Hmm, where does this quote come from? I could swear it was a punchline somewhere; was it Arrested Development or the IT Crowd? Simpsons, maybe?

Anyhoo, it’s finally here: I got my copy of Demoscene – the Amiga renaissance, the latest installment of Éditions64’s glamorous demoscene coffee table books.

And we’re in it, with a little feature of Blood Sugar Rises!

It’s a bit weird to be featured with a tongue-in-cheek production, but I’ll take it! In the end, it did win the Revision Amiga demo compo…

Also, the editors understood the assignment (as today’s younglings would put it) and placed it right after Batman Rises, the masterpiece of a demo that was the blueprint for this production. Heh, heh! :)

Randomly stumbled upon this post in the “Amiga Germany” Facebook group the other day: Zerosphere running on the Analogue Pocket!

You can also play Amiga games on the Analogue Pocket just enchantingly well. I had bought Zerosphere from polyplay as a digital version one year ago, and it’s really fun on a handheld as well

I’m taken away by how awesome this looks! And by the fact that they sell Analogue Pocket in cases that match Zerosphere’s title screen. :)

Obligatory shameless plug: Various editions of Zerosphere are available at polyplay.xyz.

This is a little addition to the evolution of the Amiga Topaz font. Surprise! The rabbit hole goes deeper…

Just nine months ago, former Commodore employee Peter Cherna wrote on Hacker News:

I worked at Commodore and was responsible (ish) for the new Topaz for OS 2.0. We had been told to replace Topaz with a sans-serif font, and we replaced it with a font originally called "Clear" that was on one of the Fred Fish disks.

Maybe the font we used was called "Clean", not "Clear".

[…]

"Clean" was the source of the interim font, not of new Topaz.

In the same thread, commenter LocalH (who also posted an extracted Topaz 1.4 font on the AmigaLove.com forums in 2021) adds:

The font "Clean" that's part of the NewFonts package on Fish disk 34 is pretty much identical to the font I've seen that was included in 1.4 prototypes.

Interesting! On a closer look, though, there is no font named “clean” in that specific package, neither in the preview picture nor in the disk contents.

I did however find a clean.font on Fred Fish disk 256, used as an asset in a game called “NameGame”. If you look at the green text, this does look a lot like Topaz 1.4:

It’s hard to tell if this is the original version – was that font specifically created for NameGame and picked up by a Commodore dev? Or has this font has been floating around elsewhere at the time?

There are hints for that:

• DiskMaster2.guide mentions clean.font as a configuration example
• Amiga-Magazin PD 5/93 disk 2 contains an animation program called “CAGS” which comes with clean.font
• Searching for “clean.font” on discmaster.textfiles.com yields 268 results!

Phew! So it’s a mess. There are several incarnations of clean.font, in different sizes and different styles. Apparently a lot of Amiga users thought to themselves: “Let’s chop off those serifs and use it as my clean.font!”

If we look at the preview images provided by discmaster.textfiles.com, we find:

Specimen	Count
	84 occurences
	64 occurences
	21 occurences
	31 occurences
	2 occurences

Lovely!

No, really: Aren’t all these variations a charming testament to the creative do-it-yourself spirit of Amiga users back then? “I like a zero without a slash better!” – “How about a super-slim asterisk?” – “That ß isn’t wonky enough!” etc.

If we go with the most popular version, the lineage from Kickstart 1.2 to the interim 1.4 font may look like this:

A closing fun fact to this little investigation, coming back to the commentary of Peter Cherna:

As I mentioned, we used Clear, maybe with a few mods (ampersand maybe) […]

Hehe, the ampersand & is one of the few characters that hasn’t been altered in any version of clean.font – and neither has the weirdest letter of them all. :)

Little observation on the side: When someone posts a link to your website on Mastodon, you get hundreds of requests from different servers within seconds. I guess that’s expected when you think about it, Mastodon being a distributed microblogging system and all. Calling that “Masto-DDoS” might be exaggerated, but I was alarmed for a moment when I had the logs open…

