one at a time
This month's here and then gone is a co-operative local multiplayer button-pressing game, a bit like a co-op B.U.T.T.O.N. maybe?
The way it works is: everyone stands around a keyboard, decides which player they are (P1, P2, etc.), and are then tasked with pressing the keys that the game displays, in the order they are displayed. This repeats over multiple key sequences, with the allotted time for each sequence getting shorter as more sequences are completed.
And importantly, there are modifiers that will be randomly applied to specific sequences. With the exception of a handful of in-game rule changes, these are all IRL modifiers; things like "Press each key in order WHILE HOLDING YOUR NOSE," "Press each key in order WITH ONE EYE CLOSED," etc.
There's a couple of files you can edit to add your own modifiers and alter the speed that the game's timers count down at. See the readme for more details.
Download one at a time
Controls: escape: quit; space: start; a-z, 0-9: keys
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (5/10/24).
- All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
- All source code and assets are included, licensed under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
- As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
This month I've been listening a lot to Margaret Killjoy's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast, a long-running podcast about (mostly) anarchists in history who fought to make the world a better place. Podcast infrastructure is weird, so I'm not sure how to link directly to specific episodes, but so far the ones that have stuck out to me are: The Civil War Within the Civil War episodes, the Paris Commune episodes, and the Gay Resistance to Nazis episodes.
...which led me down further rabbit holes:
- Baba Yaga Burns Paris to the Ground, on the folklore surrounding the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune. And from the same author: St. Lucy: An Anti-Hagiography.
- This quote from Louise Michel: "good men in power are incompetent, just as bad men are evil, and therefore it is impossible for liberty ever to be associated with any form of power whatsoever"
- The Edelweiss Pirates, queer homeless teens who lived in the forests and fought the Hitler Youth.
Fair warning though: excellent as it is, that podcast has more adverts than any podcast I've ever encountered.
A beautiful piece of writing about a game called "Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman"(!)
I found this short horror story about being trapped in the central reservation of a busy highway far more disturbing than more fantastical or openly supernatural horror stories.
At the time of writing, everyone's talking about Bret Victor's Dynamicland. I haven't had a chance to properly investigate it myself yet, but I did read Victor's Learnable Programming article, which is full of super valuable insights into programming and learning, and how we teach these complex systems and concepts beyond rote, step-by-step descriptions.
I love the promos Harley Cameron and Saraya have been doing lately. Harley Cameron's interjections are so good!: "Loser!"; "TECHNICAL wrestling!"
And MxM Collection are consistently spectacular: "He's like a cat... with hair"
I fell down one of my now periodic SCP rabbit holes this month. A couple of tales that stuck with me:
- The Edge of the World; a gently hopeful tale about endings.
- The Lucky Dinosaur; an alternate take on one of the original SCPs. These sentences in particular moved me in a way that I can't fully articulate: "But I look at what you have done and I think it is enough. I think it is good work."
(I think partly because this is how I feel towards my students, yet my job requires me to assign their work a letter grade. Grades are a distraction. The work is what matters, and the work - however it might have turned out in the end - is enough)
As part of my undergraduate degree I read Trevor Wishart's On Sonic Art, and I think it forever reshaped my understanding of sound and music. This month I discovered monoskop have it in their PDF archive. This was one of those books that dismantled a lot of my preconceptions and expanded the world for me.
Teenage hackers building a community in the margins of a viral tech/art project.
A couple of songs that I returned to repeatedly this month:
The anarchists teaching people how to make their own versions of horrifically expensive life-saving medicines.
I found this post about Confucianism's understanding of power relations enlightening.
Just as I was wrapping this up, a grey squirrel jumped in my open window, took one look at me, and then jumped back out!? Huh. Hope it's not an indication that greys are going to start chasing out the local red squirrels.
Anyway, I hope your September goes well. I'll write again in October.