My online projects that need more hands
Over the last few decades I've started some projects online that didn't attract the contributions from others that would have led to their success. Today I'm describing a few of them that I still have hopes for. My goal is to spark a bit of interest in possibly reviving them, or perhaps just inspire someone to steal one of the ideas and run with it..
Modes of Discourse (https://web.archive.org/web/20241226163258/modesofdiscourse.com) was a wiki where I attempted to catalog all the mechanisms that people use to communicate with each other. The main pages would be things like “Tiktok”, “Facebook”, “ICQ”, “Email”, “Telephone”, “Smoke Signals”, etc. Those pages would each have a description of the thing in question, covering when and how people use(d) it, how it works, what technologies it is based on, etc. Those descriptions would wikilink to another layer of content describing various common aspects and features, with pages like “asynchronous”, “notifications”, “follow”, “internet”, “line of sight”, “plain text”, “algorithmic feed”, “markup”, “images”, “videos”, “instant messaging”, and almost any other such thing that multiple different modes have in common. I tried twice to start this wiki, each time putting a few dozen hours into creating content, but never reaching the critical mass necessary to attract outside attention that could have led to more contributors and incoming links. If I try this again, I'll probably hire a human to do the first few hundred hours of content creation then use AI to fill in descriptions and links once the structure and style of the wiki is well established. This might sound like just a subset of Wikipedia, and some of the pages and content might start out from there, but my intention would be to get into a lot more detail of the specific functionality of each app / site / platform, including how they differ and which features they share. The main pages would also describe how the thing had changed over time, such as a social network app adding or removing markup from posts, replacing a chronological feed with an algorithmic feed, launching a mobile app or eliminating mobile or non-mobile functionality, changes in control or ownership of a technology or company, etc.
VGM Extractor (https://github.com/sparr/vgm-extractor) is a program that extracts music files from locally installed video games. It's coded mostly in Python, with a bit of custom scripts in other languages for handling specific games, and yaml files describing the music file layout of each game. For games with officially published soundtracks the results are sometimes identical and other times wildly different. For other games this is the only way I've found to get the music into my music library without going hunting for it one game at a time. For some games the extraction process involves just copying mp3/ogg files from the game folder to the music library folder. For others, it relies on third party tools to extract from a wide and growing variety of media and archive formats (e.g. zips, Unity assets, Bethesda archives, XACT wave banks), and can even call out to other scripted tools like QuickBMS. What this project really needs is for people with games installed to find the audio files and contribute descriptions of the names and locations of the archives and files so that the tool knows where to find them for everyone else with the same game installed. I have it working with about 115 games so far, but it needs to work with 1000+ games before most gamers would be interested in using it. Code contributions would also be welcome, such as to support more archive types or the paths of more non-Steam installers, or to add a GUI or modernize the project structure and build process.
Cutting Edge Gaming (https://www.reddit.com/r/cuttingedgegaming/) is a subreddit based on https://xkcd.com/606/, organizing people to play old video games on the 5 / 10 / 20 year anniversaries of their release. There is some demand for something like this in the retro gaming community, but it would take a lot of effort and/or notoriety that I don't have in order to bring together enough players to make this work. One major benefit of doing this as a group is that many old multiplayer games have no players online today, or even no servers, so getting someone to set up a server in advance and then a bunch of people to play on the same day(s)/week(s) would work a lot better than an individual trying to do the same. I never had enough time to keep up with making weekly posts about which games we might play, including links to current distributors, patches, mods, etc. If I tried this again today, I'd probably rely on AI to write those posts, and I'd create multiple other online profiles (e.g. instagram, tiktok) and platforms (e.g. Discord) for getting the word out and bringing the players together.