"Making entertainment media is a bit like telling a joke; you really can’t tell whether it’s going be funny until you’ve told it." A really good synthesis of many years of work and process from Jack and Timo. Reading this I remember how I'm somewhat shaped by this thinking.

"I mention Knuth because, of all the Old Masters of computer science, he is the one most interested in the relationship between computer programs and texts. Could we even suggest that a program is a text? It is, after all, a written expression of creativity. Certainly, when running, a computer game can be an artistic experience in the same way that a film, or a play can. But my concern here is not whether the program is art when it runs. I’m talking about whether its source code is a text. We could go down a bit of a rabbit-hole here about playful literary theories. Umberto Eco once reviewed a new Italian banknote as a work of art, describing it as a numbered, limited edition of engravings. But let’s concede that a functional document like a shopping list or a spreadsheet of student names is not a literary text. On the other hand, a recipe by a literary cook like Elizabeth David might be art, even though it also has function. Perhaps the relevant question is: can we experience a program as a text? Can we, in the fullest sense of the word, read it?

A cynical answer might be that if program source codes are texts, why can’t you buy them in a bookshop?" Graham Nelson on a potted history of Inform, and then its future. The second half may be less interesting to you, but the first half is a fantastic piece of writing on literate programming, source-code-as-art, and the nature of languages. I loved this.

Stonemaier Games made a very long list of all their advice on running Kickstarters. (Not running a Kickstarter any time soon, but it's still… deep.)

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.

A good list of design notes from Raph and a few things to get around to playing.

This genuinely 100% works. Gosh. That's going to make life easier.

Finally found the original source for the 'black triangles' anecdote. On: pipelines, and the bursty nature of software engineering progress.

A superb interactive explainer. I've long believed the best way to understand this stuff – how sound works – is by seeing and hearing it simultaneously. This page does just that. Brilliant.

Bandcamp is one of my favourite internet things; it's where the majority of music I purchase comes from, and discovery via the streaming services I pay for regularly leads to purchases from Bandcamp. And I'm now doubled-down on it, as an artist who sells through them. Their brief year-in-review piece is always worth a read.

"All my work is tracked through a Git repository — a way to track code changes over time, complete with comments on why something has changed or what that commit was about. In conduction with that I take timestamped screenshots. These two things combined — words and image — have the side-effect of creating a document of the making process. So with that in mind I have begun to take those words and images and compile them chronologically into small books, both for myself and the client, as an historical record of how something went from A to B." Very good. I really like (in general) the idea of Project Books.