Zoë Blade

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Musician, writer, programmer. Analysis and synthesis. ∞ Makes music for ContraPoints

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Zoë Blade@www· Jul 12

Going back to the studio's always a bit perilous...

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 10

On that bastion of prose fiction, the humble simile: notebook.zoeblade.com/Simile.html

A simile is a comparison of one thing to another. It's more explicit than a metaphor, often using the phrase "like a", or occasionally "as if". They tend to be employed in narrative fiction.

In addition to clarifying something using a point of comparison, the specific choice of comparison should match — indeed, it is an opportunity to further establish — the tone and mood of the story. It should be appropriate to both the setting and style, revealing what the narrator, often speaking as a point-of-view character, seemingly most easily calls to mind as an appropriate point of reference.

For example, Neuromancer is about high-tech low-lives. Its poetic narrator describes the dark sky by comparing it to a CRT TV set tuned to a dead channel, that's attempting to show a plain black image but still faintly glowing. At the time, this was a comparison befitting of a cutting-edge, stylised cyberpunk novel.

In steep contrast, Equal Rites is about witches and wizards in a fantasy setting. Naturally, the points of comparison are timeless affairs such as ravens. As with the rest of the Discworld series, it's rather whimsical, with a befitting narrator. Delightfully fanciful comparisons are therefore in order, such as comparing someone's dress sense to that of a very respectable raven.

Snow Crash, another cyberpunk staple, is outlandishly hyperbolic, bordering on outright parody, and so is its similes.

I recommend littering first drafts with, at most, placeholders such as "like a [simile]", so that you can maintain your momentum. When working on a later draft, you can take your time crafting the actual similes.

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 5

A few words on Batman of all things:

Batman is a fictional masked vigilante, and a whole franchise of comic books, films, and TV shows. Essentially, he's Superman's goth cousin. Literally, he's just some guy dressed up as a bat. Clearly, he has issues.

The first stories and their imagery were originally conceived by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's "Design for a Flying Machine", Sherlock Holmes, The Mark of Zorro, The Man Who Laughs, and The Phantom. Kane later gave Bill the finger, as it were, falsely claiming sole credit.

It's a timeless tale of a rich orphan who becomes a masked vigilante by night. This mythology is malleable enough to be periodically updated to better fit the current social mores, from the camp 1960s TV show to the gritty 1980s series The Dark Knight Returns.

Admittedly, it might say something worrying about human impulses and society that there are so many stories glorifying violent revenge. Still, a brooding loner is always relatable, just as a stylised old city at night is always atmospheric.

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 4

On the subject of migraines, a weird day in my life: notebook.zoeblade.com/2026-06-06.h...

09:43

Yesterday I left the house, a rare event for me. The break from my routine fucked me right up. I ended up eating lunch about three hours late, then dinner about four hours late. It was more of a snack, at that. I had a little alcohol, and only one coffee. I usually have about for coffees a day, and almost always no alcohol at all.

So it's perhaps not surprising that I woke up this morning with a headache. I had lots of water, suspecting dehydration, and some ibuprofen. Nina waited on me, I was so ill. I forced myself to drink two glasses of water and eat a banana, to keep the pills down. I assumed it was just dehydration, as close as I get to a hangover. Then I remembered the lack of coffee, and began to suspect caffeine withdrawal. This happened to me once before, after spending all day accidentally drinking decaff, and then throwing up before figuring out why I was suddenly ill.

She was kind enough to fetch me her caffeine pills, and after a few minutes, presumably from one pair of pills or the other, the pain started to subside, replaced with feeling sick, like I genuinely might throw up.

I made my way to the bathroom, and indeed threw up — out of my mouth and nose, no less. It burned my nostrils and tasted terrible, albeit banana flavoured. And then... I felt pretty much fine. Almost back to normal. Not quite OK, but essentially there. Certainly able to look after myself again. Just like that.

Nina suspects it might have been a migraine. I'll take things slowly for now, even though I feel much better. I have no real theories on the matter.

