It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

In 2018, users of the still relatively-new Amazon Echo devices would occasionally hear their Alexa… laughing. It felt completely unprompted, and creepy as hell.

There are so many memes and exaggerations that it is hard to find the genuine recording of the synthesized laughter, but I think this video from WTNH News8 captures what it genuinely sounded like:

There’s not much to the mystery, so I’ll jump to Amazon’s explanations to the story, as excerpted in this Ars Technica article:

In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh.” We are changing that phrase to be “Alexa, can you laugh?” which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance “Alexa, laugh.” We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to “Sure, I can laugh” followed by laughter.

Combine this with potentially overeager wake words…

It’s not uncommon for Echo devices to hear sounds and mistake them for a user’s wake word. Amazon’s smart speakers can be programmed to respond to a few words: “Alexa” is the most common, but other options like “Echo” and “Amazon” are available as well. These bouts of laughter could be a byproduct of Echo devices mistakenly hearing their wake words.

…and it all starts to make sense. “Echo, laugh” is three grunt-esque syllables and I can imagine other words or even noises interpreted as these.

But one of the commenters under the article had a good observation:

I’m confused what circumstances could possibly lead to this behavior. Why does Alexa even have a “laugh creepily” response?

Perhaps this was nothing more than a programmer trying to add something “cute” to software, and that idea backfiring horribly. It feels similar to all those random and awfully cheap Google easter eggs when you search for specific phrases that randomly change the font to Comic Sans, or rotate the screen, or do other basic things, just because that’s “fun.” (You know me, I will never miss an opportunity to hate on these.)

Anyway, it seems like the problem went away after the described patch was implemented.

The original WTNH News8 video continues with “One Twitter user even reported an Amazon Echo that began listing the names of local funeral homes and cemeteries without prompting,” and the idea of someone pranking the news team on Twitter was the thing that made me laugh.

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Imagine this: It’s 8pm on a rainy Sunday night in the ’90s, and you’re bored, so you boot up the family computer looking for something to do.

But you’ve already played Solitaire a bunch, and you still don’t really get how Minesweeper works. You’ve had a laugh in paint, making abstract art. So now what?

Keep in mind, you’re not allowed to go onto the internet because firstly, someone in the house is already on phone call and secondly you’ve already been warned about running up the phone bill, but then you remember something a legend that had been circling around the net about a secret portal into a demonic realm.

And the way to get there, so they say, was through Excel.

I’m just going to leave it at that. For the rest, watch the video:

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is my memory of the first bug that freaked me out, and perhaps the first bug I ever remember witnessing.

N.Y.C. The Big Apple walked so that Grand Theft Auto could drive.

Well, not really. But the 1984’s awkwardly-titled game for 8-bit computers could be seen as a spiritual predecessor of the first GTA. Your job was to drive and walk around New York City. If you crashed into another car, your car would be towed. If you ran out of fuel, you had to use the subway – or go on foot. If you then fell under another car, you ended up in a hospital.

These were the map mechanics. The overarching narrative was as complex as 1984 allowed: You were supposed to dip into various areas and buildings, and complete different minigames hiding within each. The post office hid a clone of Frogger, Central Park was a facsimile of Qix, and the subway offered shades of Mario:

There were twelve areas, and I believe you had to visit and finish all of them to win the game. (You can watch this walkthrough to see someone doing it all.)

The minigames themselves were hard, and driving in New York appropriately stressful, but what added to the pressure were three clocks ticking along. One was the fuel gauge in your car. The second was cash in your pocket – running out meant automatic game over. The last one? A literal clock, rendered in the upper right corner. You only had one in-game day to accomplish everything.

I am not sure how popular NYCTBA was. Its reception felt mixed. Here are two modern reviews from Atarimania, clearly written from two different coasts:

The most aggravating game unleashed on the [Atari] platforms that I can think of. Horrid controls and collision detection/​responses, pathetic graphics, annoying sounds.

This game is more than merely the sum of its parts: The many little arcade games are embedded into a very dynamic and amusing traffic simulation, which combines the numerous, fairly challenging tasks to a very satisfying whole.

