The Elden Ring Tiger Electronics LCD game is pretty fun.

Yeah, definitely depends on who I’m recommending to. If it’s someone who’s pretty familiar with games, I think it would be Elden Ring. Love the sense of exploration and discovery in that game.

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn’t a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer (“webmaster” to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!

I would add to this community migration, which will be important as instances start going offline. User migration is great, but, whereas on Mastodon, the content lives on the user, I believe here it lives on the community.

• The internet was way better before it became a giant shopping mall.
• Those cars that don’t have the flecks in the paint look like children’s toys.

Then, I have a couple that pre-date even boomers by many years 😅:

• Handkerchiefs kick the shit out of paper tissues.
• Cars have made the world a worse place.

Loving Arc! I kinda like how it doesn’t really make a distinction between tabs and favorites, and at the same time I kinda don’t.

Do you have a solution for links you want to have access to someday but don’t really want as pinned tabs or favorites? I have some pinned tab folders at the moment, but I don’t love that solution. I’ve used Pinboard in the past but, 1) I feel like that product is dying and 2) I’d like tighter browser integration.

Just got around to playing (most of) Mother 3 last year. It has a lot of the same charm and is really interesting in its own way… but it still didn’t hit me quite the same way Earthbound did.