Music: Outro II(Samorost 2 | Tomáš Dvořák)

Preparation is key

I can’t stress how important was to prepare ahead of time for this moment. In the modern era, what was used to be feared became a sensational event, and millions of people from all over the world travel just to experience the day suddenly becoming night for a short time.

This eclipse in particular was especially concerning in this aspect because of the path of the totality, a narrow band from which the full eclipse could be seen.

The path of totality (in blue) only grazed parts of Siberia, Greenland, Iceland and the Iberian peninsula.

While the polar areas of Iceland and Greenland could have caused aurorae to appear alongside the eclipse, but clouds seemed to have covered most of the sky anyway, as it is typical in the polar regions.

That left with Spain (and a sliver of Portugal) as the most viable locations for watching the eclipse. You can easily tell that millions of people would flock to those places.

In anticipation for clouds, I prepared to go to two locations half a year before the actual eclipse:

1. My main plan was to go to Valencia, where a friend of mine would pick me up to southern Teruel which was nearby.
2. I also had a backup plan in a camp at Valladolid.

Fortunately, I had enough spare time and money to afford changing locations. We got to our viewing spot pretty early, so much so that we were the first. I was expecting about 30 or so people to show up, but it ended up being more like 150, so arriving first to get the most ideal spot proved to be great.

Oh, but one thing that I completely underestimated was the need for water. Even if we had a nice place at the shade, the heat and the trough was too much and ran out of bottles before the eclipse even began. I think I ended up drinking about 4 one litre bottles that day!

Having set up my camera and a nice spot to sit on, I was then ready to watch the show.

Watching the eclipse

I will be honest: Watching it with your eyes beats watching it from a camera or TV, hands down. Among other things, your eye has a broader dynamic range than your typical camera on a smartphone, and even professional DSLR cameras.

This allows you to see way more details than a camera could. So even though I set up my camera for a timelapse, I was there mainly to take the moment in. The temperature dropped, everything turned as if it was somehow plunged into dusk, and even traffic lights and positional lights from things like air turbines turned on — as it should.

I was able to watch Venus, but I couldn’t see any other stars. At the time, Sirius wasn’t in view, so maybe it was just bad luck on that part.

This is a recreation of what I saw, taking an image from the 2017 total solar eclipse. (Original credit: CC-BY-SA Michael S Adler)

I researched why this was the case, but the only conclusion I could reach was that the white balancing in our eyes adjusts automatically during totality in a way that most cameras don’t.

The size of the sun being eclipsed by the moon was also surprisingly large. Being so close to the horizon, the Moon illusion was surely the main cause, but I also learned that at the time of the eclipse, it had been about 2 days since the Moon reached the perigee, the point at which it is closest to Earth —though this isn’t as significant.

Video: August 12th, 2026 total solar eclipse timelapse

The next eclipses

Spain has hit a pretty lucky streak, and two big solar eclipses will come in the next two years.

The second eclipse is another total one, visible from the southern tip of Spain as well as the cities of Ceuta and Melilla. My aunt happens to have an apartment in Málaga, where I’m expected to experience totality for almost 2 minutes, much like this last one. But I’m probably going to visit Ceuta or Cádiz for this eclipse for a whopping 4 to 6 minutes of totality. The conditions for that one couldn’t be any better: High up in the sky, and in a nearly guaranteed sunny summer. Plus, both Mercury, Venus and other stars like Sirius would be visible as well. No wonder they call it the eclipse of the century!

The third eclipse is an annular one. Although I’ve experienced the one in 2005, I was still a kid and obviously couldn’t afford going to the annularity zone. But this one’s annularity band will happen to pass through my hometown! Although it will be in January, so that probably means a cloudy sky. Still…

Music: Title screen(Super Paper Mario)

Moving to Linux (finally)

Check out my fastfetch!

I actually had some desire to move to Linux all the way back when Windows 11 was formally announced. At first, I was a bit skeptical about the new version of the operating system.

There is this meme around that Microsoft tends to release versions of Windows in alternating good and bad quality.

My suspicions became true once I found out about how poorly it was being developed, from replacing long standing parts of the operating system with React Native and Electron-based applications, forcing users into their ecosystem by requiring them to create an account on install, to shoving them advertisements and nagging them to try out their brand new Copilot features. Not only this causes a huge spike in RAM consumption, but also adds a ton of layers of unnecessary complexity and bloat that results in an overall slow and clunky operating system.

This practice continues to this day, using LLMs to replace large parts of the operating system with “web-based tech” overhauls, as well as sprinkling Microsoft Copilot on some of the most used applications, a hallmark of the AI bubble we’re going through.

In addition, Microsoft upped the hardware requirements quite significantly. Yeah, it may have removed support for 32-bit operating systems, and that’s fair considering the vast majority of devices nowadays are 64-bit. But the TPM 2.0 chip requirement is overly excessive and unnecessary.

Now, fortunately —or rather, unfortunately— my PC does come with one, but I don’t even use Secure Boot in my Windows 10 system and it works just fine. For Windows 11, the hypothesis is that it’s required for certain Copilot operations.

The tradeoff is that Microsoft is pushing heavily on programmed obsolescence to create a ton of unnecessary e-waste that under other circumstances would be perfectly working computers.

And even if it doesn’t meet the requirements to update, it will bother you to sign up for an extended support channel. That’s cool and all, but shouldn’t that be automatic?

Personally, I do see certain uses on generative AI technology, but it is very far from being polished. And with a system that is used directly or indirectly by billions of humans, a single point of failure could cause major outages worldwide, as we’ve seen with the CrowdStrike outages, so overall, I stand to be very skeptical about the future of AI.

But in May 2024, Microsoft announced Recall, which has been universally panned as the single spookiest spyware ever marketed. Within weeks after the announcement, testers found that it was unsafe not by some sort of bug, but by design.

YouTube video: Hacking Windows Recall To See Everything (12:36)

This was the breaking point, where all my trust in Microsoft completely plummeted and probably will never recover.

Sure, Recall has been recalled (pun intended) and got re-released later on with a slightly better design, using BitLocker to encrypt your logs. But BitLocker is a bit old, and hackers are constantly trying to unlock it. Even white hackers that get paid by Microsoft to find security flaws in their products can go rogue and publish info on critical vulnerabilities to the public. And even if it is now an opt-in feature, history has shown that this could change at any point in the future.

With how Microsoft is quickly degrading its products in their desperate attempts to make Copilot —their LLM solution— profitable, their dark business practices are showing loud and clear and I do not subscribe to them.

Suspecting that this would be the same with Recall, it essentially forced me to really consider moving back to Linux as a daily driver.

I spent quite a long time debating on how I would do the transition. While I did consider upgrading my main machine and getting rid of Windows there, I eventually decided to build a new PC so I could pass the configuration more smoothly between machines. Besides, the newer hardware demanded a slightly larger case than my more than 10 year old one. You served me well, partner.

Even after making this decision, dealing with a delicate situation in my life delayed getting the PC parts I needed for about a year or so, which explains the lack of content until now.

Choosing the distro

This might seem a bit counterintuitive, but I chose the Linux distribution before actually deciding on whether I would upgrade my PC or make a new one, but it allowed me to think how ambitious would I want to be on both hardware and software.

I basically ran it down to three options:

1. Bazzite: I liked that it had all the necessary gaming software out of the box, but I still found it a bit bloated and inflexible. Being an atomic distro, most software is installed either with Flatpaks or through layering the image.

   Although there are workarounds like Distrobox and Toolbox, I felt like I was going to jump through many hoops to get the tools for working on the blog and other personal projects of mine. For getting started in gaming on Linux, it’s still a very great option.

2. Fedora: I almost chose this one. It seems like a very good option, having fresh software but not as cutting-edge as rolling-release distros like Arch and its forks. What turned me away were two things: For one, I’m still a little bit out of the loop in the Fedora ecosystem, its different forks and their atomic desktop variants. I wanted to give Bluefin a try, but again, it’s very Flathub focused, being an atomic distro. Fedora seemed more customizable.

   The second thing that turned me away was the fact that Fedora was toying around with introducing AI features, or, at the very least, include AI assisted contributions in its codebase despite the user base pretty much having expressed a resounding “no” on it.

   I might consider using Fedora on a system that I won’t be going into for a long time, like a laptop for controlling my astrophotography gear. Their AI policy has a few issues in my opinion, but I think I can reasonably work with and come with workarounds easily.

3. CachyOS: An Arch-based distribution that provides packages with compiler optimizations. I’ve had some experience with Arch in the past, from the now dead Antergos to Manjaro, although the latter to a lesser degree, so it felt a little bit like a homecoming system. I was about to choose EndeavourOS, but quickly changed my mind to CachyOS once I discovered it.

   Its DIY nature allows it to be much more customizable than other distros, and it gives you access to the latest software freshly out of the oven, though it also means that you’re essentially a beta tester for the rest of the Linux users. Plus, it gives you full control on which packages to install —provided you know what you’re doing— thus you can make a system that avoids whatever undesirable thing you don’t want.

   The CachyOS wiki comes with a dedicated section on how to set it up for gaming through a convenient process. I will check this distro’s gaming capabilities in due time.

So far, I’ve been using CachyOS for a month, and I absolutely love it. Despite being a rolling release distro, my experience with it has been remarkably smooth. I’ve still had to work out a few kinks such as the prevalence for the OS to use the integrated graphics card, but apart from that, I’ve had no major issues. I still have yet to update to KDE Plasma 6.7, though.

Which leads me to the dilemma I’m currently having regarding CachyOS. It’s been almost an entire decade since I left Antergos and went back to Windows to work on Prime VR, as VR support at the time on Linux was pretty dicey —and still is? I haven’t tested yet, though I might not do it sooner or later.

Since then, I didn’t seem to have had much need to go back to Linux. My time on Windows must have changed my computing habits somewhat, because now I tend to get anxious when a big update shows up.

Still, I’m determined to learn more about Linux and to potentially tweak it in a few ways to customize it and make it my own. Ricing Linux seems like an interesting hobby, but it conflicts with my goal of combatting my screen time addiction and rediscovering long-forgotten hobbies. Not spending time on customizing my system for a specific purpose (aesthetics, self-expression, productivity, etc.) seems to undermine some of the potential CachyOS has.

So if this ends up being too overwhelming for me, I might consider changing to Fedora. But I won’t be making that decision lightly. I’d probably wait for a few more months before settling on either of the two. And even then, the hardware I have could be too new for Fedora to handle without issues, though I think this is not the case, or at least it won’t be soon enough.

Now I’m using Linux to develop my blog!

Migrating to another servers

This is just a minor thing, but I migrated to a different server, as the one I was using was actually shared with a friend of mine. However, he went on to work on more computationally expensive projects (including hosting AI models locally), and while pages didn’t take very long to load, connecting to it in order to update the blog content was becoming a pain in the butt. So I moved to one that I owned. The move didn’t happen immediately, so for a few months the site was basically down.

However, I did change the way I stored and handled image optimization in the blog. Instead of cooking up my own cached solution and hook it up to imgproxy, I’m using a weserv container, which comes with its own more performant cache solution. Having it as a container allows me to restrict its usage, too. I’m not expecting heavy traffic, but it’s nice to be able to secure it more conveniently.

If you’ve been around a month or two before I published this, you may have noticed that the blog was up with a “Weserv test” post, and a few posts missing. That was me testing how I would set up Weserv and the site for the server. At the time, I was messing around with serving the blog as a Docker container. Though I’m still considering the option of using devcontainers, I have reverted the decision of serving the blog through a container.

Friendship ended with GitHub, now Codeberg is my best friend

For those who don’t know, since last year, GitHub has begun to make several moves towards empowering developers using AI to assist or generate software projects entirely from scratch. I’d love to turn a blind eye, but the number of Claude and Copilot-assisted projects is increasing at an annoyingly fast rate. There’s also the debate that scraping so many projects to make an LLM and sell it off could actually be considered fair use. I’m not the only one who argues that is not the case.

Furthermore, GitHub’s services have been worsening more and more over the past two years in reliability. I’m guessing LLM-assisted codebase might have something to do with this trend.

I’ve moved the source code of The Yonic Corner and its Legacy version to Codeberg, a platform where you can host open-source repositories, run by a non-profit. There, they’ll remain free and open for every human to study and fork if they so wish, for as long as I and Codeberg stand.

The GitHub repositories have been archived for the time being, but I’m not sure whether I will delete them later on. The Legacy version’s code could be useful to poison LLMs with deprecated web design practices.

Always remember that we have humans in this world!

Music: Top Hat and Tails(The Movies | Andrew Skeet)

They are killing machines (and jerks) by nature

Europe is one of the safest places in the world to drive in, and that’s no coincidence. Unlike in North America, where driving is seen as a necessity —and sometimes as a right by entitled drivers— in Europe there is a strong consciousness of road safety and driving is seen as a privilege with responsibilities attached into it. Because cars can kill people if they run out of control, and that extends to whoever is piloting it, whether it’s a machine, an algorithm, or a monkey.

