Week 1: Jumping on the SubStack bandwagon

The RuneScape Archive, Million Dollar Homepage, Horizon Open, and all kinds of mysterious videos!

Please pretend this is the 1st week of January not the 2nd since that’s a far better time to start a newsletter! A pretty productive writing week, with 3 new posts across 3 different sites, and a mixed collection of intriguing videos from around the internet.

New articles:

• On my programming blog, I dived into the RuneScape Archive, a community project to hunt down old cache versions and save them forever.

• The first ever post on my internet history blog was published, an exploration of the Million Dollar Homepage exactly 17 years after every pixel was sold. The creator made $1m and eventually founded Calm!

• I finally unlocked all of Forza’s Horizon Open badges, so wrote a detailed guide to badges / online racing on my personal blog for anyone else working their way through the grind.

From elsewhere on the internet:

• I love the Eric Andre show, every interview has so many hidden bits of madness that rediscovering an old clip gets better with every rewatch. I feel a little sorry for Blake Griffin in his interview, he seems too nice to get Belipe Belipe Belipe’d. Jack McBrayer has an even worse time, poor guy!

• It’s hard not to love Group B rallying, and this short film featuring Richard Madden (Game of Thrones) beautifully shows the intensity and focus required, whilst also acknowledging that what happens outside the car is just as crucial.

• Sports can be hard to get into. Luckily, this isn’t the case with “Car Jitsu”, which is… wrestling inside a small car. It’s as violent as it is absurd, and the first sport where strangulation by seatbelt is a valid tactic. MoistCr1tikal gave a great summary, but every second of the CarJitsu Championship channel is amazing.

Other bits and pieces:

I created this SubStack, obviously. I’m hoping to use this as an easy way for anyone who inexplicably enjoys my posts to keep track of them despite their tendency to be scattered across various sites. I have no intention of monetising it, but hopefully it’ll be a way to collate all the little things I’m doing online. Not sure when to publish it, Sundays will do for now.

Internet History also has a Ko-fi, despite a grand total of… 1 post. This is mostly so anyone can “commission” an article if they really want to, and to get a feel for the platform. The fee structure is very, very generous in comparison to other services, so no risk / cost from my side!

Finally, it was just over a week ago, but I didn’t know 500 karma bounties even existed on StackOverflow, let alone win one!