My writings about the Hopkins case have solicited quite a few reader comments. I felt it was necessary to address some of them:
→ Eye on The Press: A Note to Readers on the C.J. Hopkins Case
Misinterpreting the law, being outraged at prosecution and misunderstanding the criminal courts system
Nikon Z fc, Nikkor Z DX 16-50 mm ƒ/3.5-6.3 VR (ISO 5000 • 1/60 s • ƒ/3.5)
Nikon Z fc, Nikkor Z DX 16-50 mm ƒ/3.5-6.3 VR (ISO 4000 • 1/125 s • ƒ/4.0)
I went to Berlin yesterday to report on the C.J. Hopkins case. Turns out that, aside from The Epoch Times, I was the only journalist writing about the proceedings.
→ Eye on The Press: C.J. Hopkins Acquitted in Berlin
Court finds satirist’s use of a swastika to criticise anti-pandemic measures legally justified
Today I learned that the creator of PICO-8 is working on another fantasy video game console called Picotron that is releasing in March. Unlike PICO-8, which is an 8-bit fantasy console modelled after third generation video game consoles (like the NES), Picotron is a 16-bit console modelled after the fourth generation (like the SNES). It can run PICO-8 games and its Lua syntax is largely backwards compatible, but it has a lot more features like 64 colours, an 480 x 270 pixel (widescreen) display and – and this is pretty important – no size limit for cartridges. It also includes an operating system written in Lua that can be modified. And you can code your own apps for it. And all of this runs on the web!
Although Picotron is conceptually similar to PICO-8 — an imaginary machine that you can make things for with built-in tools — it aims to be a more practical and flexible development environment. The two main differences are in specifications (larger display and cartridge capacity), and the way that built-in tools are implemented.
Unlike PICO-8 and Voxatron, all of the design tools in Picotron are written in Lua and are editable from inside the machine itself. Even things like the file browser, code editor and the terminal are implemented in userland. Custom tools can be created from scratch that run in fullscreen workspaces alongside the bundled editors. These additions and the subsequent shift in focus of the machine give Picotron the title of ‘Workstation’ rather than ‘Console’. Instead of ‘Plug in a keyboard to get a devkit!’ It feels more like: ‘Unplug the keyboard to get a console!'
Holy shit this is exciting!
I’ve been spending time in courtrooms again:
A local district court in Germany has fined a programmer for analysing software for a client and then reporting a serious vulnerability
Something quite bizarre happened to me on Substack over the holidays. I’ve written a recap of the incident for Eye on The Press, which also includes what I inted to do about it:
→ Eye on The Press: C.J. Hopkins and the Swastika
How I got called a “fascist German creep” for defending tenets of the German constitution I don’t even like much
So I’ve been watching Taylor Sheridan on The Joe Rogan Experience and those guys say a lot of smart things on that episode. As is usual with Rogan, they also say some dumb shit. But the dumbest thing is something that I’ve heard a lot and it just baffles me.
What is it with Americans saying “our country is a republic, not a democracy”? And it’s always Americans saying this. Is it something about their school system where they’re just not educated about this stuff? Of course your country is a democracy. A republic is a way of running a government, usually a democratic one. Your whole nation was founded on the same ideal than the French Republic, in the same era of revolutional upheaval. And that idea was chiefly that a country should be run by its people instead of a king and a class of privileged individuals that pass on their privilege to their children. So a republic, in contrast to a monarchy, is a government by the people, for the people. And how do you decide who is in that government? Guess what? Democracy.
“Republic” and “democracy” aren’t mutually exclusive terms. On the contrary. One (republic) is a practical means of achieving an idea (democracy). They can theoretically exist without one another, and sometimes do. One example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a democratic state that isn’t a republic. If anything, the US republic is more democratic than the constitutional monarchy in Britain. You can also have a republic that isn’t democratic. The Italian fascist, for example, founded such a state when Mussolini was dismissed by the king.
All this should demonstrate that the terms certainly aren’t exclusive. And why would you think they are? Aside from studying history — the Roman Republic is a good start — you could just look these words up in a dictionary. People saying this just drives me nuts. Especially when they are from a country that has quite often invaded other countries on the pretext of enlightening them about democracy.
Pixel art in the PICO-8 palette for #PixelDailies
Work’s been pretty stressful lately and one of the way’s I’ve been coping with that is to take some time out of my day to do some PICO-8 game development. I’ve had a number of game ideas lately, one of which I have written about on this blog. But I’ve now actually had a new game idea that came to me over the holidays while staying offline in a cabin in Sweden. It’s a mashup of the Half Sword demo and Dark Souls, mixed with a healthy dose of roguelike ideas, rendered within PICO-8’s tiny 8-bit dimensions.
The idea is to make an endless roguelike game where you fight enemies with a sword and collect their embers (a kind of soul-like essence). When you die, you lose all embers you’ve collected since your last rest at a campfire. So it doesn’t have permadeath, since you always load in at the last campfire, but the enemies get spawned in prodecurally, based on your ember score. It doesn’t have a world per se. It’s just a dark, mysterious place — much like the Half Sword demo — which enables me to concentrate most of the limited PICO-8 resources on having interesting enemies. One big goal of the game is to make the combat very smooth and pixel-perfect, taking inspirations from early shmups. As fas as I know, nobody has done something like this, which is kind of exciting to me.
It’s also pretty interesting that I’ve been able to re-use a lot of code from Tinyhold and an earlier unfinished prototype. I guess that’s a factor of PICO-8 forcing its restrictions on the developer, so you tend to have to solve similar problems again and again, even in games that look very different from each other. As it turns out, I have quite a nice library of (probably shoddily written) tools now.