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I was sad to discover that if you try to go there now, it’s been replaced by someone else’s empty Substack.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.
- The weird world of cyber, hax, privacy and Internet subcultures, with a slice of retro.
- Tales From The Dork Web #1
- A Loveletter To The Atari Lynx
- Consumerism and Anti Consumerism in Tech
- Cyberpunk: Then and Now
- Taking You Down To Tilde Town
- Frank Herbert’s Dune in Print and Pictures
- Going Rogue Like
- The Battle For The First Dune Game
- …The Japanese Music You Loved But Never Heard
- The Amiga Smart Watch That Wasn’t But Now Is
Tales From The Dork Web #10.5 - The Missing Links - You’re Almost Entirely Blind: A Guided Tour of the RF Spectrum
- A Demoscene Conversion
- Anthology of Dorkness
- Crash And Burn: The Amiga ST Story
- This Fortnight In The Dork Web
- Cyberdecks for High-Tech Low-Lifes
- The Dork Web Missing Links
- Propaganda, Pirates and Preachers: The Weird Wide Web of Shortwave Radio
- Adventures in the Dork Web
- Beyond Cyberpunk: Towards A Solarpunk Future
- The Dork Web Roundup
- Gopher, Gemini and The Smol Internet
- Everything But The Kitchen Sync
- The 100 Year Computer
- More On Heirloom Computing
- A Week With Plan 9
- The Outsiders
- Tools For A Solarpunk Future
- Back To Mine: The Dork Mix Tape
- Personal Computing On An Amiga In 2021
- Making Sense of Sensory Illusions
- Hacking ZX Spectrum Games Like It’s 1989
- Escaping The Web’s Dark Forest
- Hey MiSTer!
- The Weirdness Beyond Web3’s Bullshit