Personally, I was fascinated with it, and the GTA connection above came to me not just from the vehicular carnage, or the top-down view used by GTA before it embraced the third dimension. NYCTBA also tried to be cinematic; at the beginning of the game placing you just outside New York City, so you could actually start by driving into it. In your mind’s eye, you could imagine a classic Hollywood shot revealing the city’s skyline – but realized with the limited production value the computer’s eight whole bits provided.

And that one decision happened to come with the first bug I ever remember encountering as a little kid.

Upon game launch, the only thing you were meant to do was to drive right into the city to begin your adventure. Even moving your joystick left had the car moving right toward the buildings.

But the game’s author didn’t predict you could do another thing: Wait. Specifically, wait for over 13 minutes with your car idling, watching your fuel meter go all the way to zero.

At that point, the game declares YOU ARE OUT OF GAS in a classic Atari font, followed by a familiar routine – the car disappears, and the player is ejected to continue the journey on foot.

Except now, you can walk left.

And what is going on to the left is truly frightening. The road ends and you encounter another city… a nightmare city of sorts, with cars changing shapes, driving into the buildings, and crashing into each other.

Get run over by one of these mangled cars, and things get worse – you travel forever over a surreal 8-bit nightmare world, with random disconnected streets, to a land in the middle of nowhere. It’s a creepy mirror world, an endless universe filled with broken cities where the rules of time and space don’t apply, landscapes echoing with sounds of car collisions that never seem to cease.

(I uploaded the entire experience, with sound, to YouTube.)

This freaked me out so much as a kid I remember waiting for many days until trying it for the second time.

Many years later, I have an inkling how this bug came to be – the programmer didn’t remap left movement to right for walking, because you were not supposed to be able to walk on the game’s initial road – and I could probably fire off an assisted emulator to understand the rest fully. Was it some overflow somewhere? Some memory corruption? Some version of Pac-Man’s kill screen? I could probably even learn stuff from it.

But I think I want to leave this alone, this strange memory of a rare bug in a forgotten game. In my head, it still feels like a fireside story, something that no one would believe actually happened, a mind-bending anomaly that frightened me some two decades before I myself got to visit The Big Apple.

To play the game yourself, go to Atarimania and click the Download button to get the ATR file, then go to this browser-based Atari 800 emulator, click on the hamburger menu, click on Boot Image, and point to the ATR file. Then, press F4 (start) – or press ⌘K, and search for Start. Then, use arrow keys to move around. Left Shift is your solitary fire button. If you press space to pause, just move the joystick again.

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

This is a really enthralling video walking people through a 2023 fan-made Doom level myhouse.wad:

When I say “a fan-made Doom level,” I’m not doing it justice. It is not just a cool map, or just a technically impressive one. myouse.wad treats the Doom game engine as a canvas to tell a particular, and perhaps even poignant story, and a story that could have only been told this way. From the author of the map, by way of an introduction:

Last August I lost a good childhood friend of mine, and took it pretty hard. When I was visiting my hometown for his funeral, I connected with his parents who shared with me some of his old belongings. Among them was a copy of an old map of his, backed up on a 3.5″ floppy from high school. Thomas and I were into amateur Doom mapping in the early ’00s, but I had never seen this map of his prior to uncovering it on one of the old floppy disks. As a way of paying tribute to him and all the great memories we had together, I took the plunge and installed Doom Builder in order to polish up his map and add a few modern amenities just for convenience sake.

And when I say “a really enthralling video,” I’m not doing that justice, either. In the summary of the 2023 BFI video awards, a reviewer wrote:

A masterpiece of recapping, Power Pak’s video is essentially a narrated journey through an ingenious mod. A good recap doesn’t just communicate plot, but also the point of the essay; this does both. Excellent pacing and vocal delivery communicates the tone of the map, and becomes a jumping off point for an analysis of horror in gaming / the oft-discussed topic of liminal spaces. […]

The video itself is performance, too, further blurring the lines between what is art and what is, erm, “real.”

This isn’t cheap machinima, and this isn’t a cheap walkthrough. Definitely worth checking it out.

