A few weeks ago, I was rummaging through the Internet Archive’s computer magazine collection and stumbled on these cover illustrations from the Midnite Software Gazette, a Commodore user newsletter that ran from 1980 to 1987.

Now, I think about them every time I’m up too late, like tonight, working on my computer well into the night.

We’re almost done releasing the talk videos from the first day of XOXO 2016—including Mystery Show’s Starlee Kine, rapper/producer Sammus, Yelp whistleblower Talia Jane, and the brilliant Neil Cicierega. They’re all great. You should watch them.

Today’s talk is from John Roderick, the frontman and songwriter for The Long Winters and the bearded half of the Roderick on the Line podcast with Merlin Mann.

Roderick talks about a trap I see creative people fall into often, which he calls “the myth of no effort”—the damaging lie that creative work should feel easy if you were any good, while simultaneously feeling that anything that feels easy and natural to you is, by nature, worthless.

When making anything feels challenging, you feel inadequate. But when it feels easy, you feel like a fraud and the work is illegitimate.

This talk was a little polarizing. While I heard many attendees say this was one of their favorite talks, I saw some people who really didn’t like it. As far as I can tell, they thought Roderick was saying that only hard things are worth doing.

But I think it’s pretty clear he’s trying to debunk that idea. Some things will feel easy for you and some will take incredible effort, but you shouldn’t let that reflect on you or the quality, value, or significance of what you’ve made.

Making Roderick on the Line is, as he said, the thing he’s most proud of that he’s ever done. But it felt illegitimate because it was so easy to do. Writing music is incredibly hard for him, but it’s also meaningful and important to him, and something he’s returning to—fighting the feeling that just because it takes effort doesn’t mean you’re not meant to do it.

This year’s Interactive Fiction Competition is over, and for the first time in its 22-year history, the winner can be played without a keyboard.

IFComp is run by and for the interactive fiction community, a group of hobbyist writers and programmers making experimental art with prose and code. It’s free to enter, and anyone can judge it.

It’s an oasis of joy and experimentation and creativity right now, for me and others.

For most of its history, IFComp was dominated by parser-based interactive fiction: games navigated with keyboard commands like “NORTH,” “READ BOOK,” “TAKE BUCKET,” “UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRASS KEY” and so on.

But the last few years have seen a dramatic shift towards other experimental forms that don’t require a keyboard: choice-based and hypertext games, played with a mouse, mostly by clicking on links in a browser.

Tools like Twine, Texture, and Inklewriter made it possible for many, many more people to make interactive fiction without learning to code. These stories were also more accessible for players, played entirely with a mouse and without learning the conventions and syntax of parser-based games.

This year, more than two-thirds of the 58 entries are non-parser games played without a keyboard, most made with Twine. (This led to some predictable hand-wringing from some corners of the interactive fiction community, but it seems to have been embraced by most.)

On Thursday, the IFComp 2016 winners were announced.

For the first time ever, the winner isn’t a parser-based game.

Detectiveland is a tongue-in-cheek noir game that retains many of the features of traditional parser-based gameplay—inventory, interactive objects and NPCs, puzzles, and scoring—all playable in the browser entirely with a mouse. Robin Johnson built his own homebrew Javascript engine for it, nicknamed Versificator 2, which he plans to release publicly.

The third-place winner, Cactus Blue Motel, is a Twine game by Astrid Dalmady, telling the story of three friends on a road trip through the American Southwest, stopping off at a roadside motel with a unique past.

A special shout-out to Amelia Pinnolla’s widely-misunderstood TAKE. (Read Emily Short’s post for more context.)

I’ve loved interactive fiction for years—I even made a community for people to write their own. To me, it represents a beautiful fusion of art and technology, and it’s achievable by a single person. Seeing people push the genre forward with new tools and platforms is a bright spot in an otherwise-dreary year.

Go play.

In February 1949, the U.S. Army published Personal Conduct for the Soldier, a pamphlet of etiquette and good behavior for its soldiers, a “code of personal good conduct” for daily life.

Nearly every page includes a cartoon illustration, covering subjects like loyalty, respect, self-control, and respect for women and minorities.

Someone please give a copy to the President-Elect.

“In the past, some wars have been started by ill-mannered tyrants who believe their countries and their people superior to all other countries and all other people. They didn’t believe in consideration for others. It was much too late when they learned that lack of respect for others doesn’t pay.”

“Americans, however, who live among people from all parts of the world, have no excuse for being ignorant, intolerant, or prejudiced against any class of people. Each has a right to choose his friends and is entitled to civil respect from all others.”

“When you lose your temper, you do and say things you regret—that you may regret till the end of your days.”

“Beware of the man who speaks disrespectfully of women… Ladies do not like the whistling and catcalls and the personal remarks that ‘drug-store cowboys’ hurl in their direction.”

The pamphlet is part of the Internet Archive’s Manual Library, a collection of nearly 75,000 scanned technical and instructional manuals—a treasure trove of archival materials.

Thanks to Jason Scott for his effort in collecting these manuals, and pointing me to this particular one on Twitter.

 

After nearly a decade, invite-only music tracker What.cd closed today and deleted all its data after a raid by French authorities—a sad end to what was likely the largest, most active private torrent tracker ever.

Founded the day Oink’s Pink Palace closed in 2007, What.cd managed to survive for nearly a decade, including several crippling DDOS attacks.

It may have flaunted copyright law, but collectively, What.cd’s dedicated group of fans worked together to create the most comprehensive, organized, and metadata-rich collection of music online.

All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish. <3 2/2

— What.CD (@whatcd) November 17, 2016

What.cd, like most private trackers, operated on a ratio system—you could only download if you were actively uploading, donating, or otherwise making the site better.

While most of its members were invited by someone in the community, What.cd provided the unusual option of an open interview process. Applicants were expected to study preparation materials on site rules and encoding guidelines, conduct a speed test, and interview with a volunteer moderator in IRC. (Don’t expect to ace the interview, either.)

Their focus on quality and comprehensiveness was relentless. They encouraged original encodings at high-quality, with automated tools to check logs, verifying encoding, and culling out low-quality rips.

The ultimate goal was perfection. Every release should have a perfect lossless rip and the “perfect 3” MP3s—V0, V2, and 320 MP3 encodings—along with all accompanying metadata, consistent file names, folders, tags, and album art. What.cd provided tools for finding releases that could use improvement, giving everyone an easy chance to improve their ratio.

The developers open-sourced Gazelle, their web framework, and Ocelot, their large-scale BitTorrent tracker, which became the foundation for hundreds of other private torrent communities.

In addition to organizing music into discographies and collages, users could make requests for specific releases, spending their ratio to drive up the demand for rare releases. As a result, out-of-print and unreleased material often found its way to What.cd, occasionally putting it in the headlines.

An unreleased Radiohead song, unpublished JD Salinger stories, and Microsoft’s forensic tools for law enforcement all made headlines when they appeared exclusively on the site for the first time.

The result was likely the most comprehensive and well-organized music archive ever—over a million unique releases—assembled entirely by passionate music fans operating outside of copyright law.

what.cd was the largest and most meticulous library of recorded music ever assembled, as far as I can tell. Sad it had to end this way.

— Parker Higgins (@xor) November 17, 2016

It will be missed.