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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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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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Short.

Published 23rd February 2023

Internet

Matt Gemmell:

“If you’ve wanted to start blogging but felt reluctant, I’d like to invite you to shift your perspective. Write less, and be at peace with it.”

Andy Bell:

“Get a lot of posts out quick, and suddenly you’re more confident in your writing, you’ve got some momentum and you get quicker.”

If you want to write online, then write. Short is fine. Short is useful. Just do it.

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Absolution.

Published 30th December 2022

Internet

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read a number of different blog posts from many different people, all saying roughly the same thing. “Oh, now that dickhead is running Twitter, I’d best start updating my personal site again.” Some of them are more considered than others. Indeed, a fair few of them make some extremely good points.

And yet every time, I have the same reaction. A peculiar combination of hope… and my eyes slowly rotating to the back of my skull.

Now, look, I admit it. Part of the reason for this is because I’ve been writing on Dirty Feed for well over a decade, and writing consistently online since 2003. The idea that you should own your words, and not just rely on social media, has been talked about for years, well before Musk got his wrecking ball out. But this line of thinking doesn’t really get you very far. The person who realises everything at the earliest possible opportunity would be some kind of superhuman indeed.

No, there’s another reason for my eye-rotating antics. Let me give an example of one particular site which I’ve read recently.1

Yesterday, they did a brand new post, stating that they were going to start blogging again. This was their first new post in nearly two years. Their previous posts, from early 2021, were about the following topics:

  1. Procrastinating with their writing.
  2. A long-abandoned manifesto for their blog.
  3. A short piece about Substack.
  4. The software they use for their writing.
  5. How their writing workflow doesn’t work any more… which explains why they aren’t writing.
  6. And finally, another post which promises some more writing, at some point.

Now, I’m going to be absolutely fair here: the blog I’m talking about above does have some self-awareness about all this. They know it’s silly. But that doesn’t stop it being a perfect catalogue of writing about the possibility of doing some writing, and then not really doing any writing. It’s an utter waste of time.

Or, as I called it once, pretend blogging.

[Read more →]

  1. I’m not linking to it, for obvious reasons. It’s still Christmas. ↩

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,

Something New

Published 11th December 2022

Internet

On a Google Sheets document, I have a list of articles planned for Dirty Feed. As it stands today, there are 236 items on it. The chances of getting round to writing all of them are zero. The chances of getting round to half of them are also zero. What makes it even worse is that it isn’t even my only list of potential Dirty Feed projects.

But one potential article seemed so vanishingly unlikely to get done, it never even made it onto any of my lists. That article was a history of a little show called Parallel 9. A Saturday morning kid’s show from my childhood, which I vaguely remembered, clearly had a hugely interesting story attached to it… and yet nobody had really done any research on it at all.

Well, now they have. My old pal Jonathan Bufton is currently writing a multi-part history of the show. Part 1 and Part 2 deal with how that first series of Parallel 9 looked on-screen, but it’s Part 3 where things begin to get really special. Having been given access to plenty of never-before-seen documentation, Jonathan has put together the true story of how the programme was made. A story which has never, ever been told before, that people have wondered about for years… and suddenly, there it all is, 30 years later.

[Read more →]

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Procrastination.

Published 28th October 2022

Internet / Life

Hey, everyone! Fed up with your ridiculous procrastinating? Don’t worry, this article will tell you how to stop once and for all.

“Most of the tech industry is designed to turn you into a vegetable. They invite you to click on things until you click ads, and then they try to make you click ads until you click buy. Since many of us work on the screen, it can be confusing to discern between consumption and production. Here is a guideline:

  • No one came back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized.
  • No one peeled out motivated and happy after two hours of scrolling through Instagram.
  • No one ever got inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza.
  • Buying some stuff online is not very productive. It’s consuming.

Hang on.

I can’t comment on Instagram; I don’t use it. But I most have definitely come back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized; I most definitely have been inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza, and I most definitely have been productive through buying things online.

Take YouTube; it never occurred to this person that someone might genuinely be inspired by what they see there. Or, in my case, use it as a proper research tool. Which I do, endlessly. You only have to read my articles on here to know how useful people’s uploads are to me on Dirty Feed; here’s a particularly good example.

