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Badge of Honour

Published 14th July 2024

Animation / Internet

When it comes to anecdotes, it’s always best to poke them with a sharp stick occasionally. That goes double for anecdotes about Walt Disney. No, I promise you: he wasn’t cryogenically frozen upon his death. He really wasn’t. Promise.

A less well-known story surrounds Walt’s political persuasions. By 1964, he was most certainly an avowed Republican. Neal Gabler, in his biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Random House, 2006) tells us the following:1

“…none of his honours may have been greater than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award the nation can bestow. Walt received it from President Lyndon Johnson at the White House during the 1964 presidential campaign – Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel – and it was a measure of his status that among his fellow honorees that day were the poets T.S. Eliot and Carl Sandberg, the novelist John Steinbeck, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the artist Willem de Kooning, the composer Aaron Copland, the columnist Walter Lippmann, the journalist Edward R. Murrow, and Helen Keller. Walt Disney was in the pantheon.”

Hang on, hang on. Back up from that list of names a minute. What was that?

“Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel”

So Walt Disney received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat… and wore a campaign button for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, during the ceremony? This is very, very funny indeed.

But is it true?

Gabler sourced this particular piece of information from Remembering Walt (Hyperion, 1999), by Amy Boothe Green and Howard E. Greene. In it, there’s the following short quote from Charlie Ridgway, a publicist for the Disney theme parks for over three decades:

“The day Walt went to the White House to receive the Freedom Award from President Johnson, he wore his Goldwater button inside his lapel. Walt had been terribly antipolitical until George Murphy ran for the Senate. Being a friend of George, he supported him and that got him into politics again. From then on he was a rather avid Republican. Johnson did not take Walt’s political commentary with good grace at all.”

It’s a great story, but it also raises questions. For a start, if Walt wore the badge inside his lapel, how did Johnson even see it in the first place? Did Walt flash the badge at him? And if he didn’t flash the badge at him, why would he wear it in the first place? Just for his own amusement? For that matter, how did Ridgway know about any of this in the first place? Did he personally witness it?

It all feels a little too good to be true. Worryingly like an anecdote that people wish had happened, or something that Walt had joked about doing, but never actually did. There’s just not quite enough information in the above quote to truly trust it.

Luckily, somebody else has done the real work. Back in 2007, animation historian Michael Barrier did some research, and wrote this in-depth essay, which is essentially the final word on the whole affair. I won’t quote extensively from that piece; it’s worth reading for yourself. But, incredibly, while some of the details are still difficult to pin down, the story turns out to be pretty much true. Amazing.

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  1. With thanks to Darrell Maclaine for digging out his copy. ↩

“At Best, Misguided”

Published 18th March 2024

Internet

Or: Why Conversation on Social Media Is Often So Tedious, Part #264842.

The New York Times1, “Classified Material on Human Intelligence Sources Helped Trigger Alarm”, 27th August 2022:

“Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.”

This section was quoted at the time by a popular account on Twitter, with the following statement attached:

“The way the NYT talks about what would amount to getting people straight up murdered.”

The replies were equally as scathing: “The level of unearned deference”, “misguided?!?“, “Misguided, they said! That was all… Misguided!!!”, “Jfc”, and so on. Or how about:

“Potentially misguided is generally reserved for thing like socks with sandals, not getting informants killed. But, you know, it’s all semantics.”

Here’s the problem: that’s not what “at best, misguided” means in this context at all. It’s clearly not meant to be taken at face value. It is deliberate understatement for effect. And that understatement, to me, reads far more strongly than an angry screed.

This isn’t a difficult thing to understand. Misinterpreting this is a very basic problem with comprehension. “At best, misguided” here simply means “terrible”. A very dry way of putting it, sure, but that’s what makes it grimly amusing. And there is place for such rhetoric in journalism, just as everywhere else, even on unpleasant subjects like this one.

With all the shit going on in the world, we cannot let ourselves be dragged into the idea that there is only one way to communicate. We cannot let pure fire and anger rule the day at all times, no matter how virtuous it might make us feel in the moment. We have to allow a range of approaches in how we write.

We do not win the day by reducing language to its most obvious, boring state at all times. We do not survive by being boring and one-note. Sadly, there are far too many people out there who think otherwise.

It vaguely frightens me.

  1. Disclaimer: I do actually have subscription to the New York Times. I can’t remember why I bought it – I think there was an old article I want to read – but I’m only subscribed to it while it costs me the offer price of £2 a month, as I don’t use it enough to justify any more. ↩

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“Are You OK With This?”

