background: black;
}
.padding-box {
  padding: 10px;
  border: 2px solid black;
}
.content {
  color: white;
}

hack.css

* {
  box-sizing: content-box;
}
.container {
  width: 500px;
  background: black;
}
.padding-box {
  padding: 10px;
  border: 2px solid black;
}
.content {
  color: white;
}

hack.css

* {
  box-sizing: content-box;
}
.container {
  width: 500px;
  background: black;
}
.padding-box {
  padding: 10px;
  border: 2px solid black;
}
.content {
  color: white;
}

Set the width of the container-class elements to percentages and you could potentially have something like a rudimentary responsive element!

But I’ve learnt one more thing about the box model, which is the kicker. All the time I’ve mentioned the box model, I’ve been talking about the width of an element. But what about the height? It turns out that the height of an element is computed in an entirely different way, and there is no mention of padding nor border in height calculation. And older browsers seem to calculate it in the same way regardless of the rendering mode! So, unless you set the box-sizing: border-box rule in CSS, padding and borders will always make the element taller than specified.

I think the last part of this series is going to be the most fun one. I want to address and laugh —and roar in anger— at the many issues and weird stuff that happened since I started working on this project. Hopefully it won’t take a year to post it!

The AAA corporate greed: Game development as slavery?

Music: Busy Sim (The Sims 2 | Mark Mothersbaugh)

A bit of a flippant title, but it’s seems to be becoming ever increasingly truer with time in big studios with an economic model that’s based on the model of tech giants from the United States.

I’m not going to delve deep into US economics, but the gist of it is that it’s mostly growth driven: “The more reach you can obtain, the happier the investors become. We’ll see the actual earnings later.”

This is one of the reasons big publishing firms spend so much money on marketing: It’s one of the main drives for potential growth, which gives them a lot of leverage.

In their desire to achieve more growth, studios are pressured to hire more staff than they actually need, because having more jobs tends to look good on investors. This often results on a troubled situation in which management is found being incapable of coordinating a team of such size, which will probably have an impact on why the development won’t get anywhere. And once the project doesn’t seem to be delivering what it’s been promised, companies resort to cutting costs by axing jobs that they knew beforehand shouldn’t have hired in the first place, and attempt to “try to look good and responsible” by applying damage control to their best.

This is especially true in companies that go public in the stock market, as there is a constant pressure for exponential growth; since other companies are doing this, stockholders may consider that your company might be stagnating if the stock value doesn’t keep increasing, even if it’s being inflated. Game companies even resort to buying back stock just to do this.

This is a (comedic) depiction of a graph explaining how this cycle of the game development progresses over time. This applies to large companies, not just indie game studios.

And if that wasn’t enough, some publishers have also found an exploit: The early access rug pull. This really shady practice consists on releasing a game as an early access game, hoping to gain traction. But the game will be full price while in this phase. If the game eventually flops during development, since they’ve already gotten some earnings, they pull the rug, stop development altogether, and run away with the cash while at the same time leaving just a handful of programmers for fixing bugs only. This is fraud and punishable by law.

This is exactly what happened with Take-Two when they shut down Intercept Games, putting the final nail in the coffin of Kerbal Space Program 2’s troubled development. And last year we also had the Fntastic’s The Day Before incident.

Indies and the lack of funding

Music: Neon Lights (Last Window: The Secret of Cape West | Satoshi Okubo)

This is something that has been happening more often than not in studios all over Europe, a region where most of the game throughput come from indie studios, which normally don’t have much capital to embark themselves onto making videogames.

Ever since the worldwide lockdown due to the pandemic period ended, things have gotten for the worse for indie studios. During the pandemic, investors were able to read the tea leaves and figure out that games were going to be extremely valuable during lockdown, from a convenient way to cope with having to stay indoors, to a collectible commodity. Roblox is the textbook example of this: It exploded in popularity during the 2020s, and went public at an astronomically high market value of over 7 times the value of Ubisoft, but fell victim to the 2022 bust and quickly devalued as restrictions went down.

The Web3 fiasco further exacerbated the damages, because it fostered a lot of interest on game projects that had blockchain-like features, but these were simply terrible investments that could be considered a downright scam. Their failure caused a lot of devaluation of a lot of startups, and many tech investors grew extremely wary of investing.

YouTube video: Tech bust of 2022 explained (3:05)

However, game studios started with their massive layoffs a year after the bust because videogames are generally more of a long-term investment and it took some time to see that they weren’t as profitable anymore.

Investors in Europe face similar concerns, and are being now more conservative and risk aware because game European studios are increasingly being handled like tech companies from the United States.

And if that wasn’t enough, the tech industry did eventually find something that seemed promising: Generative “AI”, a field in which videogame development seems to have have yet to find anything to take advantage of —let alone that its usage is deemed unethical within the industry— and with nothing else seemingly equally promising in tech, investors have flocked in herds to those greener pastures.

Crowdfunding isn’t what it used to be 10 years ago, and it has become very stagnant with no hopes of improving. Early access used to provide a lot more confidence that a game would eventually be completed, but also the increased awareness of scam-like or development going wrong has made people very wary of putting their own money on a game. And if your game failed to meet expectations, it’s game over; your now forever ruined public image would seriously affect sales of future projects you would be involved in.

Hardware development from now might be having diminishing returns

Do you feel like something is happening to next-gen games as of lately? Like, despite the technological advances of the latest in console gaming hardware, the games themselves are failing to live up to their expectations? Like it’s all ports of the previous generation? If you’ve answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you’re not alone.

I think there’s now enough room to start worrying about the fact that gaming hardware has become “too powerful”. Moore’s law applies to hardware, not software. And it is my belief that we’ve reached the point where despite computers are becoming increasingly more powerful, it is no longer possible to come within grasping distance to the limit on what consoles are capable of. At least, not unless you have humongous resources and even still resort to unethical development environments.

However, expectations of players increase with each new generation of hardware. And unfortunately, their expectations have reached a hard glass ceiling with this current generation.

But even still! This is precisely where I see a ray of hope within the darkness.

Konnichiwa, baby! Japan is back!

Music: Route 4 (Spring) (Pokémon Black & White: Super Music Collection | Shota Kageyama)

The Eastern game industry hasn’t been affected as much in this wave of decline, because their economics work in a more conservative way than those from tech in the United States.

Take a look at Nintendo, for example. Instead of laying off employees, they resorted to actually increasing their salaries by 10%. Japanese —and I think Korean companies as well— tend to operate very differently than those from the United States, and to a lesser extent European companies. Instead of valuing growth over anything else, they value resilience and a long-term but sustained growth, and one of the key factors for that resilience is workforce.

Whether it’s a sociocultural or a business managing aspect, it’s a fact that in Japan, workers are a vital part of any company, people consider the workplace “their second home”, and the actual legal action of firing people is massively restricted. This drives companies and game studios alike to keep the workers that they have, even at a loss.

Instead of panicking and minimizing losses by panicking with damage controls, Japanese companies will generally accept the fact that hard times are coming, and prepare themselves in order to “at least not make it that hard” to be able to get up and kick off when times get better. This hardening-based culture generally makes companies less prone to collapsing, and instead have simply a flatter overall productivity.

Japanese studios also have it much easier to secure funding than studios in Western countries because they have other ways to get funding that aren’t as prominent in the West.

Method 1: Trans-media projects and the production committee

A very large amount of games are actually trans-media projects handled by a production committee. This method of funding is also fairly common in Europe, but Japanese production committees tend to treat projects from the same IP equally, and get a more fair share of funds than with an European “main project and accompanying projects” model. In anime circles, production committees are seen rather controversial, but it’s still a major source of funding for many entertainment and merchandising industries alike.

While games aren’t a common sight in these committees, if a game publisher does become part of one, it would allow the studio working on the game to get piggybacked by this system, and not only get easy funding, but also obtain protections against losses should the project fail commercially, even if it means a more equal share of profits with the rest of projects —again, Japanese companies focusing on resilience rather than growth. Game studios themselves joining are way less common since they generally don’t have the capital to make a contribution in the committee.

