LinkNYC: I Still Got Game On These Stupid Things

My Summer of Softee may have ended but that doesn’t mean I gave up messing with the Smart City. I still can get to portions of the open Internet through the LinkNYC kiosks. I might do so at such times as yesterday, while waiting for a bus. If I was even ½ the asshole the folks at LinkNYC probably think I am I could do a lot of anarchist stuff with this knowledge. Or I could take the low road and set up screens all over town to stream porn videos. Not my style.

Yesterday I got to a DOOM emulator. The poor little kiosk tablet could barely play back the opening animation sequence. You cannot actually play the game on the kiosk tablet. The emulator still expects a mouse and keyboard, and neither the on-screen keyboard nor the tactile number keypad are any use. But you probably would not want to play DOOM on this curbside device anyway, since the tablet can only barely handle it.

I posted this to Twitter yesterday. Somehow the video got compressed enough to make it grainier than I would have liked. So here is a slightly clearer version. I chopped out about a minute of this. The DOOM splash screen stayed in place for about 45 seconds as the tablet huffed and puffed getting the game to start. The kiosk also played back no sound from the game.

I changed the Payphone Project’s Twitter handle to projectpayphone. Someone else got @payphoneproject years before I begrudgingly entered social media. I could just ask that person to trade, since they have not posted in years. But it doesn’t matter that much to me.

My Twitter name used to be “payphonenews”, which echoes back to when you could actually expect news from the world of payphones. But as Horace Greeley would have said there is nary a new in the payphone world. What does go on in the payphone realm today would interest very few outside what’s left of the business. I changed it because I don’t post what would be called news any more, and changing Twitter handles is painless, save for having to change any of my links to it.

In other news I moved my formerly semi-private blog to this site. For most of my 24 years building websites I kept my personal projects in silos, save for links from one project to my others. Moving my personal sorabji.com blog to the payphone site seemed like a big deal at first. But really, my life is a payphone project. But for the last several years I made the sorabji.com blog stuff invisible to the commercial search engines. I found that for the most part the kind of traffic coming to that type of content from search engines has no particular value to me.

I also blocked the searchies because I wanted to keep my accounts of the LinkNYC/Softee stuff off the radar.Between that and the Payphone Radio, where I further described the shenanigan, I was hiding in plain sight.