If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

So stated an anonymous 2019 thread on 4chan's /x/ imageboard -- a potent encapsulation of liminal-space horror that gave rise to a complex mythos, exploratory video games, and an acclaimed web series (previously; soon to become a major motion picture from A24!). In the five years since, the evolving "Backrooms" fandom has canonized a number of other dreamlike settings, from CGI creations like The Poolrooms and a darkened suburb with wrong stars to real places like the interior atrium of Heathrow's Terminal 4 Holliday Inn and a shuttered Borders bookstore. But the image that inspired the founding text -- an anonymous photo of a vaguely unnerving yellow room -- remained a mystery... until now.

...turns out it's from a 2003 blog post about renovating for an RC car race track in Oshkosh! Not quite as fun a reveal as for certain other longstanding internet mysteries, but still satisfying, especially since it includes another equally-unsettling photo (and serendipitously refers to a "back room"). Also, due credit to Black August, the SomethingAwful goon who quietly claims to have written the original Backrooms text. Liminal spaces previously on MeFi:

Discussing the Kane Pixels production (plus an inspired-by series, A-Sync Research). Note that as the Backrooms movie takes shape, Kane is continuing work on an intriguing spiritual successor: The Oldest View The Eerie Comfort of Liminal Spaces A Twitter thread on being lost in a real-life Backrooms space Inside the world's largest underground shopping complex A 2010 post about Hondo, an enigmatic Half-Life map designer who incorporated "enormous hidden areas that in some cases dwarfed the actual level" MyHouse.WAD, a sprawling, reality-warping Doom mod that went viral last year AskMe: Seeking fiction books with labyrinths and other interminable buildings

My personal favorite liminal space: the unnervingly cheerful indoor playground KidsFun from '90s-era Tampa -- if only because I've actually been there as a kid (and talked about its eeriness on the blue before). Do you have any liminal spaces that have left an impression on you?

This post started as a single video of veteran musicmaker Leonard Solomon performing Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" on a homemade "Squijeeblion." That led to discovering his YouTube channel @Bellowphone, full of similarly whimsical covers on a collection of bespoke instruments hand-built in his Wimmelbildian workshop, from the Emphatic Chromatic Callioforte to the Oomphalapompatronium to the original Majestic Bellowphone. Searching for more videos led to his performance in the Lonesome Pine One-Man Band Extravaganza special from 1991, where he co-starred with whizbang vaudevillians like Hokum W. Jeebs and Professor Gizmo. But what was Lonesome Pine? Just an extraordinary, award-winning concert series by the Kentucky Center for the Arts that ran for 16 years on public radio and television -- an "all things considered" showcase for "new artists, underappreciated veterans and those with unique new voices" featuring such luminaries as Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Koko Taylor, and hundreds more. You can get a broad overview of this televisual marvel from this excellent half-hour retrospective, see a supercut of director Clark Santee's favorite moments, browse the program directory from the Smithsonian exhibit, or watch select shows in their entirety: Lonesome Pine Blues - All-star Bluegrass Band - Nashville All-stars - Bass Instincts - Zydeco Rockers - Walter "Wolfman" Washington - Mark O'Connor - Alison Krauss & Union Station - Sam Bush & John Cowan - Maura O'Connell - Nanci Griffith - A Musical Visit from Africa

Also, I had a hard time fitting this in, but the strangest episode (and one of the best examples of the eclectic and creative spirit of this series) was a whole-ass wrestling match live-orchestrated by the "Masters of Percussion":

It's as weird as it sounds: a young Jeff Jarrett and Dirty Dutch Mantell battle it out in the ring while in the background Walter Mays conducts a live orchestra performing his original composition, "War Games for Ten Percussionists and Two Wrestlers, " for broadcast on PBS of all channels. The actual match is pretty basic with a standard "heel dominates, babyface gets some hope spots, and finally makes a comeback" format - at one point Mantell attacks a plant in the orchestra after trying to take a drum; otherwise it's pretty by-the-numbers - which was probably a wise choice to give an audience likely largely composed of non-wrestling fans something easy to follow. (In a then-rare kayfabe-breaking moment, the extra Mantell attacks - played by Memphis wrestler Marc "The Beast" Guleen - is listed as a third wrestler in the program's end credits.) It's interesting to see this sort of high-concept wrestling content as early as 1989, as this seems more like something you'd see tried nowadays - and maybe somebody should try doing it again. While the in-ring action is simply adequate, the idea behind it gets it an extra point for creativity in my book.

