Zoë Blade

@www.zoeblade.com

2141 Followers 42 Following

Musician, writer, programmer. Analysis and synthesis. ∞ Makes music for ContraPoints http://patreon.com/zoeblademusic

Superman: Birthright was a very well-regarded limited series comic written by Mark Waid, illustrated by Leinil Francis Yu and Gerry Alanguilan, and coloured by Dave McCiag. It was originally published by DC as twelve comic book issues from 2003 to 2004, then collected as a trade paperback. It's a Superman origin story, about a supernatural alien refugee who was adopted as a baby. He can't help himself from helping people to the best of his abilities, which are unique in his new home. This inevitably puts an expiration date on his ability to fit in with those around him, who then become afraid of him, forcing him to move on. He learns to reconcile these conflicting needs, to both befriend and help people, breaking the pattern of endless travelling by leading a double life. In one life, he openly lives as himself in order to help people, embracing his inherited abilities, along with his ancestors' culture as much as he can piece it together. In the other life, he puts on an act, hiding who he really is in order to settle down and make longer lasting friends, or at least co-workers. In spite of this, he still remains an outsider, his meek persona excluded from after-hours socialising. And yet he still chooses to help the very people who shun his fake persona and, worse, outright fear and distrust his real one. He helps them not because he expects their affection in return, but because it's the right thing to do.
Superman stories aren't a fantasy about how good it would be to have power. They're a fantasy about what it would be like if someone with power was good. — Ian MacIntyre, 2024 Superman is a fictional superhero, and a whole franchise of comics, films, and TV shows. The first stories, their characters, and their imagery were originally created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. In 1938, they sold their original 13-page Superman story, along with the exclusive rights to the character, to DC for $130 — $10 per page. If you can look past the character's preposterous supernatural abilities, at his core, Superman's just a relentlessly nice person. He doesn't care about his career, realpolitik, glory, fame, or money. He only cares about helping as many people as possible, face-to-face, when they each need it most. He's effectively a larger-than-life emergency responder, who's notably not prejudiced — the kind of person who would have, for example, actually saved Tyra Hunter's life. He could certainly be viewed within the lens of US propaganda, especially if anyone considers him in any way representative of people who wield power in the real world. I think it would be more accurate to view him as an ideal, for the target audience of children to aspire to. The world needs more characters as genuinely wholesome as this, and more importantly, more real people like this too. Not the supernatural part. Just doing the right thing.
A website displays a warning that I'm blocking their adverts, using the main picture of the article I'm reading, turned greyscale. The thing is, though, that the article in question is about V for Vendetta, so the image paired with the phrase "We noticed that ads aren't being displayed" is an ominous 1984-esque screengrab from the V for Vendetta film, of the chancellor dictator on a huge videoscreen looking ominously down at his employees. This probably isn't the tone they were aiming for when they designed this.
Superman: "Then why is everyone so eager to listen to Luthor?" Lois Lane: "Because he's loud. Because there aren't many of us who know he's a vile, vile man. Because he knows how to amplify the fear that drives people and how to trick them into turning to him for protection. You can't show up nowadays and be a super-friend. We are a skeptical lot. Government... advertising... god help me, the media... these things manipulate us 24/7, and worse, we know it. We claim to fight it, but most of us don't have the energy to struggle every moment of every day. Wear us down enough, and the lesson we eventually take to heart is that it's easier and safer to be cynical than it is to trust someone."
The Queen's Mate, a gracious Mate. The Biſhop's Mate, a gentle Mate. The Knight's Mate, a gallant Mate. The Rook's Mate, a forcible Mate. The Pawn's Mate, a diſgraceful Mate. The Mate by diſcovery, the moſt induſtrious Mate of all. The Mate in a corner of the Field, Alexander's Mate. The Mate in the middleſt of the Field, an unfortunate Mate. The Mate on the ſide of the Field, a coward's Mate. The Blind Mate, a ſhameful Mate. The Stale, a diſhonourable Mate. The Mate at two Draughts, a Fool's Mate.
