"Annoyed to have been following someone else's path, "you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform". Three years later, something similar happens. "This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others." What's the answer? "It's simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus."" Yeah, that. Been feeling that a lot, recently.

"Someone smarter than me once described game development as jumping out of an airplane with nothing but a needle and a silkworm." Brendon makes good games, and this is a good post. But I really liked this quotation.

"In class I do this drawing of this big mountain, that I call Hemingway Mountain. And talk about how, early in my writing life, I just wanted to be up there near the top. And then I realized: Shit, even if I made it to the top, I'd still be a Hemingway Imitator. So then you trudge back down—and look, there's Kerouac Mountain! Hooray. And then it's rinse, lather, and repeat—until the day comes when you've completely burned yourself out on that, and you see this little dung heap with your name on it, and go: Oh, all right, I'll take that—better to be minor and myself. So that is painful. Especially at first. But it's also spiritual, in a sense—it's honest, you know. It’s a good thing to say: Let's look at the world as it is, as opposed to the way I'd like it to be. Let's see how the world seems to me—as opposed to the way it seems to me, filtered through the voice of Hemingway (or Faulkner, or Toni Morrison, or Bukowski—whoever)." This whole interview is great, but as a creator, I liked thinking about this.

"What did The Hustle™ accomplish? I gained weight. I wasn’t spending enough time with my (now) wife. I felt like shit. I began to resent my work, and the work I was producing clearly wasn’t my best. I started cutting corners. I went from a mindset of shipping with quality and integrity to “when is this going to be over?”" I've almost never worked like this – but every time I have, it's always been as terrible as I've suggested it will be beforehand. Mainly on the software end of things, but not always. And the hustle is short-term thinking: the long-term damage is usually so much worse, including, but not limited to: technical debt, RSI, ill health, weight gains, emotional exhaustion, damage to relationships, friendships, and family. I am not only convinced that nothing is worth that; I know it.

Really excellent technical article on the development of Novation's Launchpad S. It's not that remarkable a product in many ways, but this is a super-detailed post about some of the thought and improvements that have gone into what looks, on the surface, like a most incremental upgrade – but is in fact surprisingly comprehensive and affects many things at low levels. Really clear, well explained – as is the rest of Focusrite's engineering blog.

"Mark V Shaney is a synthetic Usenet user whose postings in the net.singles newsgroups were generated by Markov chain techniques, based on text from other postings. The username is a play on the words "Markov chain". Many readers were fooled into thinking that the quirky, sometimes uncannily topical posts were written by a real person."

"MiniProfiler allows you to see the speed of a request conveniently on the page. It also shows the SQL queries performed and allows you to profile a specific block of code." Ooh, been looking for the latest version of something like this for a while.

Because AA uses Devise, this is pretty straightforward, but still: I found this guide hepful.

"But – and here’s where every single one of these cuts affects us all, even people who live in gated communities and have second homes in the country – I don’t personally want to live in a society where the worst-off are treated with corner-cutting contempt. This is the seventh richest nation in the world. In the world. And yet a report commissioned by the TUC predicted that by 2015, almost 7.1m of the nation’s 13m youngsters will be in “homes with incomes judged to be less than the minimum necessary for a decent standard of living”." The whole piece is very good indeed; Andrew Collins, excellent as ever.

"The UMC32+M is an OEM/DIY product that allows Electronic Musicians, Multimedia Artists and Experimenters the ability to create custom user interfaces to control any software application that supports the MIDI protocol." Cheaper than a Livid Brain, as well.