1980s Computer Porn
If you were a boy or girl at around the same time I was and if you owned a computer then there’s a good chance you’d have followed the same ritual I did every month: down to the newsagent’s for a furtive flick through the magazines on the shelves before picking up what caught my eye, then back home to the bedroom where the door would be shut and the computer switched on, magazine spread out on the desk by the keyboard, all ready for some passionate pounding, sometimes using two fingers. Good grief! Look at this filth for the BBC! With every byte counting there’s no room for spaces in the listing leading to dirty, dirty code. Makes me feel grimy just looking at it. “VDU28,0,24,39,24,134,136:” I have no idea what you’re saying but keep talking! “EVERY 7,1 GOSUB 1530” This Amstrad code is up for some repetitive action. It’s going to be doing it over and over again until it’s stopped! Naughty! That there is the holy grail of ZX Spectrum program listings: Z80 baby! Short and sweet, pulsing to the music you’re playing, poking away in two holes in the memory space. Oh yes! And look that those 201s! 201 is C9 in hexadecimal, and that means RET. Yeah, this code isn’t just going there it’s coming back for more. Insatiable! These days our listings embrace all the colours of the rainbow but back in the 80s the best you’d find was a little bit of black on white action thanks to some inverse video. This was pretty damn risqué back then. This Spectrum code will take what you give it and then flip it over, lay it on its side, look down on it from above, and spit it right back at you. That’s what we call European code and things were just a little bit nastier back in the 80s. You give it your depth and it’ll multiply what you’ve got by the cosine of PI over 6. When was the last time you had that done? Yeah, I thought as much. This C16/Plus 4 code is a bit of a hard mistress to please. You just want to get right down and do things but there are conditions you’ve got to meet first. Look at it, line by exquisitely conditional line; have you ever seen so many IFs in your life? You get a nice long listing split into many parts then you want some detailed instructions; you want some code that knows what it wants you to do and isn’t afraid to tell you exactly how to do it. You’re looking at...
The Hairstyles Of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler – you’ve probably heard of him – had a style all his own. The Hitler moustache, of course, was fashioned after the comic actor Charlie Chaplin’s, whose movies were Hitler’s favourites; Chaplin, it has to be said, was not so fond of the films featuring the German leader. But when it came to hair only Hitler could get away with the slicked side parting. It was smart. It looked sharp, clean, leaderly. However, Hitler wasn’t always quite so dapper in the hair department. Despite attempts to remove from history all evidence of his previous dalliances with hair fashions in much the same way he tried to eradicate his occult connections during the Night of the Long Knives some previously unseen pictures have emerged from the darkness in recent years. Hitler was a massive fan of African and Caribbean music and a typical rally during his early political career would always start with something a little reggae, calypso, or Ghanaian polyrhythmical. Embracing those cultures led to the future despot sporting dreadlocks for a period. It wasn’t a massive leap of hairstyle logic to shift from dreadlocks – considered (rightly) by some of Hitler’s supporters as “looking like you haven’t washed in ages” – to the afro so that’s what the German leader did next. This move created such a backlash in Europe’s black communities who felt the charismatic chancellor was insulting them that Hitler retaliated by embarking on a white supremacy political and ideological platform. To appeal to the Nazi youth Hitler briefly employed a young stylist who transformed his look with lighter colours and soft curls. The style was mocked mercilessly and the stylist was forced to flee for her life. She survived and continued her styling career for decades to come. Her clients included Weird Al Yankovic and Kenny G. Towards the latter years of the nineteen thirties Hitler finally started to close in on what would become his trademark look. This final photo shows the penultimate transformation in the many hairstyles of historical madman Adolf...
Science Fiction Book Covers
I’m a sucker for science fiction whether that’s in film form or literature. As such I follow a lot of science fiction-themed websites’ RSS feeds. One of the things I love discovering through these sites are vintage sci-fi books. Sometimes it’s the author or title that will stand out – someone who may only have had a small distribution in another country, for instance, or something so bizarre-sounding you wonder how it ever came to be published in the first place – and sometimes it’s the cover artwork that catches my eye. Sometimes it’s both and I’ve picked a few examples to show off below. Originally found via 70s Sci-Fi...
