After seeing this post about it, I’m hooked! I’m probably the last person to know about it but RetroAchievements is basically a service that hooks into a specific set of emulators to let you get little achivements for retro games. Achievements are kinda goofy and maybe a net negative for games, but I like doing this with old games I’ve played a bunch of times before. It’s just fun and goofy to get them for something like Super Mario Bros. My only real complaint is that it’s basically only for console games, when this would be much more exciting to me if it supported DOS and the Amiga. It apparently supports the Apple II but I haven’t been able to get it to work. Which is a shame, because the idea of earning achievements in something like Gabriel Knight 2 is very funny to me and I wish I could do that.
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My Favorite Radio Stations
Even though this Strong Bad email is very accurate, I love public and college radio. I think the curation it offers beats streaming and it’s how I discover new music these days.
Anyway, here are my favorite radio stations. All of these can be streamed and it is probably not a huge surprise that I own t-shirts for all of them. If you have a community radio station you like, consider supporting them if you can fit it in your budget. Funding is being cut for everything good right now and they need support.
WDET – Detroit’s NPR station. I think it has a lot of good music shows that play at night and as a local, the news programming is relevant to me as well.
WCBN-FM – The University of Michigan’s radio station. It’s pretty chaotic and they play a wide range of stuff and a lot of obscure things too.
WPRB – A community radio station in Princeton, New Jersey. I really like Jon Solomon’s show on Wednesdays and he hosts a 25 hour long Christmas music marathon every year where he stays up those entire 25 hours and plays really weird christmas music including a 40 minute version of Little Drummer Boy
KEXP – A legend in Seattle. They have helped so many bands from the area, including the whole grunge scene, and I like all the alternative rock they play
Proposals A and B Passed in Ann Arbor!
Local library posting again but it’s wonderful to wake up and see that proposals A and B passed in Ann Arbor. This means that a parking lot that has been sitting next to the library for over a decade will be transferred to the library where they can build a new, larger library that will also include affordable housing. My limited understanding is that it had a vote in 2017 to make it a park, which it was never suitable for nor did the city or the citizens group that pushed for that vote ever do anything with it. As relatable as I can find “no really, I’ll get right to doing this task any minute,” I’m glad that it will belong to the library. The amount of misinformation being spent and put out by this group saying that the vote was to destroy parks was intense and I was worried it wouldn’t pass. It turns out it wasn’t even close though.
“We’ve replaced a parking lot with a library and affordable housing” is my dream scenario for any city and a great thing to wake up to.
I was hoping the proposal for Livonia to build a lot of new buildings for the city would pass but didn’t expect it to and it didn’t. It’s Livonia, which is a lot more conservative, and I knew that a monthly increase of $10-15 per month in taxes would be a tough sell.
But I’ll take the new downtown library in Ann Arbor. Congrats to the city!
The Ann Arbor District Library Archives
Shoutout to the Ann Arbor District Library archives for no reason other than they’re just a lot of fun to search. I’ve posted before about The Cybertub, but it’s fun to just browse the tags and search to find old computer history. The World Wide Web tag is a lot of fun and I can search for local businesses like Borders Books and Music (who started in Ann Arbor) and find tons of old ads and stuff like that. If anyone has any libraries that have easily searchable archives like this, please link them to me!
Apparently the original website for the AADL is still up and preserved too!
Blog Roundup (August 3, 2025)
My first blog roundup of Blaugust, the month long event where folks try to make a little blog post every day (not it’s not required for participation in blaugust). It’s been fun seeing folks I already follow jumping in, even unofficially. I recommend these blogs!
- LunarLoony
- Syl’s Blog
- The Works of Egan
- Yaffle
- Megan Carnes
- Turgon
- coffee spills
- renkon
- dhippo
- theTangentSpace
If I forgot your blog, please excuse my screwup and let me know so I can follow it too!
The Obscuritory did its first post about a game in years and I’m so excited! I never even heard of The Tone Rebellion.
Indie Tsushin is back!
I haven’t even heard of many of the Games Aura’s Playing and that’s awesome.
I also love to hear about marketing adventure games and just stuff along those lines, so here’s exodrifter talking about No Signal.
I think if you’ve been following my blog then you are used to me telling you to see a RSS feed reader, but here’s a very good intro guide to them for you to share with friends.
It looks like Myst Online has a bunch of events organized by the community coming up this week! Just a reminder that Myst Online is absolutely free to play.
Do tumblr posts count as blog posts? Maybe? Anyway, here’s a good post on Ultima Underworld.
It’s not a blog post about I liked this video on The Hidden Origin of Artillery Games.
Also not a blog post but I like this website on why you should leave Substack and alternatives you can move to.
Gemini
I’ve joked sometimes on social media about how there needs to be an Internet 2 because of how crappy the modern internet has become, but I just learned about the Gemini protocol, which is maybe not The Internet 2 but a fun thing to noodle with, thanks to this blog post. I’ve downloaded Lagrange, which seems like the recommended application for looking at these pages and started poking around. I think it’s pretty neat so far, even if I have no idea what I’m doing. If you have a page, I guess let me know? I’ve found a few pages from people I know but I’m always looking for more to bookmark since I’m still learning how to navigate this. I would also appreciate any tutorials on how to make your own page so I can do my own.
Blaugust is Here!
As I mentioned last week, it’s Blaugust! I will be trying to post every day so apologies in advance for for the huge quantity of posts that are coming your way, with a lot of them being on the short side. I hope you’ll consider joining me in making lots of posts on your blog! I don’t plan on following any sort of prompt or theme. Mostly just highlighting various indie games that I think are worth a look, especially with so many being delisted lately.
Fighting Censorship of Games on Itch.io and Steam
If folks weren’t aware, Steam and Itch.io have been delisting adult games on their stores due to pressure from Mastercard and Visa. This has impacted many games, even games that are not porn but just have adult themes. That said, even if it just impacted erotica it would still be bad, because I think people should have access to that too. Fortunately, it seems like there is a way to fight back and help out game developers. People have been calling Mastercard, VISA, and Stripe to complain and it seems like it’s starting to work. It will take days of doing this to make a change though, so here are places you can call to complain and take up their phonelines and costing them time and money in the process until they ease off Itch.io and Steam.
If you’re able to help out, here is a page listing phone numbers you can call and petitions to sign. It sounds like some folks at Mastercard and VISA are telling people to email instead but please keep calling. Emails just allow them to filter out things they don’t want and phone calls clog up the phone lines.
Blaugust Plans
No indie game roundup today. Was caught off guard by all the Itch adult games stuff (and also just schoolwork tbh) and will probably talk about that later if I have anything interesting to say about it about than it sucks and makes me sad. Blaugust is coming up, the month long challenge where folks try to do a blog post every day (even short ones are fine), and I had been thinking quite a while about how I was going to have posts about FMV games every day. Even scheduled a few. Then all the adult games stuff happened with itch and I think the rest of the month will be me finally uploading all the games I’ve made to here and talking about them a little bit, and highlighting some adult games for visibility. That seems fine!
Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga
Apparently the Amiga computer turns 40 today! It was first computer I used and what we had in our household when I was born so I have a lot of fond memories of it and playing games on there with my dad. It’s nice to see that it still has a very active game dev scene for it and you can find lots of great games for the platform on Itch.io. Amiga emulation is a little bit of a headache which understandably keeps a few people from checking it out, but I think it’s worth pushing through it and giving the games a lot. There’s a lot of weird stuff on there like everything by Bill Williams, the Psygnosis stuff looks really nice, and it’s got some nice versions of old adventure games like the early Sierra games and Infocom’s The Lurking Horror.