Various Long Reads 7/19

Been a few months since I did one of these, so let’s empty out the backlog:

• The Story Behind The Song: Slow Ride by Foghat – (Fun fact: Foghat’s first two albums were both self-titled. This was long before Peter Gabriel pulled that shit for three albums, so I think it’s unrelated.)
• Chicago’s World Fair 1934 – A great short (half of it in color) which is neat if you like Art Deco architecture. I’m curious if any of this remains, or where exactly it took place on a modern map. Dubai is having a world expo in 2020 – maybe I’ll save my pennies and check that out.
• Why ‘ambient computing’ is just a marketing buzzword (for now) – I haven’t heard the term “ambient computing” (nothing to do with Brian Eno) but it’s a possible direction I’ve already thought about, so it’s interesting to see someone sum it up like this.
• Out of the Dungeon: In Conversation with Mortiis – The whole dungeon synth thing is polarizing among extreme metal fans, but every five years or so, I fall down a k-hole of Havard Ellefsen’s weird releases. Here’s a good video interview of him without the mask and ears and rest of his persona.
• The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia’s Mortality Crisis – I never realized the Soviet Union had a large anti-alcohol campaign in the late Eighties. (We only learned about them being an evil empire in school.) Interesting theory that the moral crisis and increased death rate post-USSR may have less to do with evil capitalism and more to do with post-prohibition ‘catch-up’ blackout drinking.
• How the SuperPET came to be – The Commodore PET was before my time, and I don’t think I ever saw one in the wild; my history starts with the C-64/Vic-20. Here’s a history of a rare variant with two CPUs developed with the University of Waterloo to run mainframe programming languages. Here’s another link.
• Robert Christgau, ‘dean of rock critics,’ still obsesses over music – Every few years, I waste about three days reading every review he’s written of every album I’ve ever bought, and we disagree on about 90% of them but he’s still somewhat genius.
• First Blood Filming Locations – I don’t even know how I got on this tangent, except maybe I thought it was shot somewhere in Southwest Washington, because it sure looks it, but of course it was shot in Canada.
• Tales of a BeOS Refugee – This is more about early OS X, but any time I see something related to Be, I bookmark it, because good luck doing a google search on it. Fun fact: I remember applying for a job at Be in 1996 when I thought it was the coolest thing in the universe. Glad I didn’t relocate for that one.
• The Real Story Behind Danzig’s Mother Video – I like listening to the first three Danzig albums just as much as I like making fun of Danzig, which is a lot, so I’m a bit conflicted here. I like the bit about the model later insisting it was an actual Satanic ritual and Glenn had cursed her. (Her name is Jill Kethel if you want to look up her workout videos on youtube.)
• The End of the Waffle House – If you went to Bloomington back when I did and you ever needed caffeine and grease at three in the morning, you probably remember this place, which unfortunately closed in 2013 and is probably now a bunch of condos.
• Halcyon Days – A series of interviews from 20-some years ago with many classic game programmers. I got pulled into this because of an interview with Ed Averett, who wrote the bulk of the Odyssey 2 games for Magnavox, a system which most people have completely forgotten.
• Star Raiders reverse engineering – I first read about this in POC | GTFO and I don’t know what’s more amazing: all the weird hacks the original programmers used to fit this game into 8K, or how someone meticulously reverse-engineered the source code.

As always, here’s another plug for you to go get my latest book if you haven’t already.