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January 2026

Created: 2026-01-31 (12:48:00) — Modified: 2026-02-06 (13:45:00)
Status: completed

We’re into the new year! This month’s newsletter has updates on games, hypertext fiction, poetry, cyberpunk media and mixtapes. Most of it can be characterised as excessively online, but there is a very good reason for this.

Australia is in the middle of its driest and hottest summer in years. The last time the country was this hot it was also pretty much entirely on fire from end to end. The heat does not leave you many options: either spend the whole day by the river, in the water, or spend it indoors with the windows closed and blinds pulled. I’ve been opting for the latter, more often than not.

I tend to associate summer with darkness and quiet, a season which alternates between wandering around at night and hanging out on the computer. An excellent season to hide away and escape into fiction!

A strange computer terminal

Bitsy Jam 99–TEXT ONLY

I started the year with a submission for the December Bitsy Jam on the theme TEXT ONLY. My game, Secret Squirrel, was about navigating an interstitial space by way of its signage, graffiti and strange markings. You can find it here and at Itch

The other submissions to the jam worked around this constraint in their own unique ways. Dreams to Text by Wandering Artist uses its monospace font and black-and-white palette to produce excellent moire effects. More than that, its textual landscapes are opaque and unsettling in the way dreams can be, which is a difficult atmosphere to achieve.

I also learned, through this game, that Osamu Sato of Eastern Mind and LSD: Dream Emulator fame wrote a book called The Art of Computer Designing, a guide to making black and white art with a computer, itself a work of art. I link it here for anyone else who needs to see this.

FILL ME IN! by Lacertilia starts as an upbeat fill-in-the-blank game but quickly spirals. The relentlessly upbeat commentary only gets more dissonant the further you must contort yourself to fit in. SPECTACULAR.

Street.lamp is a short vignette by Tripplemode. Its arrangement of images and text reminds me of a handmade zine. That is Enough by NickDidIt sees you passing through the same space over and over, with a subtly shifting sense of transit each time.

I only had time to play a few entries this month. No doubt there are others well worth a look! Part of the joy with these jams in particular is seeing just how varied the things people make for them are, even working within the confines of this particular engine. Developers have no excuse for staying in the lines, when people are being this inventive with Bitsy.

Now and then your computer will suddenly stop working, or throw something at you that you didn’t ask for. But in general it is a companion which will gladly help you create a world of interesting things. (The Art of Computer Designing)

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Updates

Continuing with my commitment to return to some neglected areas of this site, I finally got around to rewriting my page on Reagan Library, an early hypertext work which has been left stranded by several decades of shifting web formats.

I’ve had copious notes and sketches floating around on this work for years, only… the world that it depicts is pretty bleak, and spending too much time inside of it tends to put me in a bleak headspace myself. Reagan Library may be something you are better off exploring in fragments. Its author possibly intends as much when he describes it as a “space probe.”

I’m still not entirely satisfied with this page, suspect there is a lot more to write about, but for now am content to let it sit and rest.

Elsewhere, I added a little more to the page on web spaces, to temporarily close out my memories of the dial-up era. This thing is getting increasingly unwieldy. I briefly hit a wall after writing this last section and was not sure where to go next. But a few weeks working on other things seems to have resolved this, so expect another update later this month.

Staying on the topic of the web, I also added more outgoing links to my exits are collection. A lot of fan sites and net art in this batch. The internet is a vast and exciting space! I have also added more stuff to my are.na, including channels for writing about games, for pretty visualisations, for sacrifice zones and for images of Garfield

Finally, I made some updates to a couple permutational poems, fixing the code for LAND and properly linking ZONE, which was sitting hidden before now. I want to write more–and more about–net poetry this year, about OULIPO and this entire literary practice that exists alongside, and yet a little apart from, the development of computing throughout the twentieth century. For now this part of the site remains a sketch, a promissory note.

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The National Film and Sound Archive in my city is excellent for many reasons, one being that they regularly screen films in their beautiful art-deco theatre. This month they ran a cyberpunk retrospective, which included RoboCop, The Matrix, Blade Runner and Akira.

The Matrix and Blade Runner are old friends and great, stupid fun to see on a big screen. RoboCop was unexpectedly brilliant, rooted in the postindustrial wreckage of eighties Detroit and in the anxieties about automation, economic precarity and unemployment we associate with that city, in that era. It was, in fairness, also content to be very violent and sometimes stupid. I appreciate that in a film.

Akira got screened a few years back in this same theatre. Last time, it was supposed to be followed by a panellist discussion, but, well… without wanting to spoil how that film ends, it ended with everyone sitting in stunned silence. It took a little while before anyone in the audience could shake themselves out of it and ask anything of the panellists.

If you have the opportunity to see Akira on a big screen, preferably with big LOUD speakers, you should not pass it up. It’s a phenomenal film, scary and sad and spectacular. Its score deserves special mention too, an intense mixture of chanting and gamelan produced by Geinoh Yamashirogumi.

Really, though, if you have the opportunity to see any of these films in a theatre, you should go see them. Cyberpunk as a genre lends itself so well to the theatre experience–you get to see all the interfacial, technological, and often grisly details you would otherwise miss!

Between this retrospective, and all the extra time stuck indoors, I have become obsessed with cyberpunk fiction all over again. I re-watched Serial Experiments Lain and took copious notes on each episode. I re-watched Paprika and now feel compelled to work through all of Satoshi Kon’s filmography. I’ve started in on Ghost in the Shell and am actively chasing down a restored version of Metropolis. This may engulf my whole summer.

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Around the grounds

I wound up back on the gemini protocol one sweaty afternoon trapped indoors, and, following up a confluence of links, stumbled across a series of lo-fi mixtapes released under the name KONPEITO. The tapes were released throughout 2020-21, back in the initial waves of the pandemic, when everyone was similarly trapped indoors and gemini was getting a heap of traffic.

KONPEITO seems to have enjoyed a legendary reputation amongst the community. But after its host went offline the tapes became unavailable. Someone has now reuploaded them to a mirror for all to enjoy, once again, but the catch is that they are still only accessible though the gemini protocol.

But it is well worth chasing these mixtapes down if you enjoy any combination of lo-fi, performance poetry, post-rock and/or trap. They are gorgeously put together. I particularly want to shout out the omake release titled Night Letters to X, which intermixes dark ambient and post-rock tracks with numbers station recordings.

KONPEITO tapes have become the almost exclusive soundtrack for my bus trips to and from work lately. It is fascinating to me that they were exclusively released in this tiny corner of the internet, kept deliberately obscure: secretive bootlegs.

Gemini is a very, very niche communications protocol, possibly only used by people trapped indoors by heatwaves, pandemics and other disasters. If you need a primer, or just want to get in, grab the tapes and get out, the Gemini Quickstart is a useful if slightly outdated point of call.

gemini://konpeito.thebackupbox.net

This was another long one! Expect the length of these newsletters to steadily drop off as the southern hemisphere passes into autumn and my prospects for leaving the house improve.

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References

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