A remarkable book – and resource – from Chris Brejon. All on lighting for CG animation, but as usual with this sort of reference, so much to say about cinematic lighting fullstop.

A deeply personal obit that will likely be lost to the sands of Facebook, but hey.

Via Phil G, a nice modern boilerplate for HTML pages – notable because of the excellently narrated explanation around it. Always useful to have something like this to refer back to.

Marvellous writing on one of Infocom's most notably experimental works, and its relationships to the present.

This is great – "three-reads" combined with some great interaction design and animation critique; I'm a fan of Zach's work, but this is insightful and clearly presented. Also: not a video! A skimmable talk! In writing! Wonderful.

Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.

Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.

Impressive, fun, immediate.

A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.

Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.

Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.

Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.

Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.

Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.

Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.

"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.

Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.

Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.

This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.

He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.

Beautiful, beautiful character design in this ident for the Style Frames conference.

"The 12 basic principles of animation were developed by the 'old men' of Walt Disney Studios, amongst them Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, during the 1930s. Of course they weren't old men at the time, but young men who were at the forefront of exciting discoveries that were contributing to the development of a new art form. These principles came as a result of reflection about their practice and through Disney's desire to use animation to express character and personality.
This movie is my personal take about those principles, applied to simple shapes. Like a cube." Wonderful.

Great interview on the end titles for the Lego Movie, which, unlike the rest of the film, were actual stop motion. From designing in Lego Digital Design, through digital previz, and into manufacture, lots of details shared and cunning insight; motion controller stereoscopic stop motion isn't easy, you know. Very much symptomatic of all the detail throughout the film.

"Today I want to talk about these moments when the future falls in our laps, with no warning or consideration about whether we're ready to confront it." This is a great, great talk from Maciej, on the histories of technology, and how culture interferes with work, and how 20th century history complicated most things it touched. Also: the rant in the middle is good. I think this might be my favourite Maciej talk I've read or seen.

"I was hoping that Simon Starling [would engage with CGI as a medium creatively]. But he didn't – he used it _invisibly_. CGI is always used invisibly. You're not supposed to see the seams. It's supposed to appear like it's not CGI in order to fool the eye and boggle the mind. Sadly (for me and probably no-one else) CGI was again denied the opportunity to do anything more than _facilitate_." I enjoyed Starling's piece, but this is astute and fair criticism. (I'm rather taken with Alan Warburton following his Spherical Harmonics at the Photographer's Gallery. All of CGWTF is very good.)

You had me at "a film by Jim Le Fevre".

"We learned that being first is important, but should not be the only factor when determining the viability of a project. If you have an evolved approach to a preexisting concept, you are likely doing something original and the results have a good chance of being meaningful." So, in one sense, it's another physical mirror. But: I like this point, that sometimes, you have to do a thing for yourself to learn about it. And by learning about it, you might ultimately differentiate your own work. As long as you don't claim you were first, there is no shame in doing what other people do. How else do you learn things? Not by other people yelling "OLD!" at you, that's for sure.

"Gifsicle is a command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations." Handy.

"These three frameworks — objects as portals, objects as subjects, and objects as oracles — propose distinct (yet related) structures for thinking about how connected objects might begin to contain their own narratives, seek their own history, develop their own perspectives, and become storytellers in a multitude of ways." Nice article about the various perspectives on Connected Objects (which namechecks Hello Lamp Post).

"Gor is a simple http traffic replication tool written in Go. Its main goal is to replay traffic from production servers to staging and dev environments." Handy to know about.

"While collaborating with the geniuses at Bot & Dolly in beautiful San Francisco, Munkowitz was tasked to Design Direct a truly unique piece called BOX.. The piece was originally supposed to function as a Technology Demo, but Munkowitz and the team quickly realized it's visual potential and transformed it into a Design and Performance Piece… The resulting short film is a one-of-a-kind visual and technological achievement due to the very special combination of talent and gear behind the doors of the B&D facility…" Projection mapping and motion control all at once; very clever, sure. But it's the art direction of the whole performance (and the camera's dollybot is very much part of that) that really grabbed me – especially 'Escape'.

""Prisms" is fully algorithmic. There are no cuts, just one continuous generative animation. All decisions (camera work, movements, formations, etc…) are made by my system's interpretation of the audio track. My work was creating the system and then curating its output or, to put it another way, I just wrote a computer algorithm, and the computer did it all."