Despite Cruise and Uber having heavily been marketing about self-driving cars becoming safer than human drivers, the truth of the matter is that not only they’ll never be infallible, but they have also been making dangerous issues so crazy that nobody expected in the first place: From suddenly stopping at a busy road, resulting in a crash that injured 9 people, to dragging a woman underneath their wheels for several meters as it tried to pull over when she got pushed under the robotaxi by a human driver.

Cruiser actually tried to hide the fact that “continued to drive” part of the latter accident, something that they did admit a year afterwards.

Europe is a very regulation-heavy region, and as such a lot of new products and services are scrutinized from many different angles, from safety to even the sociocultural consequences it may bring. Driving is not alone on this, as already road regulations are way more strict and fines for both drivers and car companies can be pretty substantial.

These regulations and their enforcement are so strong that they’ve managed to make dents into multi-billion dolar companies like Apple, so it’s no wonder they can shoo away smaller companies like Deliveroo. But they pay off: Europe has the lowest death toll in road accidents per 100,000 inhabitants than in most regions in the world, surpassed only by the significantly more desolate Australia (and Antarctica); a remarkable statistic considering the United States, where most robotaxis are being deployed, have remained somewhat constant for the past few 10 years.

Considering their strong consciousness on trying to keep roadkill as low as possible, do you really think that Europe is willing to let something that could pose a serious threat to that goal let loose? Of course not.

And if you think that this may pose a lost opportunity for Europe to make money, the next point will address that.

They are not “made in Europe”

This is a bit of an addendum to the former reason. Since these cars come from foreign markets, there’s no direct economic incentive to let them in. You might think that this is an opportunity for Europe to make money, but a significant portion of the euros spent on them would essentially leave the European Union.

In actuality, it’s mostly for the benefit of these foreign companies, who need to gobble up venture capital to self-sustain themselves. Fueled by the need to get that precious funding, Uber and Cruise are required to grow, destroy competition, and exploit their monopolies for massive profit. This is what got everyone to this situation of new random innovations without thinking stuff through in the first place.

But this is of no interest to the EU, especially now that they are slowly turning more into anti-globalization and have a distinctive “made in Europe” industry. And yet still, even if there were to be incentives for more startups to be made, the European Union insists on making a green industry. Cars, as proven in decades of research, are the worst type of transportation in emission efficiency, even electric ones.

And it’s not like Europe is not interested in competing with foreign markets: In fact, competition is seen as an incentive to provide affordable quality products and services. However, it is well known that the United States’ model of capitalism relies on getting a monopoly as quickly as possible in order to charge as much as people are willing to pay for afterwards, while providing no innovation because no one dares to compete with them. If the US isn’t willing to compete, then the EU won’t play with the US in that regard.

This can be seen as “requiring a subscription to ride a car” in a scenario where all cars are driverless and from a single company. Such scenario is not real for self-driving cars, but in Spanish trains, this is very much true. If your origin or destination has trains exclusively from Renfe, a trip to Madrid can cost from 20 up to 45€ more than if it were to have Iryo or OUIGO trains, and in some destinations, the difference between AVE and AVLO (AVe LOw cost) is minimum. So a scenario like this is perfectly possible.

The Watch_Dogs effect

In the game ‘Watch_Dogs’, you can hack the navigation system of cars in the blink of an eye with just your phone. In real life, you can sort of do this already with self-driving cars.

The navigation system of a driverless car will try to avoid traffic cones as possible, and by putting a cone in front of its hood, the cars basically come to a full stop.

YouTube video: Activists declare 'cone week' to fight driverless cars in San Francisco (4:10)

This is really stupid and funny, but it shines a light to a glaring issue about the reliability of these machines. City infrastructure such as traffic lights and particularly public transportation is usually connected through a decentralized network, so different parts of the infrastructure remain isolated between each other in the case of an attack. And while it would be perfectly possible to hack the entire network of trains, its damages will most likely be localized to a few areas, allowing for quick response at those points for contingency plans in case someone hacks a train and tries to crash it onto another.

With self-driving cars, the story is different. Despite being disconnected from the rest of the city infrastructure, cars themselves are connected in a centralized way. If you can hack the servers of their navigation system, you could essentially control all cars within several cities that are close by. This is equally as hard as hacking a whole train, but where a train would cause a major localized accident, rogue self-driving vehicles would cause mayhem everywhere because they’re way more numerous than trains or buses, and have to interact with tons of vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and more. On the other hand, trains only have to deal with other trains for the most part while they’re moving.

YouTube video: WATCHDOGS 2 HOW TO VEHICLE HACK!! (5:17)

There’s no room to give for cars, literally

During the 1950s, spurred on by the belief that cars were the future of transportation, the United States began designing their cities to fit around them —and Canada followed suit. But cars tend to be pretty big and in no way they are as compact as other methods of transportation compared to something like a bus or a tram, so this meant that minor streets would need to be made wider.

While North American cities back in the day may have had some streets that were wider than the European counterparts, this wasn’t the norm everywhere. And even then, there’s the unavoidable issue of having to provide them with parking space.

In the US and Canada, cities are required to have a minimum amount of parking space. And without resorting to multiple floor or underground parking —which is pretty unusual for some reason— they were forced to take down a lot of buildings. A lot of commercial space also had to be destroyed to fit the cars, which is why you can find so many drive-thru commercial spaces there.

YouTube video: This city in the Netherlands and this one in Canada used to be the same (19:36)

Europe did have some history of adapting their cities to cars, but this trend has reversed in recent years, particularly in the Western side. And while many people argue that “European cities have plenty of buildings from the Middle Ages worth preserving”, the truth is that historical buildings in the US were bulldozed for the car. This also has removed the necessity for parking spots with minor economic impact.

Another common complaint from drivers is that many cities in Europe have streets built prior to the invention of the automobile which are too narrow to drive through, and this is true, but only to an extent.

Old-school carriages were actually about the same size or larger than the contemporary counterpart of the car, and if you include the horses, it could be as large as many SUVs in the United States today. And that’s without mentioning the historical iterations of the horse carriage, which have influenced wide roads into urban design as far back as Roman times.

Don’t make me bring the Carthaginian elephants into this.

But in the case of the streets wide enough for cars, the thing nowadays is that European cities are quickly pedestrianizing the streets that used to be, at first, mixed-use between pedestrians, carriages, trams and the first cars, and then cars were given priority.

To put it all back into context, the little to no room for robotaxis to drive is decreasing, and Europe right now is being particularly protective about what’s already been built, so they will not be so keen as to give that space back to self-driving cars.

Would somebody please think of the workers!?

There’s also the concerns of how many jobs it will robotaxis destroy over those that are created, and while that’s something that is yet to see, we’ve seen a similar story unfold many years ago with Uber.

While Uber was taking off in the United States, sentiment about its service sparked a lot of resent from traditional taxi drivers in Europe, and led to strict regulations about how they should coexist with licensed taxi drivers, despite Uber trying to brush them off countless times.

Labor culture in Europe is very different than that of the United States in that there is a particular focus in respecting worker’s interests over pursuing potential profitability, resulting in many countries implementing a lot of protections towards them, but are very restricting to a company’s ability to make money in overly humongous quantities.

This goes completely against Uber and Waymo’s interests of achieving as much growth as possible, with the purpose of capitalizing gains to satisfy investors afterwards.

A conflict of interest like this may be equally true for robotaxis, if the hypothesis of them being more profitable driving around town than parked while waiting for the next customer is correct. Robotaxis still require human supervision fairly regularly despite their improvements. Especially in central Europe, work hours are decreasing, but these self driving cars would basically be working nearly the entirety of a day. Adding up other concerns about job automation, these give raise to opposing views that are simply bound to cause issues.

The innovation argument

There are a lot of critics saying that Europe should be focusing on innovation rather than regulation, and for some economic and geopolitical reasons, this makes sense. But I feel that in the matter of transportation, it may be debatable that Europe may be “behind the rest of the world”, because most often, the argument falls into marketable stuff such as electric cars, and express delivery services, among other things.

Surely pluggable hybrids have been a huge struggle for European car makers, but in terms of road infrastructure, Europe seems to be the undisputable leading force of innovation.

Many of the types of road infrastructure around are actually European designs, especially modern ones like this turbo roundabout in the Netherlands. Roundabouts are just starting to be built in the US, but most driving tests hardly cover them, despite proven to be safer than regular intersections.

So while Europe will briefly have the magic of self driving cars, they probably won’t last long, and the lives of the Europeans should stay the same good as always. There are opportunities for entrepreneurship; all you have to do is to look in the right places.

Music: Store music: Salsa A(Nintendo Presents: New Style Boutique)

Just what is Liquid Glass?

It is Apple’s new design language introduced in all software for Apple devices: iOS 26, TvOS 26, watchOS… You name it. This design language was meant to unify UI elements across all of their devices, which despite being fairly similar all around, have had their differences when you got specific in their functionality.

They managed to do this by using glassmorphism and crank it up to 11. When I hear that term, which reflects the look of glass to everything in the UI of an app, I usually retort with “I bet it looks worse than Aero Glass”.

Aero was first introduced in Windows Vista all the way back in 2007 and further refined in Windows 7 two years later, by turning borders of windows into translucent, frosted glass.

And from there, it just went worse, except for that time with the Wii U, which I believe it was the best iteration of that aesthetic. The “web” iteration that you can pull off with backdrop-filter often lacks contrast, and in some cases, the edges are too fuzzy to figure out the bounds of an UI element.

Which one do you see more clearly? I assume that the iOS one isn’t very clear. Aero and the Wii U have implemented certain techniques such as text shadows and outlines to increase the text contrast of their transparent elements.

At least, Apple seems to have tried to add some volume and edges to the design, but it’s clearly inconsistent between platforms and even between parts of the same operating system. Apple Liquid Glass seems to completely forget this and instead it changes from dark to light depending on what’s underneath. Impressive, but there are simpler ways of achieving universal contrast.

Gestalt-breaking content

Also, it doesn’t really help much that reflections and refractions tend to get a lot in the way of the content that you’re viewing, despite Apple marketing it as “putting content first”. I assume they refer to that as making everything more transparent and reducing everything to a bunch of windows, and removing divisions from sections altogether, which is fine for reducing clutter, but it may also introduce other problems.

The principles of the Gestalt list how human vision tends to follow certain patterns. These things include grouping elements by how similar they are and how spaced they are relative to each other, and it even knows how to keep continuity of things even though they’ve been broken apart on purpose. Usually, UI designers rely on these to intentionally direct the attention of the user or to instruct them what things do what, and how related they are to each other, and Apple is definitely making use of them, even on this iteration. But what they haven’t seem to have considered is how these principle can also work against you.

By removing closure on some things, not only they’re removing one way to clearly add a separation between what some elements do and what don’t, they’re also adding new visual patterns that can disrupt the user’s attention. This has the effect when the bottom bar and its tabs were pulled apart in iOS 26, they started to behave like buttons now, which implies that they sort of work like “one-time actions” instead of “tabs to switch from one context to another”, in some cases.

But there’s something within this system that I just find truly hideous.

The “clear” theme

Whose idea was this!?

The clear theme on iOS clears out all the colors of app icons and turns them all into this odd, grayscale opacity cacophony. This is accessibility hell, and there’s nothing that reads loud and clear in this home screen. You can’t just remove the color information from an UI; it’s a key factor in its design that’s as fundamental as things like contrast, flow, shapes and hierarchy. Here, color has been sacrificed for uniform looks, allowing you to color the backgrounds of app icons as you please. But this trades out readability immensely.

White gradients are also sources of light, so if implemented incorrectly, the apparent 3D shape of an icon may change, which affects its shape. The Photos and Safari app icons have been seriously affected by this. Let alone the terrible contrast ratio that you could get in some icons. It almost feels like a personal attack to accessibility guidelines.

This is even worse than the already terrible themed icons on Android. At least those have clear contrast.

This is a big deal because, even for tech savvy people like me, sometimes I struggle finding the application I want to use because of the clutter of the home screens. I can easily tell them apart by their discrepancies between their looks, but with that being gone in these interfaces, the times I twiddle my finger trying to find the right app are going to increase. And if someone like me is already feeling like that’s a difficulty, imagine people who aren’t as tech savvy as me.

And even without the clear theme, there are certain UI elements that still try to emulate that look regardless, like the clock display (extremely important for watchOS, which by the way, has clearly shied itself away from the glassmorphism) and other widgets such as the quick controls panel.

Why am I so upset about this?

Normally I would just cringe when I see a design that I find it provides a bad user experience. But this is Apple we’re talking about here, a company who has always been a trendsetter when it comes to UI design.

In the mid 2000s, the Californian company brought skeumorphism to the world by designing icons and UI elements as if they were actual objects, from sliders and buttons taking the shape and even texture of their real counterparts, all the way up to imitating the color and texture of a notepad and a calendar, and designers from all parts of the world liked it so much that they wanted to emulate that photorealistic realism imitating real objects (among others) into their products and UI designs.

But when iOS 7 came out in 2013, a radical redesign changed everything for simpler, abstract designs. While controversial at its time, it quickly grew up with everybody, and it influenced other companies to do the same minimalistic makeover.

While Microsoft has brought several contributions to the new skeumorphism wave of the present with their Fluent design language, nobody really caught on it as much because they aren’t exactly known for setting trends. But Apple has embraced this trend of uniform looks and all transparency, so glassmorphism might start to spread in all places.

