Nor October the 8th (culture)

The opportunity to engorge myself on the fat butchered sow of modern culture was stunted this month by such distractions as moving into a van, getting a promotion, and several long evenings unpicking the impact of the internet going down (three times) due to overdependency on cloud providers.

Rather than thinking that the quality of materials this month as merely nose-diving, I'd say we performed a roller coaster maneovre and swung down for the excitement of it.

Reading

The Greatest Estate Developer (manhwa)

Myself and a net friend traded isekais after a lengthy discussion of the genre and how it fails to live up to its potential. I sent him the Chinese webnovel "Release That Witch!" (which is interesting but suffers from classic webnovel "I didn't plan this far ahead let's get weird" towards the end) and received this in turn.

The possibilities in an isekai beyond simply being easy-insert escapism pig slop are at least:

In almost all other respects an isekai is just a fantasy story.

GED is funny. Mostly because of the funny faces that the protaganist makes. The illustrator absolutely killed it. The trope count is high but the stakes are low until you reach a point where the tropes double reacharound to heightening the stakes, so it's not frustrating. There's not a lot of actually meat on the bones of the story, but it's well paced and escalates in a way that's enjoyable to read.

I'll catch back up on it in a year.

Ghost in the Wires, by Kevin Mitnick

This is part of hacking canon, it's odd it took me this long to read this as I've known about Mitnick for a long time. I spent my childhood watching DEFCON and playing with Kali Linux tools, reading all the phreaking manuals on textfiles.com, and eventually lurking on remnants of oldhead +friend ircs which I was introduced to via +Ma's Reversing.

Looking back on it, this single talk by Zoz probably has a direct through-line to my love of compooters and my whole career, even though I didn't end up in security.

DEFCON put out some actually decent talks this year in DEFCON 33 which made me do a little snooping, which brought me to this book.

Mitnick was a legend and a mystery to me because although I conceptually understand things like chaining calls to make conferences and dumping the bill on a company, or phreaker boxes, doing crazy nonsense like tapping calls at will, tracking the FBI, and reversing phones is unbelievable.

How'd he do it? Go phish. The focus throughout the book of phishing attacks, doing them so frequently and with such ingenuity that Kevin getting people to do what he wants over the phone becomes a brushed-past one-liner like the Jedi wave is very interesting. As today, the softest point to exploit are the people involved. This is a worthwhile takeaway even if you're not a phreaky guy or on blue team - this is a big concept in "systems thinking", and how people poke holes in otherwise watertight systems even if they are not doing so maliciously. The concentration on systems comes naturally to people like programmers, because that's what good programming and software design is. Understanding the value and impact of the socio-technical membrane and where people meet systems is at least as important, probably more important.

A few other general takeaways - these were simpler times when computer security was a lot less understood and highlighted. It's true there are weak links everywhere - plaintext password databases, openly accessible systems, infinite default passwords. But median and peak security has ratcheted up the required skillset a lot due to an eternal arms race with security researchers and hackers. Even the recent CICD and supply chain attacks are a lot more sophisticated than a cursory reading would suggest. This DEFCON 33 talk on games anticheats is telling, even when I was a kid reversing and cheating on games was way simpler.

It was fun seeing things I'm more familiar with show up later in the book (Sun labs, bootloop to root, SecurID). The fact they were pwning 2fa in the 90s is telling. Looking back it's incredibly funny that even in the late 2000s with Windows 7 you could get SYSTEM access without knowing a password by having physical access to a machine. In spite of everything, we've still come a long way.

A few times Mitnick refers to his hacking as a sort of addiction. The way he behaves is congruent with that, and it's not something that people often bring up for regular normal software engineering and success. I certainly know that the feeling of getting lost in the pooter for several days or a week is a heady brew, and I imagine that with the stakes and possibility of failure that Mitnick is working with his highs are a lot higher too. Unlike Kevin, my hacking career ended quickly because I got spooked as soon as my school's admin said he'd involve the police, despite otherwise having a good relationship with him.

A delicious slice of irony pie is that as Mitnick became more and more targetted by the law, and other hackers, his paranoia make him need to blue team more and more. The classic problem with blue team is that red team only has to succeed once to win the game, whereas blue team has to win forever not to lose. This specific problem is what finally leads to his downfall, after a life on red team.

