Obsolete Formats

Don't click there because nothing will happen...

Thanks for the nice comments on Sado Air. When I read the requests for further chapters, I got sort of sad. (Sad, not sado!)

I started the long Charbucks saga somewhere around 1998, or maybe earlier. It was when Starbucks were just starting to appear everywhere. It was just gifs, one episode at a time, with the characters repeating their lines over and over, until you clicked the next button.

I started looking for ways to make it livelier, found some script that allowed the girls to say things randomly, which seemed wildly wonderful.

Then a mysterious fellow in the Netherlands contacted me to beta test a web program he'd created himself, which simplified using JavaScript to create web animation and break out of the gif format. I should have been looking to Flash...

I built a long story about Whinsey and Anita travelling on the Titanic Two, after their plane crashed in Mesquite, Nevada. (And the plane crash too was in an obsolete form of code.) A very cool composer, Peter Drescher, provided music for me in the Beatnik format. Beatnik had some amazing code which made midi files sound like real music. This was before there were alternatives like mp3!

Beatnik is now obsolete, and the files don't play. The Titanic Two files also no longer play, because of changes to web browsers. I suppose I could recreate them, but not easily, as there were just masses and masses of code and engines in this program of Sada's. (That was his name.) He's completely vanished from the internet world as well.

Recently the New Yorker profiled Gordon Bell,
who's basically scanning/digitizing his entire life. But he says it's all dependent on the jpeg and word docs still surviving as valid formats. Don't count on it, bud!