A simile is a comparison of one thing to another. It's more explicit than a metaphor, often using the phrase "like a", or occasionally "as if". They tend to be employed in narrative fiction. In addition to clarifying something using a point of comparison, the specific choice of comparison should match — indeed, it is an opportunity to further establish — the tone and mood of the story. It should be appropriate to both the setting and style, revealing what the narrator, often speaking as a point-of-view character, seemingly most easily calls to mind as an appropriate point of reference. For example, Neuromancer is about high-tech low-lives. Its poetic narrator describes the dark sky by comparing it to a CRT TV set tuned to a dead channel, that's attempting to show a plain black image but still faintly glowing. At the time, this was a comparison befitting of a cutting-edge, stylised cyberpunk novel. In steep contrast, Equal Rites is about witches and wizards in a fantasy setting. Naturally, the points of comparison are timeless affairs such as ravens. As with the rest of the Discworld series, it's rather whimsical, with a befitting narrator. Delightfully fanciful comparisons are therefore in order, such as comparing someone's dress sense to that of a very respectable raven. Snow Crash, another cyberpunk staple, is outlandishly hyperbolic, bordering on outright parody, and so is its similes. I recommend littering first drafts with, at most, placeholders such as "like a [simile]", so that you can maintain your momentum. When working on a later draft, you can take your time crafting the actual similes.
Batman is a fictional masked vigilante, and a whole franchise of comic books, films, and TV shows. Essentially, he's Superman's goth cousin. Literally, he's just some guy dressed up as a bat. Clearly, he has issues. The first stories and their imagery were originally conceived by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's "Design for a Flying Machine", Sherlock Holmes, The Mark of Zorro, The Man Who Laughs, and The Phantom. Kane later gave Bill the finger, as it were, falsely claiming sole credit. It's a timeless tale of a rich orphan who becomes a masked vigilante by night. This mythology is malleable enough to be periodically updated to better fit the current social mores, from the camp 1960s TV show to the gritty 1980s series The Dark Knight Returns. Admittedly, it might say something worrying about human impulses and society that there are so many stories glorifying violent revenge. Still, a brooding loner is always relatable, just as a stylised old city at night is always atmospheric.
09:43 Yesterday I left the house, a rare event for me. The break from my routine fucked me right up. I ended up eating lunch about three hours late, then dinner about four hours late. It was more of a snack, at that. I had a little alcohol, and only one coffee. I usually have about for coffees a day, and almost always no alcohol at all. So it's perhaps not surprising that I woke up this morning with a headache. I had lots of water, suspecting dehydration, and some ibuprofen. Nina waited on me, I was so ill. I forced myself to drink two glasses of water and eat a banana, to keep the pills down. I assumed it was just dehydration, as close as I get to a hangover. Then I remembered the lack of coffee, and began to suspect caffeine withdrawal. This happened to me once before, after spending all day accidentally drinking decaff, and then throwing up before figuring out why I was suddenly ill. She was kind enough to fetch me her caffeine pills, and after a few minutes, presumably from one pair of pills or the other, the pain started to subside, replaced with feeling sick, like I genuinely might throw up. I made my way to the bathroom, and indeed threw up — out of my mouth and nose, no less. It burned my nostrils and tasted terrible, albeit banana flavoured. And then... I felt pretty much fine. Almost back to normal. Not quite OK, but essentially there. Certainly able to look after myself again. Just like that. Nina suspects it might have been a migraine. I'll take things slowly for now, even though I feel much better. I have no real theories on the matter. 10:19 According to Wikipedia, skipped meals can indeed cause a migraine. Humans are far more delicate than I realised! I've made myself half of my usual breakfast, just a single slice of jam on toast, and my usual frothy coffee. Let's get back into my safe routine! I guess I have to wonder, not why autistic people have routines, but why allistic people don't, if health is this precarious..?
A scintillating scotoma is a swirling pattern of bright colours around the periphery of your vision, that spiral inwards until you become temporarily blind. It's an early part of a migraine, and can serve as a warning sign that one's coming on, although not all migraines have this particular component.