Published 28th February 2024

Internet

Jason Kottke, 21st December 2023:

“Substack explains why they are paying Nazis to publish on their platform. Friends who publish on Substack, are you ok with this? If not, maybe try Buttondown or WordPress or Ghost or literally anything fucking else.”

Greg Storey, 27th February 2024:

“Tumblr and WordPress user data have been sold to train AI, and Automattic intends to do it again moving forward. Content posted on both platforms between 2014 and 2023 was shared without user’s permission. Even worse, the data exchanged included private and deleted posts, private answers, and “content from premium partner blogs” for clients like Apple. […]

If you’re using Tumblr or WordPress it’s time to seriously consider moving on to software made by companies with more integrity. Any integrity frankly is better than what you have now. I can’t say enough about Ghost, Kirby, and Craft.”

*   *   *

It doesn’t matter what I actually think about the above two issues. I’ve come to believe that Substack’s Nazi problem was at least a little overblown, and I’d need to research the WordPress issue more thoroughly before coming to any kind of conclusion. But it’s all kinda irrelevant.

Instead, let’s take a hypothetical example. Some poor soul is running a newsletter on Substack. They read about all the Nazi stuff in December, and try to do the right thing: so they move to a self-hosted WordPress installation, as Jason recommends above. All sorted, right?

Only to now be told this month by someone else that, sorry, you backed the wrong horse. Don’t go with WordPress, they’re the bad guys.

That’s two moves, in the space of two months. I guess our hypothetical person could move again… but will the next service they choose turn out to be the bad guys too? How long will it be before that happens? A month, two months, maybe a whole year?

How long do they get to spend writing, before the tedious admin kicks in again?

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“Plans Change”

Published 2nd February 2024

Internet

Birmingham Live, 30th January 2024:

Jonnie Irwin says ‘plans change’ and issues fresh update amid cancer battle

Jonnie Irwin has said “plans change” as he issues a fresh update from his home amid his ongoing terminal cancer fight. BBC Escape to the Country and Channel 4 A Place in the Sun star Jonnie posted an update from his home amid an ongoing renovation.

Jonnie typed: “I was tempted to spray the remaining windows, but after interviewing someone that actually knows what they’re talking about I changed my plans. This more than any other Reno has been a fluid process! Check out the film we made on Morning Live on @bbciplayer, it’s worth a watch.

Birmingham Live, 2nd February 2024:

A Place in the Sun presenter Jonnie Irwin dies aged 50

A Place in the Sun presenter Jonnie Irwin has died at the age of 50. The TV presenter had been battling cancer for more than three years.

The devastating news of his death was announced on Friday (February 2). The dad-of-three ‘fought bravely’ with ‘unwavering strength and courage’, loved ones said.

A headline which deliberately tricks the audience into thinking a change in some home renovation plans is actually an update about a cancer diagnosis? I have to say, I find that to be one of the most unpleasant pieces of journalism I have read in recent years. There’s yer standard clickbait, and then there’s that.

It’s even more unpleasant when the person you’re writing about dies three days later.

And no, I ain’t linking to any of that shit.

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Click Around, Find Out

Published 21st January 2024

Internet

2024 is the year of the indie web and the blog. Just like 2023 was. And 2022. And 2021. In fact, how far can we stretch back?

At least ten years, and that’s without having to look very hard.

To be sure, perhaps 2024 has a little more momentum than most. There has rarely been a more high profile piece – at least in terms of getting the idea out to a wider audience – than Anil Dash’s article in Rolling Stone, “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again”:

“Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.”

Yet there is always a wrinkle when it comes to this kind of writing. Are we talking about something new, or is it already there? The headline of Anil’s seems to indicate the former, the opening hedges its bets a little, and then the rest of the article seems to indicate the latter:

“What’s more, the people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive are seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again. Take someone like Everest Pipkin, an award-winning digital artist and activist who has been making games, videos, interactive sites, and video streams all exploring the boundaries of digital culture. They evoke the open-endedness of the Nineties internet, but with the modern sensibility that comes from someone who wasn’t even born when the web browser was first invented.”

Anil goes on to give many more examples. Examples which are wider than a strictly blogging or writing mindset, but essentially all part of the same thing: the indie web.

This dichotomy – is there a potential resurgence of this kind of web, or is it already here? – keeps coming up time and time again with these kind of articles. In his piece “Where have all the websites gone?”, Jason Velazquez at first indicates the indie web has essentially died, replaced with social media:

“No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos.

No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them.”

And yet when he tries to answer the question posed in his headline, we get:

“The good news is that websites didn’t go anywhere. There are currently one billion websites on the World Wide Web. Here’s a few from my bookmarks that are amazing.”

