Well, of course they are, because it’s fun! :) In this case, “they” is Nova 2025, the demoparty. It is taking place right now in Budleigh/UK, and I had totally forgotten they have a dedicated Teletext competition until I turned on the stream.
My last remote entry for Nova (and the subsequent inquiry what happened with it) somehow got lost in 2023, but I would love to do a little Teletext piece again. Maybe enter something for Flashparty in October? I seem to have skipped Flashparty 2024 after sinéad in 2023, so it’s about time…
Anyhoo – seeing all the nice Teletext entries on the Nova stream was great!
Compressing each party theme into a 512 byte Amiga intro, that is. (Too bad the years aren’t consecutive…) A pouet thread made me look up my past productions for Nordlicht – a welcome procrastination while I should be thinking about ideas for this year’s edition in a few weeks…
| Party theme | Production |
|---|---|
| Fire brigade 2018 Notice the little fire truck on the website! :) |
512 Byte Brigade A minimalist cover of the Game Boy Advance invitation. The first 512 byte competition at Nordlicht! 
|
| In the beginning, there was a floppy disk 2019 The trophies were exceptionally nice that year. 
|
spoke As in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. Very dirty code, but a nice 2001 Space Odyssey mood and a perfect fit for the party theme. 
|
| Ahoy, landlubbers! 2022 Finally, a pirate theme! |
Arrr512 You can never go wrong with a huge skull and a bit of Monkey Island’s theme. Oy! 
|
| Nordlicht Express 2023 Choo-choo! |
hypotrain I like trains, and I like Rebels’ legendary subway demo – let’s do a 512 byte adaption! 
|
| Crime Scene – Do Not Cross 2024 This party theme was lovingly put to life at the party place. And there were Tatort-themed trophies! 
|
B.S.I. – Byte Scene Investigation I kinda hit the limits of story-telling in 512 bytes here. Scary! 
|
Sooo… This year’s headline is “Neon Prime” – galactic, sci-fi, space-opera!
I might have gotten the spark of an idea while writing this. Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
Inspired by this post commentary by Kev Quirk, I decided to look into my own logfiles of the past months and see how much bot visits I’m getting.
Some findings:
- No, bots are not eating my blog, two thirds of all requests seem human.
- But boy, there are a lot of bots around nowadays!
- Surprisingly, Googlebot isn’t the hungriest bot. It’s OpenAI/ChatGPT!
- Strong contender: Ahrefsbot – they’re really nosy! I can see why you would pay for their service, though, given that browsers generally don’t send referer headers anymore.
- Bytespider, operated by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, also seems really into Amiga, demoscene, and Teletext content.
- Of course, all of this can only take bots into account that play nice and identify themselves as bots.
The top user agents of the past months are:
| # | Hits | Percentage | Identified as |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 316,944 | 66.3% | User agent looking like a human-operated browser |
| 2 | 22,622 | 4.7% | openai.com |
| 3 | 21,574 | 4.5% | GoogleBot |
| 4 | 15,075 | 3.2% | AhrefsBot |
| 5 | 11,407 | 2.4% | Scrapy |
| 6 | 9,140 | 1.9% | Bytespider |
| 7 | 6,474 | 1.4% | bingbot |
| 8 | 5,815 | 1.2% | babbar.tech |
| 9 | 5,105 | 1.1% | ClaudeBot |
| 10 | 4,895 | 1.0% | Amazonbot |
| 11 | 4,298 | 0.9% | facebook.com |
| 12 | 4,185 | 0.9% | Applebot |
| 13 | 3,666 | 0.8% | PetalBot |
| 14 | 3,532 | 0.7% | SemrushBot |
| 15 | 3,449 | 0.7% | ImagesiftBot |
| 16 | 2,564 | 0.5% | MJ12bot |
| 17 | 2,401 | 0.5% | DuckDuckBot |
| 18 | 2,134 | 0.4% | BLEXBot |
| 19 | 1,961 | 0.4% | Empty (“-”) |
| 20 | 1,428 | 0.3% | YandexBot |
| 21 | 1,118 | 0.2% | curl |
| 22 | 1,100 | 0.2% | Dalvik |
| 23 | 1,058 | 0.2% | VelenPublicWebCrawler |
| 24 | 1,038 | 0.2% | Timpibot |
| 25 | 1,001 | 0.2% | serpstatbot |
| 26 | 970 | 0.2% | AwarioBot |
| 27 | 967 | 0.2% | SeznamBot |
| 28 | 963 | 0.2% | DotBot |
| 29 | 881 | 0.2% | DataForSeoBot |
| 30 | 870 | 0.2% | coccocbot |
The bot-vs-human ratio roughly ends up like this:
| Percentage of all requests | Category |
|---|---|
| 66.3% | Probably human |
| 33.7% | Bot |
So… go humans, I guess? That is, unless we filter out all file requests (CSS, images, other media). Then we get:
| Percentage of page requests | Category |
|---|---|
| 50.8% | Bot |
| 49.2% | Probably human |
In any case it was lovely to see some Amiga users visiting with IBrowse on AmigaOS 3.2 and 3.9! And I guess the “PSP (PlayStation Portable)” user agent is a nerdy joke? :)
Cool stuff on the webz, recent and olde.
