- 21 Jun, 2025*
tonight I watched Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard which was a delight. Between this and seeing Some Like It Hot and The Apartment recently, you really can make the argument that Billy Wilder might have been America’s greatest director.
Which is a tough competition, to be sure, and I’m probably not the person to adjudicate the argument in any case. But there’s something really magical about watching older films when you can look beyond the age of them and see the humanity in the moments. It’s hard to describe, and I’m definitely cheaply paraphrasing something I heard once on a po…
- 21 Jun, 2025*
tonight I watched Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard which was a delight. Between this and seeing Some Like It Hot and The Apartment recently, you really can make the argument that Billy Wilder might have been America’s greatest director.
Which is a tough competition, to be sure, and I’m probably not the person to adjudicate the argument in any case. But there’s something really magical about watching older films when you can look beyond the age of them and see the humanity in the moments. It’s hard to describe, and I’m definitely cheaply paraphrasing something I heard once on a podcast, but it really does feel like unlocking a new ability when you can start to view older movies as historical documentation of human achievement like that. Like little memories.
I like to take photographs for the same reason. We’re documenting our lives for what? So that we can try and evoke those memories later. It’s a play at holding something close for more than just the fragile moment of its existence.
Here’s a bunch of links.
Games
Found In Retro Game Mags: Holiday Gift Ideas For Your Online Sweetie
Tell your sweetheart your password and let them use your online account for one free hour of chatting with you.
cassandra lugo (BLOOD CHURCH): I have discovered an interesting corner of the internet
the wiki camp 2 describes itself as “The Wiki Camp 2 is an object camp -styled game where you do challenges by editing a wiki.” this was completely inscrutible to me, as it probably is to you. fortunately, the front page also includes instructions for this situation, inviting the confused to a page called “Explain.“
cass found something that young children on the internet are apparently obsessed with and I have straight up never heard of, which is a nice little weird thing to find, I think.
Adrian Hon (mssv): Playing First Contact in Eclipse, a Spectacular 3-day Sci-Fi Larp
Eclipse is a three-day sci-fi larp set in 2059. Earth has been wracked by environmental disasters, leading to widespread civil war. Humanity’s hopes lie in the Eclipse space programme, established to find a new home using wormhole technology.
Reading this made me want to go to a LARP more than anything in the world, which is the sort of thing that happens when I read detailed breakdowns of LARPs. I have never done a LARP! I have done similar things, like tabletop RPGs and also escape rooms, but never a LARP proper. I want to Make A Guy and then Live Action Role Play as the guy.
Bruno Dias (azhdarchid): Why can’t you be more like your older brother?
The older brother, in this analogy, is cinema. Why don’t video games have a standardized, regimented division of labor and working methodology? Why can’t we be more like movies?
I think the answer here is actually really complex; it’s about both the mediums themselves and about their differing histories.
Bruno illustrates point by point why games and movies deal with their labor in different ways, as well as confronting the question of “should game studios be organized, in a labor sense, more like movie studios?” to which the answer is (of course) no. But the reasons for that are fascinating.
Steve (Steve’s Nerd Blog): Vtech’s “The Equalizer” Laptop
If one is to do a search on “Vtech The Equalizer Laptop”, not much comes up. The top hit is a (very poorly) photocopied version of the manual. A couple other links lead to Wiki entries with extremely limited information on them. One website refers to it as “one of Vtech’s rarest computers”. A few sites show a manufacture date of 1996/1997, which, as you’ll find out shortly, is impossible. There are a handful of images of the computer, but nothing going into detail. It seems it was released in other countries under the names “IT Laptop” in the UK, “IQ Unlimited” in Germany, “Le Manager” in France, and “Century XXI” in Spain. These machines have got to be even rarer than “The Equalizer” as I could find nearly no information on them.
Incredibly detailed breakdown of a very strange, almost-laptop from the age of Kid’s Laptops. A strange dive into an understudied device.
History
Allegra Rosenberg (tchotchke): tchotchke #40: an ephemeral education
By the 1930s, film fan scrapbook culture was so ubiquitous that you can go on Ebay right now and buy an authentic vintage Hollywood scrapbook, much like the one in the original video, for less than the price of a nice meal out. In Diana W. Anselmo’s excellent book A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (2023), she describes how movie studios and magazines incentivized scrapbooking as a way to retain fans’ attention and “counteract the intrinsic ephemerality of filmgoing.”
I really liked this piece about a minor Internet Discourse that is more about how we, as people, love to create little documentations of our own moments. It’s kind of like what I was saying above. People love to have little proofs of their memories, proofs of their feelings.