In Europe, games aren’t usually the main project and the overall trans-media project tends to have a more limited funding and reach, so they typically tend to be of smaller scope and of less quality than Japanese ones.

Method 2: Licensed games and publishers

Other projects are usually licensed games commissioned by a publisher.

Licensed games were particularly notable in the United States industry until the 2000s, but publishers would outsource games for as many platforms as possible to other developers with minimal funding and tight deadlines, baking on the fact that brand recognition alone would sell the game. But this resulted in a huge amount of terrible quality games and their eventual demise in the 2010s, as game development became costlier and consumers became more informed on the industry as a whole.

YouTube video: Extra Credits on licensed games in the United States (8:09)

Japanese publishers, on the other hand, act in a similar way to Spanish licensed game publishers during its silver age with mobile games in the 2000s: Focusing on a single game and platform (or leveraging cross-platform if possible) and having a more respectful budget. Japanese developers also earn their trust with publishers through these commissions, allowing them to secure funding on their projects based on the developers’ own IPs.

Method 3: Self-funding

Smaller and indie studios are also capable of funding their own projects because they tend to focus on games that are much smaller in technical scope: Visual novels. This allows them to make games with much less funding, while remaining somewhat able to generate a small profit.

However, not every visual novel developer seeks that: A particular category of games, “doujin software”, involves games that are based on existing IPs and made as a hobby rather than for profit. Most of these projects are made at a loss, but thanks to the strong market of fan-based projects, developers may expect to grow up to be successful later on.

While visual novels aren’t as notorious as they did in the early 2000s, they still account for a significant portion of the Japanese game market, and thanks to opening up to English and Chinese speaking markets, the visual novel industry is still holding on strong.

The dawn of new hardware

A promising prospect is that the Japanese economy seems to have been rebounding since the past couple of years (although the Bank of Japan did make a cautionary warning for trade markets due to unstable foreign markets) so it’s possible that the Japanese game industry could boost itself up again despite the hardships.

Unfortunately I don’t know about the Chinese and Korean game industries enough to provide more information about them, but it does seem like they may be going through good times as well.

For now, it all comes down to Nintendo’s next console. One of the reasons why I have bet for a powerful home console as Nintendo Switch’s successor (and short-time companion) is partly because Nintendo needs to compete with Microsoft and Sony with their Xbox Series and PlayStation 5, and the economy of Japan seems to be at a very adequate time to strike hard with a powerful system.

But this is absolutely not what I want! This would place the bar for AAA games above the diminishing returns point, and both AAA and even AA studios would feel pressured to scale up their scope in projects to meet up with hype and expectations. In other words — this spells an unsustainable hell.

Rather, I’d prefer Nintendo to go another route, and actually release a Switch 2, and be something comparable to a PlayStation 4 Pro or an Xbox One. This would make them leave the overly engineered home console market and dive deep into the affordable hybrids market such as the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally. I wouldn’t ask for more. The fact that they plan to flood the market with the gaming system in order to fight with scalpers makes me think a little bit that they could be taking this strategy, but as I discussed in a previous post, there are several reasons that make me think otherwise…

This second half of the year and the first quarter of 2025 are by far going to be of upmost importance in the gaming industry ever since the beginning of the HD era!

In short, there are several reasons why the Internet began its transition to what it is now, and despite what many people may think, the big player is not actually because of “corporate greed”.

How customization is achieved in the first place

Music: Pop Star (Kirby 64 | Jun Ishikawa)

Before we can begin outlining the reasons, we need to understand how making the look of a webpage is achieved in the first place.

Back when the World Wide Web started taking its first steps, we already had one of its corner stones already settled: HTML, a markup language that allowed your browser to display content from the web in a rather standardized way. This allowed you to create simple layouts for your pages, and a bit later, allowed you to make certain customizations such as changing the text color or the background images.

Customization would evolve to the next level with the introduction of CSS, which allowed to further customize HTML elements, their layout, and eventually, even make custom cursors and animations.

But these would remain static pages with no changes whatsoever, unless you used PHP or something similar to generate personalized HTML on demand, and even still, it wouldn’t be interactive apart from links to other pages. But during the 2000s, JavaScript eventually came into play to provide interactivity to websites by modifying the HTML and CSS of a page.

By adding the possibility to add your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you could essentially change the style and outlook of the page, especially with the latter two.

Custom scripting is dangerous

Very early on, one of the first restrictions that were put in place when adding customization capabilities is the automatic removal of <script> HTML tags. These tags are the main way for you to place JavaScript code on a page —and depending on the point in time, you could use some other scripting languages too— in your page.

There’s a whole plethora of vulnerabilities that revolve around tricking the servers into injecting your own code, because any opportunity of doing this opens floodgates for malicious code to be run. When you can just outright add your own scripts because the tag is not filtered out, there’s nothing stopping you from putting in malicious code to do some treachery on your visitors, so it’s like having no floodgates at all.

At first, MySpace didn’t have this restriction when they accidentally added the ability for you to add your custom HTML. While most pages would be really creatively put together, some of them could be crafted with harmful code to say, install a virus or wreck havoc on your screen.

Websites like Neopets quickly started filtering out potentially malicious HTML, mainly <script> tags.

Thankfully CSS was able to give you some slack, because you could add some “interactivity” with pseudo-classes such as :hover and :active, so you didn’t need JavaScript to make interactive UI. In fact, The Yonic Corner remains somewhat interactive even with JavaScript disabled.

The rise of responsive layouts

The main limitation that HTML had in its starting days was the fact that it was very rigid. It would look the same no matter how the size of the browser window was. This created a problem in which content would spill over the window if it was small enough, requiring you to scroll the window. This was okay for vertical scrolling, but horizontal scrolling was more obnoxious.

At first, it wasn’t much of a problem because the web was mostly browsed from a computer screen, and they had roughly the same size, aspect ratio and pixel density, so screen resolutions were mostly the same. However, it was still relevant enough that some websites would display messages like “looks best on a 1024 x 768 resolution”.

It became a more notorious problem once phones became capable of browsing the web, and especially with the rise of smartphones, since they would have way more different aspect ratios, display sizes and eventually even pixel densities.

This led to the creation of solutions to create responsive layouts. CSS first started with @media queries that allowed different layouts depending on the screen size. Later on, intrinsically flexible layouts would become much easier and way better to make with CSS’s flexbox and grids, among other things, which would become quintessential to make layouts that could work at any resolution.

However, because these CSS features are a late addition, this is not the default behavior of HTML. This was done in order to maintain backwards compatibility with older websites. If the user who wanted to customize something was not aware of the responsive layouts, whatever layout they would create would most likely be not flexible by default, so if one were to add their own HTML and CSS, they could very easily be set in a way that would either conflict with, or completely break the already set up layout.

This caused websites to begin following a “mobile-first” approach to their design, one that would be friendly to smartphones at first, and then gracefully change the layout as the viewport of the browser got wider. Standardizing the layout severely limited the way one could add, move, replace and remove HTML elements.

YouTube channels in the late 2000s could still be customized, but only certain stuff could, such as the background base color and images and the position of certain sections, but you couldn’t add your own stuff in. And even this particular layout was not responsive!

Scalability issues

Although this was a smaller issue, it’s still relevant to this day. All of these customizations had to be stored somewhere and loaded in apart from the core website’s design. Depending on the infrastructure, this could make pages prone to undesirable effects such as flashes of unstyled content, where layouts will break, everything is on a white background and the text is black with an ugly serif font.

Images were also a big problem. They usually were hosted on an image hosting service such as ImageShack and were usually left unprocessed. If they were large, they could severely affect the bandwidth and cause loading issues. Also, most image hosting services would remove the images if not accessed after some time, leading to broken images if they were not used a lot.

