💽The Oldest Torrent, Dynamic Podcasts, and Browser MMO's

do you leech or seed

Oct 09, 2023

Hey friends!

How are you doing this week?

We finally picked the watermelon in the backyard - and to our dismay - the end was rotten! We didn’t eat it - but check it out.

We’ve got two more growing in the backyard - but with cold weather finally happening, I’m not sure if they’ll make it.

It’s been another crazy week in tech - the AI hardware arms race has heated up.

Rewind AI and Tab are off to the races.

and Meta’s shipping AI features like a madman.

It’s wild!

Have any of you taken up my horror movie watching schedule?

I watched the Chernobyl Diaries and Savageland last week.

Of the two - Savageland was the winner. It’s a “mockumentary” about a zombie attack on a border town - and the only glimpses we see of the attack are pictures from a photographer.

It’s pretty dark, creepy - great find this October.

Let’s dive in . . .

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💽The Oldest Torrent

They may live deeper in the shadows than a decade ago - but torrents are alive and surviving these days.

Disclaimer: All information in this section is purely informational. I am not condoning torrenting or theft of copyrighted materials, but merely writing about it as a topic of interest.

The Pirate Bay’s website is still up and kicking - and the day it goes down (forever) will be an indication to me that things are not good in torrent land.

If you’ve never torrented before - here’s a quick explanation.

People host files on their computers and when you go to download a torrent, you download the file from their computer. They “seed the file” and - usually - you also “seed” as soon as you begin downloading. If you turn off the “seeding” you become a “leech”

BitTorrent is a pretty popular client - and they even tried to go “legit” back in 2015 by trying to create a tv show. (Didn’t happen).

It’s actually still a pretty incredible technology - and If legal streaming companies ever go bankrupt or charge more than people are willing to pay - you’d better believe it will make a fast comeback.

Which honestly - might be this decade. All the major streaming services - with ads - will set you back at least $100 a month.

So for example - sharing this for illustration purposes - you can see how many people seed and leech “Cyberpunk 2077”

Quite often - there’s more leechers than seeders because of the legal issues that surround the sharing of copyrighted materials.

I read recently in TorrentFreak about the “world’s oldest active torrent” turning 20 years old.

The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film “The Fanimatrix”. The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement.The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days. While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major hurdle . . . Luckily, however, the group’s IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives . . . After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. (source)

The Torrent for the fan film is still running today!

The website may have broken images - but the torrent is still up.

The crew behind the Fanimatrix plans to do some really cool stuff for the 25th anniversary - including merch.

Director and writer Rajneel Singh, who is still active in the film industry, would like to do something special for the 25th anniversary. Frost says that there is a plan to get the cast together to shoot and release a new clip, perhaps coupled with some fresh “Fanimatrix” merchandise . . . “I never expected to become the world’s oldest torrent but now it’s definitely become a thing I’d love to keep carrying on. So I’ll be keeping this active as long as I physically can,” Frost tells us. (source)

Go check out the Fanimatrix at the link!

Fanimatrix

🎙️Dynamic Podcasts

Over the past few years since Clubhouse - there’s been several attempts to fill the “social audio” space.

and honestly, none have succeeded - Twitter Spaces remains the most popular implementation of live “audio spaces.”

Wide adoption is just so difficult.

A new app called “Roads Audio” hopes to enter the space.

I downloaded it on my Pixel 7 to check it out (available for iPhone too).

It’s a fascinating UI/UX experience I haven’t seen before.

You can create an episode (random musings, podcast) and people can leave audio comments that show up as little “roads” on the audio recording.

It’s a horizontal audio reimagining of Soundcloud’s feature where you can comment on tracks.

Here’s a demo of the app

Recording + comment adding is a very seamless experience - but I’m not sure how “Roads” will grow as a social app.

The usual “get a million users” is very hard - and the “get your friend group together for recording audio” is also difficult.

Things are pretty private by default - I can’t seem to find channels - or connect other social services to see who else has the app.

I wish Roads Audio the best!

Go check it out at the link - If you download it - let me know.

We can try and test it as a group!

Roads Audio

🎮Browser MMO’s

Browser games are fun.

You don’t have to download them - or buy a console.

You just play, or sign up and play.

Easy, Peasy.

I saw this tweet about a developer making a web browser game (looks like a really fun game) and got inspired to do a bit of writing.

You can sign up for hordes.io at the link - I look forward to playing it in my browser! The graphics are fun and low-poly.

I did a bit of meandering on the tutorial - and it loads pretty fast! DEFINITELY easier if you have a mouse.

What else is there to play?

Unfortunately, we live in an era where “browser mmo’s” are more of an old school relic, rather than something popular or cool.

As one Reddit user put it

Yeah. Adobe Flash dying the other year didn’t help either.

Runescape is always a good choice - it’s been around for ages.

There’s a subreddit called R/PBBG (“persistent browser based games”) which has some more to explore too!

You could always play Counter-Strike 1.6 in your browser.

There’s definitely a lot of hunting and exploration involved in finding a good game to play - browser mmo’s are definitely in the realm of “most of these are played by kids around the world secretly at school.”

Maybe that’s how it will continue to be - browser MMO’s will continue to be ancient relics kept alive by schoolkids until . . .

Xbox or Playstation release cloud-based games for free on the internet.

Who knows?