08:39:57 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://chaos.social/) Bot"
08:39:59 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.pub.solar/) Bot"
08:40:00 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://norden.social/) Bot"
08:40:02 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://waldvogel.family/) Bot"
08:40:02 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://phpc.social/) Bot"
08:40:04 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://hostux.social/) Bot"
08:40:04 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.world/) Bot"
08:40:06 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://rstokes.uk/) Bot"
08:40:06 "Mastodon/4.4.0-alpha.1+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://inductive.space/) Bot"
08:40:07 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.gamedev.place/) Bot"
08:40:07 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.tchncs.de/) Bot"
08:40:08 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://gruene.social/) Bot"
08:40:10 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://toot.martyn.berlin/) Bot"
08:40:10 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.meenzen.net/) Bot"
08:40:11 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.ffmuc.net/) Bot"
08:40:11 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://techhub.social/) Bot"
08:40:11 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://burningboard.net/) Bot"
08:40:11 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://flownative.social/) Bot"
08:40:11 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://linux.social/) Bot"
08:40:12 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://det.social/) Bot"
08:40:13 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.netz.org/) Bot"
08:40:13 "Mastodon/4.3.0+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://fedifreu.de/) Bot"
08:40:14 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.online/) Bot"
08:40:14 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.social/) Bot"
08:40:15 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://patashnik.club/) Bot"
08:40:15 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://d-64.social/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://floss.social/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.caserio.de/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.raspinerd.de/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.3.1+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://scalie.zone/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.4.0-alpha.1+mementomods-2024-10-16 + Mastodon Bird UI 2.0.3 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mementomori.social/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.adlerweb.info/) Bot"
08:40:16 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://lohmann.social/) Bot"
08:40:19 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://fosstodon.org/) Bot"
08:40:20 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://nrw.social/) Bot"
08:40:21 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodonczech.cz/) Bot"
08:40:21 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.green/) Bot"
08:40:22 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://fabulous.social/) Bot"
08:40:22 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mathstodon.xyz/) Bot"
08:40:23 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.vtubers.place/) Bot"
08:40:23 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://rtsn.dev/) Bot"
08:40:23 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://digitalcourage.social/) Bot"
08:40:23 "Mastodon/4.3.0 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://fidget.place/) Bot"
08:40:24 "Mastodon/4.4.0-alpha.1+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://dragonscave.space/) Bot"
08:40:24 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://social.tollofsen.se/) Bot"
08:40:24 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.scot/) Bot"
08:40:25 "Mastodon/4.4.0-alpha.1+tom (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://tomkahe.com/) Bot"
08:40:25 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://livellosegreto.it/) Bot"
08:40:26 "Mastodon/4.3.0-nightly.2024-10-01+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://tweesecake.social/) Bot"
08:40:26 "Mastodon/4.3.0-nightly.2024-09-07+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://catlang.social/) Bot"
08:40:27 "Mastodon/4.3.0-rc.1+glitch (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://soc.saiyajin.space/) Bot"
08:40:28 "Mastodon/4.3.1 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://planetearth.social/) Bot"
...

Still, when I want to search for that URL to find the post containing it, the search yields nothing?!

I thought I kinda understood how Mastodon works (“You see, it’s a whole fediverse of self-hosted nodes communicating using ActivityPub…”, zzzZZZ) – but how do I search for posts there?

Edit: Found the post! The trick was to omit the protocol part of the URL because, um, of course! Anyway, thanks for the shout-out! :)

PS: Not to shit on Mastodon, though – I’m as happy as the next person when everyone hangs out at a Musk-free microblogging service. Depends on who you expect as “everyone” of course. For now, BlueSky feels a bit nicer to use, and I think those starter packs are a nifty feature to add whole chunks of “everyone” to your feed.

Sherlock Horse returns in Teletext form for this week’s #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt, “horsepower”.

Source code as editor link. I like how the thick Teletext borders around the eyes make him look more unhinged. :)