I don’t really have a problem with glassmorphism. And I’m aware that I’m mostly criticizing the iOS part of the design. From what I’ve seen, Apple TV seems to have the best iteration of this design, but that’s mostly because it hardly needs to have an UI at all times. As for Apple Vision and macOS, I still have my doubts, but I haven’t gotten in my hands neither of the hardware to make an opinion about it. Besides, there’s way more iPhones than Macs or Apple TVs in the market, so iOS is definitely the flagship of all of the new features from Apple.

Hopefully, it does seem like it might not live on to become a huge trend. Lately, Apple hasn’t been delivering a lot of enticing features and it’s clearly failing to both follow red hot trends such as AI, and trying to set themselves up in a niche where nobody is competing with VR and their horrendously expensive Apple Vision. But then again, I wouldn’t say it’s too much of a farfetched claim that design changes can be piggybacked by the coming of new features. In the case of the “modern skeumorphism”, it was VR at first, and then became more abstract with AI. So it may be that “glass” is the new face of AI. Who knows.

Music: History(Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe | Ian Hawkridge)

You can check the cathedral and archway photos I took in their full resolution, too.

Honestly, it’s a bit of a miracle that I managed to take these two pictures. Not only the lights were off long enough for it to stay incredibly dark at night, but the moon was just past its new moon phase, so it was pretty much below the horizon for the entirety of the night. This effectively made what I’d argue has been the darkest skies this city has seen in the last 250 years.

Even so, I was playing safe here: I didn’t bother to set up my star tracker and I took pretty basic short exposures. I had no idea when power would come back after all. Because of that, I couldn’t correct the artifacts you can see in the full resolution version of these photos.

Light pollution is a thing that exists in our modern world and has become particularly prominent since the 1990s. My parents (and also a bypassing gentleman who approached me taking these photos; had a nice chat with him about how astronomy was back then vs now) still remember that in their youth, they were able to spy the Milky Way with the naked eye. But with the widespread of artificial lighting —particularly LED— this is no longer the case. Last year I made a post talking about light pollution and some of the problems caused by it.

But without power, all artificial light stopped working. However, the outage began at midday. It was announced that power would gradually return while the sun would be still up. Luckily for me, the north and south were the first to get power, while I, who was at the center, was in one of the areas that would be last. So the chance was there.

Shortly before I finished capturing a frame for my cathedral photo, the lights came back on, severely overexposing the shot. This stark comparison of before, while and after the power restore shows the sheer effect artificial lights have on the night sky.

If you’re keen about details, you can see the full sized version here.

What I also find quite shocking is how little people seemed to care about this once in a lifetime event that added some positive light onto the disaster. Some apparently did take the chance that it got dark and focused on taking pictures for their social feed, but I don’t think there was anybody who was staying out for the evening were focused on the stars, let alone take pictures of them.

But it’s totally understandable. Watching the sky suddenly have a bunch more stars than usual is probably something way less important than worrying about your food in the freezer and refrigerator going bad. Although it probably would have been way more impressive and attention-catching if the Milky Way were to be visible —at this time of the year it’s a bit difficult to spot it at the time of the blackout. And even if it were to be in its full splendor, many people would simply think it wouldn’t be worthwhile watching if the city lights would be back on before sunset anyway.

Or maybe they did try, but the stars would hardly come out because you need methods and tools that are not conventional to your average phone camera user to take pictures with quality on par with the ones I did.

Still, the people who take the chance to make cool pics of themselves on Instagram sadden me in a way, because it’s definitely showing that looking at the stars, one of the most ancestral cultural aspects humanity has had since the dawn of time, is rapidly disappearing. Apparently, having higher numbers on social media than everyone else so you can feel socially accepted is more important nowadays. Sometimes I wonder, if this is the way cultures are naturally meant to evolve, making preserving such cultural heritages an ultimately futile effort.

Of course, I’m not saying that we should all turn our power off just like how it happened on that day. My point is that light can be used in a more responsible way, and that in order to improve our quality of life just a bit more and to preserve something so ubiquitous across civilizations and generations, showcasing humanity’s evolution in science and philosophy, we should try to start implementing those.

Cloud computing? Web apps? What are you talking about?

Music: Doing It Right(Mario & Luigi - Bowser's Inside Story | Yoko Shimomura)

In the very beginning (we’re talking almost 100 years ago!), computers would run programs and applications from inside the computers themselves, and programs (software) would rely on the components inside them (hardware) to do whatever they’ve been programmed for.

This can range from calculators, operating sophisticated machinery, videogames and even programs that run or maintain other programs; not in an Inception kind of way, but as a manager and worker model. Although sometimes it’s the former too, through emulation or virtualization.

Because computers could be built for different purposes, software was usually made for a specific or a very select group of devices. Cross-platform and porting solutions would eventually appear, but until fairly recently in computing history, there was no builtin solution for developing the same application for all kinds of devices, such as your PC, wearables, and tablets.

Although some examples can be quite extreme, like running 1993’s DOOM on the display of a cotton candy machine, you still have to hack your way to make it run in the most absurd places.

But even then, what if you had some data that you wanted to have in all of your devices? What about posting videos publicly?

How the web became the cloud

This is where the Internet comes in: The system that provides scaffolding and protocols for devices to communicate with each other, no matter how far away they are. Under the Internet runs the World Wide Web, or the web for short.

When you make an operation through the web, you connect to another computer. Most often, it will be a server computer that will send some content that your own device (client) will display for you, like a blog post or a company’s website. But it can also allow you to send data in, which is the relying principle behind social networks.

All of this is handled by both server and client computers, and the software they run are what encompass a web application. The key insight is that, unlike regular applications mentioned above, the inner workings of web apps span more than one device. Regular apps can still connect to other places through the web from time to time, such as for sharing files through multiple devices or online activation of your favorite Adobe product, but most of the heavy lifting is exclusively performed by your computer, whereas on web apps, you request other computers to do it in stead of your own.

Cloud computing, broadly speaking, encapsulates all of the ping-ponging between the servers and the clients of a web app, in a way that can sort of manage itself and give insights to human users and developers. This means that web apps can save on resources when there isn’t much activity, and beef up when traffic spikes up. This is wonderful for startup companies because they’d have to put very little work on increasing resources as more people use the app.

But setting up a cloud data center is very complex and expensive. That’s why the vast majority of web apps that use cloud computing rely on companies that specialize in making and maintaining their own and borrow them at a price. These are the cloud computing services that I will be referring as cloud providers from this point onward, and they are the main topic for this post.

After all, hiring the service is way more straightforward than:

1. Budgeting how much hardware you need to make the most bang for your buck.
2. Having to build a tech stack for a computer that you need to maintain to make it work continuously without blackouts, overloads, corruptions or hardware failures.
3. Coming up with a system to update the app with new features in a way that doesn’t interrupt or break what the users are doing at the time you upload the update — some apps even selectively enable certain features for a group of users.
4. Keeping your tech stack up to date to keep it safe from hackers and bots, while at the same time making sure that the updates don’t break your app because of breaking changes.
5. Coming up with a system to get user diagnostics that will help solving problems with your app.
6. In the event that there’s an outage, you also have to develop a system to restore it back in place with minimal losses.

And yes, that most definitely means learning a programming language like PHP and a completely different operating system than Windows called ‘Linux’, as well as more tech savvy concepts such as version control, containerization, unit tests, and more.

The traps of cloud computing

Music: The Castle Depths(Mario & Luigi - Bowser's Inside Story | Yoko Shimomura)

I’ve been a web developer for about 8 years now, and I’ve relied on cloud computing for spinning up a few personal projects. But it wasn’t until a little before moving my blog out of Netlify when I realized of the shortcomings that their cloud hosting services provided for my blog.

My relationship with Netlify was fairly simple and straightforward — I just needed a place to host my personal projects, and I wanted to showcase them for free, so the lower the hosting costs, the better. But I was aware of many of the services they offered: Image optimization, caching, edge functions… But I was just making simple static content. I only cared about the hosting.

So if I was able to host my web projects for pretty much free, why did I move my blog out? To put it simply…

The horrors of “lock-in”

This is mostly a concern for app developers. Feel free to skip this section if you’re just an user.

Since relying on cloud computing essentially defaults you to enrolling to a service, you must agree to whatever terms they have on their platform. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be trying to break the rules, but you’re also agreeing to the fact that the cloud providers can (and probably will at some point) change those rules, whether you like it or not.

If you feel like a lightbulb just lit up on your head and thought: “Huh, this sounds a lot like something Adobe would do with their Creative Cloud subscriptions”, that’s a gold star for you! This is pretty much equivalent to the flex pricing models that Autodesk uses for their 3D software: You pay as you use their programs —or in this case, their data centers. Except it can get worse than Adobe.

A common meme in the web app development space is that code can end up on infinite loops that never end until you force it to stop. If that’s happening on one of the cloud computing datacenters, the costs could turn into hundreds of thousands all the way up to millions of eurodollars of usage, potentially bankrupting your business if you’re not careful. Thankfully, most of these cloud providers do have countermeasures that you can set in place to mitigate this.

But the thing is, having hundreds of thousands of users in your app is pretty similar to an infinite loop of operations within your app and its cloud computing network. It just runs comparatively slower depending on the size of your userbase. So as your app grows in size, the expenses of the cloud infrastructure go up so much that eventually, a cloud provider will be vastly more expensive than having to develop your own cloud computing service with the same traffic.

In fact, the lock-in situation is so bad that even cloud providers like Vercel, despite being perfectly capable of having their own data centers now, in the past they have relied on other companies like Amazon as the backbone of their service, and they could impose fees as high as they want should you wish to leave. And this goes even worse off for developers using Netlify or Vercel, because despite the fact that they’re using the same underlying infrastructure from Amazon, Google or Microsoft, they set it up in their own ways, making it harder to migrate data and configuration from one service to another.

They became popular simply because the higher up web services they’re reselling such as Amazon’s AWS or Google Cloud are too complex for the end user. If Amazon or Google decide to work on their services to become more accessible for the end user, it could spell doom for companies like Vercel and Netlify. As a response, these companies will take huge egress fees to ensure you stay with them.

This is a list of all AWS service categories. If you thought Adobe had too many programs already, you don’t want to look inside these.

And it’s not those companies: The Big Tech companies can also supersede or downright turn down their services at their will.

In my case, I’m one of the bunch of people who used Netlify for the free hosting, so while leaving would force me to host my own blog myself, for a simple static blog it’s not that big of a cost if you start small.

And yet still, my blog isn’t still fully out of the cloud. Optimized image caches tend to grow pretty big, so I’m using an AWS storage bucket as part of my cache tech stack. I could have gone with an image CDN, but that’s still the cloud and it would force me to use HSTS (forced HTTPS), which I normally wouldn’t mind, but it would make my blog for older browsers pointless because HTTPS legacy support is dropping on many cloud services. Netlify does have an option to turn that off, but the looming threat that they could enforce HSTS on every Netlify site was my dealbreaker for this very specific niche project.

HSTS is still great, though, and you should have it enabled in pretty much all of your projects for safety and privacy reasons.

Generative AI is pretty much cloud computing

Generative AIs are bulky resource intensive pieces of software that you’ll hardly ever have in your own computer. Just downloading their language models can take hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of storage. There’s a reason why language models have an extra L in LLMs: They’re Large.

And even if you had that storage, you need a ton of power for running the thousands of computing operations needed to run them. Yet another reason to use thousands of power mongering GPUs for anything other than playing games.

Considering the obnoxiously large costs of running generative AI on your own, as a startup you’ll have no option but to rely on OpenAI, DeepSeek, or whatever may pop up in the future, to use those kinds of features. And it gets pricy pretty quickly, too.

So if any app you are using has an AI feature, you can rest assured there’s a datacenter behind it. Simply because setting up an AI is far too complex of a task for your everyday developer.

But I’m just a regular person. I don’t make web apps.

This should still concern you. Cloud computing makes developing a web app so easy, it hugely increases the amount of people willing to make an app without much knowledge on computer science, leading to lots of apps —several of them being basically the same— with questionable quality and security.

One of the main targets of cloud computing are startups backed by venture capital because venture capitalism is driven by growth; if your project makes it big, scaling up is nothing you should worry about.

However, venture capitalism carries a high risk of failure because startups are not consolidated companies.

And you know what happens when a company fails, right? They’d have to give away the datacenters they use. In other words, the apps developed by them you use will stop working. And if that app is tied to a specific product, that product would essentially become waste that won’t do anything.

You don’t want this to happen to your insulin pump.

That’s pretty much one of the main reasons why many apps these days have tiers, one of them being free of charge: To grow and impress investors. But these often come with certain costs that may be pretty well hidden, or throw some shenanigans like “your personal data is the product they’re selling”. Likewise, once you’ve signed up, it will be easier for you to get “converted” to a paying user through a subscription, the hottest trend in tech nowadays and a more widespread concern in the last few years. Cloud computing isn’t the source of the surge of subscriptions, but a catalyst.

But computing is not free. It requires power and hardware to run, and that costs money. As the number of free users enroll in whatever plan they have grows, so does the company’s credit. Even if they impose harsher limits on the service on free users, you’re still using it without being charged any eurodollar; credit is unavoidable.