Some image hosting sites would infamously show a generic placeholder image for those images that have been automatically removed.

Nowadays images are preprocessed to modern, more lightweight formats and optimized, and cached so that the load isn’t as heavy. While this in itself makes no limitations on what kind of images can you use, they do have their own shortcomings that limit the number of how many images can you upload.

The rise of web apps

Music: GT Mode 2 (Gran Turismo 4 | Isamu Ohira)

Since Flash and HTML5, websites have become way more interactive than ever, and with that, browsers have become the second most versatile pieces of software apart from a full fledged operating system.

This has given browsers the potential to run websites as if they were real applications, which developers found very attractive thanks to the fact that websites could be displayed anywhere, regardless of the operating system or device you were using.

The culmination of such process became true with the rollout of Progressive Web Apps, which allowed websites to behave much like a native application on your PC or phone. You could also throw in UI frameworks for highly interactive user interfaces that would make your website come close to the performance of a native app.

But this clashed with customization in two ways:

• If you added custom HTML and CSS, it would most likely be unable to interact with whatever reactive components you had with your UI framework unless the web developer added a functionality for that, which comes at the hefty cost of being way less secure.
• Apps generally have a UI that is mostly consistent with a design idea and tries to provide a good user experience; allowing for custom CSS to change this could alter these in a harmful way.

It also didn’t help that at this time accessibility guidelines were starting to be set in place, which discouraged taking certain “creative approaches”.

Sure, this site screams “pink kawaii glitter” which I found a bit endearing, but this is also accessibility hell. Even a non-colorblind person such as myself can struggle to make out the sidebar.

CSS libraries would also begin showing up, first with Bootstrap, and later on with Tailwind CSS, that helped making websites look and act like apps, albeit with the cost of having to remain somewhat consistent.

Addressing the ads problem

Lastly, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: Why do people say that advertisers prefer a more “corporate” looking website?

One of the common remarks is that having a set layout allows advertisers to get a good idea where their ads will go, how much space will it take, etc. And yes, that is a valid point. One can easily hide away them with CSS or disable altogether with JavaScript, like this:

adRemoval.css

.ad {
    display: none;
    visibility: hidden; /* A bit overkill. */
}

adRemoval.css

.ad {
    display: none;
    visibility: hidden; /* A bit overkill. */
}

adRemoval.css

.ad {
    display: none;
    visibility: hidden; /* A bit overkill. */
}

adDisabling.js

const ads = [...document.querySelectorAll('.ad')];
for(const ad of ads) {
    ad.remove();
}

adDisabling.js

const ads = [...document.querySelectorAll('.ad')];
for(const ad of ads) {
    ad.remove();
}

adDisabling.js

const ads = [...document.querySelectorAll('.ad')];
for(const ad of ads) {
    ad.remove();
}

This is the most straightforward way, although there are more creative ways to hide them. But alas, this isn’t the main reason. There is no such thing about websites becoming more “corporate”. It’s a bit of a misnomer.

What’s actually happening is standardization of a design language. Now we treat parts of a page with common lingo such as “hero”, “call to action”, “statistics” or “feature”. Now it’s all about consistency, which is something that’s typical from an application: You want its features and user interface to behave in a consistent manner.

On July 2024, of the top 25 most visited sites (source: Similarweb), 15 of them are web apps. This goes to show how important consistency has become in the past few years. Google’s search engine also tends to favor sites with a consistent semantic design (the HTML has all of that lingo mentioned above), so everyone tends to follow very similar design patterns because of search engine optimization (SEO).

But that doesn’t mean you can still be artsy! However, it’s a fact that your SEO will get harmed this way because these designs tend to be more “niche” and “out of the norm”.

Several modern websites break away from the “corporate aesthetic” by not going with the standards. Some look really original, even if it sacrifices legibility.

In a more recent example on the other hand, some who try to be more “avant garde” can end up with horrible results. What were they thinking here!? It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten how to do things out of the norm.

But if there’s one thing that’s become obvious is that we’re far from that moment where the Web was still figuring itself out. Companies would do their best to fit their branding on the web, while there was still room for customization. As Internet became a new way to do commerce, consistency became more important than the flexibility of customization, and since they go hand in hand, the overall branding favored over the individual expression.

I can understand how these phenomena can be confused with “corporate greed”. But in an objective sense, I do think the pros of lack of customization outweigh the cons, especially in times where new web features come and go really quickly. While people tend to follow standards even if you do provide customization, not everyone does, and those intrusive designs can hinder your experience on a website.

And yes, I also understand that this also hampers freedom of self-expression. Tumblr was probably the best example of all time in terms of web customization: Restricted yet flexible enough to do almost whatever you wanted. But I’m a hard advocate that freedom of expression should end where the freedom of someone else begins, something that the current Internet doesn’t seem to understand. Be mindful of what you’re making!

But nevertheless, I still wish for customization to make somewhat of a graceful return. It’s cool that graphic and web designers can have their own way of self-expression for their portfolios and all, but I also would love to see the resurging of being able to do it in a more casual basis.

Running out of space

The main problem that I had was that GitHub Pages has a hard limit of 1 GB in storage. For most small scoped sites, this shouldn’t be much of a problem. But in my case, it was my personal blog, and while text is pretty easy to compress and make thousands of pages without even coming close to that limit, media could potentially do that.

Especially if we’re dealing with optimized responsive images! Most images in the modern version of my site come in multiple sizes for PC and mobile screens, and multiple formats for backwards compatibility. Add that to the fact that Astro keeps a copy of the original image, and it’s a recipe for a bloated image cache, some of which wouldn’t be used at all.

An image CDN could work marvels for this situation, but I was a bit skeptical on those to work well, especially because of the reason below.

Watch out for HTTPS!

In a previous post, I talked about how pages have begun breaking because HTTPS support for legacy systems is being dropped. I’m expecting that GitHub Pages may be doing the same thing in the near future should they begin enforcing mandatory HTTPS on all their pages. This would render the Legacy Version of this blog useless. It was designed with old operating systems in mind, after all!

And this also applies to what I was talking about before: Normally I would be okay with just using an image CDN, but all of these networks work under HTTPS in a way that only modern systems can understand.

This has eventually forced my hand: I needed to self-host my own blog. That way, I’d have full control over what I want to do. I could even set up a cipher suite specifically for the legacy blog, so you could browse the legacy blog in HTTPS while in an old system!

The blog also works as a reverse proxy server to another program that optimizes and caches images on demand, so I can show the images regardless of whether you’re using regular HTTP or HTTPS. Plus, I can shove in a storage bucket to have virtually limitless —and cheap— storage space for my blog.

However, this is not without its drawbacks. Since I’m hosting it myself, all maintenance tasks are on me as well. I still have work to be done to optimize the server, to automatize updating the blog, and to tidy up the API for remote images, which is a total mess right now, let alone a rudimentary solution. So until then, do expect some slowdowns!

Music: The Moon (Space Engine | Ashterra)

But if you search for this question on the Internet, you won’t find much detailed information about it. So I decided to provide a detailed explanation as to what it looks like and why.

To lay the groundwork, many people are aware of the phases of the Moon, which are caused by how the half of the Moon lit by the Sun changes as it orbits the Earth. If one were in space above the orbital plane of the Earth while its northern hemisphere faces up, the Moon would look as if it were to be orbiting the Earth in a counter-clockwise motion.

Because of this, the waxing crescent and its following quarter (the 1st), in the northern hemisphere will look like the letter D, while in the southern hemisphere it will look like a letter C. If the orbit were to be clockwise, it would be the other way around.

In Spanish there is a really interesting mnemonic for this:

• In the northern hemisphere, the Moon is a liar. This is because the 1st quarter is called cuarto creciente (quarter increasing in size to full moon), but it will have a D shape. When it has a C shape, it’s called cuarto decreciente (quarter decreasing in size to new moon).
• In the southern hemisphere, the Moon always tells the truth, because an upside down cuarto creciente looks like a C, and an upside down cuarto decreciente looks like a D.