"Define 'woman'" is a rhetorical question routinely asked by transphobes, as an attempted gotcha against trans women. (They never seem to demand anyone "define 'man'".) As an autist, I've never been good at spotting rhetorical questions, and have generally been much better at reading far too much theory and pondering things far too deeply. So here's my answer. As far as I can tell, a woman is an adult human whose gender orientation is female. That is to say, an adult human whose brain needs her body to be female in order to be happy and comfortable. Usually the gender orientation aspect goes unnoticed, in favour of the simplistic assumption that a woman is an adult human whose body is already female. This is because most people, including most women, are both cis and endosex. However, occasionally someone's sex can be quite nebulous, and so any attempt to definitevely categorise it is doomed to failure. Specifically, your chromosomal, genital, gonadal, neurological, hormonal, and legal sex may not necessarily all align, as is the case with intersex and trans people. Personally, I believe in consent and bodily autonomy. I certainly wouldn't want to deny anyone their womanhood, manhood, or nonbinaryhood. You know who you are better than a complete stranger does — doubly so a bigot — even if you don't yet have the terminology for it.
...Killing Joke. His choice of Michael "Beetlejuice" Keaton, however, launched a fierce storm of protest from Batfans. Their tall, square-jawed, heavily muscled hero was to be portrayed by "a wimp with no chin", mainly known for his light comedy roles! News of a petition to "Stop the Batman Movie" even made the front page of The Wall Street Journal (a US newspaper even more staid than The Financial Times). The casting of Jack "The Lad" Nicholson as the Joker did little to calm Batfans, nor did the musical contributions of rock star Prince. But maybe all publicity really is good publicity...
Your gender orientation (otherwise known as your gender identity, or simply gender) is the sex your brain needs your body to be. It can be female, male, or nonbinary. This is the one type of gender that's innate, rather than a social construct. It's been proven to correlate with neurological sex. It presumably also correlates with the part of the brain that houses the body map. If it's ever revealed that there's a type of neurological sex that can be determined individually and not just in aggregate, then it will presumably correlate with that too. Gender orientation was inadvertently proven to be innate by John Money's attempts to prove the opposite. He convinced surgeons to perform an unnecessary vaginoplasty and orchidectomy on the cis, endosex infant David Reimer, and later made him take oestrogen. He similarly convinced surgeons to perform equally unnecessary surgery on countless intersex infants, gave them hormones without their consent, and lied to them about it. Meanwhile, countless transsexual people were just as vehemently denied the hormones and surgery they needed to bring their bodies inline with who they were. In spite of all the gaslighting to the contrary, and all of society's attempts to suppress them, all of these people still knew who they were. In short, it's been categorically proven that you can't force someone to be a sex that's incongruous with their gender orientation, nor to pretend they have a different gender orientation. That merely gives them gender dysphoria. Rather, you need to let them tell you which gender orientation they are, and help them bring their body inline with it if it isn't already. In a just society, respecting people's bodily autonomy should go without saying, but as the enduring popularity of John Money's long-since debunked theory shows, our society is still all too often authoritarian.
Screen grab of Always Sunny, in which some characters attend an orgy that appears to be of ill repute
The 1581 was a 3½″ floppy disk drive made by Commodore. It's technically compatible with the VIC 20, C64, Plus/4, C16, and C128, although its beige colour scheme suggests it was designed with just the C128 and C64C in mind. It can format each disk to a whopping 3,160 blocks (790 KB). In 1541 terms, that's equivalent to over four 5¼″ disk sides, without even having to turn over the disk. Being a 16-bit generation drive for 8-bit generation home computers, it would have been quite opulent. I've never heard of anyone actually having one (or even having heard of one) back in the twentieth century, although I've since seen YouTube videos by collectors. Naturally, I also haven't heard of any C64 software actually being sold on a 3½″ disk. That would scarcely have been a problem for someone who had amassed a small collection of single loader budget tapes, and wanted to format shift them onto disk with the aid of an Action Replay cartridge, for quicker loading... The problem would be trying to find, much less afford, a 1581 drive in the first place.
The 1530 was a cassette tape drive made by Commodore. It's compatible with the PET, VIC 20, and C64, although its cream colour scheme suggests it was designed with the VIC 20 in mind. The C64 was one of the most popular home computers in the UK, and was usually bundled with the 1530. As a 1541 disk drive cost about as much as the computer itself, most Brits were content to load their software (chiefly games) from tape. The 1530 drive was reliable but notoriously slow. This wasn't a massive problem, as computer game publishers used increasingly elaborate loaders to bypass the slow default loading routine in favour of faster custom ones. Compared to Spectrum users having to bring their own tape deck, the C64 with its 1530 drive offered an embarrassment of riches. For one thing, the C64 didn't force you to listen to the digital screaming of raw data while it loaded. Combined with its SID chip, this eventually allowed publishers such as Ocean to get the machine to play a tune for you while you waited. Mastertronic even let you play a simple Space Invaders clone while the main game loaded. Just to really rub it in, when finding a file to load and displaying its name onscreen, the computer could even automatically pause and resume the motor's movement. Luxury!