Or how about having a “Netflix Bonanza”? Well, there’s a loaded phrase if ever I heard one. So let’s replace it with the rather more normal phrase “watching television”. Now we have the phrase “No one ever got inspired to finish things up after watching television”, which is a self-evidently ludicrous phrase. As though television can’t be inspiring. As though television hasn’t inspired most of the writing on this site. It’s the same old “television is mindless” stuff, all dressed up for a new generation. There are times when I have watched some TV, and not been able to resist the urge to immediately go to my laptop and start writing about it.

As for buying things online? Bang go all the books I’ve bought which have been vital while researching one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, then. Writing that article took the purchase of four books, none of which I could easily access any other way.

Indeed, discerning between “consumption and production” is difficult at best. So much of the writing I do here involves both. I consume in order to create. The two are entirely intertwined. Consumption here is being painted as entirely passive, and I really don’t think that is the case at all.

But the further I get into the article, the more I blink in confusion. Here are some things which have apparently “never ignited any meaningful action”:

  • Discussing with strangers

Discussing things with strangers has lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

  • Reading the comments
  • Reacting to comments

Comments on here have lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

  • Reading tweets
  • Liking tweets

Tweets have… fill in the rest of this sentence for yourself.

Some of my best work here has involved reading tweets and comments. Without them, the site would be far less worthwhile, as I wrote about recently. “Reading tweets” was responsible for a major update and correction to one of the most popular pieces I’ve written all year.

Now, if you want to argue that writing this site isn’t “meaningful action”, then that’s fine. I feel awkward making the argument that it is, because if you’re a certain kind of person, you’re conditioned into thinking that’s arrogant and self-important. But this site has given enough joy to people over the years for me to confidently state that what I do here is, in fact, meaningful. And all the above would be absolutely terrible advice for me, and I think many others.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful. I presume what the writer is trying to say is that you should be careful about distractions. I get it, I truly do. But trying to entirely silo off “consumption” and “production” is not the way to make your case. It’s not that simple. Nowhere near so, in fact.

And if you truly think that watching television is always that passive, or that reading tweets is always that pointless, I would suggest that you aren’t very good at either watching television, or reading tweets.

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they’re good blogs Brent

Published 11th October 2022

Internet / Meta

Last year, software developer Brent Simmons wrote something which stayed with me. It’s short, so hopefully he won’t mind me quoting all of it.

“This blog is almost 22 years old, and in all that time I’ve been solid about posting regularly — until this recent dry spell.

I skipped the summer. Last post was in June. There was just one that month, and just one in May.

I have an explanation: while my health and physical circumstances are unchanged and, happily, fine, I have not felt the drive to write here that I always felt.

I never, in all these years, had to push myself. I’d get an idea and I would be compelled to write it up and publish it. It was always that simple.

But I haven’t felt that way in many months, and I’m not sure I will again.

Maybe this is temporary, and there will be hundreds more posts to come.

But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.

I have no plan. I’m feeling my way to that destination, which is years off, surely, and I just hope to manage it gracefully. (I don’t know of any role models with this.)

Anyway. In case I don’t write here again — in case these are the last words of this blog — thank you. I loved writing here, and you are why.”

Since then, Brent has stayed true to his word, and really has become less of a public person. He’s made just one more blog post since then, and seems to have deleted nearly all of his tweets too.

[Read more →]

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Small Fries

Published 8th October 2022

Internet / Videogames

An interesting thing happens to people who are very successful in their chosen line of work. Often, when they retire or just move on, they never want to talk about the field they worked in again. Maybe it bores them now. Maybe they were never truly interested in the first place. Either way, it’s stymied a fair amount of research for Dirty Feed: people who achieved great things, but are more interested in walking their dog these days.

Then there’s the other type. Those successful people who still clearly love what they did. People like Ed Fries, who writes an amazing blog about vintage arcade games… and was Vice President of Game Publishing at Microsoft for much of the initial XBox years. The kind of person who shatters any notions that huge success requires a destruction of your soul.

