Tag: bbs

  • Archiving 300,000 Fidonet messages

    Archiving 300,000 Fidonet messages

    In 2015, I began looking for archives of networked BBS messageboards, hoping to find contemporary discussions of BBS door games from the 1990s. The best source I found was the fidonet.ozzmosis.com archive. The Ozzmosis archive is awesome — and it’s still active, archiving any new messages posted to Fidonet. (yes, Fidonet still exists!) But I…

  • Who needs SVG when you’ve got ANSI?

    Who needs SVG when you’ve got ANSI?

    Presidential election years are great times to work at a news organization. As a designer at a newspaper, I love to explore the cool election maps developed by folks at places like the New York Times or the Guardian. My favorite is probably the 2016 Election Forecast from FiveThirtyEight.com, which is full of cool visualizations,…

  • ANSI mermaid swims in parallax

    ANSI mermaid swims in parallax

    I made it into an artpack! It’s no exaggeration to say that as a kid I always admired the guys in the artscene. I saw their work from afar, and they inspired me to dabble in ANSI myself. I didn’t produce anything memorable, and I certainly never tried anything ambitious, like a character portrait. So…

  • Talking BBSes on the Electric Dreams podcast

    Earlier this year, a new BBS-related podcast debuted: Electric Dreams. Host Mike Whalen emailed me to invite me onto the show, and of course I said yes. He interviewed me in March, and I understand he also interviewed other folks like Ken Gagne. The podcast series debuted later that month, and it sounded great! Unfortunately,…

  • ANSI tile map

    ANSI tile map

    Earlier this year I described how we used Synchronet’s Javascript support plus its Frame and Sprite libraries to produce some pretty cool ANSI animation effects, including a sprite walking in front of a parallax-scrolling background. Recently I’ve been experimenting with how to make maps.

  • Parallax-scrolling effect … in ANSI

    Parallax-scrolling effect … in ANSI

    Every so often I’ve been experimenting with Synchronet BBS’s Javascript capabilities, as I try to figure out how to make a BBS door game with my daughter.