He then proceeds to do just that.

All this is perhaps a sore point for those of us who have been plugging away at our projects online for years. We keep being told that “this is the year of the indie web”. Oh, really? Some of us never left the damn thing. I’ve been writing continuously online now on my own websites for 20 years, 14 of them right here. I published 100k of words on Dirty Feed in 2023 alone.

When Cabel Sasser decided to revive his blog last year, he wrote the following:

“My name is Cabel and you probably came here from Twitter? Maybe? For the past too-many years Twitter absorbed all of my “blogging energy” — it was so fast and efficient to dump out some random or mildly interesting thing. I liked Twitter. And I truly (mostly) enjoyed connecting with people on there. But I’m not feeling real great about the situation over there. Time to diversify.

So, here we go. 2023, the year of the blog???”

Cabel has proceeded over the past year to post some quite wonderful things, so he certainly followed through on his promise.

But for those of us who kept the faith – who always used Twitter as a scratchpad, and then wrote things up properly on our own blogs – it can feel mildly irritating. Twitter and social media in general was always a bad replacement for a place of your own where you could write. I never needed a big realisation on this score; it had always been obvious to me.

The indie web shrinking wasn’t really the fault of social media companies and other “big tech”. It was the fault of people who abandoned their own little place on the net.

Anil Dash:

“For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services.”

I don’t entirely disagree with this. And it’s especially relevant to people who actually want to make a living with their web projects, rather than just having fun in their spare time. But we also have to admit that anybody who deserted their corner of the web, did so by choice.

If you stopped cultivating your own website because you really liked Twitter, or because Google Reader was shut down, did you really care about it that much in the first place?

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No.

Published 9th October 2023

Internet

I don’t often bother making fun of Google’s suggested questions in their search results. It’s rather a shooting/fish/barrel scenario. But I’m afraid the below just broke me.

People also ask What was the last episode of Yes, Prime Minister? The Middle Class Rip-Off Yes Minister/Final episode

The above is wrong in three entirely different ways:

  • The last episode of the original series of Yes, Prime Minister was “The Tangled Web”.
  • The last episode of the revived series of Yes, Prime Minister in 2013 was “A Tsar Is Born”.
  • OK, fine, so maybe they’re just getting confused, and they mean the last episode of Yes Minister. That would be… “Party Games”.

Still, maybe I’m being unfair. Google trying to be helpful is usually fine, let’s just check their autofill—

Noel's House Party, autofilling to noel's house party death

You know what, never mind.

Why Do We Care About This Bridge So Much?

Published 15th September 2023

Internet / Meta

Recently, one of those kind of blog posts has been doing the rounds. One that gets picked up by seemingly everyone, and even crosses into the mainstream news media. I’m talking about Tyler Vigen, and The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge:

“This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It’s not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn’t connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?”

It’s a great story – long, but well worth reading to the end. In particular, don’t miss the copious footnotes, which contain a lot of the really cool stuff. Put aside half an hour and take a nice, leisurely read.

But it’s also worth pondering exactly why the story is so interesting. Tom Scott in his newsletter called it “exactly the kind of fascinating infrastructure-nerd archive dive that I love”. Which it absolutely is.

And yet it’s also something else. Vigen:

“It is at about this point in the story that whoever is enduring hearing about it from me inevitably asks: “Hold on, why do we care about this bridge so much?” Which, yes, fair question.

Up until this point, it was curiosity. From here on out though, it is stubbornness.

I don’t understand why this question is so difficult to answer. There IS a reason that bridge was built, and by golly I am going to find it! Will it be a bribe from a local business? A conspiracy with the construction company? An ordinance that requires a bridge every 5 miles? A makeshift deer crossing built by the DNR? Someone accidentally copy-pasted a bridge when playing Cities: Skylines of Minnesota?

Whatever it is, I want to know!”

The reason this has captured so many people’s imagination isn’t because everyone is fascinated with BRIDGE FACTS. The reason is a little more primal. This is the sheer joy of ostentatious investigation. Or in other words: research porn. Which is a close relation of that old standby “competence porn”, as defined by TV Tropes:

“Competence porn is a term invented by Leverage writer John Rogers (see here) and used by a lot of critics since. […] It’s the thrill of watching bright, talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems. It’s not just “characters being good at a thing,” particularly if that thing is fighting – otherwise, the term would apply to virtually all fiction — but specifically about using cleverness and hard work.”

The thrill of watching people “plan, banter and work together to solve problems” is very much akin to watching somebody poke every single avenue of research, until they find the truth.

