(#21) Y2K Hats, SkiFree, Porting Win95 Apps

+ mean things my PT lady said to me

Apr 20, 2024

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No long narratives this week. I’m setting the timer for 60 minutes — here’s a quick dump of what comes out of my brain.

WE MADE Y2K HATS

Greg Swan told me to watch the HBO Y2K documentary. He watched it twice, which is a pretty big recommendation. Surprisingly, there was no narrator, and it was just a bunch of clips clipped together. Classic licensed UGC trick.

Honestly it felt like what AI will be capable of doing in a prompt in, say, 6 months. Yet they somehow sold it to HBO, which I’m actually super impressed with. Usually this stuff would just be a Youtube video or Snapchat show. Emily watched it with me and as we were watching we saw this cool hat:

We couldn’t find it — because, well, it was made 30 years ago — so we decided to make it ourselves:

And of course we sent one to Greg, too:

If you want one and survived the Y2Kpocolypse, reply me.

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PT LADY, WHY SO HARSH?

I’ve been going to a physical therapist for some neck pain. Probably because I’ve been sitting in front of a computer since I was six years old.

She told me that everything that is wrong with me is due to my posture. I’m always suspicious when someone claims their area of interest/income is just the thing to fix all my problems.

ALL YOUR PAIN CAN BE TAKEN AWAY, here, just buy my snake oil supplements or let me crack your neck on a subscription plan or put these little needles in you or yadda yada.

Anyway, my PT lady is kind of quirky and kind of mean. Here are some things she has said to me:

“Wow, you have a heavy head, that must be hard for your neck”
“You have weak eye muscles”
“You wobble like gumby” ((makes erratic gumby imitation))
“Stop trying to do planks, your core is so weak it can’t even hold you upright!”

This week it jumped the shark and she tried to convince me that I need to go to church. “Yeah, the community is nice,” I said, trying to say something positive and avoid confrontation — or, worse, retorting back something I think SHE should do.

She paused, considering not saying what she was about to say, but she couldn’t help herself: “It’s not about the community,” she said, “it’s about eternal life.“

Which is sort of cute to think going to a building a day a week is somehow involved in living forever in a spiritual realm.

Her ecclesial theology wasn’t even aligned with her own worldview, but there’s really no point in engaging in these things.

Except maybe in Facebook comments, which is 𝓮𝔁𝓽𝓻𝓮𝓶𝓮𝓵𝔂 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓭𝓾𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮.

I would keep going to her, except the last two times she started 10 minutes late and ended 10 minutes early, so alas I will find a new spiritual torturer.

Anyway, my posture is improving and I can’t wait to see what maladies it fixes.

A surreal and dramatic scene at a megachurch parking lot converted into a large water area for baptisms. A prominent sign reads 'It's about eternal life'. A boat, towing a woman on water skis, leaps over a shark in the water. The parking lot, filled with people participating in baptism ceremonies, adds to the spectacle. The megachurch, resembling a modernized former mall, looms in the background, enhancing the bizarre yet spiritual setting. — actual footage of what happened

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I PORTED THOUSANDS OF APPS TO WINDOWS 95

No, not me. I wish I had time/energy/ability to do stuff like this. MattKC just made the best programming video I’ve ever seen. It’s entertaining, it’s nostalgic, and he somehow fits an entire detective noir arc in. It’s YouTube content at its finest. Probably half of my media diet is YouTube these days, I find it a lot more educational than scrolling on the scrollers.

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THE MOST OFFICIAL SKIFREE HOMEPAGE

SkiFree screenshot — i guess it was kinda “free”

Here it is, the real 100% official ski free homepage. If you don’t know SkiFree, it was the skiing game on Windows 3.0. I first played it on 3.1. There’s some fun history on the page, like “I called it WinSki, but the Microsoft marketroids hated that and decided, for inscrutible marketroidal reasons, to call it SkiFree.”

Some people have made javascript ports over the years and I found this site while considering how to make a new port for the hecks of it. If you want to see it in all its glory, you can boot up a Windows 3.1 instance on Internet Archive and play it until you get eaten. It’s a one click boot up, try it!!