The Fru Fru Brigade~

This is Wilderness: A Survival Adventure from 1985 (Apple II original, 1986 for the PC port). As the short video will demonstrate, it's an incredibly robust simulation for the era, in a sort of 3D space. This game is about 153 kilobytes in size! But that's actually just a small part of why this game is significant.

See, I don't think Friday Night Arcade has the game configured correctly. It looks the same as the screenshot on Mobygames, but in a thread about DOSBox and the feature of old graphics hardware I'm about to go into, I was able to find this screenshot showing more solid colors. If you do not configure your emulator as CGA graphics specifically, it will run an emulation of more modern graphics hardware that simulates CGA in a way that is somewhat inaccurate. You want this instead:

But that's not what's interesting either of course. See, I don't think the game is supposed to look like that either. I think it's supposed to look like this:

Or even this, on IBM PCjr:

If you're going "what the hell, that looks way better", and especially if you have some familiarity with CGA but not a lot, you're confused as to how this is technically possible.

So, without going into too much detail, the computer here only has access to four colors; cyan, magenta, black, and white. This is the look associated with CGA games of the time. But we're seeing much better here! How?

It's a technique executed over composite video called artifact colors. By placing a band pixels of one color directly next to a band of pixels of another color, you can trick the monitor's color decoding into producing them both as a different color. (The PCjr uses a different white, resulting in different composite artifact colors.) This has gone relatively unacknowledged, because unlike the Apple II, which relied on this technique for all of its color output, IBM PCs generally displayed over RGB for clearer text. Hundreds of games actually made use of this technique, and I actually found this game on a list of them, while I was trying to find multiplat games that came out before VGA that look, sound, or play best on IBM PC. Since games generally looked better on other computers, even some of the older ones, I think this is the only one; if there are any others, they probably have a similar Apple II background as this game (the Apple II's color support was more limited), or were released for 8-bit computers and EGA, but not other 16-bit computers like Amiga or Atari ST.

The other interesting thing about this game: it's partially lost! There was an expansion disk you could order that let you explore maps based on Bolivia, Burma, British Columbia, Chile, and New Guinea. The Apple II version of this disk is confirmed to be preserved, but the person who has it refuses to release it.

If I ever get around to playing this, I may give it an evaluation.

I was going to get into all the different color modes in CGA, but I had restraint this time. There's a Wikipedia article, feast your eyes.

I know a lot of people are complaining about overuse of the word "gaslighting" but I think it very much applies to the way that big corporate social media sites will hide adult content from you and then try to convince you it was your choice

"This post contains content you have chosen not to see" except I never chose that, I purposely selected the "show me adult content" option

"No results for [sex worker's handle]" AND YET if I follow a link I saved, it takes me directly to their page, where I can see they have posted within the last 24 hours

As someone with piss-poor memory and organizational skills, it scares the fuck outta me that the more I use tech to augment my mental processes, the more in-roads tech companies have to screw around with my fundamental perceptions of reality

this was a huge pain in the ass for me on twitter since I'm terrible at remembering names and spelling things, and a ton of my friends post porn, so if I tried to @ them or DM them, their name wouldn't autocomplete in exactly the same same way it doesn't if an account doesn't exist or is suspended
so I had no idea if I was misremembering their name, or how to spell it, or if they're banned, unless I type it into the URL and see if it goes where I think

"Cohost has no search function" yeah and Twitter has a shitty one masquerading as a good one

A friend of mine was an activist in the 60s and 70s in New York. He told me a story about an anti-war protest that got a lot of local coverage, with the same photo published in all three of the city's major newspapers. In the News and the Post, that photo included a banner showing the organization's phone number, which was at that time the main way that one could get in touch to learn about future events and such. In the Times, the phone number had been airbrushed out.