You can watch a clip of it in the retrospective here! [This post barely scratches the surface, and it's all so good. Some DC MeFite with a VHS digitizer needs to pay a visit to the National Museum of American History, stat.]

Sort the Court is a charmingly addictive "kingdombuilder" of sorts that's perfect for a lazy Saturday. Designed and written by Graeme Borland in just 72 hours for Ludum Dare 34, the game casts you as a new monarch who must judiciously grow your realm's wealth, population, and happiness with an eye toward joining the illustrious Council of Crowns... all by giving flat yes-or-no answers to an endless parade of requests from dozens of whimsical subjects. It's possible to lose, and the more common asks can get a bit repetitive, but with hundreds of scenarios and a number of longer-term storylines, the game can be won in an hour or two while remaining funny and fresh. See the forum or the wiki for help, enjoy the original art of Amy "amymja" Gerardy and the soundtrack by Bogdan Rybak, or check out some other fantasy decisionmaking games in this vein: Borland's spiritual prequel A Crown of My Own - the somewhat darker card-based REIGNS - the more expansive and story-driven pixel drama Yes, Your Grace (reviews), which has a sequel due out this year

窓からは柔らかな光が射し込み、
[Soft light streamed through the window]
窓の外では鳥たちが歌う美しい朝に、
[Outside, birds were singing on a beautiful morning]
私に撫でられながら眠るようにそっと逝きました。
[As I petted her, she passed away gently, as if falling asleep]
長い間かぼちゃんを愛して下さったみなさま、本当にありがとうございました。
[To everyone who has loved Kabo-chan for a long time, thank you very much]
かぼちゃんは世界一幸せな犬だったと思います。そして私は世界一幸せな飼い主でした。
[I believe Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world, and I was the happiest owner]

Kabosu, the beloved Shiba-Inu behind the globally popular Doge meme, has passed away peacefully at home today at the age of 18.

This sweet girl, abandoned by a shuttered puppy mill, had ended up in a kill shelter before being rescued and nursed back to health by kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato in 2008. She was named "Kabosu" after the round fruit that her furry head resembled. Photos of a wary Kabo-chan from Sato's blog formed the basis for the popular Doge meme circa 2013, which spread into a whole series of Shiba-centric lore, the mascot of an ironic cryptocurrency, and even got her a lovely statue (and a manhole cover) in her hometime prefecture of Sakura. Sato gamely documented Kabo-chan's charmed life (and her feline friends) on her blog and YouTube channel; a brush with leukemia and liver disease in 2022 (previously) elicited a wave of support and love from around the world, and she soon made a "miraculous" recovery and lived happily and well for another 18 months. For locals, a farewell gathering is planned for Sunday, May 26th, from 1-4pm at dog-friendly hangout spot of Kaori Flowers in Narita, with a larger event planned for the beautiful Sakura Furusato Plaza when the weather cools later in the year. Sato's obit post closes:

かぼちゃんは今もまだにこにこ笑ってシッポを振って [Kabo-chan is still smiling happily and wagging her tail] 私に寄り添ってくれていると思います。きっとこれからもずっと [I believe she is still staying close to me. Surely, from now on and forever.]