Since the Moon is just rotating 180° when we change hemispheres, it’s safe to assume that in the equator it’d make a 90° turn, right?

But that rises the question: Which way? It could be a clockwise rotation, in which case a waxing crescent would look like a smile; or a counter-clockwise one, where it would look like a frown. So which one is it?

The long answer doesn’t require understanding orbital dynamics or any other kind of complicated physics: It’s just geometry.

One of the key facts is that no matter where you’re at along the equator line, the Moon will always rise and set in nearly the same opposing orientations.

Why? Because the Earth rotates counter-clockwise around a stable axis, from west to east. The axis does drift, but this motion is so slow and tiny that it doesn’t have much of an effect in our day to day lives —it’d take hundreds to thousands of years for it to have made a significant change.

From Earth, we see objects in the sky rising from the east and setting at the west, making a clockwise motion as they scour it. The reason the direction of movement is the opposite is because when moving alongside the Earth’s surface, from our perspective the surface remains static, while the sky moves. A bit like when riding a car, bus or train and the background outside the vehicle seems to be moving backward, while it’s the vehicle that moves forward.

If one were to be constantly looking at the Moon from the equator as it moved towards the sky (for clearance’s sake, let’s call this Earth observer), at one point it’d make a sharp 180° turn once it passes above the Earth observer’s head. This is because from someone outside the Earth’s perspective (let’s call them the space observer), the Earth observer would’ve flown past the Moon, and unless they’d have impressive limbo skills, the Earth observer would have to turn around to continue seeing the moon, flipping the picture as a result.

A visualization of how the Moon sharply turns as it goes above the Earth observer’s head, in this case a Yoshi. The Moon is never turning around, Yoshi does. The red and blue arms represent the North and South directions from Yoshi’s perspective, respectively. (The apparent libration is due to the diagram not being at scale)

This effect remains visible in places away from the equator, but it’s more of a gradual change and not a very sharp turn. This is because at the equator, the Moon will pass by really close to the zenith —the point in the sky directly above an Earth observer’s head— but as you go closer to one of the Earth’s poles, the Moon won’t reach as high in the sky since you’d be looking at it at an angle and not directly perpendicular to the ground, and it will go past your head at a slower pace.

Add the fact that near the poles the axis of rotation of the Earth will get closer to the zenith, so things closer to the horizon will hardly experience any rotation; and you get an explanation of why the Moon hardly rotates as you move further away from the equator.

But as I was researching this, another question surfaced my mind: How does the Moon rotate as you get closer to the equator? If one were to look at the orientations of the Moon from different latitudes, one would assume that it’d be rotating counter clockwise as the latitude decreases, and clockwise as it increases. But this is not completely correct.

The actual answer is a bit more complicated. Essentially, when we move strictly south or north, the entire celestial sphere will rotate in the East-West axis. Looking directly eastward, the sky will appear to rotate counter-clockwise, and clockwise if you look to the west. But the cardinal directions are points on the Earth’s surface, not the sky. This means that as the Earth rotates, the cardinal directions will remain in the same place, while anything in the celestial sphere —like the Moon— will move from east to west. When the Moon is close to the East, it will rotate counter-clockwise as latitude decreases, and clockwise as it increases, as stated above. But if it’s on the West, this motion is flipped.

If you were to change your latitude and eventually cross one of the poles, your longitude would rotate 180°, switching the opposing cardinal directions. Once you cross the pole you can further increase or decrease your latitude and move the sky in the same axis of rotation, but what was on the west is now on the east, essentially flipping the way they rotate.

All of this “it’s the opposite, actually” being repeated over and over again might confuse you quite a bit, so I recommend simulating how the Moon changes in Stellarium whilst changing the latitude. But ultimately, all of these motion dynamics work in unison so that no matter where in the equator and at which day of the year you look at, the waxing crescent moon looks like a frown at moonrise, and a smile at moonset, and the opposite when it’s a waning crescent.

Music: Tallon Overworld (Metroid Prime | Kenji Yamamoto)

Revealed at the very last possible moment

After the October 2023’s Nintendo Direct, I predicted a 30% chance that Metroid Prime 4 would be revealed in June of 2024 with a “2025” release date, and a 10% for “late 2025” release date. The remaining 60% had a more pessimistic outcome: That the game would have been benched much like Metroid Dread did in the past.

This is because I predicted that we would’ve heard news of the new console sometime in 2025, which, as it’s been revealed that it will be formally announced sometime in this fiscal year spanning until March 2025, has all the odds in favor to be spot on. If this game were to be released for the Nintendo Switch, the June 2024 Direct was the last possible time for it to be announced before the successor’s announcement.

Screenshot of the announcement of the Switch’s successor.

Some people consider that Metroid Prime 4 being revealed this late implies an imminent announcement regarding Nintendo’s new console, but I still firmly believe we’ll learn its name somewhere within this autumn or winter.

The Nintendo Switch was officially revealed in October 2016, and formally presented in January of the following year, and now that they are fully unshackled from the schedules of events like E3, it does seem likely that the Big N could follow this pattern for this console as well.

Things that I’ve noticed

Music: Space Pirates Ambience (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes | Kenji Yamamoto)

It seems that one of the most prominent features of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will be the reintroduction of parallel worlds, but unlike their appearance in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes where there was a light and a dark version of the same world, it seems like these are completely distinct worlds, connected by portals, or far more likely, versions of the same world across different points in time.

This is heavily hinted at with the presence of what seems to be a portal vortex, and how the now official logo resembles a black hole.

The producer of the Prime series, Kensuke Tanabe, has stated in an interview that time-shifting was an interesting idea in his mind for a next installment, so it does seem like the setting of Prime 4 will be a single planet, but with the ability to travel through time and potentially change things across the timelines. Many fans expect this to be the case.

Analyzing the HUD, I’ve noticed several improvements over the previous Trilogy games, and a few missing things.

• The map now has a compass feature that shows in which cardinal direction you’re facing.
• The radar has been overhauled quite a lot. Now you have different types of markers: Red for enemies, green for allies, and orange for the target you’re locking on. It makes me think that you’ll encounter many people from the Federation on this game, much like 3: Corruption.
• There is also a hazard indicator like in Prime 1 and Echoes but it’s now a metered indicator instead of a gauge.
• The visor selector is missing, despite the fact that there are visors featured in the trailer. Instead, there is a selector with a missile launcher selected, so I assume it’s meant for auxiliary ammo. I wonder if this will be the same with the beams, or it will be a tiered beam like in Corruption. I’m willing to consider the latter.
• There doesn’t seem to be any space for energy tanks in the HUD, at least none that I was able to see. There are Morph Ball bombs, though.

Also, despite clearly shown that Samus got hit here, her energy meter remains unchanged at 99, meaning the one who recorded this had an infinite health cheat code on.

A surprising yet expected thing —or rather, person— is Sylux, making his first appearance in the mainline Prime series. I was expecting a Metroid Prime: Hunters remake to flesh the bounty hunters from that game a bit more, but I guess we’ll be going towards this route.

Some comments on how Sylux’s sudden appearance in a new title could make it unwelcoming towards newcomers.

A few more things that are noteworthy include the extremely satisfyingly seamless transition between the Samus entrance cutscene and the gameplay —although the fanfare and the music seems to have gone a noticeable downgrade to be honest.

The design of the Varia Suit is really beautiful. It’s pretty much the same design from Prime 2: Echoes, but they’ve obviously taken some pages out of Metroid Dread’s design book, as her shoulder pads are noticeably smaller and lie at a slightly lower height. It also looks much leaner and more humanistic. I can confidently say this is the best rendition of Samus in the Prime series. In terms of animation for cutscenes, I can assume this is the best one to work with as well.