10:19

According to Wikipedia, skipped meals can indeed cause a migraine. Humans are far more delicate than I realised! I've made myself half of my usual breakfast, just a single slice of jam on toast, and my usual frothy coffee. Let's get back into my safe routine!

I guess I have to wonder, not why autistic people have routines, but why allistic people don't, if health is this precarious..?

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 3

A short article on scintillating scotoma, the bright spiral that proceeds getting a migraine and becoming temporarily blind for a few hours.

A scintillating scotoma is a swirling pattern of bright colours around the periphery of your vision, that spiral inwards until you become temporarily blind. It's an early part of a migraine, and can serve as a warning sign that one's coming on, although not all migraines have this particular component.

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 2

I hear people are trying to define what a woman is. Here's my submission.

"Define 'woman'" is a rhetorical question routinely asked by transphobes, as an attempted gotcha against trans women. (They never seem to demand anyone "define 'man'".) As an autist, I've never been good at spotting rhetorical questions, and have generally been much better at reading far too much theory and pondering things far too deeply. So here's my answer.

As far as I can tell, a woman is an adult human whose gender orientation is female. That is to say, an adult human whose brain needs her body to be female in order to be happy and comfortable. Usually the gender orientation aspect goes unnoticed, in favour of the simplistic assumption that a woman is an adult human whose body is already female. This is because most people, including most women, are both cis and endosex.

However, occasionally someone's sex can be quite nebulous, and so any attempt to definitevely categorise it is doomed to failure. Specifically, your chromosomal, genital, gonadal, neurological, hormonal, and legal sex may not necessarily all align, as is the case with intersex and trans people.

Personally, I believe in consent and bodily autonomy. I certainly wouldn't want to deny anyone their womanhood, manhood, or nonbinaryhood. You know who you are better than a complete stranger does — doubly so a bigot — even if you don't yet have the terminology for it.

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 1

Reading old issues of Zzap!64 magazine. Have people *ever* been happy with the casting of Batman?

...Killing Joke. His choice of Michael "Beetlejuice" Keaton, however, launched a fierce storm of protest from Batfans. Their tall, square-jawed, heavily muscled hero was to be portrayed by "a wimp with no chin", mainly known for his light comedy roles! News of a petition to "Stop the Batman Movie" even made the front page of The Wall Street Journal (a US newspaper even more staid than The Financial Times).

The casting of Jack "The Lad" Nicholson as the Joker did little to calm Batfans, nor did the musical contributions of rock star Prince. But maybe all publicity really is good publicity...

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 1

From the archives: @ninarichards.co.uk upgrades my sampler

Zoë Blade@www· Jul 1

I wrote a straightforward, uncontroversial article explaining what your innate sense of your own gender is:

Your gender orientation (otherwise known as your gender identity, or simply gender) is the sex your brain needs your body to be. It can be female, male, or nonbinary.

This is the one type of gender that's innate, rather than a social construct.

It's been proven to correlate with neurological sex. It presumably also correlates with the part of the brain that houses the body map. If it's ever revealed that there's a type of neurological sex that can be determined individually and not just in aggregate, then it will presumably correlate with that too.

Gender orientation was inadvertently proven to be innate by John Money's attempts to prove the opposite. He convinced surgeons to perform an unnecessary vaginoplasty and orchidectomy on the cis, endosex infant David Reimer, and later made him take oestrogen. He similarly convinced surgeons to perform equally unnecessary surgery on countless intersex infants, gave them hormones without their consent, and lied to them about it. Meanwhile, countless transsexual people were just as vehemently denied the hormones and surgery they needed to bring their bodies inline with who they were. In spite of all the gaslighting to the contrary, and all of society's attempts to suppress them, all of these people still knew who they were.

In short, it's been categorically proven that you can't force someone to be a sex that's incongruous with their gender orientation, nor to pretend they have a different gender orientation. That merely gives them gender dysphoria. Rather, you need to let them tell you which gender orientation they are, and help them bring their body inline with it if it isn't already.

