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HIDDEN PAGE: A MESSAGE FROM THE DEVELOPER
Hello, world-- it's me, Tina. At the moment, it's November 3 2022 at 10:21 in the evening (22:21 hours).
It's dark outside, except for the annoyingly bright floodlamps the landlord had put in to make the carpark
easier for the security cameras to see at night. The outside temperature is 8°C or 47°F according to the
National Weather Service, and there's supposed to be thunderstorms later, on account of an atmospheric
river (whatever tf that means). I had homemade beef and noodle soup that I made with vegetable stock
that I also made for dinner tonight. I can hear an owl out my window.
Why am I saying all of this? Because of David Pridie, the director of The New Tetris for Nintendo 64.
He wrote an infamous rant that got commented out within the game's header code, presumably because
he knew that people were going to decompile the code and he wanted it to be easy to find. Well, only a
couple years after he wrote that, he died. I'm not sure what he died of, and really it isn't relevant here...
the fact is that he left this indelible impression on a certain subset of society. From 1999 until every last
byte of electronically-stored data is wiped off the face of the planet, we have a small snapshot into the
life of one game developer; stored in umpteen locations across the world, in datacentres from here 'til
Tuesday, and in a million computers on a million desks, this tiny segment of this man's life endures.
Usually, one has to be either gratuitously famous or unspeakably evil for such a record to be kept, or
even discussed. However, this rather mundane chap from Montreal decided to laser-etch his rant into
the permanent archives of Planet Earth, allowing us to experience the frustration of working directly
under Nintendo of America during the middle 1990s, the feelings of helplessness when people with no
knowledge of your project make demands that can't possibly be met, and the annoyance of being
surrounded by lazy, ineffectual people.
It's a textbook juxtaposition of the permanence of data against the frailty of man (humans, that is, not
men as a gender). I've been reading through the SDF's archives of "ancient users" on the Floodgap
Gopher proxy lately, seeing all these gopherlogs and "hello world" documents from people who haven't
logged in, in over a decade; looking at the archiving dates and comparing them against events in my
own life; considering the very real possibilities that the 21-year-old grad student is now a 32-year-old
mother of four, the 35-year-old computer scientist is now a 46-year-old university professor, how the
28-year-old retrogaming enthusiast may have died from COVID-19 at 39. All of these people have taken
paths that diverged from maintaining their gopherholes, but I'm still able to read a snapshot of their lives
at that moment in time.
You know the old adage, "a picture's worth a thousand words"? Well, what
can a picture really tell you about someone's life? Unless it's a picture of their messy house or broken-
down car, not much. Most pictures, even back in the 21.1st century, were staged in some way or another.
A maternity photoshoot where a mother-to-be is photographed in a long, flowing gown near a
flowering shrub isn't going to tell the viewer how much she hates being pregnant, or how her husband
spent the spare bedroom renovation money on the shoot in the first place. A child's school portrait
isn't going to tell you how much he's dreading going to math class because they're doing long division
and he can't understand how it works; or how he got his Nintendo 64 taken away because he kept
bringing home math homework with a red "F" written on the top of the page. The smartphone picture
a man took from the window of his office isn't going to tell you how much he's being overworked and
underpaid for being the only one in the building who understands how the Ruby-on-Rails engine that
powers half the company's internal software actually works. The scan of the pencil sketch of Tina Belcher
dressed up like John Wick isn't going to tell you how much the artist wishes she could move to Belgium
so she can get the gender-affirming care she really needs. A picture is only worth the amount of words
it takes to describe it; and, despite one's best intentions, things happen to pictures. They get burned up,
they get mislaid, they get water-damaged, the colours fade and distort, they become useless. And, as
there's usually only ever a single copy of the picture, ruination equals annihilation. Without evidence,
it may as well have never happened.
To a computer, text files are very small. You can take a 4032x2268 digital photograph at 72 dpi and
it'll come out to about 35,000 bytes. You could describe the photograph in such excruciating detail that
a reader couldn't help but construct the scene in their imagination, spending about 4032 words to do it,
and it would still only come out to about 3 bytes. 4 if you use UTF-8 encoding. Text is far easier to
preserve than images and can tell more about a person than any camera ever could.
That's why I'm doing this. That's why this page exists. I'm hoping Neocities will have greater longevity
than I give it credit for and that someday in a decade or so will be able to stumble upon this page and
discover that this absolute nobody of a web designer made her own soup stock out of bits of frozen veg
she had been saving in the freezer for a month.
LONG-LOST TINA'S SOUP BASE
Step 1 | Whenever you cut up a vegetable; like tipping and topping a carrot or trimming the rubbery bits
off a spring onion; save the trimmings in a food-grade plastic bag and put it in the freezer. They can keep
here for up to six months, but you'll have enough veg for a stock long before then. Apart from trimmings,
you can also put whole veg that's on the verge of going spoilt in this bag; freezing will retard spoilage.
Don't use spoilt or mouldy veg. If it doesn't smell good enough to cook, it's not good enough to save.
Step 2 | Once you have about a week's worth of veg trimmings and slightly over-ripe veg in your stock
bag, empty it into the largest pot you have. Fill a drink pitcher with water and pour over the frozen veg.
At this stage, you could also add chicken parts, beef, veal, or mutton bones, or shrimp shells if you
wanted to make a meat stock of some kind.
Step 3 | Bring the pot to the boil and reduce heat to a fast simmer. Cover and let simmer for 2 hours.
Step 4 | After the stock has finished simmering, remove from heat and allow to cool for 1 hour. Place a
sieve or pasta strainer over the pitcher you used earlier and pour the stock into it to separate the liquid
from the solids. Do this in the sink to avoid making a mess. Discard the solids into the rubbish.
Veg-only stock can keep in the refrigerator for 2 weeks. Meat stock can keep for 1.