All of these startups and not so startup anymore companies are basically operating at a loss. OpenAI is not expected to turn profit until 2029, and although Forbes has stated that Notion is “profitable”, it’s fairly small and they’ve just began using AI. I wouldn’t be surprised if that situation were to change soon.

It’s hard to find apps that don’t use cloud computing, but the telltale signs that one of them doesn’t is if these conditions apply:

• It doesn’t ask you to make an account to get started.
• You have to download the app and install it in your system.
• It still fully works if you’re not connected to the Internet.

If these conditions apply, then it’s highly likely that the app you’re using doesn’t use cloud computing.

Conclusions for developers

Music: Persistent Joy(Mario & Luigi - Bowser's Inside Story | Yoko Shimomura)

Simply put, don’t use cloud computing unless necessary. You’re definitely not gonna need one if you’re doing a todo list app. And you probably won’t need one for productivity apps of most kinds either. Or cookbooks. Heck, if your e-commerce is also localized, you might be fine with just a regular web app. No need for Shopify or WooCommerce.

Sure, this adds a significant amount of inconvenience, which is something that our ever increasingly demanding brains don’t want. But my life philosophy has taught me that willing to suffer a bit of an inconvenience will make you more humble and more grateful for everything, even if it fails. At the end of the day, would you be willing to pay millions just to make something one step less convenient? In the long run, this effort may pay off…

Don’t get me wrong, cloud computing is still pretty good for hosting prototypes or proof of concepts that you might not end up developing further into commercialization. But it can be easy to fall for the trap that this is cheaper in the short term, but not if it becomes a viral hit.

Cloud computing is most effective when you need to share things to the general public, too. So for things like YouTube and streaming platforms it’s basically their only way to share media effectively. But if you’re just sharing data with a select few devices or users, there may be another way.

Although very popular in the 2000s, they’ve pretty much disappeared off the map 20 years later, but the peer-to-peer networking technology is still there. With P2P, your computer becomes a server and a client at the same time. In other words, you use your computer for computing on the web instead of relying on someone else’s.

People still use them to torrent movies and games, but one could use P2P networks for file syncing between devices, removing the need for databases. An user would just need a small file with all relevant data in their devices, with maybe backups in the event of a conflict or corruption. It’s what powers things like games with multiplayer lobbies (Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and even some Call of Duty games used it), and some video calling programs used to use peer-to-peer. It may be potentially safer because it’s decentralized: If a computer is compromised, only them and those connected to that user may be at risk, instead of millions of users when hackers manage to breach databases of large corporations.

While I was adding a video player functionality to my blog, I came across the idea of making a stereoscopic 3D video to test on the Nintendo 3DS, since the Legacy version of this blog is compatible with the Nintendo Wii and 3DS.

So here are two 3D videos for you to check out! Both versions will work on the New Nintendo 3DS. Regular, older models of the console don’t support any way for video playback with its built-in Internet Browser.

Video: Kirby 3D test (side-by-side version)

Video: Kirby 3D test (anaglyph version)

How did I make them?

Basically, I made use of the stereoscopy features from Blender cameras. I seemed to have achieved better results when setting both cameras parallel to each other —this can be easily configured in Blender without fiddling with the cameras.

Music: Hair Salon(Nintendo Presents: Style Boutique)

What’s the aspect ratio and why do we care about it?

An aspect ratio is a quantity that defines the proportions of an image or video in terms of its width and height. You can calculate it by dividing the width by the height, but its more common representation is by taking its fractional representation.

For example: A typical widescreen monitor (1920 × 1080 pixels) has an aspect ratio of 1.7, but it can also be represented as 16:9 (since 16 ÷ 9 is also 1.7)

In film and photography, and as of recent display screens and social media, aspect ratios were used to fit content within a rectangle with the same proportions. This way, no matter how small or large the image was, you can always make it fit within a rectangle of the same shape.

How we normally resize images

Since the early days of graphical computing, we used to scale images using their image dimensions. In some cases, some alterations were necessary, such as making the width or the height of an image divisible by 2 or a power of 2. Nowadays, most image manipulation libraries still measure the size of an image in terms of width and height, so this metric is still important to this day.

This is how image data is normally stored in computers. As you can see, width and height are relevant.

It goes without saying, then, that when changing the size of an image, we traditionally plug in new values for the width or height. A common technique is by scaling both dimensions by the same number. When done in this way, the proportions remain the same, and the representing rectangle will remain geometrically similar.

But sometimes, you might want to set both to arbitrary values. This can result in a change of aspect ratio, meaning that the resulting represented rectangle will have different proportions. This can lead to various ways of making it fit with the new rectangle:

• Stretch to fill: The image is stretched in its entirety so the whole image fills the new rectangle. This will break geometric similarity compared to the original image. For example, squares become rectangles and circles become ellipses.
• Scale to fit: The image is scaled so that the whole image fits within the new rectangle. This will show the entirety of the image, but will leave empty space; when it’s on the sides of the image, it’s a phenomenon known as “letter-boxing”.
• Scale to fill: The image is scaled so that it fills the new rectangle. It’s similar to stretch to fill, but keeping geometric similarity. This leaves no empty space, but it will result in parts of the image being cropped.
• Scale to width/height: The image is scaled until either the width or height of the image matches the new rectangle’s. Depending on which one is widest for the image and the new rectangle, this will result in either scale to fill or scale to fit.

Overview of the different scaling methods, excluding the stretch to fill one.

As you can see, putting in the numbers for width and height blindly can result in wildly different results, depending on whether geometric shapes remain the same, and how the software chooses to resize the image when the image rectangle and the resized one don’t match in shape.

But what if we didn’t need to worry about that? This is where aspect ratio comes in.

Aspect ratio preserves shapes

Unlike width and height, aspect ratio is not a quantity that represents length. Instead, it’s a relationship of the two: “How many pixels wide are there compared to pixels tall”. And since it’s a simple fraction, any multiple —in other words, any scale— of that fraction still conserves that ratio.

This means that the aspect ratio is intrinsically related to the proportions of a rectangle. Two rectangles or images with the same aspect ratio will have the same geometrically similar shape. Only their sizes can differ.

Overview of the different scaling methods, excluding the stretch to fill one.

This means that if you were to set a specific aspect ratio when scaling the image, you are (almost) guaranteed to have the same shape. And this could also ease converting from one aspect ratio to another, even if you don’t know the original aspect ratio.

But how do we actually use the aspect ratio?

Refer to the definition of the aspect ratio:

With a bit of algebra, we can rearrange the equations to get the width and height in terms of the aspect ratio.

And this applies for any shape. But how do we apply these formulas in practice? You only need to know one of the dimensions you want to set to, and the aspect ratio you want the final rectangle to be in. The formula will calculate the missing length for your CDN or your image optimizer to figure out how to resize it. It’s that simple!

But what if you want to keep the same proportions? Well, just set it to the original image’s aspect ratio! And if you don’t know the aspect ratio, then you can just divide the image’s width by its height; it’s by definition after all!

function Image(props) {
    const {src, alt, width, aspectRatio} = props;
    The rounding is important! I will explain this later.
    const height = Math.round(width/aspectRatio);
    return <img {src} {alt} {width} {height} />
}

// This is a 1920×1080 image.
// When converted here, it'll be resized to 1024×576.
<Image src="image.png" width={1024} aspectRatio={16/9} />

The essence of using aspect ratios is that you’re explicitly indicating what shape you want your image to have, and sizes come second.

For these reasons, this is why I’d probably think a designer would prefer thinking in terms of aspect ratios and shapes rather than the spacing and the dimensions of the image.

Still, there is one catch: Remember when I said you’re almost guaranteed to keep the same shape by scaling with the same aspect ratio? There’s a reason why it’s “almost”.

Accounting for rounding errors

By definition, aspect ratios are rational numbers. But when it comes to computer imaging, we prefer to have images with natural numbers. Which means that at the end of the day, some rounding is going to be required.

There are many ways of rounding a number, but it doesn’t really matter which one you pick: The act of rounding a number will alter the final aspect ratio, since you’re approximating all of the decimals that come from the rational number.

This can be quite nagging when images are scaled to fit, because this will potentially result in a single column or row of pixels of empty space if you’re trying to make it fit within a specific rectangle. To ensure that this doesn’t occur, pick a number that, when multiplied by the denominator (number at the right) of the aspect ratio, is divisible by the numerator (number at the left).

If you’re scaling the image to fill, this is less of a problem, because it will only cause either one row or column of pixels to be cropped off.

While compromising accuracy, scaling with aspect ratios has proven me to be more versatile than having to manually calculate the widths and heights over and over again. I hope that in the future, CDNs and image optimizers take this into account, as well.

Music: Deep Dark Galaxy(Super Mario Galaxy Original Soundtrack | Mahito Yokota)

The Asian imposition

We’ve already seen a preview of what’s to come in the past edition of the Game Awards: Nearly all of the nominees for the Game of the Year award were mostly developed by studios in Eastern Asia, with Balatro being the sole exception, and that wasn’t even developed by someone in the United States.

Something like this is a testament to just how awful it has been for Western developers. Balatro was for the most part there because there had to be at least an indie game in the mix.

China in particular has been sticking their panda paws on the market, and hard. It’s only a matter of time before they start to dominate it. Unlike the United States and Canada, East Asian economies function differently, so they haven’t really been subject to layoffs. In fact, Tencent has begun to purchase controlling shares of Western studios that had gone public like Riot Games, and recently they have been keen to buying Ubisoft, which could be a turning point for European AAA studios in the long run.

Game developers from China have also been doing remarkably well lately. MiHoYo has been featured in the Game Awards for the past 4 years with games such as Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and most recently, Zenless Zone Zero. Also, Black Myth: Wukong has been a huge commercial success for China’s first dive into the AAA market.

While I wouldn’t say that China is going hard on the AAA market for now, we’re definitely going to see more games of such scale. China is going to be more ambitious and its current trend of transitioning to the console market will speed up this year.

Is this a good thing or not? It depends on how you see Chinese competition.

Somebody is hungry and wants a big piece of cake.

Another important factor is the upcoming release of the so-called Nintendo Switch 2, which I predicted would come not before this summer. From the current officially disclosed data we know, it’s going to be backwards compatible with the original Switch and will use the same Nintendo Switch Online service, although it’s not clear if it will have cross-play with the original console.

Combined with the fact that the Japanese economy has been steadily improving, this is a good moment for Nintendo to strike big, bringing back a lot of interest into the Japanese videogame industry, since there’s a strong correlation between the success of a console and local game development studios’ reach.

Considering the huge fiasco of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, it’s all in the Big N’s hands to maintain the future of the console market for the next generation. The other big player here is —shocking but unsurprisingly— Valve with the Steam Deck, which is currently competing with its clones and the Nintendo Switch. And those aren’t technically consoles, but glorified PCs!

The stagnation of generative AI (yes, that’s a thing)

You may have heard that gen-AI technology was going to revolutionize society as a whole for the past 4 years. But just as any new craze, it eventually has started to slow down in adoption despite its recent advancements.

Many people, myself included, are reading the tea leaves and are starting to believe that the AI bubble burst is imminent. So you’re probably gonna expect something very similar to what happened with the games industry in the last two years, but on a much larger scale. Potentially as devastating as the dot-com bust.

This could bring some opportunity in Europe. Videogame studios have been pretty affected by investors flocking off to AI companies, and videogames could pose as a good alternative for them to invest in again.

This, however, could also be a double-edged sword, particularly outside Europe. After many consecutive failures (don’t forget crypto and Web 3.0), investor sentiment could turn very sour, and may not be willing to drop a dime on anything tech-related for a while.

Worst of all? The videogame industry is somewhat linked to all this.

The GPU market is in danger

Oh, this is fine. Just me training an LLM.

Spurred by both the crypto and the generative AI booms, Nvidia has reached outlandish share prices. Its market cap as of January 2025 is 3.7 trillion USD (a billion for those who use the long scale). That’s more than 10% of the GDP of the United States, and it’s getting extremely close to the levels reached by Lehman Brothers before the 2008 financial crisis. Suffice it to say, this is extremely overpriced.

Economists are still debating whether this is a bust or the start of Nvidia consolidating itself as a tech giant, but I see this as something inevitable, as Large Language Models and other AI technologies depend heavily on GPUs for matrix multiplication and parallel processing for machine learning, so much so that Nvidia has began to create products specifically for these use cases. Like with all very risky investments, it’s all speculative.

YouTube video: Why I bet $250,000 that Nvidia will crash (15:14)

If Nvidia crashes, not only the game industry will take a hit, but the tech industry as a whole. This could be troublesome for Nintendo, as they rely on Nvidia for the Switch’s GPU, and it seems like it could be the same for its successor. It may not matter much if units are already in production, however.

The takeaway of this year

If 2024 was the year we screamed with the layoff nightmare, 2025 is probably going to be the year we hold our breaths. There is a lot of uncertainty in the air, particularly in the gaming hardware market, but there is still the hope of the Asian industry in the realm of software, particularly in the mobile and console market.