In a just society, respecting people's bodily autonomy should go without saying, but as the enduring popularity of John Money's long-since debunked theory shows, our society is still all too often authoritarian.

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 30

From the archives: "Rusted"

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 29

Screen grab of Always Sunny, in which some characters attend an orgy that appears to be of ill repute

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 24

And now an example of sophisticated British humour:

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 15

Not forgetting the C64's rare 3½″ floppy disk drive, the 1581: notebook.zoeblade.com/1581.html

The 1581 was a 3½″ floppy disk drive made by Commodore. It's technically compatible with the VIC 20, C64, Plus/4, C16, and C128, although its beige colour scheme suggests it was designed with just the C128 and C64C in mind.

It can format each disk to a whopping 3,160 blocks (790 KB). In 1541 terms, that's equivalent to over four 5¼″ disk sides, without even having to turn over the disk.

Being a 16-bit generation drive for 8-bit generation home computers, it would have been quite opulent. I've never heard of anyone actually having one (or even having heard of one) back in the twentieth century, although I've since seen YouTube videos by collectors.

Naturally, I also haven't heard of any C64 software actually being sold on a 3½″ disk. That would scarcely have been a problem for someone who had amassed a small collection of single loader budget tapes, and wanted to format shift them onto disk with the aid of an Action Replay cartridge, for quicker loading... The problem would be trying to find, much less afford, a 1581 drive in the first place.

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 12

On the C64's tape and disk drives: * notebook.zoeblade.com/1530.html * notebook.zoeblade.com/1541.html

The 1530 was a cassette tape drive made by Commodore. It's compatible with the PET, VIC 20, and C64, although its cream colour scheme suggests it was designed with the VIC 20 in mind.

The C64 was one of the most popular home computers in the UK, and was usually bundled with the 1530. As a 1541 disk drive cost about as much as the computer itself, most Brits were content to load their software (chiefly games) from tape.

The 1530 drive was reliable but notoriously slow. This wasn't a massive problem, as computer game publishers used increasingly elaborate loaders to bypass the slow default loading routine in favour of faster custom ones.

Compared to Spectrum users having to bring their own tape deck, the C64 with its 1530 drive offered an embarrassment of riches. For one thing, the C64 didn't force you to listen to the digital screaming of raw data while it loaded. Combined with its SID chip, this eventually allowed publishers such as Ocean to get the machine to play a tune for you while you waited. Mastertronic even let you play a simple Space Invaders clone while the main game loaded.

Just to really rub it in, when finding a file to load and displaying its name onscreen, the computer could even automatically pause and resume the motor's movement. Luxury!

The 1541 was a 5¼″ floppy disk drive made by Commodore. It's compatible with the VIC 20 and C64, although its brown colour scheme suggests it was designed with the latter in mind.

It can format a disk side to 664 blocks (166 KB). Throwing caution to the wind, with the careful use of scissors, you can notch out a write-enabling hole on the second side. You can then write to it by turning the disk over, just as with a cassette tape.

Rather impressively for such a downmarket system, the 1541 drive contains its own microprocessor, ROM, and RAM, making it effectively another microcomputer in its own right. This makes it less like a passive limb that the computer controls, and more like a co-worker it talks to. The upshot of this is that the host computer is free to focus its resources, both memory and processing power, on other tasks.[1][2]

Alas, it had a hefty price tag, usually costing about as much as the computer itself. In the UK, it was a rare C64 owner indeed who had a floppy disk drive. Most people simply had the 1530 tape drive it came with.

On a personal note, in the 1990s I managed to get one of these secondhand. In spite of its notoriety, it served me flawlessly, although that might well have been an example of survivorship bias.

Commodore later released the 1541-II. Besides being C64C beige, it also moved the heat-producing electronics to a separate block closer to the mains socket. This made it more compact, and apparently more stable to boot. It looks like a slightly smaller 1571 drive.

Datel Electronics of Action Replay fame could often be found advertising it in Zzap!64, complete with a disk version of the Night Moves / Mind Benders bundle. This would have surely made multiloaders Nightbreed and Sly Spy: Secret Agent much more playable.