I speak from experience. One of the big turning points for Dirty Feed was back in 2020, when I wrote this ridiculous investigation, about a recording of some Gregorian chanting used in The Young Ones. It became something of an epiphany for me when it came to my writing. For the first time, I understood that the story of the research meant as much as – or possibly even more than – the answer at the end. This knowledge has informed all my real investigative writing on here ever since.

And I think this kind of research porn does mean something, beyond the thrill of the chase. I see so much bullshit every day, often from people who should know better. Not just “stuff I disagree with” – I can cope with that – but pure bad faith arguments, deliberately misrepresenting everything. Writing something which attempts to get to the actual truth of something in 2023 can feel like a revolutionary, dangerous act.

Even if that truth is just about an old sitcom. Or an old bridge.

*   *   *

At the start of this month, I had to delete a post I published here on Dirty Feed. For the first time since I started writing the site back in 2010. The reason was simple: it was badly researched, or at the very least so incompletely researched as to make it fairly worthless. If you really want to read it, the article remains intact in August’s newsletter, but I no longer stand by the piece in its current version.

Now, I’m not really interested in self-immolation for this error. I made a mistake, I got rid, I admitted it rather than hiding it, and I’ll publish a revised version of the piece at some point next year. I did everything I should do. I don’t think any of it materially hurts either me or the site.

But the error annoyed me, and it annoyed me not because the research was incomplete per se – people correct me on things all the time – but because it was ostentatiously incomplete. Or, to put it another way: incompetence porn. If you’re stupid enough to think you’ve cracked an article about a TV show by watching just a couple of minutes of the relevant programme, rather than watching the whole series and appreciating the full context, then that’s your funeral.1

Onwards and upwards. One bad mistake in 13 years isn’t bad. But it’s a decent reminder: ostentatious investigation is this site’s forte, not leaping to the end because I want an easy update to the site.

Be more Tyler Vigen.

  1. I once made fun of someone who criticised A Bit of Fry & Laurie in an article, based on watching a single episode. As I watched two minutes of a 60 minute episode of something here, this was 30 times worse than that. ↩

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Scrabbling.

Published 30th June 2023

Internet

I’ve just idly been reminded of something by John Gruber, in his piece about the book Make Something Wonderful, and the brand new font it’s typeset in:

It has occurred to me several times during this stretch how much I miss Dean Allen, and specifically, herewith, I crave his thoughts on both the typeface and the book. Re-reading for the umpteenth time Twenty Faces, Dean’s remarkably concise and compelling “survey of available text typefaces”, I was reminded that his entry on ITC Baskerville points also to Mrs Eaves, Zuzana Licko’s inspired 1996 revival (has it been that long? I will forever think of Mrs Eaves as a “new” typeface), which Dean described thus: “an interesting if mannered experiment in reviving Baskerville by aping the unpredictability of form found in letterpress text.”

And it strikes me how, five years on from the death of Dean Allen, there is absolutely no proper archive of Dean’s writing. In order to quote his thoughts above, Gruber was forced to scrabble around on the Wayback Machine. Of course, it’s amazing that the Wayback Machine exists, and gives us as much as it does. But it isn’t – and never can be – the solution to everything. Its archives are very much an imperfect, broken representation of a man who deeply cared about how websites not only looked, but worked.

It feels like he deserves a better legacy than that.

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Ersatz Gaming

Published 15th April 2023

Internet / Videogames

I’m going through a bit of an odd phase at the moment with games, of pretty much any description. I realised it late last year, when I found myself stuck on the final level of Portal, despite beating it years ago. I also found myself stuck in the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time, despite beating that years ago too.1 I have so much going on in my life at the moment that Switch Sports Golf is about all I can manage. Figuring out puzzles is entirely beyond me. My head is too full.

But I still need that hit of seeing a puzzle solved, even if I have to get someone else to do it for me. So one constant joy over the past year has been Jason Dyer and his All the Adventures project, described as: “I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order.” This is clearly an utterly ridiculous thing to attempt. Fantastic.

I tend to dip into Jason’s extensive archive on a fairly random basis, rather than reading everything from the beginning. And recently, a set of connected games by mostly the same author2 has been keeping me company. These are very unusual – a set of first-person adventure games made between 1980-82, for the TRS-80. No overhead view or text adventures here. The closest thing I’ve seen in my world of the BBC Micro is Acornsoft Maze, but the similarity is really very superficial. It’s a whole different type of game.

