On a phone, they make a really poor reading experience.
I was even thinking, this is what the web used to be.
If instead of this it was written on another Medium blog or as a bunch of tweets, it wouldn’t have had the same impact that it does for me. It is the way that it should be, for the story it is telling.
It could represent how the web was in the 90s, but it doesn't represent what readers like these days. I sent this post to my friend and said to just open it in reader mode. Our eyes are not as sharp as in the 90s my friend.
- borrowing a BASIC game-making book from the library and hand-typing programs into QBASIC on my uncle's computer, trying to figure out how to translate the slightly-different BASIC dialect in the book on the fly
- making my own ZZT[0] games for an audience of one: myself. When I discovered the web later and learned that there was a huge community of ZZT makers out there, I was floored.
I have made several games as an adult, but none of those experiences has really been as much fun as those early ones.
It was hilarious. I didn't know what I was doing, but the dos aesthetics and the many options for FF style attacks made me really happy at the time.
If you were lucky, there was a tutorial how to do X. But requires tool Y. Where do you get Y? Here it is on some apache indexed site! Oh, I just installed Sp0rk3h. Well, time to reformat and reinstall Windows XP. Good thing I partitioned my 40gB HDD
The learning curve for Photoshop 7, when there are 0 resources was pretty tough. I remember how proud I was when I figured out how to make an animated gif. Hammer editor (Was it called Hammer? to make maps for Half-Life engine games like Counter-Strike), There was an editor for creating an archive of images. was it a .WAD archive?
That kind of self-directed learning without hand-holding, I think, is not a bad thing