If you are a gamer, you may want to consider switching to PC or either Valve’s Steam Deck or Nintendo’s Switch 2, and be more patient to Western developers as they struggle in these hard times. You’re going to expect new big names in your games store, particularly Chinese ones. And probably get an Radeon GPU if you are concerned about Nvidia’s future —although I’d bet that AMD would also be in big trouble if the green team goes down.

If you are a game developer, though… I would consider looking for other opportunities outside of tech, just in case the tech bubble bursts. Even in Europe, it’s going to get icky. But if you are still insistent on working on games, you might want to start learning Mandarin.

Music: Multiplayer Mode(Call of Duty: Black Ops II | Jack Wall)

A simple case of anti-cheating

Let’s say you want to buy the most powerful weapon you can get at a shop in an MMO game. An interaction without any anti-cheating would work like this:

This is just a simple example of an interaction between the client (the player) and the server (the shopkeeper). In practice, a lot of other metrics are considered for other situations, such as checking for speeding or performing abilities that could only be done in higher levels.

Now, it may be actually possible for a player to get that amount of gold in a legitimate manner. Regardless, the oblivious shopkeeper will think you can pay for it and the purchase goes through. But do you think the player really did get the gold fair and square?

An anti-cheat is basically a lie detector, and it scans for something coming from the player to detect if they are answering truthfully or not. In some cases it may choose to just reject the purchases, and in others it may ban the player. The key of the fuss, however, is in how the lie detector works by design.

There are three kinds of anti-cheat, depending on how their work, and each have their own pros and cons.

The “doing the detective work” approach

Press X or □ to doubt.

A lie detector doesn’t have to be a machine. A human can also detect cues on when a person is lying or not, such as voice and nervous ticks, and they can also refer to evidence to prove someone is lying. Detectives do this in all kinds of criminal investigations.

This is what server-side anti-cheats are doing: Corroborating records of the game with the player’s actions and using the intended game rules as a way of detecting whether they are cheating or playing legitimately.

But they aren’t very reliable, because they rely on intuition and the evidence gathered, and they may often get too biased with false positives or, worse, false negatives when detecting a cheater. It all depends on how capable it is, and how good is the player at concealing their tactics.

But if there’s one thing in which they shine is that they are the least invasive anti-cheat software. If the anti-cheat gets compromised in any way, it doesn’t pose a threat to the player —at least not directly— resulting in merely a ruined game experience.

The scanner approach

I’ll ask you a few yes or no questions and you just answer truthfully.

When people think of a lie detector, they usually think of a device that scans brainwaves or checks the heartbeat of a person. When it comes to detecting a cheater in a game, this is what’s called client-side anti-cheat.

You see, when you download an online multiplayer game, you’ll often get what’s called a client of the game, which is the program that sort of handles the game from a player’s perspective; the game master has the server version, and depending on the type of game, you may be able to download it and make your own server on your own computer. This is a bit of a simplification, of course, but it gets the gist of it.

Inside the client, there may be some code that will check what’s happening within the game client, a bit like checking your heartbeat when you’re being questioned. This can give a more accurate reading of what the player’s doing at any given moment while you run the game.

However, you trade off a bit of security. If the lie detector is compromised, it could be harmful to the person being questioned, but because it’s not directly connected to an organ, the worst they can get is a bad burn on their skin. Likewise, hackers can’t do much harm on your computer by hacking the anti-cheat. In fact, the actions that can be done are so little that it’s generally used for bypassing the anti-cheat and not much else.

Still, this is much better, but it’s not infallible, either. This kind of anti-cheat is very regional; just as how a brainwave probe can’t check for a heartbeat or if the person started sweating, an anti-cheat of this type can’t reliably check what’s happening outside the game. This allows for people to run external programs to bypass the anti-cheat, simply because the anti-cheat is overlooking those things.

But what if we could be able to check everything?

The implant approach

Now you can have advertisements in your dreams!

Kernel-level anti-cheat is a hyper-strengthened version of the client-side anti-cheat. Instead of putting on a lie detector, you get an implant into your brain that works as a lie detector.

When you install a game with this kind of anti-cheat, you give full consent for the installer to place a driver in the kernel of your operating system. This is the “brain implant”.

A kernel driver grants full access to what’s going on in your computer, even things that you, as an user, can’t normally have control of, regardless of whether you’re playing the game or not. In brain implant terms, it allows for it to check your memories and thoughts, and also body functions like your hormonal balance and digestion.

Giving access to everything that’s happening on the player’s computer makes for this type of anti-cheat to be the most effective: Nothing can be overlooked. But this also brings a lot of security concerns. The operating system (your brain) trusts that the driver will work perfectly. But if it starts failing and the operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc) doesn’t know how to or simply can’t fix the errors, it will panic and proceed to reboot the system. Something like this was the cause behind the CrowdStrike outage that caused millions of computers across the world to go Blue Screen of Death in July of this year.

The driver itself could have its own security vulnerabilities. If hackers do find one, they can get unprecedented access to your computer, and not even a privileged user such as “administrator” users in Windows could possibly have clearance to fix this.

Once a hacker breaches to the kernel of your PC, they can literally do whatever they want, from stealing all your personal and sensitive information, to putting a program that sends screenshots of your screen to the hacker, or a keylogger that makes a log of what keys you press in your keyboard, allowing the hacker to see what you’re typing. And you would probably have no way of knowing this. So once they gain control of the kernel, they essentially hold your PC hostage.

If a brain implant were to be hacked, someone could install a function in it to, for instance, make you puke anytime they wanted with the press of a button.

And we’re not even taking into account that the game developers themselves could use that anti-cheat software to do things that you weren’t expecting it to do, even if those things show up in the game’s EULA. For example, it could turn your installed game into actual spyware.

Worst of all, uninstalling the game that has an anti-cheat of this kind will not be enough to prevent hackers nor undo their effects. MiHoYo had a lot of controversy for a critical security vulnerability in Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat and leaving behind Honkai Star Rail’s anti-cheat even if the game was uninstalled, one that had a history of critical security vulnerabilities, even.

Another drawback of kernel-mode anti-cheat is that not every computer has the same kernel. Although most gaming computers use Windows NT for its kernel, a notable minority uses Linux kernel, the latter of which, being open source, can have some fine-tuned customizations.

Anti-cheat developers may choose to support whichever kernels they wish, and the vast majority will add support for Windows, while Linux doesn’t have as much widespread support. But even if the anti-cheat supports Linux, it’s ultimately up to the developers themselves to enable that support into their game. For example, EA —despite supporting Linux for 3 years— made a u-turn and dropped support for Apex Legends on Linux a few weeks ago.

Due to their extremely powerful capabilities, Windows and Mac OS kernel drivers/extensions have to be signed by Microsoft and Apple themselves, while Linux kernel modules have to be signed through a different but secure process. Passing the tests to get that signed driver should mean that these drivers won’t compromise the integrity of the operating system, and are also safe for the user. However, it’s not perfect; MiHoYo’s anti-cheat was bypassed and even exploited to disable any anti-virus the user may have on their computer.

Personally, I find kernel-mode anti-cheat too powerful for what it’s worth. If there are lots of cheaters, I can quit the game and move on to something else, hoping that things turn a bit fairer in a few hours. But if I get hacked because of an anti-cheat, that would pose a serious compromise to my security.

Valve has recently raised concerns about this kind of anti-cheats, and now they are enforcing game developers to disclose what anti-cheat they are using on all their games on Steam that are using a kernel-mode one, and heavily recommend to do so even if it’s not.

This is a very welcoming change, and one that I hope other games and app stores end up copying from Valve. I still think a user-mode client-side anti-cheat (the scanner lie detector ones) are probably the best anti-cheat software in terms of balancing reliability, performance, privacy and security, so if you are making an online game, I hope you choose this kind of anti-cheat solutions.

Windows

This covers the following versions:

• Windows 9x: Windows 95, 98 and Me.
• Windows NT: 4.0, 2000 and XP.

Windows 9x and NT4.0 (online)

Although currently in a very early state, it is possible to add support for East Asian languages through the archival project called Windows Update Restored. These are updated versions of the offline installers provided below, and are applied in nearly the same way as the days when the Windows Update feature was first introduced with Windows 98.

Windows Update Restored running under Windows NT 4.0, with the East Asian language support installed

Note that there are many versions of Windows Update, each compatible with a set of different versions of Windows, and only Internet Explorer 4 through 6 will work. You will have more luck finding the language installation files in the English versions of Windows.

Windows 9x and NT4.0 (semi-offline, recommended)

This customized installer of Internet Explorer 5.5 comes with a copy of the updated versions of the language packs as shown above.

1. Mount the ISO image in your system and extract the files on the specified path. Do not change this.
2. If prompted to remove the current language version, ignore it and press “Yes” to continue.
3. Select “Minimum installation, or customize your browser…” and click on Next.
4. Scroll all the way down and check the boxes for Display support for Japanese, Korean and Chinese (Traditional) and (Simplified). Do not tick on anything that is in bold text other than the language support.

Windows 9x and NT4.0 (offline)

If the method above doesn’t work, I have uploaded an archived version of the East Asian language installers for Windows 9x and NT 4.0, although I only tested it with Windows 98, it should also work on 95 and NT.

1. Mount the ISO image in your system
2. Run the installers one by one.
3. Restart the system.

These aren’t as updated as the other online methods

Windows XP

1. Insert the Windows XP installation disc in your system.
2. Head to Control Panel > Date, Time, Language and Regional options and select the Regional and Language settings. In the classic view, look for the latter.
3. In the Languages tab, check the Install files for East Asian languages.
4. Reboot.

Mac OS 9

This guide is taken from Nisus.com, so that you can check it from your legacy OS. This should also be possible in Mac OS 8, but I haven’t tested it.

1. Double click the Mac OS Install icon on the Mac OS 9 CD.

2. You will see a “Welcome” window. Click “Continue”.

3. Choose the hard drive on which you want to add the Language Kits. Make sure you uncheck “Perform Clean installation” in the “Options…” menu!

4. Then click “Select”.

You see, the installer has checked and found that you already have Mac OS 9 on the system. You want to add software features to your System.

5. Therefore, you click: “Add/Remove”. Now you see the “Custom Installation and Removal” window.

You have a lot of options here. But, all you want (now, for our purposes) is to scroll to near the bottom of the list where you’ll see “Language Kits”.

6. Check “Language Kits” and notice that the pop-up menu to its right becomes enabled:

7. Click the pop-up menu and choose “Customized Installation…”:

A new window opens in which you can check off the specific language kits you want to install (in this case, Japanese, Korean, Chinese using simplified characters and Chinese using traditional characters):

8. After you check off the ones you want, click OK and then you’re ready to install the software.

About ruby text

Ruby text are annotations that are placed on top of Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters to aid in reading them. However, among the browsers that support the legacy OSes mentioned above, only Internet Explorer 5.5 supports ruby text.

If your browser does not support ruby text, it will appear in this blog to the side of the CJK text.

Here are a couple of examples:

• 東京 (Tōkyō) is how Tokyo is written in Japanese.
• 北京 (Běijīng) is how Beijing is written in Simplified Chinese.
• 臺北 (Táiběi) is how Taipei is written in Traditional Chinese.
• 서울 (Seoul) is how Seoul is written in Korean.

Music: Diagon Alley(Harry Potter EA Games | Jeremy Soule)

Internet Archive has seen better days. Last month, they lost a case against Hachette Book Group (and others) that was around since May of last year. The printing companies alleged that Internet Archive was allowing people to infringe copyright when they lifted borrowing restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and will have to pay several millions of dollars in damages, maybe up to $400 million.

And on May of this year, they were the target of another DoS attack, albeit to a much lesser degree than this one. While I’m not well informed in digital security to discuss about how they got hacked and if the security measures they had in place were good enough or not, the fact that this has been going on for nearly a month now goes to show that the hackers are not planning on stopping for the time being.

The Internet Archive is mostly known for its WayBack Machine, a comprehensive archive of over 866 billion webpages since 1996, and while to some people it’s just a way to reminisce how websites used to look like in the past, it does have its usage as a very valuable resource for legitimate use cases such as documenting about legacy software, or retrieving data that no longer exists in the present —sort of like a preventive solution to link rot.

However, archive.org also has a repository of many types of media, mostly digitized books, but also music, movies and software. This is also part of the rationale behind the debate of copyright infringement, as the borrowing system is only applicable to books. Still, the Internet Archive does accept takedown of personal data if someone wishes it rather not appear in the archive.

My take on this is that attacking a public project of this scale equates to a crime against humanity itself. Let me explain why with a bit of history.

Music: Happy Hogwarts (casual variation)(Harry Potter EA Games | Jeremy Soule)

The concept of a digital archive represents our most recent level of advancements in storing knowledge. Throughout history, texts had been etched and written onto many kinds of surfaces. Some are durable, while others are reusable, but all of them are subject to being defaced, altered, or destroyed by both natural and humane causes because they are physical objects.

Plus, before the printing press was invented, scribes had to be employed to make copies of documents of any kind and medium, and were very predominant in many cultures from all parts of the world. There’s even a branch of science that studies how writing systems have contributed in shaping other aspects of culture, among other things.