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

★★★★☆

My server was hacked a few months ago. It wasn’t an obvious “bad password” kind of a situation, but I believe a hole in PHP propped open by some code I wrote 25 years ago. (It’s entirely possible some ancient scripts I wrote for GUIdebook were to blame!) The hacker replaced some of my pages with garish ads for Indonesian casinos, and did some other slight damage. For a few days and nights, I played a cat-and-mouse game with the attacker, learning things, trying the newest patch, only to wake up to see some new pages on my server taken over – up until the moment I managed to close it all off.

There were times during those few days when I knew I was patching my server at the same moment as the hacker was breaking it. It was a very strange, unnerving feeling, with some part of me wanting to reach out, have a conversation, generally learn more about them, or maybe also – I’m not going to lie – kick their ass.

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll is a book about a similar situation, except the story is from the mid-1980s, the server is at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the break-in takes longer than just a few days.

And it all begins rather innocuously:

And so it happened that on my second day at work, Dave wandered into my office, mumbling about a hiccup in the Unix accounting system. Someone must have used a few seconds of computing time without paying for it. The computer’s books didn’t quite balance; last month’s bills of $2,387 showed a 75-cent shortfall.

Now, an error of a few thousand dollars is obvious and isn’t hard to find. But errors in the pennies column arise from deeply buried problems. […]

I found the book – written by an astronomer! – much better than it had the right to be. The story gripping and continues throwing new wrinkles at the already interesting situation. I could sense some liberties taken with real-life events and chronology in service of smoother storytelling, but it all still feels pretty real, and nothing grated me too much.

Released chronologically right in between WarGames and Sneakers, it is appropriately retro and old-fashioned – but there are still techniques that feel relevant, aspects of security that I don’t think changed that much since, and fascinating details I learned from.

The only thing that bothered me was that the book should have ended a chapter or two before it did – there is a sort of second ending tacked on – but, to be fair, a lot of books have the same problem. If you feel like you’d fancy a breezy computer security espionage story from the 1980s, I’d recommend this one!

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a story of a second creepy bug I remember from my childhood.

The Monopoly Deluxe computer game from 1992 fascinated me for one reason that you will understand even if you know me only a little bit: despite not running on Windows, it had a really elegant rendition of a Windows-like user interface.

The game came with a pull-down menu, two kinds of keyboard shortcuts, and fun sounds. There was a history log, with font sizes! There was good typography. It was, in some ways, an improvement over its inspiration, sporting gentler fonts, nicer shadows, better bezels, and cuter animations. In hindsight, it was maybe the epitome of that particular design style, more thoughtful that it needed to be and done by – I felt it even then – someone who really cared about user interface.

It was still Monopoly, of course, and there were better games around. But I remember the interface of it all, and I particularly still remember one very strange moment.

The game allowed you to play against one or more computer players. Instead of happening quietly inside the CPU, the computer’s turn was visualized exactly like a human player’s would be. People awaiting their turn would still see die on the board, pawns moving, dialog boxes for purchases or renting or chance appear, and then… the buttons pressing themselves. This was another thoughtful design decision, making it easier to feel you’re playing against someone else, rather than a mindless algo.

That decision also came with some interesting consequences. One was the fact that, under some circumstances, you could beat the computer to pressing their own buttons. Instead of blocking that action, the game responded with a playful easter egg message that looked like this:

Like many other in-game actions, the message was accompanied with a sound. But this one felt different than all the otherwise joyful audio effects in the game. It was someone’s voice saying “I can do it” – perhaps a sample from a movie or another game, perhaps a reference to something. Even today, I have no idea. Without that context (if any existed) the voice felt… honestly? Intensely creepy. It was someone’s voice, or maybe even something’s.

Just listen for yourself:

I’m telling you all this from the perspective of today, when I understand all of bits and pieces.

But the way I stumbled upon it back in the early 1990s was this: I played against computer players for hours without ever seeing the “Dear Human” dialog or the voice sample, even once. But then, at some point, the game locked itself. Maybe it was an interface race condition, or maybe some other bug. In short: It was a computer’s turn, but the computer wasn’t doing anything. Tired of waiting, I clicked to rush things forward, and then… that creepy voice startled me. Worse, all of my subsequent clicks were accompanied by the same dialog box and yet another appearance of that terrifying sound sample. The game thought it was a computer’s turn and prevented me from doing stuff, but despite the creepy proclamations, the game also wasn’t doing anything itself.