Grima Wormtongue uses DEI to convince God to let devils do a great replacement. Think about the thought process that went into this strip. [...] Grima Wormtongue, assistant to GOD, is called in front of the uh heaven senate (i assume?) to account for the great replacement of heaven, but his parents survived the HOBBIT HOLOCAUST. there is so much going on here

Back in 2022, we discussed a viral tweetstorm from "genderfluid transvestite goblin" @BitterKarella (and an accompanying write-up from Garbage Day) which recapped (with wry commentary) the bizarre history of Tatsuya Ishida's long-running webcomic Sinfest, tracing its evolution from an edgy gag-a-day strip to playful satire with colorful characters to sudden radfem agitprop to virulently transphobic screed -- an unusual insight into the TERF-to-alt-right pipeline. Two years later, she is back (on Bluesky) with an update -- and reader, it gets *so* much worse [CW: unrolled 534-post thread discussing Sinfest's hamfisted pop culture references, 4chan memes, cartoonish transphobia, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and Esoteric Nazism (!)]. Karella also featured on the Haus of Decline podcast (90min) with recently-out trans host Alex Hood; they lament Sinfest's fall from webcomics stardom and dunk on its baffling symbology, but by the end reach a genuinely heartbreaking realization (with some evidence) that Tats may be an "egg" (or trans woman in denial) who fell in with a toxic crowd before being able to come to terms with some very deep-seated gender dysphoria.

[If you're not familiar with it, TVTropes has a great capsule summary of what Sinfest used to be and how it got to where it is today. Also, special thanks to David "retr0id" Buchanan for the nifty Bluesky thread reader that lets you load the whole thread with images in one go!] Other podcasts discussing Karella's original deep dive: A Special Presentation, or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight (80 minutes) and Drawing Controversy: Bitter Karella on the Perplexing Collapse of SINFEST - Tatsuya Ishida's Once Beloved Webcomic (46 minutes, with transcript) Sinfest on RationalWiki (which includes such subheadings as "When it was actually good" and "What the hell happened?"):

The comic started out fairly benign as a comedy strip that would sometimes poke fun at politics and religion; however, as the years went on, the strip would become infamous for having not one but two abrupt radical changes in tone. In 2011, the comic strip changed from a comedy gag strip with occasional storylines to a tract that Ishida would use to advance his views on radical feminism, with most of the comic's earlier characters moving into the background or being forgotten about. Then, in 2019, Sinfest changed to a far-right conspiracy theory-promoting webcomic that endorsed QAnon and the anti-vaccination movement, with the transphobia, which had previously only been in the background, cranked up to ten thousand; Israel's invasion of Gaza opened the door to outright anti-Semitism and Nazi-adjacent tropes. All this resulted in Sinfest receiving a reputation on par with StoneToss and Ben Garrison, which is sad, since unlike those webcomics, Sinfest actually used to be good.

The Webcomics Review recently gave up on its more sporadic observations on the strip's decline (note: reverse chronological order) Kleefeld on Comics: On Tatsuya Ishida

This isn't the first time we've seen a comic creator slide into a headspace that seems at odds with reality. (I hesitate to call this type of behavior a mental illness; I think that can be a bit reductive and, barring a psychological examination, probably not accurate anyway.) What's interesting here is that, in most cases, the creator's work was published with enough distance between installments that it can be hard to pinpoint what might've triggered them to go down this path, but Ishida has been publishing daily for decades now. You can follow his work in real time and see precisely when/where turning points occur. Bitter Karella actually did that, reading through the entirety of Sinfest in order in 2022 and offering commentary on Twitter. [...] She summed things up almost too succinctly with "it's not good." I would be curious, though, if a trained psychologist went through and tried to understand what exactly was going on and where things might have gone differently. As has been pointed out by others, Ishida seems to be in his early 50s now and has been working on (as far as anyone can tell) nothing but Sinfest for the the past 20+ years.

Note that Sinfest's forums are dead following multiple ideological purges; after being kicked off Patreon, it's unclear how Tats affords to continue working on the strip when it hasn't been published in print for over a dozen years.