The games in the series, linked to Jason’s write-ups, are:

Now, I’ve never touched a real TRS-80. I did spend a little time emulating one a while back, just for fun, but didn’t end doing that much with it. I didn’t really need to. Articles like these scratch every single itch I have for a bit of adventuring, without actually having to put the work in to map mazes and suchlike. (Something I was invariably terrible at anyway.) I was never, ever going to find the time to play these games, but reading Jason it is almost as much fun.

You might think this kind of thing would be ideal to do on YouTube instead, and I suppose for many, it would be. I think doing it as a blog does have some real advantages, though. It really does allow Jason to go into detail regarding how the puzzles are constructed, which a Let’s Play would find difficult to encapsulate, and a more general review would probably skip over. It’s this construction detail which I find so immensely pleasing about these pieces, and by the end of the final game in the series, you really do feel like you’ve learnt something tangible about how games work, rather than just being taken on a pleasure ride through nothing.

These articles are the gold standard for writing online, as far as I’m concerned. What better thing is there to write about than something obscure and under-appreciated, and actually analysing it properly? In a world where so many write about the same boring thing over and over again, stuff like this is an utter joy.

It’s something anyone writing shit on the internet can aspire to. There’s a whole world of stuff out there. Find the bits that haven’t been poked enough yet. And poke ’em.

  1. Incidentally, in the most cliched thing I will ever admit to on this site, years ago I ended up getting stuck on the Water Temple in Ocarina, and never got past it. Bah. ↩

  2. The first three are by William F. Denman, Jr. and Frank Corr, Jr. The final one is by William Denman only, although it reuses some graphics by Frank Corr. ↩

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WordPress: Not Completely Terrible

Published 8th April 2023

Internet / Meta

Today, I was idly thinking about the kind of thing I used to spend ages doing: designing loads of different websites, rather than just Dirty Feed. Among them were stuff like Ganymede & Titan, Gypsy Creams, and Noise to Signal, all at one point using the CMS Drupal.

None of those sites still use Drupal, however. The spectre of those sites breaking whenever I tried to update the backend still haunts me to this day. The incompatibility and general unpleasantness was absolutely rife. In the end, Ganymede & Titan and Gypsy Creams were converted to WordPress, and as Noise to Signal was changing from an ongoing site to an archive, I just made it all static HTML pages. Has Drupal improved its upgrade path since then? I haven’t the foggiest. I was burnt multiple times, and was warned off it for good.

Anyway, in an odd bit of coincidence1, today I also spotted designer Greg Storey posting about his current CMS woes:

“In fourteen days the CMS I use to run this site, Forestry, will be shut down for good and until I migrate to another system this site will be frozen in time. Don’t stop the presses here, the world will continue to rotate but this situation sucks. It’s like when a commercial or government entity makes a mistake that you have to now find time to fix. While software as a service makes a lot of sense, someone else’s problems are now my own. And I have to be honest, I’m not thrilled by my options because they either tie me to the same situation or they require time and money to fix.”

This must be especially annoying, as Greg’s site was only rebuilt and relaunched in 2019. In less than four years, the site has gone from relaunched, to stuck in stasis.

*   *   *

Ever since I launched Dirty Feed in 2010, it has used self-hosted WordPress. No Drupal, no Movable Type, and certainly none of the more modern or interesting solutions. Do I love it?

Not really. I like designing my own themes from scratch, but this is now really quite complicated, and has only got worse over the years.2 And it’s not the only thing which is complicated: the whole thing is clearly over-powered for what I need here. I only use a fraction of the features WordPress offers. Of course, everybody needs a different fraction of those features, and that’s where the problem always starts. We’ll find a proper solution to that one in the year 2942.

But WordPress has done two things for me. Firstly, it’s remained remarkably free of upgrade woes; there were a couple of wrinkles with comments and videos a few years back, but nothing like the bad old days of Drupal, and certainly nothing which has stopped me making new posts on here And secondly, it’s got the fuck out of my way, and let me concentrate on the thing I want to do most these days: writing.

Monocultures are bad, and everybody using WordPress would be a terrible thing. I fully admit that I’ve taken the easy way out. But sometimes, you have to pick your battles. My experience with Drupal taught me one thing: I needed software which wouldn’t keep kicking me in the balls.

WordPress isn’t cool. For most needs, it’s bloated. There are far more elegant solutions out there. But upgrades aren’t a hassle, and it ain’t going anywhere.

Sometimes, if all you want to do is write, those are the only things which really matter.

  1. I do realise that this is the kind of coincidence which makes it look like I’m just trying to write a blog post which flows smoothly, but I swear it’s true. ↩

  2. Partly because the web has got more complicated, of course, but it’s not just that. ↩

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