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Deal With It bot lets you put a pair of virtual shades on anyone

Is there anything cooler than sunglasses? Yes. Leather jackets. That one sword move from Shinobi. Anything but vaping. But sunglasses are still pretty high up there. Inspired by the meme of the same name, the Deal With It bot is a simple web application that takes any photo of one or more faces and animates a pair of sunglasses coming from top of frame to cover their eyes, followed by text that says “DEAL WITH IT.” It works with both solo and group shots, but is unfortunately limited to pictures of real, human people, meaning that cartoon characters like Kermit…

Videogame memory
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The bot that dreams of forgotten videogames

Memory and videogames is a complicated crossroads. Not least because there’s a minimum of three types of memory meeting at this particular intersection. The most obvious one is personal memory: we remember the games we played over the years and attach emotions, physical locations, the music we were listening to at the time, and more to them. The second might be called technical or virtual memory, referring to the memory that videogames themselves contain. This is the RAM (random-access memory), the ROM (read-only memory), the immaterial saved data on hard drives and memory cards of old. Third is the cultural…

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A Twitter bot turns old Sierra games into beautiful glitches

There’s a narrator who routinely mutters random, bewildering sentences to Adam Mathes on his Twitter feed. He’s fine with it. He put the narrator there himself. It’s actually somewhat of a comfort. This narrator exists under the Twitter handle @quest_ebooks but started out life in Sierra Entertainment’s many classic adventure games. Mathes grew up playing those adventure games, he loved them, and so he wanted to bring their “omniscient, antagonistic, baffling” narrators through his life with him. This is why he created a Twitter bot for them to exist within. Mathes was inspired by Andrew Vestal’s “YouAreCarrying” bot. That one tweets…

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Honoring the rich, bizarre universe of Doom’s user-created content

All images taken from the WADbot Tumblr. /// The virtual world of Doom is so big these days as to be intimidating. Since 1994, modders have been creating their own Doom levels with the tools that the game’s creator id Software released, as well as those they’ve made for themselves. All of these user-created levels, amounting to tens of thousands of files, are hosted in the idgames archive—itself being a mirror of the old id Software-hosted archive. According to Doom enthusiast and independent videogame creator JP LeBreton, each of these files, known as WADs, might contain between one and 32 maps.…