Imagine a young me, playing the generally heretofore fun game late at night, when suddenly everything grinds to a halt, and the tone shifts completely. My keystrokes and clicks go nowhere, and I’m trapped on a virtual Monopoly board with a frightening voice – somewhere between a child, a robot, and the Twin Peaks’s Red Room – saying, over and over again:

I̷̳̦͉̯̎́̈́̎͛͘͜ ̵̹̀̓̃̇̃́C̴̼̜͔̈͐̈A̴͍̤̩̤̐̃̀̑̂͌͜N̶̬̅́̔̅͘͠ ̶̦͎̣͚̦͕͂D̵͙̰̬̲͎̩̒̇̒̕Ŏ̷̺͉̔̚͠ ̷̡̙̥̝͍͈̽͂́͒͋Ḯ̵̧͓͉͉͔̰̓T̴̩̥̤͌̓̇̉̂̒

I’ve since seen many ways in which interfaces got stuck, but this was the only one I felt like the UI became absolutely possessed.

To run the game yourself, go to the Internet Archive, click on the big green button, wait until the board appears, press Ctrl+Q to exit the game (or use the right click menu), type mp digi=ibmbak.com to run it again (now with sound), wait until the board appears, press Ctrl+N to start a new game.

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a real story, and an excerpt from chapter 12 of my book Shift Happens.

The keyboards of the first teletypes looked as if the Shift Wars had happened in an alternate timeline won by typewriters with two Shifts, a century before the arrival of the iPhone. The first teletypes were, too, built with only three banks of keys, the digits sharing the top row of QWERTY. Among the most common was the striking green keyboard of Teletype Model 15, made by a company that – like many – renamed itself after its most popular product. The 15s were robust, heavy, and almost indestructible; 200,000 were made between 1930 and 1954, their production prolonged by World War II.

But the comparison to typewriters with two Shifts broke down as soon as you sat down to a teletype. There was one key called Figs and another called Ltrs, but there was no actual shifting. The two keys were meant to be used alone – pressing one would affect the meaning of all the keys used after it. Figs switched the teletype into digits and punctuation mode; Ltrs made all the keys once again behave as letters. The digits and punctuation covered all the common cases, but the letters were available only in uppercase, and remained so for a long, long time.

The reason for switching instead of shifting went back to Baudôt and his five keys. Five keys give thirty-one possibilities – not enough for the letters of the alphabet, digits, and common punctuation. So Baudôt added two non-printing combinations. Pressing just the leftmost key would switch the machine to think of letters; pressing just the second key from the left would make it focus on digits. Every chord’s character depended on what mode the machine was in: right index finger was A or 1, the middle index finger E or 2, four leftmost fingers meant L or the equals sign. Thirty-one possible combinations became fifty-eight. And even when teletypes switched to a QWERTY keyboard, under the hood they still relied on a modernized version of Baudôt’s code, switching and all.

There were more differences from typewriter keyboards. The keys had an unusual, cushioned feel: each key had a small spring inside for more comfortable typing. For the first time in history, the tops of the keys were held to the base magnetically and could be removed, making it easy to swap them for different uses. And the common mechanical gesture of the carriage return had been decoupled into two separate keys – Car Ret and Line Feed. Carriage return moved the carriage back to the beginning of the line; line feed advanced to the next line. This was done to give the teletype a bit more time for a carriage return to complete. The split was manual, however; the operator had to press the two keys one at a time, in the correct order, with every new line.

Look at post-World War II teletypes, and you’ll find other interesting keys. One common one was labeled Who Are You? Pressing it would generate a special invisible code and ask the other machine to introduce itself. It was sometimes done automatically; other times it required the interlocutor to press a key labeled Here Is, which mechanically output a pre-recorded sequence of letters identifying the location, like DE G3PPD HARROW.

You might also stumble upon another ingenious physical-world backspace. Did you press a key by mistake, creating the wrong set of holes in the paper tape? You could rewind one spot and punch out all the other holes. It was kind of like backspacing on a typewriter and typing x over a typo, but it was invisible – no one was meant to read the tape itself, and the teletypes were programmed to ignore the five-hole position when printing the text on regular paper. And since paper tape was effectively infinite, a message with many corrected typos would have only one side effect – it would arrive marginally slower than one typed neatly.