What’s Cool? ·
What’s Cool? II ·
What’s Cool? III
- WarGames Title Fonts
A nice pixel reverse engineering job of reconstructing the movie’s title and credits font. There’s an adaption of the terminal font as well. Good thing a similar font already existed when I made a whimsical WarGames-themed GIF animation for Revision 2024. :) - Learning From the Amiga API/ABI
I’ve been thinking about doing a “Why Amiga is cool” post one day, focusing on the non-obvious features and ideas that made the platform great. This article (along with its preceding “rant”) resonates with that idea: Praising Amiga not for its games or multimedia capabilities, but for its elegant library handling and its powerful microkernel.
Beware: That website uses <body bgcolor="#000000" text="#5050FF">, which is a bit too retro even for my taste… :) - melon in the wild
That made me smile: A graffiti sporting the original oldschool melon logo with the dot. While you’re at it, also check out BraxtonDK’s Bluesky profile for a nice compilation of new and classic pixel art masterpieces. - Dead Ahead by FLEX & Ephidrena feat. Skarv
A most welcome reminder to sit down with my beefed-up Amiga 1200 some more – by watching this incredible demo as a start! I intentionally squinted when skimming over the YouTube recording, not to spoil the experience of watching it on real hardware with a good old cathode ray tube. - The Meaning of Icons
An entertaining reflection on icons, the metaphors they embody, and the questionable trend towards stylized, cryptic monochrome pictures. Apropos cryptic: I especially enjoyed the old fill tool icon in DeluxePaint being mentioned because I, too, never read it as a paint bucket being emptied for many years. The weird mouse pointer didn’t help, either:
While working on my anaglyph-3D (and new art making-of) talk, I realized in horror I had misnamed this little guy all the time, calling him “Tweasy” everywhere instead of “Teasy”.
This applies to all the mentions in the write-up (since corrected) and extends to all the file names and labels in the source code. I wonder how this happened – after all, I did flip through lots of online resources in preparation for the art work, and I must have been aware of the correct name at some point.
INITIAL_TWEASY_X = -200
INITIAL_TWEASY_Y = 50
TWEASY_X_SPEED = 2
TWEASY_Y_SPEED_EIGHTS = 2
clr.l pd_StompSequence(a6)
move.w #INITIAL_TWEASY_X,pd_TweasyX(a6)
move.w #INITIAL_TWEASY_Y*8,pd_TweasyYTimes8(a6)
clr.w pd_TweasyAnimFrame(a6)
...
sprites:
include tweasy-gfx/walksprites.asm
colors:
incbin tweasy-gfx/001_placeholder.col
Was I pulling out a long eyebrow hair at the time and got him mixed up with tweezers? Or, since I was doing lots of rotoscoping and little animations for the demo, was I thinking of Macromedia Flash, the grand old authoring tool for vector-based animations, nasty ads, and browser games? Keyframe-based animations were called tweens back then, and the internal “pixel” resolution was based on a unit called twips.
Anyway, twanks, err, thanks, little guy, for spicing up the demo and my talk with some laughs and “awws”! :)