Ridgid Tools Calendars
I’m not sure what route I took while clicking along the information superhighway (are all the kids still calling it that these days?) but I ended up in a little town of George Petty pin up girl artwork, liked what I saw, asked around, and then stumbled upon a calendar he’d produced for a company called Ridgid. You know how it is then; you have a few drinks and before you know it you’re staring at another calendar, only this one’s from the 1970s, not the 1950s, and you’re quite impressed by just how things have changed, yet stayed the same. All of which is a poorly prosaic way of saying I’d like to showcase some of those images from the calendars right here. It’s the sort of thing I do. These images came from these two Flickr albums: 1975-6 Ridgid Tools Calendar and Blog Photos but there are plenty of other sources. 1953 Calendar The 1953 calendar for Ridgid Tools is the one by artist George Petty. The 1950s was a time of innuendo. Why look! It’s a small woman with a large tool between her legs! This woman is touching a knob at the end of a long shaft. What can the underlying message be? Astride a tool, ready to get it all lubricated while a knob is pressed up against her backside. Filth! Well now, that posture can’t be good for her back. Health and safety rules were clearly different back then. And working with machinery in ballet shoes? Things really have changed. 1975-76 Calendar The two year calendar for Ridgid Tools was photographed by Peter Gowland. Gone was the subtle innuendo of earlier years; in the 1970s the important thing was to show some skin and encourage blue collar workers to pin the calendar on the wall and get that brand name screwed into the brain. Of course, if you could get a woman to get her hands gripping the rod of some tool then that was good too. The challenge with the 1970s photos is guessing just what the actual tool is that’s being promoted. Take this one, for example: if I didn’t know any better I’d assume it was some kind of plasma weapon as used by warrior women of some pretty awesome bikini planet. “I need to measure something curved, something that would easily cover a person, but is there such a tool? Hang on! Didn’t I see the perfect thing on my Ridgid Tools calendar? I did!” Another mystery tool that I’m going to assume is a high tech bit of equipment for clubbing fish to death because why else would...
1970s Porno Style
If you ever take a look at the pictures of a pornographic magazine from the 1970s – and if I know you half as well as I think I do then I know you do – then you’ll no doubt have been blown away by the awesome pre-sex fashions and sex-location styling on display. Let’s take a quick look at some truly amazing displays from the golden age of porno publications. It’s a party – you can tell from that one decoration on the wall – in a time when it was perfectly okay to expose your fellow diners to cigarette smoke, with a mix of casual and smart casual wear on display, and the two stand out things for me are the gentleman’s shirt in the second photo (he’s clearly taken off his jacket sometime between the first and second ones, a sure indication things are warming up) and the candles. Look how thin they are! Who uses those candles these days? Aren’t you supposed to use those candles to light other candles? Oh well. And I’m not even going to guess what he’s trying to do in that second picture either. Some things just don’t have a modern equivalence. One man and three women has to mean sexy sex is mere moments away but cast that thought aside for one moment and let your eyes gaze lovingly on the half-height wood paneling. Heavenly. And yet even that beauty of 1970s design is overshadowed by our male protagonist’s suit. When you combine a suit of that colour and that apparent fabric with sideburns of that majesty you know you’re looking at a sex god in human form. Notice too that all the women are sporting bold necklaces. In the 1970s that was a sure sign that women were up for a little bit of how’s your father. Or that they really liked necklaces. One of those two. “Oh, Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie!” laughed the blonde as she perused the photo album of a recent trip to Amsterdam on her friend’s lap. “See, now I love your green dress – I really do – but it’s just a little plain for this era. You need to find yourself something with a little more daring; a little more wow!; a little more horrific clashing of patterns with each and every thing around you. Something like I’ve got on. Hey! Is that Ted’s arse in the corner by the canal? Great necklace, by the way! Fancy a bit of how’s your father?” It’s the same setting and the same brunette (admittedly sporting something a little more suitable for the period; I’m so...
SpeccyJam: The ZX Spectrum Game Dev Challenge
Through some random retweet I saw trickling through my Twitter stream I happened upon Speccy Jam, an annual event to create a game in one week with the rules being simply that the game can be for any platform and developed with any tool but must look like a genuine Sinclair ZX Spectrum game; specifically, the screen size (scalable) must be right and the colours used must be right with bonus points (there are no points) given if attribute blocks – the way every 8×8 block of pixels could only ever employ two colours (there’s a great discussion about this here) – is employed. I could describe how much joy I felt looking through the Speccy Jam forum and Twitter stream yesterday evening or I could post up a few screenshots of some of the games under development right now (although if you read this later then not really right now any longer) and I think it’s pretty clear which way I’m going to go here. Bratty Tim Inspired from Skool Daze if I had to guess and by Ants_And_Aphids. Pest Control Pete A classic-looking platformer by Retro Bungalow. The Accolade A little bit of isometric heaven and a very good-looking game even this early on from Juan. Bruce Leap A few puns abound as Bruce Leap tries to get Mai Wee back in this platformer from Gazzapper Games. Untitled Teddy Bear Game I’m sure this game by Stew Hogarth will have a name but right now it doesn’t although you are a teddy bear and you’re stealing things. Moon Unit Z Another gorgeous isometric game being developed for Speccy Jam by Lewis Lane. Lillian Gish A top down version of Lillian Gish in progress from developer Devi Ever. There are a load more ZX Spectrum-inspired games under development and last year’s entries can be found here too. I was too late in discovering the retro game development event this year but with a bit of luck I’ll remember for next year and have a stab at producing something truly awful and awesome at the same time, just like a real Spectrum...
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