Life is not a continuous line from the cradle to the grave. Rather, it is many short lines, each ending in a choice, and branching right and left to other choices, like a bunch of seaweed or a genealogical table. No sooner is one problem solved than you face another growing out of the first. You are to decide the course of action of first Helen, then Jed, then Saunders, at each crisis in their lives. Give your first thought, without pausing to ponder.

Consider the Consequences!, a 1930 gamebook co-written by author Doris Webster and crusading journalist Mary Alden Hopkins, is the earliest known example of a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) text, offering players a series of forking narratives for three interconnected characters with 43 distinct endings, fifty years before the format was popularized (and trademarked). Just a few years ago this pioneering work was at risk of falling into near-total obscurity. But thanks to the efforts of jjsonick on IntFiction.org, you can now read the book on the Internet Archive (complete with nifty graphs of all possible storylines), or -- courtesy of itch.io developer geetheriot -- play the game online in an interactive fiction format powered by the Twine engine. More in the mood for radio drama? Listen to Audio Adventure Radio Hour's 2018 dramatic reading of the book (based on listener suggestions), and wrap it up with a delightful retro-review by librarian pals Peter and Abby on the Choose Your Own Book Club podcast.

Scans of the original book's dust jacket Demian's Gamebook Web Page has a detailed breakdown of the book's structure, including a user review that explains why this 94-year-old narrative remains fresh and relevant:

Even though people may find the idea of reading a book from the thirties off-putting, I found this to be a fascinating read. This being a book for adults, the choices included have really serious consequences, and the ability to play as either a female or one of two male characters allows the reader to gain greater insights into certain aspects of the social life of the era (such as social class, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, and women's increasing emancipation and participation in the labor force). The thirties were a time of significant changes in social norms, which are highlighted in a manner that manages to be both entertaining and educational. The book makes great reading material for people interested in subjects such as sociology or gender studies, especially because it makes the reader face the consequences of his or her decisions without ever becoming censorious or preachy. Contrary to what you might expect from a book from this era, the story deals with topics such as alcoholism, unmarried cohabitation, unusual family arrangements, political corruption, and even suicide without trying to obscure or sugarcoat their implications. It also details both player and nonplayer characters with a level of psychological depth I've very seldom seen in interactive fiction - the reader will find him or herself clashing with the social mores of the era, and how he or she responds to them will in turn shape his or her character's happiness in later life. Along some paths, the reader will find him or herself to be contributing to social change as his or her decisions successfully defy prevailing norms and taboos. Notably for such an early work, the structure of the adventures is quite complex, with several story branches crossing with each other instead of all the paths remaining separate. Overall, I highly recommend this book for its entertainment value and developed gameplay, as well as for having demonstrated the capabilities of the interactive medium in a remarkably early era.

Authors Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins co-wrote a number of other innovative works, including algorithmic dating advice tome Help Yourself, personality assessment I've Got Your Number!, Self-Portraits ("A Novel Method of Taking Personality Photographs"), and Mrs. Grundy is Dead, a provocatively-titled etiquette book based on anonymous surveys from teens around the country on such questions as "What do you do when no one cuts in on your partner?", "How soon do you call a girl by her first name?", and "Do you take off your glove to shake hands?" More on the early years of interactive fiction: A Very Brief History of Gamebooks (up to 1979), by IF blogger Jason Dyer The Memory Machine podcast interviews Dyer on the history of text adventures [audio link]

Microsoft held a live event today showcasing their vision of the future of the home PC (or "Copilot+ PC"), boasting longer battery life, better-standardized ARM processors, and (predictably) a whole host of new AI features built on dedicated hardware, from real-time translation to in-system assistant prompts to custom-guided image creation. Perhaps most interesting is the new "Recall" feature that records all on-screen activity securely on-device, allowing natural-language recall of all articles read, text written, and videos seen. It's just the first foray into a new era of AI PCs -- and Apple is expected to join the push with an expected partnership with OpenAI debuting at WWDC next month. In a tech world that has lately been defined by the smartphone, can AI make the PC cool again?