"Gosh, mum, Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and what I'd like for Jesus' birthday is a 1541 disk drive..." [Please forgive me for skipping a bit, it's long.] "...and with daddy getting sacked, there's no way we can afford Commodore's £199.99 price tag!" "Can I have a flick knife and a nunchucka then, mother dearest?" "Certainly." Twenty years later, Markie's doing time for carving a [slur] up after a bar brawl. He was lucky, he'd been running the boards shortly after flunking computer science at high school. He was tough and mean, it just took the city twenty years to prove it was tougher and meaner. A sad but familiar scenario, I'm sure you'd agree, but until now unavoidable. (The article then finally gets on with actually reviewing the disk drive. For context, the average age of this magazine's audience was 15-16, because no-one older was hip enough to use computers except for a handful of women in their thirties, according to their reader survey.)
A glowing review of Spore, which cost a mere £1.99 on tape, and got 97% and Zzap's prestigious silver medal award.
The VICE C64 emulator shows the first level of Spore, which is very pretty and colourful for a shoot-'em-up, full of stylised animating graphics that a still screenshot really doesn't do justice to. There are lots of vaguely butterfly-looking things you mustn't let touch you, held back by lasers.
Virtual reality is essentially a technological method of tricking yourself, on some level, into thinking you're inside an imaginary place, rather than that place being inside a screen that in turn exists within the real world. It involves rendering a 3D environment in realtime, that continually responds to your head movements, compensating for your ever-shifting field of view. This becomes an immersive experience by engulfing several of your senses, chiefly your vision and hearing. With current technology, this is achieved by simply strapping two screens and speakers to your face. It was briefly popular in the 1990s when short-lived company Virtuality made a virtual reality headset and corresponding games based around a souped-up Amiga, played in arcades where participants were carefully supervised by professionals. I'm just about old enough that I managed to play on some at the London Trocadero when I was a child. Somehow, my neck survived. Eh, close enough Eh, close enough It then made a brief comeback several decades later, this time for home use. By this point, the technology had significantly improved. The headsets were smaller and lighter, and the resolution and framerate higher, providing a better sense of immersion. Virtual reality is much like 3D films (which it can also display, in a virtual cinema), in that it seemingly has potential as a very intuitive and engrossing medium, but hasn't yet managed to gain much traction. It probably doesn't help that the headsets are still quite cumbersome, nor that you have to set aside your dignity while wearing one.
Reddit user Longlivebiggiepac said 23 days ago: I like this. Might sound crazy but I retype all my drafts all over from page 1 in a new file with the added changes. I could be wrong but I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that a lot of early writers don’t excel in their writing because they aren’t rewriting enough, they are just editing a few scenes here and there. It said when you start over from page 1 and retype the entire thing again you start noticing more and more things that don’t work or need to be fixed. They compared it to how writers worked pre-computer days. When they were using typewriters there wasn’t a master file to edit they would have to retype the entire thing over for each draft.
I dropped turtles when I fell in love with ice age fossils. Collected the shit out of them. — (Fictionalised) John Laroche, Adaptation, 2002 A hyperfixation is an ADHD and especially AuDHD trait that essentially combines autistic special interests with the ADHD crave for novelty. Speaking from personal experience, it seems that every few months my unconscious finds a new seemingly random thing to obsessively research, catalogue, write about, and collect, before moving on to the next one a few months later, each hyperfixation leaving as suddenly as it arrived. You don't get to choose what your next hyperfixation will be about, nor when it will start or end. You may even find some of them downright embarrassing. Each one seems to involve having a whole new field of things to learn about without much effort. This presumably gets the brain excited about having seemingly achieved something, even when your life is otherwise in even more disarray than usual, due to the accidental neglect. This can lead to a lot of collections lying around, which is unfortunate. I've occasionally tried getting rid of collections relating to old hyperfixations, but the risk there is that examining them might reignite the hyperfixation, causing that particular collection to actually increase for a few months, before going back to gathering dust. My hyperfixations have included Shavian, mechanical keyboards, and chess. The chess hyperfixation was accidentally started by playing a single game with my partner on a whim once. In short, hyperfixations are a string of obsessions that you have pretty much no control over.
