From the top post on the creator's Mastodon account (see the 'socials' link on the site):
"I’ve had a long-standing love of stickers on laptops. I know a lot of you do too! So I built a site to highlight them. At Hope next week I’ll take as many pics (with permission) of the best stickered laptops I can find and post them.
It’s always sad when a laptop gets upgraded, the old one tossed, and that sticker canvas is lost. I’m trying to preserve it.
Please submit pics of your laptops so I can “seed the tip jar,” as it were."
I'm sure there's people out there with laptops blaring their right-wing opinions but I doubt many of them were at a hacker con like HOPE.
I am pretty sure "draw 50" refers to Lee J. Ames' "Draw 50 Somethings" series of wordless instructional books, where "something" ranged from "animals" or "athletes" or "dinosaurs" to "Beasties and Yugglies and Turnover Uglies and Things That Go Bump in the Night". Drawing fifty instances of a thing out of your head is a good exercise but completely different from those.
Oh cool! Yeah it made me think of these internet challenges "I'll draw and post 1 portrait a day for the next year" or whatever. And art classes "give me 20 sheep". Where it's fine to start "literal" but you are encouraged to get bored of that quickly and become more creative with it.
I trash and restart sketches that took a few minutes to do at most. It's very rare for me to get more than an hour or two in and discard it, I've explored and found a solid foundation long before I put that much work in.
If I was working in a studio environment there's the risk of things like "I spent a couple weeks painting that bg and animating that scene and it was absolutely gorgeous but it got cut when the we took a good hard look at the remaining budget and total runtime and cut the entire sequence it was part of" but that's another matter.
The Draw 50 process is solid. The classical techniques I learnt in training for animation are similar.
> Drawing takes forever because you're exploring AND refining simultaneously.
> We don't "rehearse" a specific drawing, we solve a novel problem in real-time. There's no cached motor sequence to execute.
When you have been drawing long enough there are a lot of cached motor sequences to execute and modify. A lot of art training is simply filling this cache: spend a few hours every week drawing the human body from different angles, in a year or three you'll be able to make it up from pretty much any angle. Add in another twenty years of doing that and experimenting ways to make your tools do more of the work for you and you can dash off "sketches" that a beginner would consider finished paintings that took days to do.
Music is the same way, especially with improvisation. When you're improvising, you don't make stuff up entirely from scratch - you glue together all the little bits you have in your toolbox to make something new. That's why we endlessly practice scales, arpeggios, learn new songs, copy others' licks, etc.
Why do you think half the keyboard/organ solos in classic rock songs sound like jazzed up versions of Bach and Mozart? That's what they had learned as kids or in music school before going on to make rock and roll.
Right, but there's no point in repeating the exact same sequences unless you are practicing, in production you always do novel stuff, in both programming and drawing. This is unlike other disciplines like music or carpentry.
I have been drawing professionally for about a quarter of a century and it is my experience there are a lot of sequences that recur. A hand is a complex piece of anatomy but you really only need a mental library of a few dozen poses to meet most needs, for instance. You don't repeat it exactly every time, it's easy to change the angle a little, the lighting needs to adapt to the scene, some hands are dainty and some are big meatslabs, but that's all about as easy to adjust on the fly as, say, shifting the rhythm of a rock song you know well into a big band swing groove.
You also learn a discipline we artists call "construction", wherein you can quickly break any object down into a few basic shapes that are incredibly easy to reason about in 3d, and quickly layer details atop that.
Also consider a daily comic strip. How many times do you think Charles Schultz drew Charlie Brown in a single year? How many of those drawings were largely similar to each other? Now that's serious production work. Animation's similar, you probably have a wider range of angles and motion than in a 1970s newspaper comics page but you are still drawing the same character a zillion times and your hand learns stuff and spits it back out without any conscious thought on your part.
Right, I don't deny that parts are repeatable, like creating a function or creating a git repo, or creating a 2 column table schema.
But a whole piece is never the same. This is because the cost of copying is almost zero and the value is in the end-product and not in the performance.
An exception would be if we are talking about an oil on canvas painting and a client asks for a piece that has already been sold.
I am pretty sure the sign should read "you have to be at least this much of a nerd to buy this keyboard" :)
Or maybe "you must be at least this far down the rabbit hole".
If you're a total keyboard nerd then you will have formed Opinions on which switches you like based on the sound they make and the feeling when you hit them. Follow a keyboard nerd community like /r/mechanicalkeyboards or /r/keebgirlies and you will see people constantly posting videos of them typing on their new keyboards to show off its "creamy thock" sound. There's like a few dozen different switches out there and some keyboard nerd shops will sell you a little block of a bunch of different switches with keys on them solely for you to poke them a lot and decide what you like. Or you could just take the default option.
If you're a total keyboard nerd then you'll have a copy of the QMK source set up so you can make edits and shoot it to your keyboard with one keypress. Or an even more esoteric open-source keyboard firmware package because you have Opinions about that too.