Sylux has a much more sleek look than in Hunters and I’m really impressed by the design, although it’s way less polished than Samus’s model. But one thing that nags me is the design of the Metroids around him. They seem to look more like Mochtroids to me.

One thing I can say with some confidence is that the Space Pirates we’re dealing with here seem to be the same ones from Prime 3: Corruption; although their design departs a bit from the ones from that game, some of the ships seen in the trailer share a striking resemblance, hinting that they could come from the same tribe.

I’d delve more into this, but I’d rather discover these things for myself once I get my hands on the game.

But I can talk about what we’ve been shown means for the future successor of the Nintendo Switch.

What does this trailer tell us about the successor of the Switch?

Music: Tensions in Norion (Metroid Prime 3: Corruption | Kenji Yamamoto)

The honest truth is that Metroid Prime 4 tells us very little about the capabilities of the successor of the Switch, or so called “Switch 2” by many.

We don’t even know as of the time of writing this that Metroid Prime 4 will be set for release on the new console. There are three possibilities, ordered by likelihood according to my expectations:

1. Prime 4: Beyond will be a Switch exclusive, assuming the successor won’t be software compatible with the Switch and there won’t be a version that runs it.
2. There will be two versions of the game: One for Switch and another for the new console. Again, implying that the successor will not be compatible with Switch’s games. We’ve seen this cross-generational release pattern happen with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with the Switch.
3. The new console will be backwards compatible with Switch games. In this situation, a single Switch version may be released. While the possibility of having two versions is also in the air, I pretty much discard this.

Some people have argued that the reveal trailer “looks too good to be on Switch”, but it’s already been confirmed by several sources that it is rendered on Switch docked mode. Although there is debate as to whether the game will run at 720p or 900p in docked mode, they confidently say —myself included— that the Beyond we saw in the trailer was running in docked mode.

Metroid Prime Remastered and Metroid Dread provide a reference for the graphics with Beyond, but in short, while I can definitely say that while the latter is visually much more striking, I don’t really think it veers off in terms of graphical performance compared to Prime 1 Remastered, and it’s more due to the result of years of polishing and taking what was learnt from Remastered.

Which brings me to the question: How would the game look on the successor? This one has an easy answer: Expect it to look much like the one on the Switch, only in higher resolution and possibly with some visual fidelity enhancements added in, while being probably a bit more performant and have a more stable 60 frames per second framerate.

We’ve seen in both first-party ports and cross-generational titles throughout Nintendo history that they generally look the same between consoles, just with a slightly higher visual fidelity on the more modern one. And I wouldn’t discard this should Prime 4 have the same kind of release.

But this would not bode well for the new hardware’s competitiveness. The Metroid series has been one of the two main Nintendo’s first-party series which put visual finesse first, alongside Zelda. However, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was released last year, and Echoes of Wisdom is already on its way, so the possibilities for flagship titles are running out. If Metroid Prime 4 is really meant to be the flagship title for the Switch’s successor, Nintendo would lose all competitive grounds against Sony and Microsoft. In other words: Nintendo could be leaving the next gen market.

One can speculate so much with so little information, so I think I’ll leave at this for now. I’m still very surprised that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has managed to stay around at the start of the sunset for the Switch’s lifetime, as the outcome I found most likely was that it was benched for the next system, or worse, cancelled, and now I’ve begun to look forward for the game seriously, although I’m not hyped up about it —nowadays one can be easily disappointed when you highly expect a game, after all.

I will try to keep myself as uninformed as possible, though. I want to discover everything by playing the game and I’m very eager to see if my predictions (and expectations) are met.

Day 4: Akihabara

Music: Game Corner (Pokémon Gold & Silver: Super Music Collection | Go Ichinose)

It was Christmas Eve. The electric city of Akihabara (or Akiba for short) was a must stop, both for me as a game developer and Raxki as an anime and hobby craftsman, so we decided to go there and do some shopping.

I wasn’t just for the games though. I knew about its roots as a general electronics store district —especially cameras. While I didn’t have my camera in my possession during the trip, I still wanted to check what they were offering at Yodobashi Akiba and Bic Camera. Though we’ve been so drawn in by other stores that we didn’t have the time to check those this day.

Figurines were a big feature this trip to Akiba. We went to Radio Kaikan and it was absolutely full of them.

Kazama fell down in Radio Kaikan. I guess this is very in-character for him.

Many of the shops offered second hand goods from all different kinds of media, such as games, anime, and virtual idols. But our biggest findings were these:

A Samus Figma and two amiibo of Metroid: Samus Returns. I had my Samus Returns 3DS before we went to Japan.

Music: Catch Mode (Brinstar remix) (Tetris DS)

Our eyes couldn’t believe it! Raxki was actually looking for this very Figma. The price was quite egregious but it was practically the best deal, being second hand. As for me, I took the amiibos of Samus and the baby Metroid from Samus Returns, the latter of which is extremely sought after among collectors and Metroid fans.

We also went to Super Potato, one of the places I held dear the most in the electric city, because it’s a shop that specializes in vintage games and gaming systems, and the shop ambience it gave was extremely warm and welcoming.

A collection of N64 games that were sold without the box. It was nice to see Kirby 64 and Yoshi’s Story there. The latter one, one of my friend’s favorite game, will show its face later in the trip once again…

An actual Virtual Boy! Unfortunately, it was out of order.

The name’s Fox McCloud, Star Fox is the name of my team!

At the top floor, there is a vintage game corner that I absolutely loved.

Close by was also what was used to be one of the many SEGA arcade buildings. I didn’t play anything at all there, but it was full of UFO catchers and other similar arcade machines on the first floor. I happened to spot a huge red Yoshi plushie that was super adorable in one of those machines, but considering the rigged nature of these —and also I was pretty short on change— I refrained from playing.

Other floors were dedicated to each genre of arcade games, from fighting games to rhythm and racing games. There were also DDR floors, but nobody was playing on them. Would have been a wonderful sight!

Interestingly enough, the logo of the new owner, GiGO, was replaced by the one from this group of virtual e-sports idols at the top of the building.

We didn’t do much after that as most businesses were closing down. We were going to check a maid café as I was keen to try the experience, but we got into the awkward situation that as we got into the elevator for one of them, one of the waiters went in to put a “Closed” sticker in front of the elevator button to the floor we were going. In hindsight, we should have checked for a business hours sign before checking on the wait times.

As we were going back to the station, we found this car owned by a hardcore fan of a character from one of The Idolm@ster games. Car culture in Japan sure goes hard, and so does the devotion for a virtual girl.

Day 5: Asakusa, Sumida and Odaiba

Music: Cherrygrove City (Pokémon HeartGold & SoulSilver: Super Music Collection | Go Ichinose)

This was a very active day. We went to three different locations because they were conveniently located relatively close to each other and we took a convenient transport to Odaiba afterwards.

We went first thing in the morning to Asakusa, one of the more traditional wards in Tokyo.

When we arrived at Asakusa station, stores on this nearby street (Okuyama Omairimachi) were closed, allowing us to see the beautiful Kabuki paintings they’ve made on their storefront rolling gates, one of the rare sights we’ve found by pure chance.

A painting on what I presume it’s how this street used to look in Edo (ancient Tokyo)

Once we crossed this street, we arrived at one of the side entrances at the back of Sensō-ji, one of the most important Buddhist temples in Japan.

The main area of the temple.

Since we came from the back, we got to visit the temple and do some praying —hopefully getting it right— but I was very impressed that there wasn’t just a temple, but also a sintoist shrine to the side of it, as well as typical Japanese-style contemplative gardens.

The gardens is something that’s a bit underappreciated about this temple. They also have descriptions in English about the many objects placed throughout.

We came back by strolling down Nakamise street, and did a bit of shopping before it started to get extremely crowded —that’s why we arrived so early.

Before we even reached the Kaminari gate, it was already overrun with tourists and believers alike.