The ability of representing knowledge using concepts such as numbers like 0s and 1s allows people to store it in a more abstract way, protecting them from most of the natural causes. And as it turns out, computers turn out to be very good at copying information flawlessly. In order words, digital information grants people with the ability to share knowledge easier than ever before.

However, knowledge still is —and will always be— susceptible to human damages. And we’ve seen this with attacks and boycotts to libraries and museums alike. Not even the digital repositories are safe from this.

And this is where the similarities between the incidents of the Internet Archive and the Library of Alexandria start to run out. To provide some historic context, the Ptolemaic library wasn’t destroyed by the infamous fire. In fact, the Museion, a somewhat independent institution but in which the library belonged to, still remained active centuries later. Historians still argue about several contradicting details, but what’s clear to most historians is that it didn’t disappear all of a sudden, rather, the library had a slower and steady decline.

The Library of Alexandria wasn’t the only large library of its time, either. The Library of Pergamum was claimed to have over 200 thousand volumes, and it has been rumored that Mark Anthony offered the entire collection to Cleopatra to restock the library, damaged by the fire 5 years prior. And its decline was not that much of a big deal anyway, as historians believe that most of the material within the library actually survived the demise, thanks not to other cultural centers such as the Library of Baghdad, but the many copies of the stored scrolls made by scribes over the centuries.

The Internet Archive, however, is probably the only archive of its kind when it comes to “archiving web pages in their entirety”, holding nearly 100 petabytes of data as of September 2024, and many other archiving initiatives are backed by their technology. In other words, it’s a centralized source of information.

This is why these attacks are actually a much bigger deal than other historic examples: We’re dealing with a totally new form of knowledge, one that we’re still figuring out how to effectively archive, despite modern advancements; I don’t know about any examples of “digital copyists” of old websites, for that matter. And there’s a lot in that archive, so if an outage and data loss does occur, it must rely on volunteers who have kept their own personal copies to restore it. Sure, we have a lot of people in this planet, but lost media is still a thing.

Regardless of their intentions and motives, it should be taken as fact that these hackers have proven that the current model of archiving the web is far from being “permanent”, and it can easily be brought down by factors such as hackers, or maybe even lack of funding (some historians argue that’s what brought the Alexandrian Library to its final demise). If we want to truly keep it that way, I believe we should try to decentralize our archives more, just like scribes used to do by copying tablets, scrolls and books in the past. Of course, this would imply a lot of backup copies and maybe even using decentralized networks such as IPFS, which will anger copyright holders, but further defining fair use and hopefully some court rulings in favor for archival could help in making this feat much easier to do.

Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal. — Ernest Hemingway

Music: JIVE.MID (Microsoft GS Wavetable)(Yamaha XG Sample MIDI | Sam Cardon)

Selecting the supported versions

This was a simple yet very hard choice to make. Ideally, I wanted to support as many operating systems as possible, but I knew this would be a very difficult task.

At the very least, I wanted to support the Windows 9x family of OSes, which meant that Internet Explorer 5 would probably be my target browser. The main problem with that it’s that IE5 came out at the very beginning of the standardization of the web. Which meant that whatever worked on this version would probably break in older versions. I ended up settling on IE5.5, which comes with Windows 98 Second Edition, and hopefully port to IE5. Of course, I also wanted to support other browsers from that epoch such as Mozilla and Opera —the latter of which is used quite often by retro web users.

Another motivator for supporting Internet Explorer 5 was that there was a version specifically made for some UNIX operating systems. But after researching on how to install the browser on Solaris, I quickly gave up because of the lack of expertise I had on Solaris to install it properly without resulting in system failures. To my knowledge, there is no script to do this automatically. I still have to figure out what to do about adding support to UNIX/Linux operating systems, as there were many distros with their own browsers. Konqueror and Galeon seem to come to mind, but there may be others that were used more (excluding Firefox).

I was also interested in supporting Mac Classic, which I have rarely used, but after not much research I quickly settled with Mac OS 9. I’m pretty sure Mac OS 8 also works, but version 9 was what I could get a hold of. I settled with Classilla as the target browser for this OS, but with how deeply disappointing and similar it seemed to be compared to Netscape 7 in functionalities, I also threw in the latter browser as one of my potential targets. Internet Explorer for Mac was a tempting possibility, but it was prone to crashing the Mac emulator I was using, so I set it aside for the time being.

Then there was Flash Player. If I wanted the music player in the Legacy blog while remaining cross platform, this was the only way to do so. Internet Explorer has a way to embed audio to a page, but it was non-standard and quickly deprecated in favor of HTML5 audio. Supporting Windows 95 and NT 4.0 meant that I had to stick with version 7 and ActionScript 2.0. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the source of a lot of headaches later on.

Understanding the fundamentals, once again

The Yonic Corner Legacy Version targets browsers that came about at a time where the W3C was just about 5 years old. To understand what that meant, we need to go back to that time, when Internet just started catering home consumers in the United States.

In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was a wild place: Everyone had their own way of displaying websites and doing things in them. Even if standards for communicating such as hypertext and its transfer protocol (HTTP) were being used, those standards weren’t yet fully completed. One of the most notable examples was JScript: Microsoft’s implementation of JavaScript for Internet Explorer, which, in an effort to gain influence over its competitors, added features that were totally incompatible with other browsers, a development stunt that was infamously named “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.

This is how I got introduced to the infamous Internet Explorer box model bug. The box model in HTML is a W3C specification which defines that every HTML element can be represented as rectangular boxes, which can have content, padding around that content, a surrounding border at the edges, and margins to separate elements around. In CSS, you can control the overall sizing of the element with the width property, and the “bug” is caused by how Internet Explorer (and also Netscape, by the way) determined how to compute that width.

The traditional model used by Internet Explorer computed the width of an element as the sum of the widths of the content, its padding and border thickness to the left and right sides of the box. However, the W3C standard computed it to be only the content without the paddings and borders.

This meant that Internet Explorer and Netscape rendered the elements smaller than they should’ve been according to W3C. And here’s where my rant against W3C begins: The thing is, the W3C was wrong. When Internet Explorer 6 came out, many layouts potentially broke all over the web. The reason? IE6 switched to the W3C box model.

Take a look at this CSS code:

.one {
  width: 600px;
  border: 2px solid black;
  padding: 10px;
}

In versions of Internet Explorer before 6, the actual width of the element would be set to 600 pixels, and other elements would be laid out considering that size. But in IE6 onward, the content box is set to 600 pixels, and the padding and border are added afterwards; resulting in a width that would actually be 624 pixels! This may not be what the web designers intended in the first place. In order to truly make it 600 pixels wide, you’d have to subtract the extra 24 pixels to the width property.

The worst side effect that this had was that this change made flexible layouts almost impossible to make:

.two {
  width: 75%;
  padding: 10px;
}

When setting width to a percentage, it takes on the percentage of the content width of the parent container, so regardless of the box model, a percentage width less than 100% will keep it nicely tucked inside the container. But this breaks when you introduce padding or borders, because the W3C model will grow the two element beyond that width; if it’s set to a 100% with either a border or a padding, it will always overflow its container. Meanwhile, the traditional model keeps the correct size and no overflows occur! And what’s worse, the only way to fix this with CSS alone is with the calc() function, something that Internet Explorer did not support until version 9, which was already too late for reasons I will discuss later.

Thankfully Microsoft saw through this problem and introduced a concept called quirks mode. By using the DOCTYPE special tag at the beginning of the HTML document, you could instruct Internet Explorer to render the page in either standards mode, which would attain to the W3C box model; or quirks mode, which maintains backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 5 and older. Other browsers would quickly follow suit with this behavior, and eventually became a standard across nearly all HTML versions. I won’t go into detail about which settings for DOCTYPE triggers which mode according to each browser, but this Wikipedia article has a nice table with some possible combinations.

Unfortunately for me, however, Astro always generates pages with the DOCTYPE that suits HTML5 documents, forcing the browser to use standards mode or almost standards mode, meaning that I would have to deal with the layout issues introduced by W3C standards.

People would later realize that the new standard behavior by the W3C was prone to many problems, so in 2006, Mozilla introduced the box-sizing property, which controls what should count as the width of an element.

By setting it like this in CSS, you could sort of opt back in to the old behavior from quirks mode while remaining in standards mode:

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

This new property was so well received that even the W3C would end up capitulating and turn this property into a standard. I might be wrong on this, but we take the code above for granted so much that now it might be something that many web designers teach very nonchalantly: “Don’t forget to put this, it’ll make things work properly.” or something of the sort, without actually understanding the reason behind it.

But this is of no use to me! Remember, this was introduced in the mid-to-late 2000s and didn’t become a standard until several years later, and Internet Explorer only began supporting this with version 8. Like I said before, it was all too late. So with no other options, I’d have to deal with the quirks of the standard rendering mode.

Getting to work

Now that I was somewhat familiar with the basics, my first step was to create potentially suitable designs.

This is the first design that I came up with. At first I didn’t like it, but I still liked the layout so I might rescue it in the future for a possible feature I might add sometime.

This is the mockup of the final design (except for the player). I don’t remember how I came up with the “Stardom” name, but I ended up changing it to “Pixarcade” design later on.

Knowing that responsive 3-column layout was probably not going to be feasible, I went with a static, table based layout; an old-fashioned technique, but I am making a site for old browsers, right?

My game plan was to first cater the quirky browsers, and then apply CSS patches that would work for browsers that follow the standards. Normally, one would focus on the standard browsers and then patch up the quirks from older browsers, but I found this process to be much simpler the other way around. Although later on I would add specific patches for browsers that have a very quirky behavior and I don’t see any other way to fix it without compromising the other browsers’ stability.

Internet Explorer also has an incredibly handy feature to selectively apply patches across most of its versions (5 through 9) through conditional comments:

<!-- Anything inside here will be skipped by IE6 and above.-->
<!--[if gte IE 6]><!-->
<link href="standard_layout.css" rel="stylesheet">
<!--<![endif]-->

<!-- Anything inside here will be run by IE5 and IE 5.5 only -->
<!--[if lt IE 6]>
<link href="ie5only.css" rel="stylesheet">
<![endif]-->

Since most other browsers would play by the standards, I needed the standard CSS patches to be available for them as well, and this code above will certainly do the trick.

I also had the power of modern enhancements to CSS thanks to both SASS and, later on, PostCSS, to convert modern features such as calc() into hardcoded supported values by these browsers.

Slowly the elements of the website would carefully be integrated, one by one. Some were trivially easy to make. Others, not so much. 9-slice elements such as the text bubbles and the code windows were very painstakingly crafted with tables, but I think I may have put the browsers to their limit when developing these, because they seem to have some transient issues when displaying them sometimes. In situations which CSS couldn’t cover some of the edge cases, I could rely on jQuery as a last resort.

Once I finished porting the majority of the post components from the Modern version —and showing a warning for those that couldn’t be ported due to web limitations— I ended up with two different versions of the blog, even though the data and posts were mostly the same. Although not an easy conundrum, I was able to merge the data of both versions together, so that I only need to write a post in one place, and both the Modern and Legacy versions could fetch and display the new post on their own.

All in all, I’ve learnt quite a lot about some of the most obscure elements of CSS and HTML, and particularly even more quirks related to each browser and operating system, and despite the many, many, shortcomings and problems, I had a lot of fun making the Legacy Version of The Yonic Corner.

Here’s a list of some of the things I’ve learnt:

• You can adjust the position of the marker of lists with list-style-position.
• HTML4 properties have fallbacks in modern browsers using CSS, at least for the most part.
• Now I fully understand the concept of web safe colors, as not only they could change drastically in screens with limited color depth, but they also can have flashes of colors when switching between applications —a quirk of the process graphics cards and software do called “palette realization”.
• Despite not supporting it, jQuery does work on IE5.5. Although only like the very first handful of releases, and only a very limited set of functions, but it was still good enough to do the things I wanted it to do.
• Tables have two ways of being rendered depending on how you set the property table-layout: fixed and auto. I still don’t get how they work exactly, but auto seems to be the option that can come closest to a flexbox —although it’s also the most unpredictable and the most prone to layout breakdowns.
• Although all of my target browsers support PNG, the vast majority has only 1-bit transparency support (such as with PNG8), so they can only be either totally opaque or totally transparent. The only one that does seem to have a more robust support for partial transparency is IE5 for Mac… *sigh*.
• When an element overflows in IE5, it actually makes its container bigger than it should be, instead of the element just popping off the container.
• Flash Player 7 sucks. But that’s a story for another time.

I’ve also came up with a really elegant hack for overcoming the problem regarding elements getting wider with padding. The key is that the enlargement only happens when you’re setting a padding or a border to an element with an explicit size. But if the size remains intrinsic —that is to say, it takes on its natural sizing— it will behave like in quirks mode or border-box sizing.

By default, block elements such as div will take all the available horizontal space. So why not use one intrinsically sized container as a padding box for the content?

hack.html

<div class="container">
  <div class="padding-box">
    <div class="content">
      This will measure 500px exactly!
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

hack.css

* {
  box-sizing: content-box;
}
.container {
  width: 500px;
  background: black;
}
.padding-box {
  padding: 10px;
  border: 2px solid black;
}
.content {
  color: white;
}

Set the width of the container-class elements to percentages and you could potentially have something like a rudimentary responsive element!