The Criterion Collection, a revered distributor of classic and arthouse cinema, built a vast library of 3,500+ films over the last 40 years. It can be overwhelming, even for cinephiles. Want a savvy friend to guide you? Enter Criterion's Closet Picks, a lo-fi YouTube series which invites top filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other artists into the vault to freely sample while musing about core influences, all-time favorites, and hidden gems. Highlights: Willem Dafoe - Maya + Ethan Hawke - The Daniels (EEAAO) - Richard Ayoade - Comic Patton Oswalt - Yo La Tengo - Cinematographers Roger + James Deakins - Charlie Day - Nathan Lane - John Waters - VG designer Hideo Kojima - Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) - Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek) - Cauleen Smith (Drylongso) - Animator Floyd Norman - Jane Schoenbrun - Paul Giamatti - Marc Maron - Wim Wenders - Cate Blanchett + Todd Field - Hari Nef - Photographer Tyler Mitchell - Molly Ringwald - Peter Sarsgaard - Udo Kier - Gael García Bernal - Pixar's Lee Unkrich - Singer St. Vincent - Critic Elvis Mitchell - Anna Karina - Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) - Flying Lotus - Agnès Varda - Alfonso Cuarón + Paweł Pawlikowski - Mary Harron - Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman - Carl Franklin - Roger Corman - Michael K. Williams - SNL's Bill Hader // Watch the full playlist, or see this cool database of picks (info), including the most popular.

In 1586, Jacques Bellot published one of the earliest printed phrasebooks for refugees, the Familiar Dialogues: For the Instruction of The[m], That Be Desirous to Learne to Speake English, and Perfectlye to Pronou[n]ce the Same. [...] The book, in 16mo, is laid out in three parallel columns: English, French, and a quasi-phonetic transcription of the sounds of the English text. [...] Bellot says "I have written the English not onely so as the inhibaters of the country do write it: But also, as it is, and must be pronoun[n]ced". [...] While men had contact with the local community through their work and would have developed enough spoken English to get by, their wives and other family members who were mostly at home had limited opportunities to learn the local language. At this time, there was significant local hostility to foreigners in England, and [...] "a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering" [...] The content of the Familiar Dialogues belies its audience in that it caters to the immediate language needs of refugees and deals with everyday interactions. These include going to school, shopping and eating a meal [...] Indeed , this little book, with its focus on domestic situations rather than travel/touristic situations, anticipates the refugee phrasebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Jacques Bellot's Familiar Dialogues: An Early Modern Refugee Phrasebook // Read the book on Project Gutenberg // The history of Huguenot refugees in England // Linguist Simon Roper has a neat video exploring (and re-enacting) the book's practical "Street English"

Over 15 years ago, Microsoft released Photosynth [previously], a nifty tool that could correlate dozens of photos of the same place from different angles in order to make a sort of virtual tour using photogrammetry, a technique that went on to influence Google Earth's 3D landscapes and virtual reality environments. But what if you tried the same thing with cartoons? Enter Toon3D, a novel approach to applying photogrammetry principles to hand-drawn animation. The results are imperfect due to the inherent inconsistency of drawn environments, but it's still rather impressive to see a virtual camera moving around glitched-out versions of the Krusty Krab, Bojack Horseman's living room, or the train car from Spirited Away. Interestingly, the same approach works about as well on paintings or even AI-generated video; see also the similar technique of neural radiance fields (NERFs) for creating realistic high-fidelity virtual recreations of real (and unreal) environments.