Bret Deveraux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry): Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’
This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and roleplaying settings. In particular, the notions I want to tackle are first how did ancient currency systems work in terms of value (what could you buy with how much) and then second how often were people likely to use physical currency at all? This is going to be a bit of a ‘fun one’ because while we’ll talk quite a bit about how money is used in historical societies, we are going to loop back around to fantasy settings at the end.
I actually have a Byzantine coin, because I got it as a birthday gift from a dear friend a year or so ago. If you study any sort of Ancient Rome stuff (or most historical stuff, I’d imagine), you get a feeling for the particulars of how coinage can be used both as a money system and as a store of historical knowledge over time.
This is a cool writeup about both historical coinages and the use of the ubiquitous “gold coin” in fantasy settings. Well worth a read!
Ex Urbe: The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy.
Medieval skyscraper cities were real!
Kris De Decker (Low Tech Magazine): How to Dress and Undress your Home
Modern insulation methods involve the permanent addition of non-structural materials with high thermal resistance, such as fiberglass, cellulose, or mineral wool, to the building surfaces. Viewed in a historical context, this approach is unusual and stems from a shift in architectural style. Preindustrial buildings often didn’t require extra insulation because they had a significant amount of thermal mass, which acts as a buffer to outside temperature fluctuations.
Did you know that houses can have clothes too?
Writing
Philip Levine (Rattle): One Brother Said to the Other, ‘Let’s Go into the Fields’
A poem about running.
Jenn Frank: christine
When I learned that my freshman-year roommate was transferring I felt a twinge of envy, but mostly I felt unnerved. Had I contributed to her decision to entirely leave the geographic region? It was true she’d seemed exasperated by my presence, but she would acknowledge only my proclivity for playing Half Life right after lunch. Well, sometimes she wanted to trade clothes; there was also that. We didn’t understand each other, was the thing. I remember feeling persistently confused. (I think at the time I also resented how much Joni Mitchell I was having to listen to.)
I love Jenn’s writing. They’re extremely good at writing in the mode of the best personal writing, that captures all the little moments and can weave them into an arc, a tapestry made of its collection of anecdotes.
Kate Wagner (the late review): against the fleeing to europe industrial complex
Unlike the essay peddlers of the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Comples, who are willing to adopt all manners of family therapy jargon, my answer to this problem is not simply leaving my husband behind, or, if we’re talking broadly about family, my aging parents either. While I have friends in Slovenia, I also have networks of local support here, people that matter to me and to whom I matter and I refuse to treat these places and people disposably. But most of all, although I have no great patriotism for my country, especially in its present iteration, I do feel as though I owe it to my community and to future generations to do my best to make things better.
I have very complex feelings about the United States of America. I have no love for it as a governmental/state entity. I have a great love for the people here, because I resolutely refuse to believe that the masses of America are bad people. I do not believe that any masses of working people are irredeemable, and I have to have the grace to extend that even to the deeply contradictory American people.
Kate Wagner puts all this very well. I do feel a great longing, in some sense, for a place that is not This America. It might be another country, it might be the past, it might be the future. But I do not like living in the America-of-the-now. It is an unpleasant, contradictory, frustrating, angering, saddening place. It is also where I live. It is where a great number of my loved ones live, blood family or otherwise.
I do believe in the capacity of Americans to create a better world. Again, I must! I do not think it is productive, or worthwhile, to think otherwise. I think that Americans have done great things in the past, and they have the potential to do great things in the future. Great good things, to be clear. We are already doing too many great and terrible things.
Will any of that “absolve” the country? no. fuck no! But again, this isn’t about absolving “the country”. “The country” is not the thing I care about saving. I wish a lot of things for the United States Of America, but only in the slimmest of possible futures do I wish for it to continue. I want it to evolve, to burn up and be reborn, or to fragment and find itself again in the fractures somehow. We create our own society.
But most of all: No, I don’t believe in fleeing to Europe. For a million reasons, most of which are articulated by Wagner here. I guess I don’t blame anyone for doing so, or for fleeing anywhere really. I just don’t recommend it. I don’t think we’re At That Point yet for many people, and certainly not for most people with the resources onhand to do it right now anyway. I think that whatever world we build requires hands to build it, and I think those hands are needed here as much as they are needed anywhere else.
If you want more like this, maybe check out the previous link roundup, which I wrote basically two months ago lmao. It’s been a complicated couple months, okay.
I did also write a few other things since then, like this post about my open tabs or this post about a lot of things but also personal updates.
As always, you can find me and this post on mastodon, or on the RSS feed for this very website. Thanks for reading. I love you.
#adrian hon #allegra rosenberg #bret deveraux #bruno dias #cassandra lugo #ex urbe #history #jenn frank #kate wagner #kris de decker #medieval history #philip levine #video games #vtech