But I’ve learnt one more thing about the box model, which is the kicker. All the time I’ve mentioned the box model, I’ve been talking about the width of an element. But what about the height? It turns out that the height of an element is computed in an entirely different way, and there is no mention of padding nor border in height calculation. And older browsers seem to calculate it in the same way regardless of the rendering mode! So, unless you set the box-sizing: border-box rule in CSS, padding and borders will always make the element taller than specified.

I think the last part of this series is going to be the most fun one. I want to address and laugh —and roar in anger— at the many issues and weird stuff that happened since I started working on this project. Hopefully it won’t take a year to post it!

The AAA corporate greed: Game development as slavery?

Music: Busy Sim(The Sims 2 | Mark Mothersbaugh)

A bit of a flippant title, but it’s seems to be becoming ever increasingly truer with time in big studios with an economic model that’s based on the model of tech giants from the United States.

I’m not going to delve deep into US economics, but the gist of it is that it’s mostly growth driven: “The more reach you can obtain, the happier the investors become. We’ll see the actual earnings later.”

This is one of the reasons big publishing firms spend so much money on marketing: It’s one of the main drives for potential growth, which gives them a lot of leverage.

In their desire to achieve more growth, studios are pressured to hire more staff than they actually need, because having more jobs tends to look good on investors. This often results on a troubled situation in which management is found being incapable of coordinating a team of such size, which will probably have an impact on why the development won’t get anywhere. And once the project doesn’t seem to be delivering what it’s been promised, companies resort to cutting costs by axing jobs that they knew beforehand shouldn’t have hired in the first place, and attempt to “try to look good and responsible” by applying damage control to their best.

This is especially true in companies that go public in the stock market, as there is a constant pressure for exponential growth; since other companies are doing this, stockholders may consider that your company might be stagnating if the stock value doesn’t keep increasing, even if it’s being inflated. Game companies even resort to buying back stock just to do this.

This is a (comedic) depiction of a graph explaining how this cycle of the game development progresses over time. This applies to large companies, not just indie game studios.

And if that wasn’t enough, some publishers have also found an exploit: The early access rug pull. This really shady practice consists on releasing a game as an early access game, hoping to gain traction. But the game will be full price while in this phase. If the game eventually flops during development, since they’ve already gotten some earnings, they pull the rug, stop development altogether, and run away with the cash while at the same time leaving just a handful of programmers for fixing bugs only. This is fraud and punishable by law.

This is exactly what happened with Take-Two when they shut down Intercept Games, putting the final nail in the coffin of Kerbal Space Program 2’s troubled development. And last year we also had the Fntastic’s The Day Before incident.

Indies and the lack of funding

Music: Neon Lights(Last Window: The Secret of Cape West | Satoshi Okubo)

This is something that has been happening more often than not in studios all over Europe, a region where most of the game throughput come from indie studios, which normally don’t have much capital to embark themselves onto making videogames.

Ever since the worldwide lockdown due to the pandemic period ended, things have gotten for the worse for indie studios. During the pandemic, investors were able to read the tea leaves and figure out that games were going to be extremely valuable during lockdown, from a convenient way to cope with having to stay indoors, to a collectible commodity. Roblox is the textbook example of this: It exploded in popularity during the 2020s, and went public at an astronomically high market value of over 7 times the value of Ubisoft, but fell victim to the 2022 bust and quickly devalued as restrictions went down.

The Web3 fiasco further exacerbated the damages, because it fostered a lot of interest on game projects that had blockchain-like features, but these were simply terrible investments that could be considered a downright scam. Their failure caused a lot of devaluation of a lot of startups, and many tech investors grew extremely wary of investing.

YouTube video: Tech bust of 2022 explained (3:05)

However, game studios started with their massive layoffs a year after the bust because videogames are generally more of a long-term investment and it took some time to see that they weren’t as profitable anymore.

Investors in Europe face similar concerns, and are being now more conservative and risk aware because game European studios are increasingly being handled like tech companies from the United States.

And if that wasn’t enough, the tech industry did eventually find something that seemed promising: Generative “AI”, a field in which videogame development seems to have have yet to find anything to take advantage of —let alone that its usage is deemed unethical within the industry— and with nothing else seemingly equally promising in tech, investors have flocked in herds to those greener pastures.

Crowdfunding isn’t what it used to be 10 years ago, and it has become very stagnant with no hopes of improving. Early access used to provide a lot more confidence that a game would eventually be completed, but also the increased awareness of scam-like or development going wrong has made people very wary of putting their own money on a game. And if your game failed to meet expectations, it’s game over; your now forever ruined public image would seriously affect sales of future projects you would be involved in.

Hardware development from now might be having diminishing returns

Do you feel like something is happening to next-gen games as of lately? Like, despite the technological advances of the latest in console gaming hardware, the games themselves are failing to live up to their expectations? Like it’s all ports of the previous generation? If you’ve answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you’re not alone.

I think there’s now enough room to start worrying about the fact that gaming hardware has become “too powerful”. Moore’s law applies to hardware, not software. And it is my belief that we’ve reached the point where despite computers are becoming increasingly more powerful, it is no longer possible to come within grasping distance to the limit on what consoles are capable of. At least, not unless you have humongous resources and even still resort to unethical development environments.

However, expectations of players increase with each new generation of hardware. And unfortunately, their expectations have reached a hard glass ceiling with this current generation.

But even still! This is precisely where I see a ray of hope within the darkness.

Konnichiwa, baby! Japan is back!

Music: Route 4 (Spring)(Pokémon Black & White: Super Music Collection | Shota Kageyama)

The Eastern game industry hasn’t been affected as much in this wave of decline, because their economics work in a more conservative way than those from tech in the United States.

Take a look at Nintendo, for example. Instead of laying off employees, they resorted to actually increasing their salaries by 10%. Japanese —and I think Korean companies as well— tend to operate very differently than those from the United States, and to a lesser extent European companies. Instead of valuing growth over anything else, they value resilience and a long-term but sustained growth, and one of the key factors for that resilience is workforce.

Whether it’s a sociocultural or a business managing aspect, it’s a fact that in Japan, workers are a vital part of any company, people consider the workplace “their second home”, and the actual legal action of firing people is massively restricted. This drives companies and game studios alike to keep the workers that they have, even at a loss.

Instead of panicking and minimizing losses by panicking with damage controls, Japanese companies will generally accept the fact that hard times are coming, and prepare themselves in order to “at least not make it that hard” to be able to get up and kick off when times get better. This hardening-based culture generally makes companies less prone to collapsing, and instead have simply a flatter overall productivity.

Japanese studios also have it much easier to secure funding than studios in Western countries because they have other ways to get funding that aren’t as prominent in the West.

Method 1: Trans-media projects and the production committee

A very large amount of games are actually trans-media projects handled by a production committee. This method of funding is also fairly common in Europe, but Japanese production committees tend to treat projects from the same IP equally, and get a more fair share of funds than with an European “main project and accompanying projects” model. In anime circles, production committees are seen rather controversial, but it’s still a major source of funding for many entertainment and merchandising industries alike.

While games aren’t a common sight in these committees, if a game publisher does become part of one, it would allow the studio working on the game to get piggybacked by this system, and not only get easy funding, but also obtain protections against losses should the project fail commercially, even if it means a more equal share of profits with the rest of projects —again, Japanese companies focusing on resilience rather than growth. Game studios themselves joining are way less common since they generally don’t have the capital to make a contribution in the committee.

In Europe, games aren’t usually the main project and the overall trans-media project tends to have a more limited funding and reach, so they typically tend to be of smaller scope and of less quality than Japanese ones.

Method 2: Licensed games and publishers

Other projects are usually licensed games commissioned by a publisher.

Licensed games were particularly notable in the United States industry until the 2000s, but publishers would outsource games for as many platforms as possible to other developers with minimal funding and tight deadlines, baking on the fact that brand recognition alone would sell the game. But this resulted in a huge amount of terrible quality games and their eventual demise in the 2010s, as game development became costlier and consumers became more informed on the industry as a whole.

YouTube video: Extra Credits on licensed games in the United States (8:09)

Japanese publishers, on the other hand, act in a similar way to Spanish licensed game publishers during its silver age with mobile games in the 2000s: Focusing on a single game and platform (or leveraging cross-platform if possible) and having a more respectful budget. Japanese developers also earn their trust with publishers through these commissions, allowing them to secure funding on their projects based on the developers’ own IPs.

Method 3: Self-funding

Smaller and indie studios are also capable of funding their own projects because they tend to focus on games that are much smaller in technical scope: Visual novels. This allows them to make games with much less funding, while remaining somewhat able to generate a small profit.

However, not every visual novel developer seeks that: A particular category of games, “doujin software”, involves games that are based on existing IPs and made as a hobby rather than for profit. Most of these projects are made at a loss, but thanks to the strong market of fan-based projects, developers may expect to grow up to be successful later on.

While visual novels aren’t as notorious as they did in the early 2000s, they still account for a significant portion of the Japanese game market, and thanks to opening up to English and Chinese speaking markets, the visual novel industry is still holding on strong.

The dawn of new hardware

A promising prospect is that the Japanese economy seems to have been rebounding since the past couple of years (although the Bank of Japan did make a cautionary warning for trade markets due to unstable foreign markets) so it’s possible that the Japanese game industry could boost itself up again despite the hardships.

Unfortunately I don’t know about the Chinese and Korean game industries enough to provide more information about them, but it does seem like they may be going through good times as well.

For now, it all comes down to Nintendo’s next console. One of the reasons why I have bet for a powerful home console as Nintendo Switch’s successor (and short-time companion) is partly because Nintendo needs to compete with Microsoft and Sony with their Xbox Series and PlayStation 5, and the economy of Japan seems to be at a very adequate time to strike hard with a powerful system.

But this is absolutely not what I want! This would place the bar for AAA games above the diminishing returns point, and both AAA and even AA studios would feel pressured to scale up their scope in projects to meet up with hype and expectations. In other words — this spells an unsustainable hell.

Rather, I’d prefer Nintendo to go another route, and actually release a Switch 2, and be something comparable to a PlayStation 4 Pro or an Xbox One. This would make them leave the overly engineered home console market and dive deep into the affordable hybrids market such as the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally. I wouldn’t ask for more. The fact that they plan to flood the market with the gaming system in order to fight with scalpers makes me think a little bit that they could be taking this strategy, but as I discussed in a previous post, there are several reasons that make me think otherwise…

This second half of the year and the first quarter of 2025 are by far going to be of upmost importance in the gaming industry ever since the beginning of the HD era!

In short, there are several reasons why the Internet began its transition to what it is now, and despite what many people may think, the big player is not actually because of “corporate greed”.

How customization is achieved in the first place

Music: Pop Star(Kirby 64 | Jun Ishikawa)

Before we can begin outlining the reasons, we need to understand how making the look of a webpage is achieved in the first place.

Back when the World Wide Web started taking its first steps, we already had one of its corner stones already settled: HTML, a markup language that allowed your browser to display content from the web in a rather standardized way. This allowed you to create simple layouts for your pages, and a bit later, allowed you to make certain customizations such as changing the text color or the background images.

Customization would evolve to the next level with the introduction of CSS, which allowed to further customize HTML elements, their layout, and eventually, even make custom cursors and animations.

But these would remain static pages with no changes whatsoever, unless you used PHP or something similar to generate personalized HTML on demand, and even still, it wouldn’t be interactive apart from links to other pages. But during the 2000s, JavaScript eventually came into play to provide interactivity to websites by modifying the HTML and CSS of a page.

By adding the possibility to add your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you could essentially change the style and outlook of the page, especially with the latter two.

Custom scripting is dangerous

Very early on, one of the first restrictions that were put in place when adding customization capabilities is the automatic removal of <script> HTML tags. These tags are the main way for you to place JavaScript code on a page —and depending on the point in time, you could use some other scripting languages too— in your page.

There’s a whole plethora of vulnerabilities that revolve around tricking the servers into injecting your own code, because any opportunity of doing this opens floodgates for malicious code to be run. When you can just outright add your own scripts because the tag is not filtered out, there’s nothing stopping you from putting in malicious code to do some treachery on your visitors, so it’s like having no floodgates at all.

At first, MySpace didn’t have this restriction when they accidentally added the ability for you to add your custom HTML. While most pages would be really creatively put together, some of them could be crafted with harmful code to say, install a virus or wreck havoc on your screen.

Websites like Neopets quickly started filtering out potentially malicious HTML, mainly <script> tags.

Thankfully CSS was able to give you some slack, because you could add some “interactivity” with pseudo-classes such as :hover and :active, so you didn’t need JavaScript to make interactive UI. In fact, The Yonic Corner remains somewhat interactive even with JavaScript disabled.

The rise of responsive layouts

The main limitation that HTML had in its starting days was the fact that it was very rigid. It would look the same no matter how the size of the browser window was. This created a problem in which content would spill over the window if it was small enough, requiring you to scroll the window. This was okay for vertical scrolling, but horizontal scrolling was more obnoxious.

