Datagubbe

It's not, the same thing happened even in the 1980s and 1990s. Think of it like "stolen valour".

Let's say you enjoy Skyrim. All the people are like "Yay Bethesda!". Bethesda gets the warm fuzzies (and lots of money)

Then PERSON X introduces the HORSE ARMOUR mod. All the people are like "Yay PERSON X!". PERSON X gets the warm fuzzies, and this keeps them going. To get the mod, you have to go to PERSON X's page on nexus, read their spiel, download their file, read their README, install it just right, and so on. That's a lot of time the masses are spending with PERSON X because... they changed a piece of Bethesda's game.

Now PERSON Y introduces the PERSON Y's MEGAPACK mod, which combines multiple mods and makes sure they work together. PERSON X's HORSE ARMOUR mod is just a single bulletpoint on the list, along with hundreds of others. They are mere datapoints, what's important is PERSON Y, because PERSON Y made sure all these other modders' stuff worked together, and used their taste and discernment to decide what was worth including or not. All praise now goes to PERSON Y. PERSON Y gets the warm fuzzies while PERSON X gets the cold pricklies. Boo!

Now do you see why PERSON X doesn't like PERSON Y's modlists.... for Bethesda's game?

A side piece about who's "stealing" from who in the 1990s demo and piracy scene, which cracks games and makes painstakingly pixellated copies of famous artworks: https://www.datagubbe.se/scenecop/

This was a fantastic walk-through of the making of intro, including great descriptions of some Amiga tech and features, plus: quite the cute little intro!

Reminded me a lot of some of the quick-shot productions me and my friends used to do back then! It was very satisfying to do these little single-screen things, sometimes in a single day/night, that were perhaps (eh) less about showing off massive technical chops (never my forte, especially not back as a teenager) and more about mood, sometimes humor, or simply just ... saying something. Then when the thing was done, you got to start spreading it by (of course) using your modem and uploading it to some choice bulletin board systems.

Amazing that Datagubbe (which by the way is translated by the author [1] as "old computer fogey" although I feel the Swedish word "gubbe" is really hard to translate well) wrote this in AMOS by the way, I used that a lot but mostly for tooling and general playing around, never for any released productions, they were always in assembly.

[1]: https://datagubbe.se/colophon/

https://cheapskatesguide.org -- Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and Internet. Low-end and frugal computing in the 21st century. Long, opinionated posts on a pink(!) background.

http://ranprieur.com/ -- Ran Prieur. Frugality, societal collapse, "dropping out", and beyond. Has been constantly blogging for ages; it's really interesting to see how his views have changed in time.

http://joeyh.name/ -- Joey Hess, former long-time Debian developer, author of git-annex. Frugal living and computing in the wilderness (he used to do everything on a 9-inch Dell Mini 9).

https://datagubbe.se/ -- Carl Svensson. Great long-form essays on frugal computing and, uh, what has gone wrong after 1994 or so.

http://len.falken.ink/ -- I just really like the "layout", even if it feels a little pretentious to some. IIRC, his essay "Writing for the Internet across a Human Lifetime" also had some feedback on HN.

http://viznut.fi/en/ -- Viznut. Demoscene, "low-end technical extremism", permacomputing. Updates are rare, but the older pieces are well worth a read.

There is a fantastic article which I've linked to before that goes into a lot of that: https://datagubbe.se/ltmag/

Datatypes in particular are amazing! I really wish some of these features (see also: ASSIGNs) made it over to other platforms. Which makes me think... A really nice hack (after I finally port SetCmd back to 68k and then bring it to more platforms) would be to add an ARexx port. Rexx itself is a pretty decent scripting language and the ubiquity of it on later-day Amiga systems meant that glue-ing components together and automating big chunks of platform behavior was very simple. Off down the rabbit hole again ;)

Well, yes, staring at a screen is the digital art workflow just as it is the programming workflow, and deep work (or just most work!) requires not constantly getting distracted.

The artist is Avril Harrison. Other than that, seems to be lost to history. https://datagubbe.se/famous/

(this is a better process than the 1965 NASA version, which involved doing pixel art by hand on paper. A form of human "shader". https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-tv-image-of-mars-hand-colored/ )

The X-COPY user interface[1] was very powerful, watching the little squares slowly fill with color while hearing the floppy drive painfully squeaking and grinding was an experience in itself.

Operating system standardization have killed this kind of creative interface, it's probably for the best, but I'm pretty sure something bold and colorful can still happen and make a difference to users.

[1] https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/a5003-crop-2302041155-01.png