Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, its short-lived 1990s experiment in turning Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations into comic strips – and, for many users, their first encounter with Comic Sans. Microsoft Comic Chat was released in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3. It was conceived by David "DJ" Kurlander of the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group as a new visual representation of conversation histories. Rather than displaying the scrolling sequence of text messages still familiar today, a chat was depicted across several cartoon panels, replete with characters, backgrounds, and speech bubbles. According to Microsoft, "the visual world of Comic Chat was the work of Jim Woodring, a highly regarded independent comic artist whose characters gave the software its distinctive look." This was long before generative AI, and the software generated its scenes using rules. "If someone wrote 'I like that,'" explained Microsoft, "the character might point to itself. If the text suggested anger, the character might frown or cross its arms." "Comic Chat was more than a clever skin for IRC. It was able to interpret conversational cues in the text and choose appropriate poses, facial expressions, gestures, and panel layouts. "That meant Comic Chat was not simply displaying messages but also making real-time editorial decisions about how a conversation should look and feel as a comic." It could be entertaining, even if the novelty wore off quickly for many users – something Microsoft tacitly acknowledged when it pulled the plug on the project in the early 2000s. That said, Comic Chat is a reminder of when the World Wide Web was a more optimistic place, full of experimentation. While the concept didn't really go anywhere (although its spirit lives on in emojis and gifs), it was innovative. Microsoft localized Comic Chat into 24 languages and bundled it with Windows 98. Comic Chat was also a natural home for Comic Sans, unlike an HR handout promoting the latest company event. In its post announcing the code's release under the MIT license, Microsoft stated: "Comic Chat was created during a period when software teams were willing to color outside the lines, literally and figuratively." ®

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2; Undercoders
Colourful, counter-cultural and captivating – this rail riding game set in a dystopian Japan is as weird as it is exhilarating

Every now and again a game appears with a premise so outrageous you stop in your tracks to take it all in. Denshattack!, a game about kickflipping trains across a dystopian future Japan, is the epitome of this feeling. Set in a post climate disaster world, people have retreated to corporate-owned domed cities to live out their days in air-conditioned, ignorant comfort. Save for a handful of outcasts, the rest of the country is a mess of broken infrastructure, where rival gangs battle it out on the ruins of Japan’s famously extensive rail network. Naive upstart Emi has one goal: become the best Denshattacker there is, one sick nosegrind at a time.

Taking the idea of an on-rails platforming game to its extreme conclusion, developers Undercoders have combined the best bits of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series – grinding, flipping and spinning through an entire dictionary of tricks – with the anti-establishment message behind Jet Set Radio. The rivals Emi encounters showcase the history of Japanese misfits, pitting you against ageing rockabillies and violent girl gangs without a shred of judgment.

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Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation.

The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once. These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search.