The Who Are You?, Here Is, and Backspace keys were enhancements that came after the Model 15. But even the earlier model sported one unique key: S/Bell. In letters mode, Bell would do as expected and print a letter S. Switch to digits and punctuation mode, however, and the teletype would ring a bell. It would do so not just on the machine you used, but also on the teletype on the other side.

It wasn’t a gentle typewriter bell alerting you to the end of the line, either. The teletype bell harkened back to an idea in an 1837 telegraph by Cooke and Wheatstone, its ringing meant to alert someone that a message was coming. And sometimes, it was an important message.

The Morse code-powered telegraph network gave us a taste of what an internet could be. Teletypes added automation. In the late 1920s, the next step was Telex, a global network that connected business teletypes.

Elsewhere, post offices in many countries brought telegraphy to the masses by introducing telegrams, a way to send a written message to someone via telegraph or teletype. No knowledge of Morse code or typing was necessary. The message would be typed in at the post office by a teletype clerk, travel through the wires, the resulting printout cut into pieces at the receiving station, and eventually be delivered by a clerk to the recipient’s doorstep as if it were a regular letter. Telegrams were much faster than letters, as they traveled mostly through wires; were much cheaper than long-distance phone calls; and didn’t require your recipient to have any technology in their house. (They also introduced the now-forgotten tradition of saying STOP in between sentences, and they begot the art of making messages as short as possible, later perfected in texting and on Twitter.)

But what was most commonly associated with the telegraph first and teletypes later was the instant broadcast of world events. The Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and United Press International (UPI) took Morse’s “Have you any news?” to heart, and established competing networks of teletypes clacking impatiently with the latest bulletins. Their correspondents would dictate by phone to their offices. The transcribed reports were typed in on one of the agency’s teletypes and sent within seconds to receiving teletypes in the subscribing newspapers. Since most of it happened over wires, it was often called “the wire service.” One UPI employer remembered:

Nothing was true in those days unless the wire services said it was. Confirmation was on the yellow paper rolling out of Teletypes. There was no 24/7 cable TV news. No emailing. No tweeting.

The teletypes were a common fixture in newspapers, “as common as a bathroom, although the machines probably were kept in better repair,” as one reporter recalled. “There was something about the throbbing of teletypes that made reporters and editors feel alive,” an article noted in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986.

They used electromechanical technologies similar to those in electric typewriters. They were, however, driven by paper tape, and so their typing was distinctively machine-like, always at the constant speed of about 60wpm. “They made a low, guttural engine noise – rugrugrugrugrug – punctuated by that loud da dacka-dacka dak-dak, and they were as constant and pokey as a pair of plowmules. They. Yielded. Their. Secrets. One. Word. At. A. Time,” wrote the seasoned Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David O’Reilly. Just as many newspapers put the word Telegraph in their titles in the nineteenth century to align themselves with the high tech of that time, the next century witnessed many TV or radio news programs adding the distinctive cacophony of multiple clattering teletypes to their opening titles.

One surprising but important component in the sharing of news was the S/Bell key. Its use evolved over time. It was no longer just about catching attention – the number of bells grew to signify the importance of upcoming news. On UPI teletypes, three bells meant “Urgent,” five bells indicated a “Bulletin,” and ten bells was a “Flash” – a story so rare and significant that it changed the world’s trajectory.

Flash stories were reserved for earth-shattering events: a declaration of war, a president’s resignation, the death of the Pope. They would cause a newspaper printing plant foreman to yell “stop the presses” and a TV station manager to interrupt shows with breaking news. “Guys had worked in newsrooms for years and never heard ten bells,” wrote the Philadelphia Enquirer. Another columnist put it more bluntly: “when [a teletype’s] bells chimed out a Bulletin or Flash, it was like God clearing His throat.”