DSA Dolch style doubleshot keycaps from Signature Plastics. Sort of olive-grey alphanumerics and punctuation, black keys flanking those, and bright red cursor movement, all with large, white legends. The keys are just the right combination of squareish and rounded, gently cradling the fingertips. It looks like a keyboard from the late twentieth century, my favourite era for computer tech.
...An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce that phase-shift. Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we wanted by choosing the desired resistor value. I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color... -- Robert 'Bob' Yannes
For want of a better phrase, the Boolean colour palette is a garish colour palette that's technically simple to implement on colour CRTs such as TV sets. Colour CRTs work by combining the additive primary colours red, green, and blue in varying intensities to make all the other colours. The Boolean colour palette simply uses Boolean logic to toggle all three of these primary colours between full tilt and completely off. Any one in isolation gives you that colour; any two in combination give you one of the secondary colours cyan, magenta, and yellow; all three give you white; and none at all give you black. So using three bits gives you eight colours to work with. An optional fourth Boolean value for brightness doubles the palette, for sixteen colours represented by four bits — a nibble. This palette was very common circa the 1980s, used by old standards such as the ANSI escape codes for video terminals, teletext for televisions, and videotex for phones, as well as by new home computers such as the BBC Micro and the beloved ZX Spectrum. The C64 was notable for not conforming to this palette. Its engineers devised a way to pick any arbitrary sixteen colours, and so were able to choose a much more aesthetically appealing palette. Even into the 1990s, a slight variation of the 4-bit Boolean colour palette made an appearance in the IBM PC's CGA, EGA, and VGA graphics cards. This led to its use in Windows 3.1, and even the World Wide Web's sixteen named colours. It's surely the most common of the 3-bit and 4-bit colour palettes. When designing a user interface or video game using the Boolean colour palette, you can try further limiting the colours to complementary (opposite), triadic (a third of the colour wheel away), or analogous (neighbouring) colours... but with such a garish starting point, it will barely help.
Desktop publishing is, essentially, simplistic typesetting that can be accomplished intuitively using GUI-based personal computer software. Eventually, word processors evolved to include desktop publishing abilities. While these features are useful for some types of writing, they can be an unwelcome distraction for others. I contend that at this point, word processors stopped incidentally serving serious writers, as their workflow of combined writing and typesetting was no longer comparable to the format-free focusing offered by typewriters and text editors, which let you quickly write and edit plain text. In this sense, the evolution of word processors to include desktop publishing features is comparable to the evolution of MIDI sequencers into DAWs. In both cases, it becomes harder to focus on creating something when you're encouraged to simultaneously work on the appearance of what you're creating, rather than completing the distinct tasks one at a time.
A writer deck is a small computer designed for writing without distractions. It's usually portable, and often homebuilt. They can be thought of as an evolution of the 1980s hardware word processor, itself an evolution of the typewriter. Indeed, some writer decks are billed as digital typewriters. Some people are making one-off writer decks just for themselves. Some very small companies are making them in small numbers, also often 3D printed and open hardware. (The distinction between someone making a small run for their friends and a small company selling devices to the public can often be hazy.) Alas, these often look a tad hipstery, designed more as a fun novelty toy than as something you could actually accomplish serious work on. A few mass-produced commercial products fit the bill. Japanese stationery company King Jim has been making a whole series of them, Pomera. I've personally managed to get a good amount of writing done on a Pomera DM250, for example. A related idea is to repurpose an old subnotebook or netbook for the task. A general-purpose PC lets you install your text editor or word processor of choice, rather than requiring you to learn a new one. It helps to avoid a GUI if possible. Another related concept is the cyberdeck, which is also usually portable and homebuilt, but used for more general-purpose computing.