To avoid crowds, we took a slight detour offside Nakamise street heading to the famous Tokyo Skytree. Along the way, we stopped at a store well known for its matcha ice cream.

I also got to eat some really sweet dango!

A really interesting item I found in one of the surrounding streets: A promotional book of the original release of the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back movie!

Crossing the Sumida river, we entered one of the more ancient parts of the Sumida ward, which was much more calm than other bustling areas nearby.

One of the vending machines in a park next to the Sumida river with lots of Pikachu on it. It really drew me in to buy a strawberry milkshake…

A statue in Ushijima shrine, which reveres the god of oxes and is at least 1150 years old.

We eventually arrived at Tokyo Skytree, but didn’t get inside nor at the top because I thought it was overrated. This view of the tower from one of the entrances to Ushijima was really worth a picture, though.

In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have stopped by to get that matcha ice cream, because we suddenly had to make haste; we had a boat ride to catch.

Music: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Discovery | Daft Punk)

By sheer luck, Maps gave us a path straight to the Asahi Headquarters, known for its modern art at the rooftop, or “golden turd” as some people like to call. In my eyes it looks like the smoke of beer in the making.

After racewalking for like it felt like forever, we got there just in time to our cruise: The Emeraldas.

This vessel was designed by the legendary Leiji Matsumoto, master creator of space opera works such as Galaxy Express 999, and childhood hero of Daft Punk, with whom supervised the creation of Interstella 5555, an animated series that accompanied their music album Discovery.

The cruise ship crossed below several of the many bridges that connect Tokyo over the Sumida river to arrive at Odaiba, one of the artificial islands in Tokyo in a little below an hour.

The Emeraldas crossed the Rainbow Bridge, seen here from Odaiba.

Now, there were a lot of stuff I wanted to do in Odaiba, but we mostly spent the afternoon in the mall containing the Gundam Base Tokyo, noteworthy for having another of the three life sized Gundam in Japan.

Music: Unicorn (MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM UNICORN OMPST 1 | Hiroyuki Sawano)

Two down, one to go.

The DiverCity mall supposedly had a workshop where you could built your own Gunpla, but it was closed off at the time. But at least we got to see several of the entries from a recent Gunpla builder contest.

The Gundam Unicorn lits up at night. It also has some moving parts as well.

We took the monorail back home, which we noticed it was fully automatized —which is something that urban planning channels should probably look into.

Day 6: Yokohama

Music: The Beginning (Zack & Wiki - Quest for Barbaros' Treasure)

The previous day ended with Gundam. And this day started with… More Gundam.

Prior to this trip, I booked in advance for a stage show involving a life size moving Gundam in Yokohama. Saving the best for last!

According to Raxki, despite being a lifesize rendition, this one could actually be the smallest of the three in Japan.

We also got up the docking tower to check it up close and personal. To be fair, the perspective and vistas totally felt in-proportion to their depictions in the anime series, so props to the animators for making theirs up to scale.

This looks like we’re inside a Gundam diorama now.

There was also a museum showing all the technology and the work that made an attraction such as this possible.

Music: Twinkle (Gundam Build Divers ReRISE ep 2 | spira · spica)

We spent here pretty much all afternoon. We took a short walk once it was starting to get dark, and visited a location that appeared in the Gundam Build Fighters series on our way.

At first glance, this kinda looks like the beachline of Barcelona with the W Barcelona looking building in the background.

This red brick warehouse is a big shopping mall and cultural center in the city, and one of the real life locations in Gundam Build Fighters. There’s a bunch of these buildings with a “red brick/industrial” architecture scattered througout Japan.

There was also this pretty cool looking fox sculpture. Gotta give modern art its spotlight, too!

It’s quite eyecatching to spot some classic revivalist architecture thrown about the city.

We then took the monorail back to Tokyo, which I noticed it was fully automatized. I guess for a monorail that has its own independent track system, it makes a lot of sense that it should be fully automatized, but it makes me wonder if it’s capable of reacting to unusual and unexpected events.

And that was pretty much it for the first week of our trip. We did most of what Raxki wanted to do the most during this time. With that now completed, now it was time for the places and experiences I wanted to check out! Which is coming up on the next part of this series…

Music: Restoring Hollow Bastion (Kingdom Hearts II.5 Final Mix | Youko Shinomura)

The reasons why YouTube sucks

Since the mid 2010s, YouTube has been developing some UX design practices that in my humble opinion, are anti-humanistic in that they are designed to drain your soul away for profit. I’m not exaggerating on this.

Social engineers have researched the concept of “attention economy”, the business model of keeping the attention of a user in order to throw the user as many ads and collect as much usage metrics and marketing data as possible.

To achieve this, YouTube relies on several UI and UX patterns that rely on stimulating the user’s attention with minimal input —especially on mobile, which is more convenient for the user:

Swipe “up”? Sounds like an Y-axis flip issue.

• In the home screen, you get a list of recommended videos that are likely to grab your attention.
• If not, the user swipes downward to “pull” the UI. This is actually very similar to pulling a lever in a slot machine.
• Because the content shown is user generated, what will be shown is random, with a bias to cater the user. This is very much like a Skinner Box, which helps encourage people into repeating the same action over and over again.
• Autoplay is enabled by default, which negates the necessity of looking for a new video after finishing with another.
• When the user selects a video, a list of recommendations appears below the video. This creates an escape route from a dissatisfying video to something that may be more pleasing to the user.

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The thumbnails of these recommended videos used to be much smaller, and in even older versions, you had to check another tab to see them.

Nowadays they are just a tad smaller than the video when in portrait mode and visible as soon as you open the video, which makes it an extremely more convenient “escape route”.

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This is all done to ensure one can enjoy videos with as minimum hassle as possible. This may seem like it’s not a big deal, but in a world where the principle of minimum effort reigns, it is vital for user engagement.

Why? There are many factors, but one of them is because our brains are very conscious on the effort you put to obtain something, even if it’s something as small as pushing a button. A research paper makes a direct inverse correlation between the lack of effort and the probability of choosing what content to watch, and that the balance between how worth the effort is for the reward works at a logarithmic scale: It makes a much bigger difference between 1 and 2 steps than between 10 and 11.

TikTok has managed to basically reduce this to essentially zero from the point you open the app, basically turning it into an “automatic fast video feeder”. YouTube is betting hard on this too with YouTube Shorts.

Yes, the speed at which new content is delivered can also trick your brain into wanting more even though the content you might be watching isn’t that interesting. This study links this phenomenon to attachment theory —one involving forming interpersonal connections, especially with parents. In other words, researchers hypothesize our brains can think of YouTube and TikTok as if it were loved ones.

YouTube video: Everyone hates YouTube shorts (17:15)

This results in the paradoxical effect that people now don’t really need highly enjoyable content to stay engaged, because instead of selecting what you want to watch, the content is given to you directly without any input from you. This has led to an oversupply of videos, both of high and low values of production, but with very varying quality of engagement. This “era of excess” —as some experts call it— is usually described as YouTube giving you feelings of boredom, fear of missing out, anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

All of these gimmicks (among many, many other factors) result in the many negative effects that have been deeply documented by many studies across the years, like the ones above. I suggest looking them up in Google Scholar if you don’t mind the scientific jargon, because press (especially on TV) tends to hit hard on these by blowing the effects a bit out of proportion to discourage people from using competing mediums of entertainment.

So what did I use to do to combat this?

Basically, I simply did the opposite: Make the experience of browsing YouTube as painful as possible, but not too much, so that I could still enjoy it without feeling like I’ve been drained of my time.

I use Unhook, a browser addon to remove some of the most convenient ways to watch videos. After installing it, if I wanted to watch a video, I had to actively type it in in the search bar, an extremely effortful thing compared to being suggested what I wanted to see.

This is how I used to use Unhook to remove some of the content that was extremely distracting, especially the sidebar with its recommendations on what to watch next.