Picking keycaps is easy: what color do you want them to be? Do you want a few extra keycaps in a contrasting color to mark the home row, WASD, various shift keys? Keys with astrological symbols, abstract designs, or cartoon characters instead of letters? If you're a total keyboard nerd you are probably fine with keycaps with no letters on them because you have a complex setup with a lot of layers. Maybe you want to go even deeper down the rabbit hole and buy a transparent acrylic key with a little sculpture in it. Maybe you care about the shape of the keys, too. There's a bunch of different possible profiles for the tops of keys, because that contributes to the feel too and some people like to have Opinions about this.
What’s slightly annoying is that the ergonomic space is almost all mechanical. I have zero interest in that aspect, I just wanted switches most like my MacBook.
> “We are talking about more subtle things,” Paczynski explains, “like the game not supporting modern controllers, the game not supporting ultra-wide screens or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like being able to minimize the game.”
I dunno if it's really preservation when you have to completely rework the game to work on a screen three times wider and 4x denser than anything that existed when the game was designed, and hack in a completely new way of talking to the controllers. Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day. Even if they're still both running versions of Windows, a 2025 computer and a 1997 computer are completely alien systems that have about as much to do with each other as a 2025 computer and a Nintendo 64.
It's probably closer to conservation and restoration. One day there won't be any more working 1997 computers, so getting the game to work on a 2025 computer extends the lifespan of the media by at least 28 years. It's not unlike digitizing VHS tapes.
> Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day.
This is indeed one of the ways GoG ships games, but it doesn't work in all cases.
QEMU does a pretty good job at pretending to be a 1997 computer, or a 2025 computer, and it seems to work well to run QEMU inside of QEMU already, so should be somewhat likely that old virtual machines can be kept alive by running inside of increasingly deep levels of virtual machines running inside of newer virtual machines.
Legal, non-free, operating systems to install in those virtual machines is trickier. No old freeware version of Windows (yet?). Installing a minimal Linux distribution with WINE, for games that can be made to run in WINE in QEMU, might be the most stable way to preserve a 1997-era game. Except for 1997 DOS games (there were surprisingly many still being published in 1997!) that run so well in DOSBox(-X).
I remember working at a library field where there was a tremendous amount of concern that digital assets like floppy disks and files would become 'unplayable' over time.
You might not be able to pay people to do it but the video game emulation community shows that it can be done as a labor of love.
Projects like eXoDOS and DOSBox (and its derivatives) have basically allowed most of DOS and win31 games to be in a very playable state. GoG is doing the detective work of finding out who owns it and trying to monetize parts of it as well as fixing some of their own stuff. When it comes to many of the late 90s win9x/winxp games those are in the territory of 'maybe runs'. Due to the way windows is subtly changing the API and what a standard windows install comes with. Also APIs that now return even more stuff than what they tested with. Such as a video caps function may now return 500 items when it was tested to run with 60 and the input buffer maxes at 256. Never mind many of them act totally bugged out if you hand it a 4k screen and you have scaling turned on.
Had one game from a few weeks ago that I could not get to run. Turns out it was an intel video driver bug. Really old intel driver worked. One from 2 years ago didnt. One from a few weeks ago did. Old nvidia worked, newer ones broken. One windows box worked the other didnt. Shims like dgVoodoo2 and dxwrapper help to a point But still have lots of issues. Then on top of that if there is a online component the game will at best hang/timeout at worse crash out. Have one game if I open the leaderboard on it will crash the game. The board was apparently turned off 15 years ago.
But we do want that, right? We want people in the future with their unknowable future digital-experience-providing devices to be able to experience the video games of the past/today, right?
So in the interest of making older games future compatible we (those interested in preservation) do need to pursue those things.
How else can we guarantee they'll run on future devices? Emulators are one good way to make things run on newer devices, but emulators will in turn need the features to be able to run on 4K/8K screens, XR devices, etc.
I used to be able to buy a piece of software for $30, and I owned it until that computer became an antique. All your turning Photoshop into a monthly subscription did — was make me download the free version, GIMP.
Dude. Photoshop was like $700 back in 2008. You weren’t buying that anyway, you were pirating it or using an old unregistered copy of Paint Shop Pro.
I’m not gonna argue that every single app being either a subscription or an in-app purchase funnel now doesn’t suck, but you were not buying that for $30 unless it was from Bob’s Totally Legit House Of Burnt CDs.
"I’ve had a long-standing love of stickers on laptops. I know a lot of you do too! So I built a site to highlight them. At Hope next week I’ll take as many pics (with permission) of the best stickered laptops I can find and post them.
It’s always sad when a laptop gets upgraded, the old one tossed, and that sticker canvas is lost. I’m trying to preserve it.
Please submit pics of your laptops so I can “seed the tip jar,” as it were."
I'm sure there's people out there with laptops blaring their right-wing opinions but I doubt many of them were at a hacker con like HOPE.
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