Hyperfocus is the state of concentrating on something to the point of ignoring your sensory inputs, including both the world around you and your own bodily needs. It can be hard for autistic and ADHD people to focus on something, even when we really need to. Often, when we do finally manage to focus, we really focus. We can do so for hours at a time, forgetting to do things like eat. It's difficult to both start and stop this intense concentration. It's especially difficult to focus on what we should be doing, rather than whatever our special interests or current hyperfixations happen to be.
A tube of mechanical keyboard switches in front of an out-of-focus keyboard. The switches are black, brown, and translucent.
As the film on the TV shows someone walking into a building, a subtitle sings "Doo, bow, bow", thus signifying an excellent needledrop, Yello's Oh Yeah, or, as Mac from Always Sunny once called it, "Der Bowbow".
My Atari ST
A 70% layout is a QWERTY keyboard layout roughly 70% the size of a full layout. It appears to only be used by a handful of manufacturers, chiefly Keychron. Keychron's version offers 72 keys total, laid out in typical QWERTY fashion across five rows. It has no function keys or number pad. The keys it does have are arranged very neatly indeed, into a perfect rectangle with no gaps, while still having the usual QWERTY staggering. It's very much like the more popular 60% layout, only with an extra two columns on the right, and shorter righthand meta keys the size of regular keys. This makes just enough space to comfortably squeeze in a standard inverted-T style set of arrow keys in the bottom-right corner, and the other cursor-moving keys above them. It's used by, for example, the Q7.
Two mechanical keyboard switches in cute pastel colours (one peach and pink, the other turquoise and green), that wouldn’t look out of place next to a screen displaying the Common Desktop Environment
Some of the moai statues of Easter Island at sunset, depicted with stunning artistry considering the limitations of the system: just 15 garish colours, only two of which can be displayed in any given 8×8 pixel character block.
The front cover of modern classic Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway
UTF-8 is a very popular character set. It's a superset of ASCII, increasing the number of supported characters from 128 to over a million. It's essentially ASCII's successor. The backwards compatability with ASCII works because an ASCII character is 7-bit, while a byte is 8-bit, meaning that every byte representing an ASCII character has its most significant bit set to 0. All UTF-8 characters are either single-byte ASCII characters with this bit set to 0, or multi-byte characters with this bit set to 1 for each and every byte. So within the context of known UTF-8 text, if any given byte's most significant bit is set to 1, it can be inferred that it's part of a UTF-8 character. Anything that can't cope with non-ASCII characters can therefore simply ignore all bytes that have their most significant bit set, leaving them untouched. Each character can take one to four bytes to store. Basic Latin characters take up one byte each, as they're still ASCII; extended Latin characters, and most other current alphabets, take two; almost all other alphabets and syllabaries still currently in use take three; and everything else is encompassed in four bytes. Contrast with UTF-32, which uses four bytes for every single character. As this is more consistent, it's much simpler to process, and less English-centric. The tradeoff is that it's even more wasteful to store. Compared to all the old code pages, UTF-8 finally allows using multiple different alphabets and syllabaries within the same plain text file or stream. Even without that important advantage, it automates working out which one is being used, at the expense of having larger files. Given how far storage space has come since code pages were popular, the larger files are well worth it in order to be able to give those files to someone in a different country and expect them to see all the characters correctly.
Aadam Jacobs in front of six rows of records covering an entire wall
A fake glowing terminal with a squarish font displays narration: Ursa Root slammed her laptop onto the café's rustic wooden table, almost spilling her cappuccino. She prised open the hinged screen. Emitting and detecting imperceptibly short bursts of electromagnetic radiation, the machine automatically exchanged pleasantries with the café's wireless router. After a short journey through ageing copper wires into the junction box outside, it was fibre-optic all the way, tiny packets of information bouncing from country to country and continent to continent at the speed of light. A so-called daemon awoke from its slumber in the recesses of what passed for her laptop's digital mind. The RISC microprocessor got to work shifting and processing data in meaty 64-bit chunks, the free clone of a server-grade operating system relaying information between hardware and software. Ursa couldn't see any of this, of course, however much she could picture it in the abstract. The background operation merely lurked, careful not to saturate her consciousness with an overabundance of information. Its job was a thankless one. It worked tirelessly, connecting with two likeminded programs, one in Hong Kong and one in Russia. Each had different but slightly overlapping chunks of a large compressed archive file, and whenever more than one of them was online, they swapped parts of it back and forth, slowly sharing every scrap of information until all three had the whole thing. It was like you and your friends each having part of the same jigsaw puzzle, and the jigsaws themselves that you could use to make perfect copies of your pieces. By giving each other your copies, eventually you each had the complete picture. Only your friends were random strangers dotted across the world. In Ursa's case, that actually was true of her friends. She didn't know the sex or race of most of them. Only their handles and IP addresses, along with more important things like shared interests.