Ed’s pieces are fascinating; just read his brilliant pieces on the first arcade game easter egg, or fixing old games like Gran Trak 10. Each is a wonderful mix of research, history, and practical electronics. One of my favourite things about his writing is his acknowledgement of other people in the research process. It’s something I always try to do here on Dirty Feed; to point out that this kind of writing doesn’t always spring out of nowhere, but is often the result of people working together.1

But here’s the real reason I want to link to Ed’s work here. His blog currently consists of just six articles, written between 2015 and 2021. On average, one a year, although there was some concentrated work in 2017, and his writing has slowed recently. But each of those articles is wonderful, and each of them forges new ground in our understanding of its topic. You won’t find six better posts anywhere on the net.

And it’s a reminder that blogging – or just writing, or whatever you want to call it – can take many different forms. Despite my occasional sarcasm, it’s not something you need to show up every day to do, or even every month. One in-depth post a year, if that’s the best way you write, can result in something amazing.2

Owning a blog doesn’t need to take over your life. Nor does it need to be at the technical level that Ed Fries is working at. You can still contribute something worthwhile.

All you have to do is attempt to say something new. That’s all.

  1. To read some people’s writing, you’d think they were the only people who ever did anything. This kind of self-aggrandising gets my goat. No, I’m not going to give examples. But it’s truly pathetic. ↩

  2. Frankly, it’s how I’d prefer to write myself, but I come up with too many silly things I want to write about. ↩

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Mind the Gap

Published 12th September 2022

Meta

On Thursday September the 8th, at 12:09pm, I tweeted the following.

31 minutes after this tweet, BBC One broke into Bargain Hunt, to report on concerns about the Queen’s health. Around 15 minutes later, I finally learnt about the story, from people DMing me on Twitter. I had no idea about it. I was calmly sitting at home, well away from my job working on a certain popular national television channel.

And yet, doesn’t it look like I was trying to drop a huge hint about the upcoming news? I wasn’t. I was scanning through various Red Dwarf episodes for potential articles, and saw the opportunity for one of my silly “Current Mood” gags, which I’ve been doing for years.

That’s all.

*   *   *

Yes, there is a lesson here on the danger of conspiracy theories. But that’s a boring point. The problem with all this is that it actually hits far closer to home.

Because anybody who misread my tweet above isn’t actually doing something particularly unreasonable. They know that I work on a certain TV channel. They know that a royal obituary is one of the most stressful parts of working on that certain TV channel. And half an hour before news of the Queen’s health breaks into Bargain Hunt on BBC One, I post an alarming image from Red Dwarf which indicates I am in distress. Of course I’m hinting that I knew something, and there was something big coming. Except I didn’t, and I wasn’t.

But the problem is: on Dirty Feed, I attempt to make these links all the time, when talking about television. I’m leaping back, 30, 40, 50 years – sometimes more – and trying to figure out exactly what happened. This involves taking disparate facts, and trying to draw links between them. But as the above proves, sometimes things which look like they’re obviously linked, are in fact complete coincidence.

Let’s be clear: things like this happen in my job all the time. People often leap to conclusions about something that happened on TV which I was involved with. Sometimes, they can be entirely wrong… and it’s about a subject I can’t even remotely talk about, for confidentiality reasons. It’s infuriating.

And then I might go home, start writing, and do exactly the same about a TV show from 30 years ago.

So, what’s the solution to this? There isn’t one, really. When you’re trying to reach into the past, making your way through faulty paperwork and faultier memories, being forced to leap between gaps is inevitable. And it’s inevitable that I will get things wrong.

The only thing I can do is try and be as open about my procedures as possible. I really try not to write this site from a God’s-eye view, where I state what “definitely” happened in these situations, when we can’t be sure. The best I can do is try to make good guesses, clearly label speculation, and have as many facts to hand as possible. And most importantly, show my workings so the reader can come to a different conclusion if they want.

For instance, take the following paragraph from this piece on some unbroadcast Fry & Laurie sketches:

“Therefore, I would suggest that there is a high probability this unbroadcast sketch was shot on the 17th December 1988, with an outside chance that it was shot the week before on the 10th. It almost certainly wasn’t shot later; there’s no evidence that Radio Times photographer Don Smith was present at the final four sessions of the series.”

I hope you can all figure out what the words “probability”, “chance”, and “almost” are doing in that paragraph. And if that makes my writing woolly and annoying, it’s better than the alternative.

When leaping across gaps on here, I fully invite you all to come up with alternatives. Together, we might inch our way towards some kind of truth. I sure can’t do it by myself.

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