Tucker McKnight's blog

Some Classic Video Game Websites

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:00:00 GMT

I found a handful of well-preserved sites from an older era of web design.

Sonic Team

https://www.sonicteam.com

Sonic Team's website has been updated recently (though not too recently, since it doesn't mention their newest games, nor the latest Playstation/Xbox consoles at all), but it still has links to sites for games dating back to the Sega Saturn generation. Links for the Dreamcast and Saturn are near the bottom of their sidebar, in Japanese.

Here's a few highlights:

Sonic Adventure, for the Dreamcast, released in 1998.
- A blog from the music team about their trip to a recording studio in New York. Check this one out with Google Translate, it's amazing.
- Photos from the trip
Space Channel 5, also for the Dreamcast, released in 1999.
Sonic R, for the Saturn, released in 1997.
Nights into Dreams, also Saturn, relased in 1996. The footer mentions Netscape 3.0.
- a page about the story with a very 90s era background

The King of Fighters

This fighting game series still has some of the original marketing sites up for its earlier titles.

KOF 98 "Unlimited Match". I'm not sure when this was made. This is for the 2008 re-release of KOF 98. The copyright date says 2007 and there's a Wordpress logo for the favicon. However, everything else about the website screams "1998." It's using tables for the layout and font tags for text colors. I'm wondering if there was an existing site for KOF 98, and they gave it an update for 2008 without changing the way it was written.
KOF 2000. A great example of how a site would sometimes have completely different layouts for each page.
KOF 2002
A general information site about SNK's games, last updated in 2009, but looks like it was designed before then.

Honorable Mention: Team Fortress 2

https://www.teamfortress.com

Team Fortress 2's website, which is the only one on this list that is still the current website for an active game, isn't really that old. And it doesn't look old, either. But I'm including it because it has a few elements that are from an earlier era of web design. It has had some revisions since 2007, but hangs on to those older design choices.

First, the width is not responsive. If you're on a phone, you just see a shrunken down version of the desktop layout.

Also, it has gradients and shadows on buttons: we had not yet flattened the internet in 2007. And check out the Twitter logo — that's the old Twitter logo. Like, the really old logo.

Any text that uses the Team Fortress 2 typeface* is actually an image being added as a CSS background.

The characters in the header use an imagemap to make them clickable, which is something that I haven't seen in a very long time.

There is also an Easter egg. If you inspect the page's HTML, there is a comment just inside of <div id="primaryHeaderArea">, which is commenting out some divs. If you remove the comment markers () so that the divs show up, it will add a blood splatter next to the Team Fortress 2 logo and the spy's face will become a skull.

And last but not least, the only Javascript downloaded is for the social media buttons. None is necessary for the website itself.

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Link List: Social Media & Our Attention Spans

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 08:00:00 GMT

Some articles related to social media and how it may affect our brains.

article: How Your Attention Span is Auctioned Off to Advertisers
article: Reconstructing Our Attention in the Era of Infinite Digital Rabbit Holes - archived copy
podcast: How much are we paying attention, really?

Using Obsidian as an Org-Mode Replacement

Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:00 GMT

I was an Emacs user for several years before switching to Neovim, and then recently switched to Kakoune. I've been getting more serious about using the note-taking app Obsidian as an editor-agnostic replacement for org-mode, and so far it has filled that role nicely.

I plan on writing a series of blog posts about how I'm recreating my org-mode usage in Obsidian. Some of the things I used org-mode for are not really possible in Obsidian right now, so writing some plugins might be part of this work.

Recreating Org-mode's Agenda View

One of my favorite features in org-mode was the agenda view. There are two community-made plugins for Obsidian that allow you to create an agenda view: Tasks and Dataview.

Let's say we have this list of tasks somewhere in our Obsidian vault:

- [ ] Dentist appointment [due:: 2023-05-22]
- [ ] Sweep the kitchen floor [due:: 2023-05-23]
- [ ] Do laundry [due:: 2023-05-23]
- [ ] Make post about Obsidian [due:: 2023-05-23]

Ordinarily, the [due:: 2023-05-23] syntax is meaningless to Obsidian. However, both Tasks and Dataview know how to parse that format and use it for displaying lists of tasks elsewhere in your notes.

Tasks Plugin

Tasks is the more simple option here. Dataview allows you to add custom values to your notes that you can query for later; if that sounds unnecessary to you, go with Tasks.

Once your tasks are labeled with due dates, in a fence (that's what those three backtick characters are called) labeled "tasks", you can tell it to show you your upcoming tasks, sorted by day of the week.

We can display an agenda view like org-mode by putting this in a note:

```tasks
not done
due before next week
group by due
```

When you preview that note, Obsidian will replace the ```tasks block with this:

2023-05-22 Monday

Dentist appointment 📅 2023-05-22

2023-05-23 Tuesday

Sweep the kitchen floor 📅 2023-05-23

Do laundry 📅 2023-05-23

Make post about Obsidian 📅 2023-05-23

Viola -- there is your agenda view. I like to have a "home note" that serves as a kind of dashboard, and I have that agenda view code block in it. But you can use more filters to get an agenda view for a specific project -- see the plugin's documentation to get an idea of what you can do.