With each character in its natural 8×10 resolution, a 640×480 pixel display can display a roomy 80×48 characters. A screenshot shows all the characters crammed into the middle of the far-too-spacious screen.
A tiny plastic-and-metal switch, sort of like an upside-down mushroom cube.
Screenshot Moleman from The Simpsons in a payphone, birds attacking him. "I need the biggest seed bell you have. [Pause] No, that's too big."
Visiting the replica Manchester Baby in Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum. I’m in the foreground of a rare selfie, next to their excellent recreation of the machine. It takes up a mere seven racks, whereas the previous panoramic photo looks more like thirteen, so I’m not quite sure if they truncated or squeezed together anything, or the panoramic photo includes superfluous gear or a second machine. You can definitely see where some more distinguishable racks are the same. At any rate, it apparently works! Thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) ahoy!
A monitor in hit film Alien, showing some glorious wireframe graphics alongside some fixed-width text. The screen's surrounded by clutter, including a photo of a kitten.
An IBM PC clone, as its name implies, is a clone of the IBM PC, albeit often extended beyond the original IBM PC's abilities. If you had a personal computer, it was almost definitely an IBM PC clone, unless you were poor enough to use a Soviet ZX Spectrum clone (unheard of outside of the Soviet Union), or rich enough to use an Apple Mac (almost unheard of outside of the US). As the IBM PC used off-the-shelf components, with the only original part being the BIOS, all a competitor needed to do to clone it was to make or buy a compatible BIOS that functioned exactly the same, but technically was made by someone who hadn't knowingly copied any of the source code. Companies like Phoenix Technologies and American Megatrends provided just such a BIOS, by having some engineers document what IBM's BIOS did, which they then passed along to an engineer who hadn't seen IBM's code, who then replicated its functionality without using the original code as a reference. That way, even if part of it had the exact same code because it was the logically sensible way to accomplish the needed result, they could plausibly claim in court that they hadn't copied the code itself, only the outcome produced by the code. This enabled any manufacturer with sufficient capital to create their own IBM PC clone, by combining a Phoenix or American Megatrends BIOS chip with regular parts. (Preinstalling DOS helped, but IBM didn't own that either. Microsoft did, and they were happy to sell it.) IBM was unable to sue the companies who cloned the BIOS, or the companies who slapped together whole machines, and so their particular personal computer became the de facto standard, with almost everyone buying a compatible machine, but almost no-one buying an official one.
The IBM PC BIOS's 16x8 VGA font, in the same application I'm making
The fixed ZX Spectrum character set, complete with lowercase letters, more punctuation, and non-ASCII characters.
My new desktop background, an indoor panoramic black and white photo of a computer. Being the 1940s, this computer takes up two opposing walls of a pretty big room, thick clusters of cables going from one to the other, suspended from the ceiling. Forties pre-cyberpunk. It consists of a lot of different devices housed in racks, presumably the same 19 inch racks that were already used for telephony and train signalling, and would eventually be used for serving webpages and creating hitech music.
A microcomputer is a computer that uses a microprocessor as its CPU. This allows it to be even smaller than a minicomputer. They were introduced in the 1970s as kits for US hobbyists, such as the Altair 8800. By the 1980s, British children were using prebuilt home computers such as the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 to play and even write their own games. By the 1990s, businesses had embraced personal computers, chiefly IBM PC clones. Technically, all home computers and personal computers are microcomputers, although by the time people started using personal computers, the term had fallen out of favour.
The application now lets you scroll through different UTF-32 pages. Page 48, shown here, displays various katakana glyphs. They tentatively look plausibly correct.
The English half of the venerable Hitachi font, as used on LCDs everywhere
The same interface, using the ZX Spectrum's font and colour scheme, is a bit lacking. Uppercase Basic Latin characters are well represented, but without anything fancy such as lowercase characters or box drawing.