June 30th, 2026
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2026 mid-year link clearance

Raymond Chen

Oh boy, more random stuff.

  • The hardest working font in Manhattan: Marcin Wichary digs up the history of the font named Gorton. I grew up with this font, seeing it not only on punch card keyboards but also in a Leroy lettering kit that we used in sixth grade graphics class when we studied mechanical drawing.
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon’s Overengineered Puking System. Learn more than you ever needed to know about the algorithms in the game RollerCoaster Tycoon that determine when a park guest pukes. No really.
  • The Spaghetti Policy for All MLB Teams by the appropriately named Sickos Committee breaks down the outside food policies for all of teams in Major League Baseball to determine which ones would let you bring in a gallon of spaghetti. The first part is fairly straightforward, but it gets far more weird (and sicko) as they look at the stadiums where a gallon of spaghetti might not be permitted. (Background information: Sports fans in Philadelphia have a reputation for poor behavior. These are the people who booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs.)
  • We have reached the second generation now. “Microsoft invented “escrow builds” to launch functional apps – that’s internal ‘Microspeak’ jargon for quality control” is a rehash of my article on the history of the term “escrow”, but the article appears to just be a suspicious mishmash of fragments from the article. For example, in the sentence “He described it as unhelpful because the blog essentially described a metaphor using another metaphor” the antecedents of “it” and “the blog” are not present in the article, leading the reader to think that “it” is the explanation of what escrow means and that “the blog” is my blog. On top of that, the title of the article introduces the phrase “launch functional apps” (whatever that means), even though none of those three words appear anywhere in the original article, nor in the dodgy rehash. Undaunted, a different AI content farm picked up on that article and somehow expanded it into an even longer article that conveys even less information.

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Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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  • Jacob Manaker

    So when the AI content farms inevitably start spinning bullet point 4 into a new article, do we call that the 3rd generation (3 instances of AI), the 4th generation (2 AI + 1 Raymond + 1 AI) or the 1st generation (because each interposition of Raymond restarts the clock)?

  • Ray · Edited

    Oh nice, RollerCoaster Tycoon internals – I guess Marcel Vos documented it first! You’ll like lots of his videos if you’re into absolutely useless knowledge on absolutely entertaining game logic. (Also I protest! This blog software turns my dashes into em-dashes! I’m not a bot, I’m a human being!)

    • Louis WilsonMicrosoft employee

      As a typography nerd, I protest to your protest: that’s an en dash, not an em dash. This is an em dash: —. It’s much longer.

      Besides, humans (including this human) used en and em dashes way before bots ever did. I’m not about to let a bot tell me what punctuation I may or may not use.

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