God cleared their throat on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 local time. UPI reporter Merriman Smith, riding in the motorcade just behind the president, got ahold of the press car’s radiophone and called UPI with the news. Soon, a few thousand UPI subscriber teletypes across the world started printing in unison. One inside the U. S. government cabinet plane reported:

HANDSOME DR. ALEL DOHRN. %% WAS N IDEALIST BUT BROKE
THE LAW IN AT LEAST IP OF THE QNEPP STERILIZATION
OPERATIONS HE HAS PERFORME ON LOCAL WOMEN
MORE
HS137PEST
RV
SSSSSSSS
FLASH
KENNEDY SERIOSTY WOUNDED PESTSSSSSSSSSS
HS 138/
SSSSSSSSSSS
MAKE THAT PERHAPS PERHAPS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED
HSQEOPEST
SSSSSSSSSSSSSS
GJ OWHL W WOUNDED BY
HQ139PESTXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
KENNEDY WOUNDED PERHAPS FATALLY BY VASSASSINS BULLET
HS139PESTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

The chaos of the garbled transmission seems to capture the magnitude of the news. Knowing how teletypes – and their keyboards – worked, we can decipher most of it, starting with a few lines from a message from Hanover, West Germany: an update in the trial of a local doctor.

Then the Dallas messages start taking over, although not without trouble. Typos likely happened in a hurry to get the message out, and the unusual spacing came from not giving enough time for Car Ret and Line Feed actions to finish their job. (Either could also have been the result of the Hanover and Dallas teletypes talking over each other on the same line at the same moment.)

HS137PEST and others like it were standard signatures following each transmission: two letters for the initials of the operator, and seven to indicate 1:37pm Eastern time. How about HSQEOPEST? It’s the operator forgetting to press the Figs key, or the signal being lost in transmission – the keystrokes 1 3 9, meaning 1:39pm, come out as QEO, as the receiving teletype never switched to speaking in digits.

This is the reason we see a repeated line of X, meant to be slashes separating one message from another. That also explains the long lines of confused letters S, and makes them more harrowing – those were meant to be bells, ringing to alert everyone of an event that shook the nation like few did in the twentieth century. But the switch to digits mode never happens or is lost in transmission, and the machines, obedient and clueless, interpret the transmitted data blindly. Counting the letters betrays the urgency, the desperation, or the despair felt by the teletype operator typing in the message. In a break with protocol, the early eight and ten bells grow to eleven, and then to an unprecedented sixteen bells.

This wasn’t God clearing their throat – this was God caught surprised. The president was dying. Just a few minutes after seeing the UPI’s messages, CBS interrupted its mid-day soap opera to put on air a distraught Walter Cronkite, and soon the other two networks followed, suspending their usual programming for the subsequent three days and nights.

On the wire, the uncanny intersection of human emotions and machine coldness continued, as transmissions of people oblivious to the tragic events in Dallas interleaved with frantic shouting from others:

STAY OFF ALL OF YOU STAY OFF AND KEEP OFF GET OFF
WILL U U P L E A S E STAY OFF THIS WIRE
STAY OFF STAY OFF

But in time, everyone understood and the day’s other events surrendered. An hour after the shooting, another teletype operator, Alice Guenther, started a new shift at the UPI offices. Four minutes later, the White House sent out the feared message of President Kennedy’s death. The broadcast news editor asked Alice to key it into the teletype, but her reaction reminded us that despite all the mechanization and the rhythmic ticking of teletype machines, sitting behind keyboards were still people. Guenther could not make herself finish the task. She took her hands from the keyboard, covered her face, collapsed, and cried “Oh, my God.” The operator supervisor, Jimmy Darr, walked over to her, lifted her out of the chair, let her sit gently on the floor, and leaned over the keyboard. Thirty-nine keystrokes later, at 1:35 Dallas time, thousands of UPI teletypes rang ten bells for one more time that day, and then printed, at a measured pace:

FLASH

PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD

JT135PCS

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. After this and this, the post below feels like a third story in an accidental “angry rectangle” trilogy.

If you used Windows in the 1990s or 2000s, it’s likely you’ve seen this effect, which today we’d call a “glitch”:

The reason for it had to do with window compositing.

