ten years ago i let people fuck up my 8-bit art
cw: 2014, nostalgia, spreadsheets, mentions of tub girl
releasing an editable document on the web for anyone to edit in any way is terrifying but exciting. that's in part why i worked on glitch for so long - letting millions of developers run arbitrary code for free allows incredible viral moments to happen that often shine brighter than any of the bad stuff. this facilitation of web building always comes with its moments of noticing someone is doing something you didn't intend. you immediately think "oh, that's it, we're fucked", but more often than not the next moment you're tearing up because the web can be so beautiful! this is all to say i absolutely understand the rollercoaster of emotions nolen royalty went through when he thought one million checkboxes was being hacked. please read that post and then you can come back to read the rest of this one.
in ~2013 i put out a tool called pixelchat that was an anonymous chat client heavily inspired by pictochat where your messages were an html canvas - you can view the source on glitch but i doubt the twitter sign-on works. within 30 minutes of tweeting about it, someone embedded tub girl (don't google it) into the canvas and i had to shut the thing down. my surprise wasn't seeing tub girl, it was that it took a half hour for something like that to happen. real sickos on the web (SOTWâ„¢) don't worry about if, they wonder about when and are ready for the if. i updated the app to require twitter sign-on with an allowlist of users who can join so i can keep it running - adding guardrails helps mitigate abuse.
by the way, to the person who posted tub girl on pixelchat: i know who you are and whenever i see you post i think about how learning to set up twitter sso helped me get a job but don't think that absolves you of your sins. i would have learned it eventually if i needed to.
10 years ago, from today exactly, i figured it would be fun to put out a spreadsheet that anyone can edit and see what happens. my guardrails for preventing abuse was setting the tone for the project by turning the spreadsheet into a pixel portrait of my cat and giving some "rules" or guidelines to follow. i forget the rules (the doc appears to be deleted) but i'm pretty sure i just said to keep it chill and also don't change the cell size so to maintain the pixel art canvas.
i wish i did a better job at documenting the first hour or so of changes but it turned out i had somewhere in the city to be that night1 and so i set up a terminal script to take regular screenshots off my computer. i also had the sheet on my phone so i could monitor it during my travels and make the sheet private if things started to get harmful - fortunately i never had to shut things down.
click here to see the full (18mb!) gif of the many automated screenshots
try to guess what i forgot to do before i left the house! if you guessed "you forgot to set your computer to not go to screensaver" you'd be correct2. here are some random manual screenshots i took before i realized i had to go out and automated them, i just found them while i was gathering more screenshots. is everyone else's computer 50% screenshots or is that just me?
putting your immutable work out into the world wide web is very scary. even scarier is putting out mutable work. if nolen royalty had been too afraid of being hacked and having his crowdsourced performance piece ruined, we'd never have one million checkboxes and the heartwarming stories about how the community interacted with it. if that loser didn't embed tub girl in my pixelchat, there's a 5% chance i would never have learned how to set up a third party single sign on in an app, nor would i have been confident enough to let a bunch of strangers fuck up my 8-bit art while i went out for a night on the town.
happy birthday, fuckupmy8bitart. may everyone go out and let people help them make and/or fuck up something on the web!
xoxo jenn
1 i just looked it up on swarm and it was a velvet teen show at baby's all right after a brief stop at silent barn, rip.
2 also shouts out to the band big star and the og sonos app for their joint cameo appearance