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 7

Work in progress for @francescaiannucci.bsky.social Sometimes it's quicker to just manually ride the portamento... (Sorry for the distortion! I advise turning the volume right down.)

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 6

They don't review computer peripherals like this anymore! (I'm censoring the slur, but just look at the rest of it.)

"Gosh, mum, Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and what I'd like for Jesus' birthday is a 1541 disk drive..."

[Please forgive me for skipping a bit, it's long.]

"...and with daddy getting sacked, there's no way we can afford Commodore's £199.99 price tag!"

"Can I have a flick knife and a nunchucka then, mother dearest?"

"Certainly."

Twenty years later, Markie's doing time for carving a [slur] up after a bar brawl. He was lucky, he'd been running the boards shortly after flunking computer science at high school. He was tough and mean, it just took the city twenty years to prove it was tougher and meaner.

A sad but familiar scenario, I'm sure you'd agree, but until now unavoidable.

(The article then finally gets on with actually reviewing the disk drive. For context, the average age of this magazine's audience was 15-16, because no-one older was hip enough to use computers except for a handful of women in their thirties, according to their reader survey.)

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 4

Admittedly, Spore was quite highly rated by the Zzap!64 reviewers, but still, I don't think I really heard many people talk about it. Not that I knew many people. Review at archive.org/details/ZZap...

A glowing review of Spore, which cost a mere £1.99 on tape, and got 97% and Zzap's prestigious silver medal award.

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 4

Spore for the C64 is still an underrated classic puzzly shoot-'em-up!

The VICE C64 emulator shows the first level of Spore, which is very pretty and colourful for a shoot-'em-up, full of stylised animating graphics that a still screenshot really doesn't do justice to. There are lots of vaguely butterfly-looking things you mustn't let touch you, held back by lasers.

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 4

Some thoughts on Virtual Reality, as someone who briefly tried it in two different decades: notebook.zoeblade.com/Virtual_real...

Virtual reality is essentially a technological method of tricking yourself, on some level, into thinking you're inside an imaginary place, rather than that place being inside a screen that in turn exists within the real world.

It involves rendering a 3D environment in realtime, that continually responds to your head movements, compensating for your ever-shifting field of view. This becomes an immersive experience by engulfing several of your senses, chiefly your vision and hearing. With current technology, this is achieved by simply strapping two screens and speakers to your face.

It was briefly popular in the 1990s when short-lived company Virtuality made a virtual reality headset and corresponding games based around a souped-up Amiga, played in arcades where participants were carefully supervised by professionals. I'm just about old enough that I managed to play on some at the London Trocadero when I was a child. Somehow, my neck survived.

Eh, close enough
Eh, close enough
It then made a brief comeback several decades later, this time for home use. By this point, the technology had significantly improved. The headsets were smaller and lighter, and the resolution and framerate higher, providing a better sense of immersion.

Virtual reality is much like 3D films (which it can also display, in a virtual cinema), in that it seemingly has potential as a very intuitive and engrossing medium, but hasn't yet managed to gain much traction. It probably doesn't help that the headsets are still quite cumbersome, nor that you have to set aside your dignity while wearing one.

Zoë Blade@www· Jun 2

Still thinking about this writing advice

Reddit user Longlivebiggiepac said 23 days ago:

I like this. Might sound crazy but I retype all my drafts all over from page 1 in a new file with the added changes.

I could be wrong but I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that a lot of early writers don’t excel in their writing because they aren’t rewriting enough, they are just editing a few scenes here and there.

It said when you start over from page 1 and retype the entire thing again you start noticing more and more things that don’t work or need to be fixed.

They compared it to how writers worked pre-computer days. When they were using typewriters there wasn’t a master file to edit they would have to retype the entire thing over for each draft.

