iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

the Frenchest part of the game: the steam locomotive has a boiler pressure manometer that measures HPz (hectopiezes) instead of non-deranged units like atm or bar one hectopieze (a unit only ever used in France and the USSR) equals one bar, making it entirely redundant. quintessentially French

$screenshot of Transarctica. scene: engine room. the firemen are standing by, shovels in hand. the view of the engine's control panel is open: throttle is at maximum, temperature is just under 600°C, speed is 20 km\h (yes, with a backslash), pressure is 84 HPz. other information from the the UI: - the train is composed of locomotive, coal tender and four other cars - game day 1, 2:30 - no rocket launcher car - the tender carries 1925 tons of lignite and 500 tons of anthracite$

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

only good for the novelty of playing a game where the inventory is measured in tons, with tare factored in as much as I hate modern games for having too many game mechanics that don't even integrate well, Transarctica takes the cake. it's like ten minigames in a trenchcoat, none very good

screenshot of Transarctica. the game's uninspiring inventory screen. it's page 3 of the full inventory and it lists two categories of freight cars: regular and XL ("freight" was mistranslated as "merchandise"). the train's 3 regular freight cars carry 6 line inspection cars and 8 tons of manure, while the 5 XL cars carry 40 tons of rails, 13 missiles and 10 line inspection cars. it's game day 92

screenshot of Transarctica. the player is stopped at Ruhr, browsing the rail car store. 8 different kinds of rail cars are for sale, with prices ranging from 100 tons of anthracite for a basic coal tender to 1300 for a construction crane. the player is considering an XL "merchandise" (how the game mistranslates "freight") car: its dry weight (tare) is 55 tons and it can carry up to 40 tons of freight; it costs 400 tons of anthracite. the UI is in Parisian Art Deco style

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

everyone remembers disgraced anchorman Howard Beale's turn as a mad prophet, but when majority shareholder Arthur Jensen browbeats him into becoming an unpopular mouthpiece of neoliberalism, it's easy to forget the almost off-handed mention that, despite lousy ratings, Jensen has made him unfireable

Howard Beale is as mad as hell and he's not going to take this anymore! Iconic scene with Beale looking like he has just been fished out of a gutter, with a crazy look in his eyes and mad prophet body language

A deflated, defeated, depressed Howard Beale, converted to the cult of capitalism, sitting in front of his studio audience, musing on whether dehumanization is such a bad thing, after all

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

art restoration is unregulated in Spain so there have been *several* high profile cases of amateur disasters

the botched restoration of Rañadorio: three wooden figures (Virgin Mary, Saint Anne and baby Jesus) repainted in bright neon colors

the botched restoration of Navarre: a repainted statue of St. George now looks like a toy or cartoon character (Tintin-like)

the botched restoration of Palencia: a sculpture of a woman whose face was disfigured until it looked like a shitty, potato-headed modeling clay sculpture

the botched restoration of Valencia: a deteriorated painting of the Immaculate Conception was defaced twice in two failed attempts at restoration. the face of Mary now looks like a bad collage of magazine cutouts

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

What's Up Mechadoc, the original anime about car tuning and GT racing. like the later, more famous Wangan Midnight and Initial D, it could get extremely technical; unlike them, it had a strong anti-street racing stance the otherwise excellent Italian TV dub butchered the technical parts completely

protagonist Jun Kazami drives his latest creation out of the garage: a red 1983 Toyota Celica XX that was rebuilt from a wreck; two "MD" stickers on the hood identify it as a creation of the MechaDoc tuning shop

the car is flanked by Jun's two associates at the shop: mechanic Kiyoshi Noro (a large man with a thin neckbeard) and manager Ichiro Nakamura (a young man with eyeglasses and a full head of light brown hair). all three are wearing tan mechanic's coveralls; Ichiro, the more business-minded of the three, wears a shirt and tie under his

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

absolutely positively never going to happen, ever, but I'd love to sadistically force a development team to come up with a credible way to port the mechanics to a 3D environment

title screen of the Amiga port of Impossible Mission II: a pixel art drawing of a futuristic fortress, a menacing building composed of several tightly-packed steel-and-glass towers (the setting of the game), in an architectural style vaguely reminiscent of Imperial military hardware from Star Wars, all smooth white surfaces with dark, geometric openings. the game title is written in a somewhat incongruous 80s Art Deco Revival style, with the "Impossible" part rendered in a hot pink "neon tube" effect. a pink neon square frames the image

the palette is mostly blues over grays, with hot pink for contrast and some yellow accents

it's all very Amiga, extremely 80s (and you can't hear the theme music!), and it was made in, of all places, Communist Hungary

text: "© 1988 Epyx™
IMPOSSIBLE MISSION II.™
PROGRAMMED BY NOVOTRADE"

source: https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/impossible-mission-2

Impossible Mission II gameplay: our hero, an unimpressive dark-haired man in black trousers and a white shirt, is navigating a 2D architectural nightmare of wall-mounted cargo lifts set in deep shafts with strategically-placed openings. his goal is to stay alive while he searches all furniture in the room (among which a console and a safe) for useful items. identical robots infest the room: they are rounded and friendly-looking, but the player soon learns that they are armed with deadly lasers

there is no scrolling (one room, one screen) and no UI

the graphics are pretty dated for a 1988 Amiga game: it looks exactly like the remastered C64 game it was. the room is rendered in flat 2D, with only a slight isometric effect to lend it a sense of depth. the robot sprites are pillow shaded

the best part is the unapologetic fauvist palette: not one of the boldly contrasting colors makes individual sense, but together they just work

source: https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/impossible-mission-2

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

you probably visited a village. one of the random things that they can do is giving you a random advancement for free

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hackbunny @hackbunny.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

in Floor 13, you keep tabs on a cast of characters that may cause embarrassment to the UK government characters are randomly generated from a set of fixed characteristics, one of which is social class, which determines name, surname, job and place of residence all female characters are bourgeois