Hello! And welcome aboard. This week, Florence glitches again, but for longer, while Chris ponders the perfect Ollie.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Skate Story is a wonderful, glitchy, glassy, spiky thing. It’s a game about skating through a kind of indie Divine Comedy, I think, but what I really like about it is the ollie.

I am a big fan of virtual skating, which means I’m a big fan of virtual ollies. Skate Story does something that initially feels very odd: you ollie using the press of a button.

No flicking? But over time I’ve started to see this as a kind of genius. Hold and release: Skate Story’s ollie has this beautiful hard-edged pop to it. Please check it out if you haven’t already. CD

There’s so many brilliant things about Ste Curran’s Luge 2026, but you should discover them for yourself. For now I’ll just say: GHOSTS. CD

Interesting things

If you’re feeling lonely, I have just the thing. How to Bake a Breadling is a guide to baking a sentient bread being. I can’t say I’ve tried any of the recipes myself, but there’s still time. “Tread lightly my good baker.” FSN

Essay: On Glitchlarking

“No program is perfect.” So begins a guide to bug hunting on the Speed Demos Archive. A bug, also known as a glitch, is a software or hardware error. Though many developers and players would like to avoid them, some communities pursue glitches like a moth to a flame. A case in point: the speedrunning community.

If you’ve ever watched a stream of Games Done Quick or Frame Fatales then you’ll likely already be familiar with speedrunning, the practice of trying to traverse a game as quickly as possible. In many cases, speedrunners look for bugs they can exploit to clip through walls, avoid enemies or even reach a completely different area of the game world. The discovery of a new glitch is like the uncovering of an exquisite artefact that challenges preconceived ideas about reality. Thus, speedrunners are always looking for useful glitches in the games they run. But how to find them? One poster on the Speed Demos Archive offers the following advice:

“For me, it comes down to exploiting nonlinear thinking. All parts of a game are meant to [be] approached from a certain 'direction' and by approaching them from a different direction, you can often make the game do things it isn't supposed to.”

Hunting for glitches is to play against the grain. This desire to find the incongruous reminds me of another hobby in a different context. “Larking is the art of looking for things that don’t belong, ownerless objects that have been lost, discarded and displaced.” This is how Lara Maiklem begins her book A Field Guide to Larking. More specifically, mudlarking is an activity in which you search mud and sediment near rivers to look for interesting objects that may have washed up. After all, a river is like the dark pocket of a city, a good place to hide something and pretend it never existed.

Likely there have been people searching in the mud by the River Thames since there were people at all, but we have written records from the 18th century referring to “shoring.” In the present day, the Thames Discovery Programme offers tours of the foreshore. I used to work at Museum of London Archaeology, where the TDP are hosted, and I always loved to hear about that community archaeology project.

Lara writes about many types of larking in her book; beachlarking and fieldlarking, but what about glitchlarking? Isn’t looking for glitches another form of patient hunting? Larkers have their haunts, and speedrunners do too. Whether it’s knowing the specific spot to glitch out of bounds or having an eye for the exact bend of a river where you know to look, both share a magpie’s instinct for discovery.

While playing Elden Ring for an academic study, I was stopped in my tracks when I found a piece of detritus hanging mid-air in the Mohgwyn Dynasty Mausoleum. It’s a glitch, I suppose, though a pretty mundane one. Even so, I couldn’t help but laugh and snap a screenshot. There’s something magical about glitches, they’re a glimpse into the craft of even the most polished AAA titles. Now that picture serves as a souvenir of my time in that game, a keepsake of the larks I got up to there. FSN