Since then, my experience with YouTube has improved massively. All of a sudden, I was way more invested into watching longer videos all the way to the end —an impressive level of commitment according to Map Men. And if I don’t know what else to watch, I began getting the sensation of needing to stop watching YouTube, and now I only watch it the time I absolutely need to, most of the time anyway.

However, this is only when I use YouTube on PC. On mobile, I have no way to customize this with as much freedom that I know of, and I still end up using it a lot more than I should. There was the risk of misclicking on the app and being forced to watch a short until I figured out how to get away from them, but it was pretty miniscule in comparison to the rest of the time I spent using the app.

But it was fine for me at the time, as I was just starting my screen time diet. I wanted to take thinks slowly. But all of a sudden, YouTube would change in a way that I just simply couldn’t tolerate and made me take more drastic measures.

The last straw

YouTube’s latest change is what has ultimately forced my hand into quitting YouTube altogether: The war on ad blockers.

YouTube has started imposing an ultimatum on users who use ad blockers: Use their premium service or disable ad blockers.

Advertisements have been part of the YouTube’s business model for a bit over a decade, but over the past few years ads have started to become more and more intrusive to the viewer’s experience.

Over its history, YouTube went from ads to the side of the video, to small popups at the bottom, to midroll advertisements that used to be skippable after 5 or so seconds —which I can assume everyone did. Now you can’t even skip those ads (although bypassing them was possible for a while) and you can expect at least one every two videos or so. Sometimes, two in a row.

The situation has gone so bad that you can be forced to watch ads that may be longer than the actual video itself.

Granted, I have to admit that the attitude towards advertisements has gone pretty sour over the past few decades, because we were pretty used to ad breaks with television. However, they were —usually— pretty seamless because they usually had transitions to ease the way to them. Nowadays, not so much.

YouTube used to put ads to the side of a video or relatively small at the bottom side over it, but nowadays it’s a video ad that creators have barely any control over its placement and can result in very awkward and annoying cuts, so regardless of whether their actions deserve their hate or not, they’re kinda asking for it. At least they are merciful enough not to put these kinds of ads in developing countries…

If it were a more seamless experience, I wouldn’t feel the necessity to use an ad blocker. But huzzah —many websites and apps already clutter their content with so many ads that it significantly hampers my experience. As long as that remains true, I’m keeping my ad blockers on.

The turn to Invidious

Screenshot from an Invidious instance

Now I consume most YouTube content through Invidious. But I didn’t realize that this change would also bring along some unexpected but positive effects that helped me a lot on my PC Exodus —that’s how I call the screen time diet initiative I’m taking— because the experience I have with it had the perfect amount of misery I needed to take several steps forward on reducing my screen time.

Invidious is a frontend that is installed in servers across the world called instances, and serves as a some sort of an ad-free and privacy-respecting alternative to YouTube. Of course, Google is actively fighting against it by blocking access to YouTube videos from these instances. However, it’s not perfect and Invidious hosts work hard on bypassing those blocks. On times where the block seems to persist, I just quit and stop watching videos.

But by far the most significant improvement was on mobile. The usage limit function on iOS tends to have a pretty annoying issue when using it on “installed web apps” like, say, an Invidious instance: The website doesn’t respond to any input after choosing to “ignore the time limit warning”, and very often I’m forced to restart the app and search the video again. In Safari and websites added to the home screen, the time expired screen shows up every time you enter a new domain, so this will happen every time I switch instances, making it a huge pain to watch videos when I surpass the time limit and the instance has been blocked.

Ever since I replaced YouTube for Invidious on iOS, my usage time has taken quite the drop, and for the first time, I reached under 3 hours a day in weekly usage. A huge accomplishment!

I’ve also noticed that my productivity time has increased quite significantly, and I’ve been able to clear my backlog of games at a quicker pace than before, but my overall satisfaction has remained mostly the same, if not better!

In the near future, I will be willing to take much bolder steps.

Web feeds: What are they and why should you care?

Music: Corpse Whisperer (Trauma Team)

To put it simply, a web feed is basically like a YouTube subscription. You add one of these feeds into a feed reader app and it will automatically grab the latest posts from that web feed as they come, and put them all together in one neat place. It’s also called a news aggregator because the app keeps stockpiling the news or posts you’re subscribed to.

These reader apps can have other features like keeping track of which ones you’ve read, organizing posts by topic, tagging posts to read later, among other things.

But more importantly, web feeds are designed in such a way that the websites that provide these feeds can’t manipulate its contents depending on who’s accessing it; unlike recommendations made by an “algorithm”, the content is the same for everyone.

This implies no website can get your personal information for their benefits, so it’s excellent for those worried about privacy (which is something that has become increasingly concerning in some countries). And you have total control over what you want to see: If you don’t like something, just unsubscribe from the feed by removing it from the app, and their associated posts will go away!

Another benefit is that since it’s you handles the content you’re seeing, it won’t be especially suited to retain you in the same website for hours, although the effects can vary significantly depending on the content and the website you’re watching it from. Still, this is something that right now I am very concerned about and regard very highly.

You may have heard about RSS or Atom feeds. They are simply two different types of web feeds. Websites that provide feeds will usually provide either one or the other, but newsreader apps normally support both types because they are very similar and widely used. For example, this blog offers an Atom feed compatible with Feedly-based apps for the Modern blog, and a RSS feed for the Legacy version blog that can be used with newsreaders for older systems.

They are also very lightweight, and will often just have text and images, nothing fancier than that. Videos are usually filtered out or will not play, on the other hand, the posts will have their ads stripped out (though the newsreader could slap ads of their own in their app). But if you feel like it’s too little for you, nearly all feed readers will provide you a link to display the full post in your browser.

Many newsreaders also support converting posts from social media like YouTube or Reddit, into a web feed that you can read just like any regular one. Just put the link to the user profile from the social platform you want to be kept notified and you’ll get their latest posts as they come, no algorithms nor recommendations involved. Just beware that the conversion is not always perfect and that you might have to open the post in a browser to see it correctly.

A double-edged sword

With web feeds, it’s ultimately up to you what you want to see, and what you’d rather ignore. If used without critical thinking, you could end up building your own echo chamber, that is, you could end up following feeds that reflect and reinforce your beliefs, and might end up radicalizing yourself.

Granted, social media nowadays builds their own echo chambers for you so that you can stay in their platforms as long as possible. Web feeds don’t do this; it’s what you choose to read, so use web feeds responsibly.

For managing my own feeds, I use these guidelines:

1. Check the authors and their sources: Even the most popular and reputable websites that you might be subscribed to can have very nasty authors, or make claims that can be widely disputed.
2. Seek information from as many points of view as possible: An enduring task, considering how polarizing media is becoming nowadays.
3. Keep your hobbies into account: This will keep your hobbies active in your brain while at the same time keep you informed about the things you like to do, with little yet need to be accounted for risk of becoming polarized.
4. Be open to new things! Local newspapers are excellent to check for new things to do, or get in touch about what’s happening where you live.

Why didn’t web feeds caught on?

The thing is that they used to be a big deal in the 2000s, but many attribute the downfall of web feeds to the shutdown of Google Reader, Alphabet’s solution for news aggregators. But I personally believe it was a catalyst more than its cause.

My main theory is that it came down mostly to its design, which was mostly against the coming of the age of Big Data and personalized marketing. By design, news aggregators request updates from the web feed on their own and don’t leverage anything from the browser or browsers you may have installed.

Feed readers generally won’t send login information or anything about the person who is requesting it, and the feed is handled on the 3rd party newsreader, the site delivering the web feed won’t get any precious user usage data, and they can’t put any middleware in between to ask for a login or something of the sort. Again, this is also by design.

So it’s no surprise why Google and other big tech companies whose business model relies a lot on collecting user data started removing (and sometimes even discouraging using) web feeds. Although Google added an RSS compatible solution, it was on Google Chrome, so they had control over the usage data, and apparently they removed shortly afterwards on desktop platforms.