Zoë Blade@www· May 31

Inevitable article on the Data General Dasher, the blue video terminal that heavily inspired the Severance prop: notebook.zoeblade.com/Dasher.html

Zoë Blade@www· May 30

Zoë Blade@www· May 29

Yet again forcing myself to make some music, and rediscovering that I actually enjoy it.

Zoë Blade@www· May 29

On hyperfixations: notebook.zoeblade.com/Hyperfixatio...

I dropped turtles when I fell in love with ice age fossils. Collected the shit out of them.

— (Fictionalised) John Laroche, Adaptation, 2002

A hyperfixation is an ADHD and especially AuDHD trait that essentially combines autistic special interests with the ADHD crave for novelty.

Speaking from personal experience, it seems that every few months my unconscious finds a new seemingly random thing to obsessively research, catalogue, write about, and collect, before moving on to the next one a few months later, each hyperfixation leaving as suddenly as it arrived.

You don't get to choose what your next hyperfixation will be about, nor when it will start or end. You may even find some of them downright embarrassing.

Each one seems to involve having a whole new field of things to learn about without much effort. This presumably gets the brain excited about having seemingly achieved something, even when your life is otherwise in even more disarray than usual, due to the accidental neglect.

This can lead to a lot of collections lying around, which is unfortunate. I've occasionally tried getting rid of collections relating to old hyperfixations, but the risk there is that examining them might reignite the hyperfixation, causing that particular collection to actually increase for a few months, before going back to gathering dust.

My hyperfixations have included Shavian, mechanical keyboards, and chess. The chess hyperfixation was accidentally started by playing a single game with my partner on a whim once.

In short, hyperfixations are a string of obsessions that you have pretty much no control over.

Zoë Blade@www· May 28

Treated myself to some new oldschool keycaps 😊

DSA Dolch style doubleshot keycaps from Signature Plastics. Sort of olive-grey alphanumerics and punctuation, black keys flanking those, and bright red cursor movement, all with large, white legends. The keys are just the right combination of squareish and rounded, gently cradling the fingertips. It looks like a keyboard from the late twentieth century, my favourite era for computer tech.

Zoë Blade@www· May 27

...An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce that phase-shift.

Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we wanted by choosing the desired resistor value.

I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color...

-- Robert 'Bob' Yannes

Zoë Blade@www· May 27

I wrote a short article about the garish colour palette used by teletext, the ZX Spectrum, Windows 3.1, the World Wide Web, the Linux command line, etc. notebook.zoeblade.com/Boolean_colo...

For want of a better phrase, the Boolean colour palette is a garish colour palette that's technically simple to implement on colour CRTs such as TV sets.

Colour CRTs work by combining the additive primary colours red, green, and blue in varying intensities to make all the other colours.

The Boolean colour palette simply uses Boolean logic to toggle all three of these primary colours between full tilt and completely off. Any one in isolation gives you that colour; any two in combination give you one of the secondary colours cyan, magenta, and yellow; all three give you white; and none at all give you black. So using three bits gives you eight colours to work with.

An optional fourth Boolean value for brightness doubles the palette, for sixteen colours represented by four bits — a nibble.

This palette was very common circa the 1980s, used by old standards such as the ANSI escape codes for video terminals, teletext for televisions, and videotex for phones, as well as by new home computers such as the BBC Micro and the beloved ZX Spectrum.

The C64 was notable for not conforming to this palette. Its engineers devised a way to pick any arbitrary sixteen colours, and so were able to choose a much more aesthetically appealing palette.

Even into the 1990s, a slight variation of the 4-bit Boolean colour palette made an appearance in the IBM PC's CGA, EGA, and VGA graphics cards. This led to its use in Windows 3.1, and even the World Wide Web's sixteen named colours.

It's surely the most common of the 3-bit and 4-bit colour palettes.

When designing a user interface or video game using the Boolean colour palette, you can try further limiting the colours to complementary (opposite), triadic (a third of the colour wheel away), or analogous (neighbouring) colours... but with such a garish starting point, it will barely help.

Zoë Blade@www· May 24

On desktop publishing: notebook.zoeblade.com/Desktop_publ...