If you look at how things are drawn on screens, at some point you realize that despite all the handwringing about additive vs. subtractive colors, on-screen drawing is not really that far off from an artist working on a painting: in both cases you can’t really remove anything, but you can always add new paint. On screens, at least, the paint is 0% thin and 100% free, so nothing prevents you from forever piling it on, but ultimately it’s the same end result: removing a window from the screen isn’t really deleting its pixels, but painting over it with pixels of the background, or another window, or the memory of what was on screen before the window appeared.

It’s the job of compositors to abstract that uncomfortable truth from you, but Windows 9x and XP compositors weren’t nearly as advanced as modern ones. If the underlying app crashed (which explains how most common examples of the above are of the “this application is not responding” variety), the system would end up skipping the erasing-by-drawing step, and compositing directly on top of the previous drawing. It wasn’t a problem if the window was stationary. If you moved it, though? Window ghost trails.

Compositors have improved since those years, yet you can still occasionally see this very problem rearing its fascinating-looking head. But it is more likely you will see its more modern equivalent, having to do with video compression.

Common video compression doesn’t treat all the frames equally. Instead, to save on space and bandwidth, it encodes occasional frames as “I frames” – those are complete sets of pixels from top left to bottom right – and all the other frames a “P frames” – containing, instead, the movement of the pixels drawn previously. Movement is cheaper to encode, in part because on many frames or parts of frames, in any video, there is no movement at all.

I frames are perfectly deterministic, but P frames are more like dead reckoning, as they rely on the previous I frame and all the preceding P frames being there for a perfect result.

In ideal conditions, you will never notice different types of frames and the video will feel as smooth and fluid as real life. But if some P frames happen to be skipped or – especially – if an I frame is skipped, you will see a strange but recognizable visual effect, as the movement of one group of pixels is applied to the wrong group of pixels, and then everything snaps back to reality as the next I frame arrives:

As we’ve seen with other things earlier this week, this category of glitches have been co-opted by digital artists, who named this effect datamoshing, used it creatively in places like music videos – here’s a video for a band Charlift…

…and started repurposing it in other places, too. This video by Jam2go has a nice visual summary of everything I wrote above, and then follows that by trying to recreate the effect in a videogame engine, and then even in more “analogue” settings:

He also quotes Brian Eno, who in 1995 wrote:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitterness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

The Windows background glitch has been remade many times in recent years, too, for example by Jez Corden in 2023. Corden wrote about it, and his recreation is so fun to play around with today, freed from the terror of seeing your app crash and your work potentially lost.

But the glitch was used creatively even when it was still around – and I bet you will recognize this, as it’s one of the most well-known visuals of the Windows 3.x era:

Yes, this is the famous Windows Solitaire, written by Wes Cherry, who combined not clearing the background with some simple physics for an iconic effect. From one of the fans:

I used to watch the whole thing just waiting for the perfect bounce: leftbound from the rightmost stack, with solid black edge. ¶ It’d practically just be gliding along the floor by the time it reached the edge of the screen. Beautiful.

I like these categories of work, the “creatively embracing a glitch” projects, the “intentionally recreating bugs in environments that no longer have them, for aesthetic or artistic reasons” ideas, and the “remixing a glitch in a medium where it doesn’t even make sense” efforts.

Because of course the Solitaire effect has been remade as well – by Mr Doob in 2012, and I imagine by countless others – but it went even further than that:

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Boku No Natsuyasumi (“My summer vacation”) was a 2000 PlayStation video game, exclusive to Japan, which portrayed a nine-year-old boy on his vacation in the countryside. The game was meant to be calm, relaxing, open-ended, and without specific goals, focusing more on the atmosphere set by its hand-painted visual style and calming music.

The story started on August 1, and the game had a fixed ending at the the month’s conclusion. However, its code came with a user interface bug which – under some conditions – allowed players to progress to the next day. Since the game didn’t even anticipate another month, the following days were referred to as August 32, August 33, and so on:

After loading a “clear data” save file, players can back out from a menu they’re not supposed to, which confuses the game enough to load the final day as a normal day, allowing the player to go to bed and save as usual. Logically speaking, the game shouldn’t work at that point, but instead it carries itself forward into August 32nd, which begins as if Boku is still on vacation.