However, RSS is here to stay, with many blogs and journalist websites still supporting it for those who remain loyal to that technology, and in the world of AI generated content, being able to control what you’re reading and watching has become more relevant than ever.

Music: Sky Watching (Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe | Ian Hawkridge)

Light pollution and the suffocation of the night

When one talks about pollution, they usually refer about air pollution and things like climate change. But there are other kinds of things that can contaminate our environment.

One of the least heard of is light pollution, which is caused by artificial lighting in our cities and towns. When it’s carelessly used, cities and road lights shoot light upwards into the sky, cluttering the skies with the glow coming out of the cities and drowning the skylight.

The Bortle scale compares on a scale from 1 to 9 how affected the night sky is due to light pollution in terms of visibility of astronomical objects, with skies of class 1 being pristine dark skies, and class 9 being the typical night sky you would see inside a city.

This is a picture of the Milky Way I took two years ago, in an area with Bortle class 2 skies. You can see a lot of detail surrounding the galaxy and even hints of nebulae.

In a sky like the one of the comet’s picture, one would be able to see up to around 300 stars with an unaided eye. In a truly dark sky, that number goes up to 9,500 stars. Downtown? About 50 stars if you try hard enough.

It is estimated that about one third of humanity has never been able to see the Milky Way. In 1994, an earthquake hit Los Angeles which caused a blackout of the whole city. That day there had been reportings of “a strange sky” that showed up out of nowhere, and people called the local Griffith Observatory up asking what it was.

Similarly, during lockdown, there had been an all-time high of reports of sightings of mysterious objects, like flashing discs of light.

One of the many reported so-called “strange lights” from Colombia. They claim it seems like an UFO/flying saucer, but in reality this is most likely to be Venus being captured by a camera that has no idea how to focus it due to for how far away it is and how tiny it looks like.

This would never have happened if it wasn’t for the light pollution, because you would be able to see many more stars and easily identify which are planets and which are other things, and of course, look up in awe at the beauty of things like the Milky Way or even the Andromeda galaxy. Light pollution washes away all of that, leaving a plain and uninteresting sky.

However, the actual amount of light pollution doesn’t have a maximum past class 9, so it can get so polluted that one could live in what’s called an “eternal twilight”, in which the sky gets so bright it feels like an if it were at twilight.

Light pollution in cities like New York make it impossible to see any stars at all, where the “eternal twilight” is clearly visible.

Throughout the history of humanity, generations of astronomers studied the night sky and elaborated many different models for understanding our place in the Universe, among other things. They were able to do it because electric artificial illumination wouldn’t become a thing until the early 20th century.

Of course, technological advancements allowed us to see more of space and in more ways than just “how we see things”. But I believe that could also bring an undesired effect.

Deceptive marketing and the surge of “hobby killers”

Music: Space Hardware (Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe | Ian Hawkridge)

Technology for astronomical observations really skyrocketed in the mid to late 20th century, with the construction of observatories specialized in the invisible light (radio, infrared, x-ray and ultraviolet, among others) and space probes that can get much closer to other planets, enabling the possibility to take pictures of the planets of the Solar System with an amazing resolution.

Before that, telescopes at the time could only make out general features of the planets, such as Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s red spot; one could spot the four Galilean moons, but they’d look like dots in the sky.

<Yonic>

Fun fact: When the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was made, there hadn’t been any probes that had arrived to Jupiter at the time, so the depictions of Jupiter and its moons were made rather vague with all the telescope images that they had at the time to avoid possible inconsistencies with how they actually look.

But by the time the sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact came out, the Pioneer and the Voyager probes had already been to both Jupiter and Saturn, which allowed to use much higher quality pictures of the former and its moons to make more accurate and detailed depictions of the astral bodies.

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I’m not saying that these leaps in imaging quality of the Solar System have been hampering astronomy; quite the opposite, actually. It’s what allowed many people to develop an even more intimate fascination towards space.

How could one not be fascinated by something like this?

The same comet mentioned above, taken by a professional astrophotographer. (Credit: Dan Bartlett)

The problem comes when you use images like these for deceptive marketing. I’ve seen advertisements of budget “telescopes” that give you the promise of seeing interesting things such as Saturn’s rings in deep detail or Jupiter’s clouds in high resolution. These have been promptly given the name of hobby killers because despite them being cheap and portable, they tend to be overly complicated and junk in quality compared to a higher quality one.

An example of a hobby killer that could be found in Amazon. One of the obvious red flags is that they usually have a phone adapter and have a really high quality “preview” of what you could see. They generally use the Moon for it because it’s harder to tell the difference in quality, but some go bolder, like this one.

With the ability to share high quality pictures of space thanks to Internet, the expectations of children have increased a lot, unless they have a proper understanding of how objects like our planets actually look like through a telescope beforehand.

Now, some who are into astronomy do claim that their hobbies actually had been nurtured by a cheap and janky telescope, and I won’t object to those testimonials. There are many factors that influence on making or breaking astronomy as a passion, and this shouldn’t be the only main factor to consider.

But the lack of understanding when it comes to the numbers and specs of a telescope, alongside the fallacy of “bigger numbers = better” —especially for things like 300X— and its exploitation by misleading marketing make giving cheaper telescopes more value than they actually have really easy.

Combined with the ten-fold increase in price of the higher quality telescopes, many parents will end up choosing the cheap and junk scopes. Because apparently spending $1000 once for something that’s “just a hobby” is too much, but spending that same amount to take your kids to sports activities in the US yearly will pay off. Sports are still good for many reasons, of course; but a high quality telescope with fairly good maintenance can last you for decades and can be easily sold if your kid decides to drop off astronomy, not much so with sports gear —and a lot of them will on their teen years.

Astronomy is an expensive hobby, but that doesn’t really mean you lose a lot by trying it.

So how do we fix these issues?

Music: Star Dome (Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe | Ian Hawkridge)

Surprisingly, both light pollution and the “killer” telescopes problems have particularly very simple solutions.

For light pollution, you can have your local community implement more responsible lighting. Which means making lights that don’t shoot into the sky with cutoff shields, using less lighting power than necessary, and use them only when necessary. The temperature of the light seems to also have an impact, so preferably use warm white lights over cooler white ones.

YouTube video: A guide for preventing light pollution in your neighbourhood (10:44)

As for avoiding disappointment of curious children, it’s mostly a matter of nurturing that curiosity into fondness. One good way would be to actually save up for a much more decent telescope, while consulting on experts on the field about which one to buy and take their advice seriously. They needn’t be a professional astronomer: Just anyone with enough expertise would suffice.

YouTube video: A guide for avoiding hobby killers (17:55)

A probably even better way would be with hands-on interactions with the astronomy community by attending star parties, where they would learn a lot more with the guidance of mentors than just relying on blind experience.

However, just because I said they are simple solutions, they may not be easy to implement:

• Light pollution regulations may be deemed unpopular due to bureaucratic or sociocultural aspects (North American people love the “lights make street safer” argument, while it’s harder in Europe and Japan to make civil enforcements).
• I personally believe that hobbies should happen naturally and be nurtured, and not be forced onto someone. Much like raising a kid, it is a considerable challenge.

Nonetheless, if we want to continue enjoying the marvels that has space for us hiding in the night sky, we should be raising awareness on these issues, so as to ensure that one of the most ancestral sciences doesn’t become a thing of the past.

But it may not be all that bad. Improvements in technology allow us to see space with way more detail than in the past centuries. One could still show someone high-definition pictures of these objects and wow them with how they look, and as of recent, the creation of smart telescopes has made astrophotography way more accessible for everyone. And while astronomy is not something that’s usually taught within the standard educational curriculum, Internet allows people to self-educate on the topic (which takes a considerable portion of astronomy enthusiasts, by the way). As long as the positives outweigh the negatives, astronomy will persevere.