Feature-length Moving Pictures

Little Big Man

Prejudice. Agenda. Humanity. Suffering. Belonging.

A generally straightforward film about that Old American West. Wears its bias on its sleeve and says what it has to say. I appreciate how much silence there is in this film.

You'd think I'd have more to say about the only actual piece of cultural heritage I'm talking about this month, alas my head has been full of other things, such as the other feature-lengths I watched this month.

The future of NFL scores | SCORIGAMI, pt. 4

Bon Joisy is back in a BIG WAY BABY.

In addition to the usual quality, there's something here. With the music and the material, Jon inspires a creeping existential dread. This isn't new for Jon, we discussed 17776 last month, but it's unexpected here and done very well, almost incidentally and then intentionally.

There is actual creepypasta-tier horror in here, which is unclear if it was done by Jon as a bit or was the random threads of chance and a game engine pushed to its limits. The real meat of the video is actual statistical horror, the realisation that your graphics represent thousands of people, countless hours of lived experiences, hopes and dreams, as tiny little specs on a chart. Where the humanity that underlies the many but finite stories that made today become so small that any meaning is stripped away. Compacted like so much trash.

Abstraction is terrifying.

Northernlion Trickshot Simulator 4-hour Supercut

Ok hear me out. This wasn't a waste of 4 hours.

This and the Sisyphus game are a paean to the indomitable spirit and the constructed meaning of VIDYO GANES. Of a man surrounded by INTERNET FREELOADERS, yet alone, holding steadfast to his truth. A lone lighthouse on a basalt island declaring a stand against the ocean with BRIGHT LIGHTS AND PRETTY COLOURS.

Immensely enjoyable to see a high charisma build high-roll for hours at a time.

Wit so sharp you could cut your heart out with it.

Vidya

Proverbs

I played this because it was recommend by Jonathan Blow off-hand. He made my favourite video game ever, The Witness. It's not pretentious, you're just not smart enough!!!

I was sort of waiting for the pin to drop for the whole game. Proverbs is Minesweeper + Picross with "juicy" clicking noises and tile flipping and colours and art references.

The style is nice, but this game is a "searching" puzzle. Whenever you do some interesting deductions, you know you're overcomplicating it and there's something way simpler you could find by looking for some single clue that you've missed. On the huge board, this is an exercise in endurance, not logic.

There is something to be said about starting with something massive that you know you will eventually complete if you just see it through, but this is mostly an idle use of 20 hours with something else on in the background.

Freshly Frosted

After Proverbs, I was hungry for a more substantial puzzle game.

Most of the game isn't really good because of the puzzles. It's really good because of the donut assembly section after the puzzle where the music adds a beat and some synths and you get to enjoy the factory marching to a shared rhythm all in sync. When you add a conveyor belt it goes "plunk", when you remove it it goes "pop". Something happens every time you do something, the juice is off the charts.

Difficulty curve is more like a seismograph than a curve. The difficulty would be fine but the game presents itself as a linear sequence of puzzles, so I didn't want to do them out of order. IMO the ideal food-based puzzler, Stephen's Sausage Roll, presents this best whilst still having a logical linear progression of mechanics.

Some of the later window-wiper splitter levels are hard to reason about because you have to sync up when donuts interrupt each others progress. Maybe if I played more Factorio they'd be simpler. The last set of puzzles are more like a victory lap.

The narrative thing the game does is weird and the general concept is not appealing to me. But the game understands its interactive aesthetic trumps logical considerations. For example it purposely gives extra space in several levels so you can syncronise donut delivery, or make solutions symmetrical. This makes later levels where there's one or two squares out of place all the more painful.

corru.observer

Amazing game, 10/10. Haven't played it yet. I got stunlocked by the first track in the OST and listened to that for an hour instead.

Terminal 00 + Visual Novel

I'll play it next month probably.

October Review

The world stills and softens in autumn, fuzzy grey-cloud light and rolling fog blur the definition of things, and the falling leaves and rain take some of it with them. Different birds sing, and different chills bring with them their early shroud of darkness. The Gods holiday in the Summer and Winter, but now seep into the soaked earth and whisper melodies of mud and earth to those who would listen.

9/10, I have a diesel heater in my van and warmed my footsies against the warm air it blows out. Everyone should have one.