That had consequences that are not hard to imagine in a game written in a 1990s programming environment: both game data and visual assets were now being interpreted from places in memory that were not prepared for this use. This resulted in particularly creepy outcomes – glitched text, empty rooms, garbled textures, characters missing limbs and torsos, and people floating in the sky:

Come to think of it, this is not that much different than the spooky NYCTBA city I mentioned a few days ago. But for some reason – perhaps because of the contrast between the calm nature of the game, and the creepiness of the discovery – this particular bug blew up.

Perhaps via the same corners of the internet we discussed yesterday, the game attained a certain notoriety, and “August 32” became one of the big Japanese gaming urban legends. Creepy video walkthroughs, often enhanced with horror-like music and visuals, became a whole category. YouTube videos from channels focused on mysteries and weird phenomena followed.

The creators’ reaction was a mixture of bewilderment, embarrassment, but also a bit of pride…

I was super surprised when I heard about it, but I was also at the same time kind of impressed. “Wow, it’s not breaking the game even though it’s a bug.”

Of course, it may not be allowed for me to think like this, but I did feel a tiny bit of pride it’s not a “good” bug, but a cool bug. I found out about it a year or two after the game was released, so my first reaction was just super surprised about it.

Millennium Kitchen as a company really cares about the quality of its games, so we do our bug checking really thoroughly. You could probably tell that the Bokunatsu series is one with very few bugs compared to other games that are out there, but maybe it was a trick from the gods to have this bug. The program house that programmed the game is really talented and is a really high-quality team, so it’s not their fault at all.

…although this all also complicated the sequel. Despite explanations and protestations, people tried to find the equivalent of August 32 in the new game, confident it must exist there, too.

Thank you to Sean Kelly for letting me know about this bug/​phenomenon.

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is another true one.

I’m the kind of a strange person who presses ⌥[ and ⇧⌥[ and ⌥] to get to the smart quotes directly from the keyboard. Yeah, I’m doing it right now. Yeah, it’s awkward. Yeah, I know that these days a lot of software automatically introduces curly quotes for you – I even wrote some of that software myself at Medium – but I started doing this in the early 2000s, and you know how motor memory goes: Once it’s all there, it feels so natural there’s no reason to change anything.

When the iPhone first came around, it was a similar story. The automatic curly quote routines weren’t there yet, but if you pressed and held the straight quote key, you’d see a little popover, and could move your finger to the proper typographical quote:

Yeah, it was awkward. Yeah, I was doing it anyway – slowly at first and then, as my fingers got used to it, more eagerly.

At around that time, I began seeing someone. We went on a date, and started texting each other, but from early on, there was something off about our conversations that I couldn’t quite put a finger on. There were chats that ended strangely, and the reactions to my texts that weren’t what I expected.

I initially chalked it up to getting to know each other, to the awkwardness of texting, and all that. But then, in real life, things were strange, too – the few dates we went on trended downward, and after two weeks or so and a short fight, it was over.

Something didn’t sit right with me, though. One of the accusations in that last fight was “you don’t respond to my texts,” which didn’t feel right to me – and, as a matter of fact, it was me who felt that way.

The accusation stung. The evening after a breakup, I looked at our message history more carefully, trying to make sense of it all. It was, I imagine, both slightly pathetic and perfectly human in a way post break-up activities are.

But that night it paid off, as I found out something that I did not expect at all. I don’t know how to build up to it, so I will just say it:

The other person has never received any of my texts where I used smart quotes or en dashes.

I’m not too eager to revisit those old messages that still exist somewhere in the depths of my phone archives, but you can imagine it looking something like this:

In hindsight, it made some sense. I was on the first iPhone, she was using an early Android device. In the famously finicky SMS flow, something ended up just quietly rejecting any of my texts with non-ASCII characters, without any warning to either party. Any time I tried to do the right typographical thing, I unknowingly sabotaged the burgeoning relationship.

Imagine me, on a sad night some time in the late 2000s, scrolling up and down iMessage, at the moment I pieced it all together. I must have stood up from the couch. It really did feel like the “I’m seeing dead people” cinematic reveal, in more ways than one.

I never reached out – our compatibility challenges felt bigger anyway – but imagine trying to explain any of this to anyone under these circumstances. In the end, there was only room for one kind of love, and it was my love for smart quotes.