Well, that was a pretty crappy year for the world, wasn’t it? My way of coping has mostly been to go try to focus on the good stuff, and dive deep into a few big projects (more about that at the end). But I did one little thing to comment on the world. Intro 107 is a tiny C64 textmode intro with a shitty cover of the Airwolf theme, released under a pseudonym. If it doesn’t speak for itself, I can reveal that it’s a sarcastic take on one of the world’s ultra right-wing governments.
I’ve been doing loads of text graphics this year. It’s the best way to relax, you should try it! You can use Moebius for straight up ASCII and ANSI, and lvllvl.com for anything more advanced (it’s basically like Photoshop for text graphics). You can see all my text graphics stuff here, but here are a few highlights:
Bastard PETSCII with a customized font for this.
GIF for Textscape. Watch out, it’s an NFT! Please don’t kill me.
One of several cracktros/installers by Razor 1911 that I did graphics for.
My graphics for 2.0 by HarleyLikesMusic, designed by Dubmood.
Music-wise, I’ve finished a new album that will be out next year, and I’ve done some other bits and bobs.
This set was streamed at Lovebyte in February, with visuals by the Portuguese wizard ps. The music is a bit of everything, but focused on slower stuff, and there’s plenty of unreleased stuff in there.
I’ve also made music for two art exhibitions by Tommi Musturi (aka Electric) – Deep Show and his contribution to SUPERBUBBLES. Both of these were were kind of eerie and hypnotic, like much of my music has been lately. Has Goto80 gone completely slow? Well, no! Cases in point from this year:
Me and PET.CORP went on a small tour, and we released a new video for Killer Piller, which runs in the browser. It won the wild compo at the Zoo’24 demoparty!
I co-authored an academic article a while back, that was finally published this year: Retro-mediation, Commodore 64, and Interoperational Devices. I did a brief presentation about the demoscene in Bucarest, and my talk 46 years of PETSCII in 21 minutes was streamed in November. Oh, and Ziphoid and me has probably managed to add the demoscene as a national intangible heritage in Sweden!
Finally, there are a few big projects that have kept me quite busy.
I’ve been continuing to work on a book about PETSCII-graphics, which might be finished next year. The research for that book has led me into numerous sub-projects, especially involving older PETSCII-graphics that are not well preserved. One of these sub-projects was to add or update old PETSCII material at text-mode.org to make things more searchable.
That work led me into more work on text-mode.org: posting new content, but also fixed a lot of things under the hood. I’m going through all the posts to fix images, info, links and tags. With some 4,000 posts it’s taking quite a while…
I’ve also been busy with my most enormous project yet. It’s an online archive/museum of music software, which currently holds some 1,500 programs for various platforms, times and places. I’ve been working on it for years, and it has changed direction many times over the years. Now the first goal is to get a searchable database online, which might happen next year if we’re lucky… Get in touch if you are curious and want to be involved!
Finally, I’ve continued to work on a soundtrack and sound design for a game. It’s been very cool to explore reactive music, rather than the linear composing I’m used to. The game will be revealed some time next year.
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