Lain chasing
Also: artisanal white noise, a card shop tycoon, and the giallo zone.
This week, we're talking new old blogs, another victory for furries, and raising your own stable of Friday Night Magic nerds.
First time reading? Sign up here.
Neocities is finally starting to live up to its name
For a long time, Neocities – a web hosting service inspired by Geocities, which Yahoo! shuttered in 2009 — was haunted by nostalgia. “Under construction” .gifs and tiled wallpapers adorned many early Neocities sites as a tribute to the blogging aesthetic of yore. In recent years, however, Neocities users have begun to remix the conventions that defined the signature Geocities look, and the site is now the host of ambitious HTML masterworks that make use of more modern web technologies. Some examples:
- Velvet Blue: a blog that features stylish graphics inspired by Persona 3. Of special note is the author’s “mini-diary,” which reads much like a Twitter feed posted to the void [link]
- Onge.org: one of many interactive Neocities blogs tagged with “lain” (a reference to the anime Serial Experiments Lain). The 3D animations that play during site navigation are particularly impressive [link]
- Sugar For Brains: a site with a candy-coated aesthetic and bespoke layouts for every page, including an “about” page that’s laid out on a simulation of a desktop PC running Windows XP [link]
Kyle Drake founded Neocities in 2013 with the intent to preserve Geocities’ creative spirit. “The purpose of this project is not to inspire nostalgia,” he wrote in an early blog post. “It’s to rebuild the platform for us to be able to be creative again.” It took about a decade, but it seems like Neocities users have started to build upon Geocities’ palette of imagery, juxtaposing old-school guestbooks and “shrines” with interactive webapps and Spotify audio players.
There’s a new tycoon in town
February’s Supermarket Simulator was one of the year’s most surprising streaming hits — a boxy, humble-looking Unity game about running a corner store that might have sold more than 2.5 million copies. One take floating around was that the game had stumbled onto a satisfying level of complexity just by replicating real-world problems like pricing, stocking, staffing, and customer flow. Now a new, almost identical-looking game called TCG Card Shop Simulator is looking to copy Supermarket Sim’s success while targeting elder nerds in particular. Two differences from its staid predecessor stood out in a recent playthrough: you can collect holographic versions of knockoff Pokémon cards, and some of your customers reek.
Furry site stands strong after another cyberattack
Fur Affinity, one of the most popular online hubs for furry artwork, was hacked this past week — though now that the dust has settled, it appears that the hacker ended up losing much more than they gained. Here’s what happened:
- This past Tuesday, Fur Affinity (often shortened to FA) announced that their domain and Twitter account had been hacked, as well as the personal account of former site owner Dragoneer [link]
- For context: Dragoneer, who’d owned the site since 2007, passed away earlier this month. Prior to the hack, FA’s front page displayed a banner urging users to donate to a GoFundMe that would help Dragoneer’s family with funerary expenses [link]
- FA users speculate that the hacker exploited holes in the site’s DNS infrastructure [link]
- Throughout the hack, FA’s domain redirected users to a number of different pages, including a phishing site, a page advertising a crypto scam, a Washington Post article about furries abusing a child, and Kiwi Farms, a forum notorious for orchestrating doxxes. Meanwhile, FA’s Twitter account posted hateful messages accusing furries of pedophilia and grooming [link]
- A Fur Affinity user named Whanos managed to regain control of FA’s Twitter handle while the hacker was in the middle of renaming it [link]
- After working with both Whanos and their service provider, FA announced that they’d gotten everything back under control, assuring users that no personal data was compromised. They also mentioned that they’re working with the FBI to identify the attacker [link]
- To top everything off, Twitter users started circulating screenshots that suggest the hacker lost $300k in domain fees while attempting to use the site to shill crypto [link]
This is far from the first time Fur Affinity has been the target of a security breach, but the hacker’s crypto blunder will surely make it one of the most memorable in the site’s history.
Recs
Arco
In both combat and narrative, Arco plays out in staccato flashes of violence. It’s a turn-based tactics RPG with a fiercely anti-colonial take on the western genre. Its four protagonists — each from a different, fictional tribe — spend the game spiraling further and further into their desperation to get revenge on The Red Company, an organization of “Newcomers” who have begun to plunder the land for oil. Arco measures the outcomes of story choices in “guilt,” which functions less like “morality” in a typical RPG and more like “sanity” in a Lovecraftian horror game; the more “guilty” a character feels, the more vulnerable they become to the ghosts of their actions. In combat, this manifests as real-time pressure on the time you take between moves: ghosts that literally “haunt” characters as they wait frozen in between turns. If you’re graceful enough in adopting the game's unique, start-stop rhythm, battles feel like elegant deconstructions of ghost town shootouts. “Guilty” actions become especially tempting for anyone who wants to plumb the depths of the game’s hidden mechanics — forcing you to plunge the hearts of your characters further into darkness. [Pao]
Spider Labyrinth
Somewhere between terror and incoherence…between erotica and boredom…between intrigue and apathy …lies: the giallo zone. Spider Labyrinth piles the usual ingredients of the Italian slasher — gloved killer, vivid color, dazed protagonist, gore — on top of a pungent base of Lovecraftian dread. It’s a strong order for people who already know what they’re in for, but you wouldn’t blame someone new for just spitting it out. The real joy for me, beyond the gnarly ending, was finding a commentary track and an abundance of pre-streaming-era bonus features on the Severin Films disc. (Once taken for granted, commentaries are now easier to find on re-releases of ‘80s slashers than big studio Blu-rays.) Sure, a forgotten cosmic horror movie with stop-motion effects is a treat — but isn’t it better when paired with a guest lecturer voice saying “Note the many forms that a labyrinth may take…” [Chris]
Chum Box
Screens
- The BBC once made a dub for Urusei Yatsura [link]
- The glacial horror of the bad ending to 1992 platformer Rolo to the Rescue must be seen to be believed [link, via Something Awful]
- The 2024 Pokémon World Championships (for both video games and the card game) are streaming throughout this weekend [link]
- Ron Cobb, the concept artist behind the original Alien, designed a "semiotic standard" that captures the film's economy of pleasing icons [link]
- Batman Begin [link]
Games
- Chinese Genshin Impact players are having some kind of war with the video platform Bilibili, which they believe suppresses (“traffic locks”?) Genshin videos due to its licensing agreement with competing gacha games [link]
- In other Genshin Impact news — the compulsively asymmetrical character designs [link] of developer Mihoyo have been inspiring players to violently symmetrize the roster [link]
- Metroid Prime's composer, Kenji Yamamoto, was reportedly told something along the lines of: "less rock, more Autechre" [link]
- The open-world sequel to fashion game Love Nikki seems monstrously cute [link]
The Internet
- Remembering when Tom Scocca ranked the eight seasons in the comment section of a Jezebel article [link]
- 404 Media's Samantha Cole tried Eyechat, which is like Omegle but only displays users' eyes [link]
Music
- Via Stereogum: a new "artisanal white noise" app that features contributions from clipping., Mary Lattimore, and Owen Pallett [link]
- People have started calling Kanye's updates to existing music "patch notes" [link]
Connect with EX
- Feedback? Hit reply or email team@exresearch.co
- Follow us on Twitter [link]
- Follow us on Threads [link]
- Follow us on Bluesky [link]
- Write for us [link]
- Support us with a donation by clicking Account
One Last Thing
HYPER SHOOT [link]