Last week, General Motors announced that it would end production of the Chevrolet Malibu, which the company first introduced in 1964. Although not exactly a head turner (the Malibu was "so uncool, it was cool," declared the New York Times), the sedan has become an American fixture, even an icon [...] Over the past 60 years, GM produced some 10 million of them. With a price starting at a (relatively) affordable $25,100, Malibu sales exceeded 130,000 vehicles last year, a 13% annual increase and enough to rank as the #3 Chevy model [...] Still, that wasn't enough to keep the car off GM's chopping block. [...] In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans. [...] As recently as 2009, U.S. passenger cars [...] outsold light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and minivans), but today they're less then 20% of new car purchases. The death of the Malibu is confirmation, if anyone still needs it, that the Big Three are done building sedans. That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers—and it may ultimately come around to bite Detroit.

Detroit Killed the Sedan. We May All Live to Regret It [Fast Company]

Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you're sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can't quite remember... Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time, with a palette of 4096 possible colours, pushing the limits of these 80's era machines memory, these early graphic artists and hackers alike have left an indelible mark on the world of digital art and internet culture, only to be forgotten in the passing of time. But what made this boring business computer from Japan so special?

The strange world of Japan's PC-98 computer [contains some NSFW pixel art] / More striking imagery: Incredible pictures from an era of games we never got to experience [CW: flashing lights] - Tumblr: High quality [SFW] pixel art from PC-98 games - Pixelation.org: The Art of PC98 - Amino: The world of PC-98 Pixel Art - Galleries from @noirlac, @item, and @densetsu.ch

A downloadable pack of over 7,000 PC-98 images and GIFs [check the current page for v4, coming soon-ish] Video: PC-98: Japan's Own Era of Early PC Gaming [CW: flashing lights] Video: Over 50 NEC PC-98 Games In Under 30 Minutes TVTropes has an extensive primer on the platform followed by a long list of game articles Music: A selection of unique PC-98 tracks by composer Takeaki Watanabe Hardware: Restoring & Learning All About The NEC PC-9821 [transcript included!] DIY: PC-98 Emulation For Beginners A collection of PC-98 image files for use with an emulator

OpenAI unveils GPT-4o, a new flagship "omnimodel" capable of processing text, audio, and video. While it delivers big improvements in speed, cost, and reasoning ability, perhaps the most impressive is its new voice mode -- while the old version was a clunky speech --> text --> speech approach with tons of latency, the new model takes in audio directly and responds in kind, enabling real-time conversations with an eerily realistic voice, one that can recognize multiple speakers and even respond with sarcasm, laughter, and other emotional content of speech. Rumor has it Apple has neared a deal with the company to revamp an aging Siri, while the advance has clear implications for customer service, translation, education, and even virtual companions (or perhaps "lovers", as the allusions to Spike Jonze's Her, the Samantha-esque demo voice, and opening the door to mature content imply). Meanwhile, the offloading of most premium ChatGPT features to the free tier suggests something bigger coming down the pike.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a ubiquitous markup language for describing the layout and design of a webpage separate from the content, typically specifying things like text formatting, background color, page alignment, etc. But as with emoticons and ASCII art before it, CSS can be repurposed to become the content. Enter CSS drawing, an intricate art form that uses the conventions of the language to create illustrations and even animation using only standard design elements. Some standout examples from around the web: A Single Div, where every new illustration is contained within one <div> tag; designer Lynn Fisher also has a previous version along with a whole catalog of "weird websites, niche data projects, and CSS experiments" - Another collection of single-div projects - Start a digital bonfire - The Simpsons (animated!) in CSS - 173 CSS drawings on Dribble - How I started drawing CSS Images - css-doodle, a web component for drawing patterns with CSS - Creating Realistic Art with CSS - The CSS Zen Garden, a collection of beautiful CSS stylesheets - CSS previously on MeFi

Thomas Jefferson University apologizes after commencement presenter flubs names. Unfortunately for the hapless presenter, the name cards used the International Phonetic Alphabet, a technical rendering used mainly by linguists. kænt rid ðɪs? Don't let it happen to you! Learn how to pronounce IPA spelling today, test your skills, or just entertain yourself with the world's most unintentionally hilarious soundboards.