Friday Night’s All Right For Keeping the Kids Out of the Pool

This week was the 20th anniversary of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network, and this mini-retrospective by Kyle Anderson on Nerdist.com does a pretty good job of concisely summing up why the combination of cheap TV programming and clever ad bumpers made such a huge impact on nerds of a certain age.

Or multiple certain ages, I guess. I’m having trouble coming to terms with the idea that I was 30 when Adult Swim debuted, because I could’ve sworn I watched it in college. Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to listen to the D-Code Mix of Mambo Gallego by Tito Puente and remember there’s no eating in the pool. What’s that guy eating? Is that pimento?

Dianna Cowren on her YouTube channel PhysicsGirl just finished a series about hydrogen fuel cell cars. It was sponsored by Toyota, so it’s definitely spun to be more positive of the potential of fuel cells than you’d tend to see otherwise, but it also does a good job of realistically assessing the downsides of hydrogen, why passenger vehicles may not see wide adoption over battery EVs, and why a combination of fuel cells (faster refueling, longer range) and BEVs (everything else) will be necessary to get wide-scale conversion to electric.

The parts of Cowren’s series that I thought were even more interesting were the episode about approaches towards storing renewable energy and different kinds of solar farms beyond the familiar photovoltaics. I was vaguely aware that solar and wind power needed some kind of storage solution to be available on demand, but I’d just assumed that massive batteries were the solution. That video explains some ingenious alternatives, such as using excess energy to pump water to a higher elevation, then using the water falling to power turbines when that energy is needed.

Lucas Pope is doing a devblog for his Playdate game Mars After Midnight, and last week’s entry “Working in One Bit” was a neat account of what’s involved in making art for a small one-bit display in 2021.

Another interesting project for Playdate that’s in the works: a framework for crank-scrollable comics called Panels, by Cadin Batrack.

Those two projects made me realize that I’ve been a little short-sighted about what exactly appeals to me about the Playdate: as somebody who still pines for his Mac Plus, I had been thinking of it as throwing back to a very specific kind of mid-to-late-80s nostalgia for the early Macintosh aesthetic. Instead, I think the actual appeal is broader: it feels like a direct expression of creativity from developer to audience. I got reminded of the wonderful and bizarre Comic Chat IRC client from Microsoft. Frankly, I never saw it actually work as well as its concept promised, but I’m still amazed by the fact that it existed at all. Not just that such an R&D project came out of Microsoft, but that they managed to get Jim Woodring to do the art!