A rabbit hole I went down yesterday was this article on The New Stack and it went deep into places I don’t ever want to frequent1. In the article, it talked about the sustainability in open source, particularly when large corporations that turn over huge profits view contributions as “here’s a bug, fix it”. I don’t want to believe it, but it does seem like open source is only a viable business solution when somebody gets screwed somewhere down the line.
The XKCD comic you legally must share when talking about open source development.
I remember when I started getting “security researchers” reporting bugs in my plugins, and it got exhausting when individuals came with their cap in hand to my free plugins, putting the bug behind a bitcoin paywall. Oddly since my plugins have joined the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Programme these updates have pretty much stopped.
It got frustrating and stressful for me to push security updates when I was getting a couple every month, and I don’t have Google’s finest security researchers and AI breathing down my neck because my code probably isn’t being used internally in Google, or in Amazon, or Meta. I can understand why people who maintain these libraries are quitting when these are corporate entities are overwhelming volunteers, often with no compensation.
As annoyingly it’s been a few weeks since I attended, so I’m going to leave the images doing the talking, but if you’re ever in the area and you like nerdy stuff like I do it’s well worth paying a visit. The items in the cave and connected Arcade Archive are beautifully maintained – I am struggling to think of a Street Fighter II machine that was so looked after and presented, it worked perfectly.
Whilst I could wax lyrical about the day and the event (it was good seeing folks again also), I would rather pictures tell the story. I will say my favourite little gimmick was the WH Smith esque area where you could scan the games to play them on a Mister. That was effortlessly cool.
Another one from the list!
The excellent looking WH Smith esque storeThe fabulous NEO GEO Pocket. My brother had one of these, no idea where it went. The joystick is wonderfully clickyA lovely tribute to one of my favourite games ever, DoomAn absolute pristine Unreal Tournament box. Literally immaculateGreat Giana Sisters. Super rare as it’s a bugger to get hold of. It’s a C64 take on Super Mario Brothers and Nintendo got Litigious.Beautiful pins. I want the Lemmings ones. Already looked on eBay. No chanceA complete collection of Codemasters games. I’ve a fair few of these (28 in my collection). Notice the Championship Wrestling game with “Hulk Hogan” on the frontThe Nintendo Kiosk. Is a multisystem that was used to advertise the NES in Japan (I believe). The 3 monitors synced up so I was playing “1 bullet, 1 screen” on Duck HuntI wanted this so much as a child. The Cartoon Classics Commodore Amiga…I had this when I was a child. Shudder to think how long I played it for.At least one person out there paid for WinZip!The Tower of Power. I did add a Game Genie to it too…didn’t work.The Acorn Archimedes was a great machine, used to pray for rain so we would boot these up and play Chuck Rock, Manchester United Europe or Lemmings on them.Serious softwareSo the machine on the left is a joint IBM PC and Megadrive. The machine on the right I think is a machine that was in cars. Not sure of the legality of that but there you go.
If you ever get the chance to go, you should. The Cave is brilliant and would love to go back again one day!
So I’ve figured out today is the day I’ve become a runner. I’ve seen an article on our local news site where there’s a festive fun run taking place in a pub near me. Reading the article I saw that the distance would be “less than one mile”.
My first thought was “Aww, is that all?”.
If only Rhys from 2 years ago could see me now.
If time allows, I’m probably going to try and do it. It’s £2, and it is for a good cause, and the folks at The Griffin are good people. But yeah, that’s a sprint! May run there for a warm up!1
(Header photo is from 2 weeks ago at St Helens’ Parkrun when I set my best 5k time of 33:02. St Helens is a really hilly parkrun so happy with my time. Also I’m wearing my Stonewall FC “Trans Pride” football shirt as I think it’s funny that it exists when EA is going to be sold to a far right regime. Also trans rights.)
You watch when I do it I do something like twist my ankle and fail miserably. Curse my overconfidence! ↩︎
I saw an interview with one of the developers of ZSNES – one of the first truly great emulators. One of the key points, highlighted by PC Gamer and Time Extension was this great quote – how a developer achieved rollback netcode in 1997.
“30 times a second, I do a secret save state. The emulator plays ahead, maybe 30 milliseconds, and whenever it gets a packet saying the controller has changed, it rewinds to that frame and replays the emulation until the current point with that new input buffer.”
Rollback netcode, even nearly 30 years later, is still a sticking point for many online games. It’s fine for first person shooters where you don’t need millisecond accuracy, but for things like fighting games like Street Fighter, it’s crucial. Really the only first enjoyable experience on fighting games online for me was Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix which was released in 2008, and even now the first thing many fighting game enthusiasts talk about was how it’s like to play online.
The fact that the problem was solved in 1997 before it is even a thing is so joyful.
I did manage to play ZSNES online in Business Studies class back in the day. Usually we were playing Bomberman or Mario Kart. Never got it working over dialup, but for a free version over a decent network, it is probably better than a lot of rollback netcode today.
What’s with all the folks online tearing down other people’s stack?
I’ve read many a post in the past few weeks where people have been complaining about WordPress. There are justifiable complaints, obviously. However I feel like some developers and designers have made their entire existence about hating WordPress. Celebrating people moving off the platform. There are folks who post 2,000 word articles about how they hate Wapuu’s, sharing it as critiques on the community at the whole. But if you read the article fully, they simply hate Wapuu.
Obviously, everybody is entitled to their opinion. But I find it a bit strange. Making your entire personality on hating anything is weird, but especially for hating something as benign as a tech stack. Mate, Node.js won’t sleep with you. I also think it’s strange that people openly post on company blogs this. At least I try and keep it a bit separate. It’s woefully unprofessional and I can’t imagine it gets many customers.
Of course WordPress has problems. The block editor is a bit clunky still, and I am cheering on Fair to succeed. But nothing else is perfect. Shopify has problems2, Next.js has problems3, Webflow has problems. Different tools have positives and negatives. Being wedded to one system is always limiting. Be curious of other things4, explore the bubble outside, recognise which tools are best for the job, and go with them.
Never one of the Cool Kids
For me, I find the tool the most comforting to be WordPress. It’s creaky and clunky at time, but the sites rank well enough and do okay, plus I can make changes easily. There’s a reason why it’s been popular for so long. Same way COBOL has been around for so long. WordPress doesn’t attract the cool kids, but do you want your bank account to be cool5? Or traffic light systems to be cool? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather they work. I think WordPress is in the same place.
I find it similar to a patriotism. Usually the ones who I deem to be the most patriotic I find the ones who don’t bang on about it and recognise there are problems along the way. Whereas the folks who make their whole personality around a flag or a leader just a bit weird. Like they have nothing else to offer bar a piece of fabric from a flagpole. Because their piece of fabric is in their mind is better than your piece of fabric. And they want you to know about it.
I think developers who make their whole personality of “Hating on WordPress” similar. It’s text in a file that you open on a computer. We don’t have to be so emotional about it.
Finally – I’d like to draw your attention to the heading of the post. Do you know how difficult to find a roundabout that hasn’t been defaced in the UK in the year of our Lord 2025? To use as a base for my top image? Surely that’s worth a share just for that.
I may have assumed the gender of Wapuu. In which case, I apologise. ↩︎
Shopify is a nightmare for redirects. Like really bad. I had to use my friend Shane’s approach to redirects with it. As redirects in Shopify is completely unusuable. ↩︎
Have you ever tried to use Next.js to put anything in the header – like JSON+LD? And for it to work? Impossible. ↩︎