At first, it wasn’t much of a problem because the web was mostly browsed from a computer screen, and they had roughly the same size, aspect ratio and pixel density, so screen resolutions were mostly the same. However, it was still relevant enough that some websites would display messages like “looks best on a 1024 x 768 resolution”.

It became a more notorious problem once phones became capable of browsing the web, and especially with the rise of smartphones, since they would have way more different aspect ratios, display sizes and eventually even pixel densities.

This led to the creation of solutions to create responsive layouts. CSS first started with @media queries that allowed different layouts depending on the screen size. Later on, intrinsically flexible layouts would become much easier and way better to make with CSS’s flexbox and grids, among other things, which would become quintessential to make layouts that could work at any resolution.

However, because these CSS features are a late addition, this is not the default behavior of HTML. This was done in order to maintain backwards compatibility with older websites. If the user who wanted to customize something was not aware of the responsive layouts, whatever layout they would create would most likely be not flexible by default, so if one were to add their own HTML and CSS, they could very easily be set in a way that would either conflict with, or completely break the already set up layout.

This caused websites to begin following a “mobile-first” approach to their design, one that would be friendly to smartphones at first, and then gracefully change the layout as the viewport of the browser got wider. Standardizing the layout severely limited the way one could add, move, replace and remove HTML elements.

YouTube channels in the late 2000s could still be customized, but only certain stuff could, such as the background base color and images and the position of certain sections, but you couldn’t add your own stuff in. And even this particular layout was not responsive!

Scalability issues

Although this was a smaller issue, it’s still relevant to this day. All of these customizations had to be stored somewhere and loaded in apart from the core website’s design. Depending on the infrastructure, this could make pages prone to undesirable effects such as flashes of unstyled content, where layouts will break, everything is on a white background and the text is black with an ugly serif font.

Images were also a big problem. They usually were hosted on an image hosting service such as ImageShack and were usually left unprocessed. If they were large, they could severely affect the bandwidth and cause loading issues. Also, most image hosting services would remove the images if not accessed after some time, leading to broken images if they were not used a lot.

Some image hosting sites would infamously show a generic placeholder image for those images that have been automatically removed.

Nowadays images are preprocessed to modern, more lightweight formats and optimized, and cached so that the load isn’t as heavy. While this in itself makes no limitations on what kind of images can you use, they do have their own shortcomings that limit the number of how many images can you upload.

The rise of web apps

Music: GT Mode 2(Gran Turismo 4 | Isamu Ohira)

Since Flash and HTML5, websites have become way more interactive than ever, and with that, browsers have become the second most versatile pieces of software apart from a full fledged operating system.

This has given browsers the potential to run websites as if they were real applications, which developers found very attractive thanks to the fact that websites could be displayed anywhere, regardless of the operating system or device you were using.

The culmination of such process became true with the rollout of Progressive Web Apps, which allowed websites to behave much like a native application on your PC or phone. You could also throw in UI frameworks for highly interactive user interfaces that would make your website come close to the performance of a native app.

But this clashed with customization in two ways:

• If you added custom HTML and CSS, it would most likely be unable to interact with whatever reactive components you had with your UI framework unless the web developer added a functionality for that, which comes at the hefty cost of being way less secure.
• Apps generally have a UI that is mostly consistent with a design idea and tries to provide a good user experience; allowing for custom CSS to change this could alter these in a harmful way.

It also didn’t help that at this time accessibility guidelines were starting to be set in place, which discouraged taking certain “creative approaches”.

Sure, this site screams “pink kawaii glitter” which I found a bit endearing, but this is also accessibility hell. Even a non-colorblind person such as myself can struggle to make out the sidebar.

CSS libraries would also begin showing up, first with Bootstrap, and later on with Tailwind CSS, that helped making websites look and act like apps, albeit with the cost of having to remain somewhat consistent.

Addressing the ads problem

Lastly, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: Why do people say that advertisers prefer a more “corporate” looking website?

One of the common remarks is that having a set layout allows advertisers to get a good idea where their ads will go, how much space will it take, etc. And yes, that is a valid point. One can easily hide away them with CSS or disable altogether with JavaScript, like this:

adRemoval.css

.ad {
    display: none;
    visibility: hidden; /* A bit overkill. */
}

adDisabling.js

const ads = [...document.querySelectorAll('.ad')];
for(const ad of ads) {
    ad.remove();
}

This is the most straightforward way, although there are more creative ways to hide them. But alas, this isn’t the main reason. There is no such thing about websites becoming more “corporate”. It’s a bit of a misnomer.

What’s actually happening is standardization of a design language. Now we treat parts of a page with common lingo such as “hero”, “call to action”, “statistics” or “feature”. Now it’s all about consistency, which is something that’s typical from an application: You want its features and user interface to behave in a consistent manner.

On July 2024, of the top 25 most visited sites (source: Similarweb), 15 of them are web apps. This goes to show how important consistency has become in the past few years. Google’s search engine also tends to favor sites with a consistent semantic design (the HTML has all of that lingo mentioned above), so everyone tends to follow very similar design patterns because of search engine optimization (SEO).

But that doesn’t mean you can still be artsy! However, it’s a fact that your SEO will get harmed this way because these designs tend to be more “niche” and “out of the norm”.

Several modern websites break away from the “corporate aesthetic” by not going with the standards. Some look really original, even if it sacrifices legibility.

In a more recent example on the other hand, some who try to be more “avant garde” can end up with horrible results. What were they thinking here!? It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten how to do things out of the norm.

But if there’s one thing that’s become obvious is that we’re far from that moment where the Web was still figuring itself out. Companies would do their best to fit their branding on the web, while there was still room for customization. As Internet became a new way to do commerce, consistency became more important than the flexibility of customization, and since they go hand in hand, the overall branding favored over the individual expression.

I can understand how these phenomena can be confused with “corporate greed”. But in an objective sense, I do think the pros of lack of customization outweigh the cons, especially in times where new web features come and go really quickly. While people tend to follow standards even if you do provide customization, not everyone does, and those intrusive designs can hinder your experience on a website.

And yes, I also understand that this also hampers freedom of self-expression. Tumblr was probably the best example of all time in terms of web customization: Restricted yet flexible enough to do almost whatever you wanted. But I’m a hard advocate that freedom of expression should end where the freedom of someone else begins, something that the current Internet doesn’t seem to understand. Be mindful of what you’re making!

But nevertheless, I still wish for customization to make somewhat of a graceful return. It’s cool that graphic and web designers can have their own way of self-expression for their portfolios and all, but I also would love to see the resurging of being able to do it in a more casual basis.

Running out of space

The main problem that I had was that GitHub Pages has a hard limit of 1 GB in storage. For most small scoped sites, this shouldn’t be much of a problem. But in my case, it was my personal blog, and while text is pretty easy to compress and make thousands of pages without even coming close to that limit, media could potentially do that.

Especially if we’re dealing with optimized responsive images! Most images in the modern version of my site come in multiple sizes for PC and mobile screens, and multiple formats for backwards compatibility. Add that to the fact that Astro keeps a copy of the original image, and it’s a recipe for a bloated image cache, some of which wouldn’t be used at all.

An image CDN could work marvels for this situation, but I was a bit skeptical on those to work well, especially because of the reason below.

Watch out for HTTPS!

In a previous post, I talked about how pages have begun breaking because HTTPS support for legacy systems is being dropped. I’m expecting that GitHub Pages may be doing the same thing in the near future should they begin enforcing mandatory HTTPS on all their pages. This would render the Legacy Version of this blog useless. It was designed with old operating systems in mind, after all!

And this also applies to what I was talking about before: Normally I would be okay with just using an image CDN, but all of these networks work under HTTPS in a way that only modern systems can understand.

This has eventually forced my hand: I needed to self-host my own blog. That way, I’d have full control over what I want to do. I could even set up a cipher suite specifically for the legacy blog, so you could browse the legacy blog in HTTPS while in an old system!

The blog also works as a reverse proxy server to another program that optimizes and caches images on demand, so I can show the images regardless of whether you’re using regular HTTP or HTTPS. Plus, I can shove in a storage bucket to have virtually limitless —and cheap— storage space for my blog.

However, this is not without its drawbacks. Since I’m hosting it myself, all maintenance tasks are on me as well. I still have work to be done to optimize the server, to automatize updating the blog, and to tidy up the API for remote images, which is a total mess right now, let alone a rudimentary solution. So until then, do expect some slowdowns!

Music: The Moon(Space Engine | Ashterra)

But if you search for this question on the Internet, you won’t find much detailed information about it. So I decided to provide a detailed explanation as to what it looks like and why.

To lay the groundwork, many people are aware of the phases of the Moon, which are caused by how the half of the Moon lit by the Sun changes as it orbits the Earth. If one were in space above the orbital plane of the Earth while its northern hemisphere faces up, the Moon would look as if it were to be orbiting the Earth in a counter-clockwise motion.

Because of this, the waxing crescent and its following quarter (the 1st), in the northern hemisphere will look like the letter D, while in the southern hemisphere it will look like a letter C. If the orbit were to be clockwise, it would be the other way around.

In Spanish there is a really interesting mnemonic for this:

• In the northern hemisphere, the Moon is a liar. This is because the 1st quarter is called cuarto creciente (quarter increasing in size to full moon), but it will have a D shape. When it has a C shape, it’s called cuarto decreciente (quarter decreasing in size to new moon).
• In the southern hemisphere, the Moon always tells the truth, because an upside down cuarto creciente looks like a C, and an upside down cuarto decreciente looks like a D.

Since the Moon is just rotating 180° when we change hemispheres, it’s safe to assume that in the equator it’d make a 90° turn, right?

But that rises the question: Which way? It could be a clockwise rotation, in which case a waxing crescent would look like a smile; or a counter-clockwise one, where it would look like a frown. So which one is it?

The long answer doesn’t require understanding orbital dynamics or any other kind of complicated physics: It’s just geometry.

One of the key facts is that no matter where you’re at along the equator line, the Moon will always rise and set in nearly the same opposing orientations.

Why? Because the Earth rotates counter-clockwise around a stable axis, from west to east. The axis does drift, but this motion is so slow and tiny that it doesn’t have much of an effect in our day to day lives —it’d take hundreds to thousands of years for it to have made a significant change.

From Earth, we see objects in the sky rising from the east and setting at the west, making a clockwise motion as they scour it. The reason the direction of movement is the opposite is because when moving alongside the Earth’s surface, from our perspective the surface remains static, while the sky moves. A bit like when riding a car, bus or train and the background outside the vehicle seems to be moving backward, while it’s the vehicle that moves forward.

If one were to be constantly looking at the Moon from the equator as it moved towards the sky (for clearance’s sake, let’s call this Earth observer), at one point it’d make a sharp 180° turn once it passes above the Earth observer’s head. This is because from someone outside the Earth’s perspective (let’s call them the space observer), the Earth observer would’ve flown past the Moon, and unless they’d have impressive limbo skills, the Earth observer would have to turn around to continue seeing the moon, flipping the picture as a result.

A visualization of how the Moon sharply turns as it goes above the Earth observer’s head, in this case a Yoshi. The Moon is never turning around, Yoshi does. The red and blue arms represent the North and South directions from Yoshi’s perspective, respectively. (The apparent libration is due to the diagram not being at scale)

This effect remains visible in places away from the equator, but it’s more of a gradual change and not a very sharp turn. This is because at the equator, the Moon will pass by really close to the zenith —the point in the sky directly above an Earth observer’s head— but as you go closer to one of the Earth’s poles, the Moon won’t reach as high in the sky since you’d be looking at it at an angle and not directly perpendicular to the ground, and it will go past your head at a slower pace.

Add the fact that near the poles the axis of rotation of the Earth will get closer to the zenith, so things closer to the horizon will hardly experience any rotation; and you get an explanation of why the Moon hardly rotates as you move further away from the equator.

But as I was researching this, another question surfaced my mind: How does the Moon rotate as you get closer to the equator? If one were to look at the orientations of the Moon from different latitudes, one would assume that it’d be rotating counter clockwise as the latitude decreases, and clockwise as it increases. But this is not completely correct.

The actual answer is a bit more complicated. Essentially, when we move strictly south or north, the entire celestial sphere will rotate in the East-West axis. Looking directly eastward, the sky will appear to rotate counter-clockwise, and clockwise if you look to the west. But the cardinal directions are points on the Earth’s surface, not the sky. This means that as the Earth rotates, the cardinal directions will remain in the same place, while anything in the celestial sphere —like the Moon— will move from east to west. When the Moon is close to the East, it will rotate counter-clockwise as latitude decreases, and clockwise as it increases, as stated above. But if it’s on the West, this motion is flipped.

If you were to change your latitude and eventually cross one of the poles, your longitude would rotate 180°, switching the opposing cardinal directions. Once you cross the pole you can further increase or decrease your latitude and move the sky in the same axis of rotation, but what was on the west is now on the east, essentially flipping the way they rotate.

All of this “it’s the opposite, actually” being repeated over and over again might confuse you quite a bit, so I recommend simulating how the Moon changes in Stellarium whilst changing the latitude. But ultimately, all of these motion dynamics work in unison so that no matter where in the equator and at which day of the year you look at, the waxing crescent moon looks like a frown at moonrise, and a smile at moonset, and the opposite when it’s a waning crescent.