Dataview Plugin

Dataview comes highly recommended by Obsidian power users. If you simply want an agenda view for your tasks, it's overkill. But if you're trying to replace Emacs, it's exactly-the-right-amount-of-kill. To stay focused, I'll only show how to create a basic agenda view here.

The same syntax for defining due dates works with Dataview, so our task list looks the same as before. The agenda view query is:

```dataview
TASK
WHERE due
AND due - date(today) < dur(7days)
GROUP BY due
```

The syntax is not as English-like as with the Tasks plugin, but in return you can use Dataview for more types of queries beyond just task items.

I Just Wish It Worked Outside of Obsidian

The biggest thing I miss about using Emacs is that just about everything you do can be done inside of Emacs. Sharing the same UI, the same shortcuts, the same everything for both coding and taking notes is fantastic. While I can edit my Obsidian notes in my new text editor of choice (Kakoune), there are still plenty of features that only work within Obsidian itself. These agenda view examples are such features.

In a sense, this isn't much different from org-mode, which requires you to use Emacs. Both Emacs and Obsidian offer an agenda view, and to see them, you must be using those respective applications. But the fact that Emacs was also the same application I used to edit code made it much more convenient.

Unfortunately, both of the plugins I mentioned here rely on features that are specific to Obsidian; they can't be run outside of it. Some kind of command-line tool that can query markdown files like Dataview would be a real holy grail for editor-agnostic, text-based task management.

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Why I Like Mastodon (for non-techies)

Sun, 14 May 2023 08:00:00 GMT

I was never a big Twitter user, but after some recent decisions from the management (like unbanning a bunch of actual neo nazis), I decided to start using Mastodon. But the thing that excites me most about Mastodon is not Mastodon itself: it's what Mastodon represents.

On the surface, Mastodon looks like a 1-for-1 clone of Twitter. Users can post short messages, attach photos or videos, and make replies to other posts. You choose who you want to follow, and Mastodon shows you their posts in chronological order. And right there we already see our first difference: Twitter (and Facebook, and all the others) will show you content "related" to people you follow so that you always have more posts to see. You can always keep scrolling; you can always keep watching.

Mastodon, on the other hand, doesn't do that. As you scroll through your Mastodon feed, eventually you will see the last post you read the day before, and that means you're done. You did it. You read all of the social media posts you signed up to see that day; you can move on. Mastodon isn't going to find more posts so that you can keep scrolling. Why is that?

Unlike most other social media sites, Mastodon is not run by a profit-driven company. The code is written by a nonprofit with help from hundreds of volunteers around the world, and the servers that store your data are run by additional volunteers who collect donations to keep their systems running. This means, unlike for-profit social media, Mastodon does not have the incentive to keep your eyes glued to your phone for as long as possible. For Twitter, the longer you look at the screen, the more ads you will see. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and all other profit-driven social media sites spend a ton of time and effort making it hard for you to look away. Mastodon lets you go about your day.

It's important to remember that if you are not paying for a service, you are not the customer. You don't pay Facebook, advertisers pay Facebook. Advertisers are Facebook's real customers. You are the product that Facebook is selling to advertisers. (Or, more specifically, your attention span is.) And the more you stare at Facebook, the more product Facebook can offer to those who want to buy your attention span.

Profit driven social media sites have been making tweaks for years to harvest your attention span, and some of these tweaks have had surprising effects. A major realization they've had in the last few years is that, if you only want to make your users stare at the screen longer, the users don't necessarily have to like what they are seeing. In fact, outrageous content can make people even more likely to keep using social media. Twitter doesn't care if you are using Twitter because you feel informed by what you are reading or if you feel infuriated by it. Either way, you are on Twitter looking at ads. Plus, the outrageous content makes you even more likely to post something yourself, since you need to tell that other person that they are an idiot. So not only does social media show you an endless stream of content, but it actually skews towards content that makes you angry.

It is often said that if a company wants your business, they will improve the quality of their service for their customers. But remember, you are not the customer of social media, you are the product. These companies have massively increased their revenue by creating the most infuriating, frustrating product that they can. They aren't catering to you, they are selling your attention span to others. Making you mad is great for business.

When considering whether some service should be provided by a for-profit business, many people will ask, "Who cares if someone is making money off of it?" -- suggesting that making money itself is the ethical issue, and they aren't bothered by it. A better question is, "If they are making money off of this, what will they be incentivized to do to make more money?"

This may sound dramatic, but opting out of profit-driven social media feels like an act of self respect. I decide that my attention span is for me to use on my own interests, not to be pushed and pulled by the interests of a Fortune 500 company. If you like the idea of taking your attention span off of someone else's shelves, there are a few places to sign up for an account. There's a list of them at joinmastodon.org/servers. If you don't have a particular niche you're looking for, you can just pick any general purpose server there.

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