Undernotes: Plain text

A few text-based links and, inevitably, some murder and politics

• 15 January 2026
• callout,
• undernotes

For this undernote, it seems I have accidentally alighted upon a few text-based links. In a image-rich world, I have a particular liking for text. While I'm no purist, I like text editors, text-based formatting, text adventures, command line interfaces and, of course, I love books and poems.

So I was interested to come across A small collection of text-only websites in Terence Eden’s Blog at the very end of last year. Mostly these sites require that you add some variation of .txt or index.html to the end of a URL to get a pure text version of a page. I kind of love that, and I wonder what it would take to apply it here. Must. Resist.

And just as, when you hijack an unusual car in old versions of Grand Theft Auto you suddenly see the same model everywhere around town, I quickly happened upon multiple other textish articles and links. Brandon Vigliarolo reported on Brow6el, a full-featured browser that runs in a terminal in The Register.

Hacker News included the Aardwolf MUD home page along with many comments. For those not in the know, a MUD is a Multi User Dungeon (or Dimension) -- a cross between a text adventure and a chat environment like Slack or, more properly, IRC. Not only can you play and communicate interactively in a MUD environment, you can often also build your own extensions to the map. I remember being particularly excited by the promise of MUDs back when Mosaic was a cutting edge browser and it's nice to be reminded that the concept remains a reality in corners of the internet. Not everything has been stomped to death or privatised by the social media behemoths.

To go back even further, Hacker News also featured a post by Jason Dyer from the blog Renga in Blue about a text adventure dubbed Adventure 751 that was hosted on Compuserve in 1980 . The name, apparently, refers to 751 points -- the game's perfect score.

Time to GO SOUTH (or wherever the machine leads me) to other matters. I promised to go easy on hot takes on these notes, but it's difficult to avert one's eyes when stormtroopers are literally executing people in the streets. So I'll just point to a couple of poems on Bluesky and a single article and leave it at that. First, Encounter by Czeslaw Miosz shared by Cian McCarthy - a meditation on time and mortality -- how astonishing the passing of moments and people will always remain.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture

It's less wonder than anger that Robin Ince channels in his satirical poem, Media Notes For the Justification of Orphan Makers, shared by the author on Bluesky.

And we cannot dismiss
How the sapphic can put men with pistols
Into a panic.
She may not have committed the sin of being brown
But her profile page declared a pronoun!

In Defector. Albert Burneko is also angry. His article focuses in particular on the lukewarm condemnation by Amy Klobuchar of Renee Nicole Good's murder, but the same sentiments might be applied to the Democratic establishment writ large.

Would Renee Good's summary slaughter at the hands of the American gestapo have been tolerable with buy-in from the Minneapolis Police Department? How fucking hard is it to simply and absolutely oppose the murder of innocent people by federal agents? How hard is it to respond ... like an actual human being?

We are long past the time of civility. We are long past reaching out over aisles or bestowing the benefits of doubt. We are past helpfully reinterpreting the lies of those who would see us, or our friends, dead or impoverished. The fiction of bipartisanship is unsustainable.

And, in case anyone in the UK is feeling complacent right now, in the Guardian Arwa Mahdawi reminded us of the plight of the hunger strikers in prison here.

I’m back in the US now and I can’t quite fathom what Britain, under the leadership of a former human rights lawyer, has become. A place where you can get arrested simply for holding a sign supporting an organization whose main purpose is targeting weapons companies. A place where freedom of speech and the right to peacefully protest is under sustained attack. A place where the government has done nothing meaningful to respond to sustained warnings of complicity in genocide but works overtime to lock up people protesting that genocide.

OK. Two articles. Sorry, not sorry. But if you're not angry right now you're not paying attention.

Finally, it is ten years since David Bowie died and this has prompted a slew of radio retrospectives. I found myself returning to Dylan Howe's masterful jazz album SUBTERRANEAN - New Designs On Bowie's Berlin on repeat. It doesn't take a sad anniversary to prompt that, but it helps.

Image: Haberdoedas