That's Classified – EyeSpark Weekly (July 17, 2026)

This has been a pretty good week! Not that eventful, but fortunately that means I had a lot of time to engage with things I enjoy! No need for further ado this time.

Last week I discovered Kate Fox, The Macintosh Librarian, and I immediately loved her videos. This week she actually uploaded a new one, about the history of AOL Instant Messenger, which was very good! Fun fact, my family's WhatsApp chat is actually named AOL, and my mom confirmed that it was because of America Online (Abate Online, I guess).

Yuval, who I've followed for years and I'm very glad is still doing longer-form stuff sometimes, made a video calculating the amount of possible boards in Settlers of Catan! As he said in the video itself, it's quite surprising that nobody has found the real answer before, and it's definitely something I've wondered myself, so I'm glad he figured it out!

I only discovered this week that two YouTubers I really like, ashens and Barry Lewis, have been collaborating a lot recently. I watched both of their channels a lot a while ago, but I am now watching their stuff again after finding their recent collaboration of them comparing the military rations of the United Kingdom and United States. I don't know why this stuff interests me so much, but it does!

For some quick usuals, I really enjoyed Yahtzee's Semi Ramblomatic on game cameras (shoutout to Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I really like the OG Resident Evil-style fixed camera in the game, it fits really well), LRR's Camel Up Super Cup livestream, and Scott The Woz and his friends ranking random animals. Also I'll write the review of it next week, but I absolutely adored the most recent Game Changer episode; I would've written about it now, but that's not how the blog works (as usual I'm gonna wait for the behind the scenes to drop).

Not a lot of art to share this time, but I do want to share these cool drawings by rappenem, mixing pixel art with a more standard style in a way I really like!

Also this doesn't exactly fit into any category here, but I've had this saved for over a month and I keep forgetting to share it. I found this very cool archive of Valve's websites from the Web Design Museum! You know I'm a Valve nerd, and you also know I love my graphic design, so I find this extremely interesting!

For video games, I've kept playing Geometry Dash, and I did make a video and post about my old levels, and I've kept steadily making progress in Dungeons of Hinterberg, RYB, and Bit City. I might write about the latter again soon, but I don't have much else to add… except for one very big thing for me.

I recently decided to try and join LambdaGeneration's Gamenights. I first tried this a couple of weeks ago, though I didn't end up staying that long, but this week we played Team Fortress 2 Classified, which I have never played online (same with the original TF2), but I decided to try it and I really enjoyed it!

I stayed through pretty much the entire event, and I played a lot more classes than I thought. There were a lot of modes, and I mostly played as Scout when I was in offense, Demo when I was in defense, and Medic and Soldier when I needed to. I am often very scared to play games online, especially when they're even just a bit competitive, but fortunately the LambdaGen community is quite positive, so I had a lot of fun! This has actually made me feel a lot better about playing TF2, which is nice!

And that's it! Definitely more of a recreative week than a creative one, but that's okay, I had a lot of fun! And it wasn't fully devoid of projects for me, as I did make that GD video, recreated an old meme, and kept writing of course. This was a very good week for me, and I hope it was for you too!