Tales From The Dork Web

I stumbled across this wonderful series of posts on Substack by Steve Lord during the pandemic, sometime around the beginning of 2021.

It was this quirky series with links to some things I might not have discovered otherwise. #9 introduced me to the concept of 癒し系 (iyashikei) games, or “soothing” games, at a time when we all needed a little bit of that. Think games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons which came out right as the pandemic started and everyone I knew was playing it. I picked up Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch based on his recommendation.

I used to look forward to the newsletters when they’d arrive…until suddenly they didn’t.

I was sad to discover that if you try to go there now, it’s been replaced by someone else’s empty Substack. This seems to have happened around March 2023. I don’t know what happened, if Steve removed them on purpose, but thankfully we have the Internet Archive.

Steve, if you’re reading this, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve created this page. I really enjoyed your work and want to share it with others. Let me know if you don’t.

The Internet Archive has copies, but it’s a bit of a pain to find them (because of Substack’s SPA trying to make API calls I assume), so I went through and pulled out the links for the posts so I could find them and share them.

It ran from January 2020 until January 2022 from what I can recover. I think I found them all, but I might be missing some. I haven’t read them all, so I can’t vouch for everything, but what I have read I’ve found intriguing.

0. The weird world of cyber, hax, privacy and Internet subcultures, with a slice of retro.
1. Tales From The Dork Web #1
2. A Loveletter To The Atari Lynx
3. Consumerism and Anti Consumerism in Tech
4. Cyberpunk: Then and Now
5. Taking You Down To Tilde Town
6. Frank Herbert’s Dune in Print and Pictures
7. Going Rogue Like
8. The Battle For The First Dune Game
9. …The Japanese Music You Loved But Never Heard
10. The Amiga Smart Watch That Wasn’t But Now Is
    Tales From The Dork Web #10.5 - The Missing Links
11. You’re Almost Entirely Blind: A Guided Tour of the RF Spectrum
12. A Demoscene Conversion
13. Anthology of Dorkness
14. Crash And Burn: The Amiga ST Story
15. This Fortnight In The Dork Web
16. Cyberdecks for High-Tech Low-Lifes
17. The Dork Web Missing Links
18. Propaganda, Pirates and Preachers: The Weird Wide Web of Shortwave Radio
19. Adventures in the Dork Web
20. Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards A Solarpunk Future
21. The Dork Web Roundup
22. Gopher, Gemini and The Smol Internet
23. Everything But The Kitchen Sync
24. The 100 Year Computer
25. More On Heirloom Computing
26. A Week With Plan 9
27. The Outsiders
28. Tools For A Solarpunk Future
29. Back To Mine: The Dork Mix Tape
30. Personal Computing On An Amiga In 2021
31. Making Sense of Sensory Illusions
32. Hacking ZX Spectrum Games Like It’s 1989
33. Escaping The Web’s Dark Forest
34. Hey MiSTer!
35. The Weirdness Beyond Web3’s Bullshit