In the mid-1990s, Nintendo released Satellaview, a satellite modem for Nintendo's Super Famicom (SNES) only available in Japan. Just for kicks, Bertrand Fan hacked an SNES and Satellaview to run Slack. Bertrand has an intimate knowledge of Slack because he's one of the engineers building that platform. From Bert:
If you can beam satellite signals to a SNES, you can probably run Slack on it...
Most SNES games are closed systems. When you play a game like Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus, an educational game about dinosaurs with asthma that teaches you how to use an inhaler, the content is fixed on the cartridge.
But the game that comes with the Satellaview, BS-X: The Story of The Town Whose Name Was Stolen (BS-X それは名前を盗まれた街の物語), is different. It looks like a lot of Japanese RPGs but has one key difference: it can receive content beamed from the sky and that content gets integrated into the game....
Using a tool called SatellaWave, you can generate your own Satellaview Broadcast binary files.
Slack on a SNES (Bert.org)
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Lanetix is your basic shitty tech company, where your two weeks of annual paid leave is subject to often-withheld managerial approval, where bosses threaten engineers with getting canned if they participate in private Slack channels where they discuss working conditions, and where high-performing software engineers who object to bad management are summarily fired.
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In 1991, MTV, back when it was edgy and relevant, commissioned Rev. Ivan Stang of The Church of the SubGenius -- the religion, disguised as a joke (or is it a joke disguised as a religion?) -- to make a television spot as part of the network's fantastic Art Break series of short films.
"Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO did the music and the miniatures and masks were created by the late St. Joe Riley," Stang writes.
Above is that video. Below is a documentary that Stang edited into a souvenir for the cast and crew. Praise Bob! (Thanks, UPSO!)
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Legendary underground artist Paul Mavrides, part of the ZAP Comix axis, a collaborator with Gilbert Shelton on The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and a founder of the Church of the SubGenius (praise Bob!), is holding his first gallery show in a decade. Mavrides' new painting exhibit, titled "Art Work Makes You Free," opens this Saturday (1/4) at San Francisco's Steven Wolf Fine Arts gallery. The new series features oil paintings scavenged from thrift stores and dumpsters that Mavrides has emblazoned with short, provocative, acerbic, cutting, biting, scathing, caustic, bitter, acrimonious, abrasive, harsh, terse, and critical phrases. Paul Mavrides: "Art Work Makes You Free" Read the rest
