"Often, on a Friday or Saturday night in the cottage on the tiny Orkney island where I lived alone for two winters, I wanted to be on a crowded dance floor in small clothes with sweat running down my back. I felt like an old woman before my time, beside the fire with a blanket over my knees, and missed the throb of the city and of nightlife. Lately, I’ve learned the German word “Fernweh” (literally, “distance pain”) which describes the feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, like a reverse homesickness (“Heimweh”), a longing for a place that isn’t where you are. I was struck by the word because I know how it is to be uneasy and never quite at home." Amy Liptrot, in Berghain.

"My fascination with electronic music centred very much around my love affair with the Buchla electronic music system. Don Buchla didn't like the word ‘synthesizer’ because it had misleading connotations. Some people thought of the word ‘synthesizer’ as relating to ‘synthetic’, or that it was imitating existing sounds, whereas he wanted to be clear that this was a completely new domain—this was a new instrument. The instrument that I had did not have a keyboard: it was played by moving knobs and dials and placing patchcords and constructing an internal routing, so that you could design your instrument within the instrument. And sometimes I would spend months coming up with a living, breathing patch that generated the sonic environments and sounds that I wanted to hear. So it wasn’t keyboard. The keyboard was added as a…I think Bob Moog did that in order to lend understanding to the masses as to what this was, because in the early days people really could not understand where the sound was coming from or how it was generated. It was all so unfamiliar that putting the keyboard on it bridged a gap in understanding. But it also short-circuited the potential of those instruments because the keyboard interface came from a mechanical universe. It produced, mechanically, one event for one action. Whereas in electronic music we were used to touching a key, say on a flat plate, and maybe 50 things would happen." Great interview with Suzanne Ciani, including some great details about instrumtiness.

Good looking Unity audio library (as used in Mini Metro).

"If losing a normal game of monopoly is frustrating, losing to this strategy is excruciating, as a losing opponent essentially has no path to victory, even with lucky rolls. Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you're playing to win, and that it wasn't your idea to play Monopoly in the first place."

"…she asked me, cautiously, “Wouldn’t you say that anybody who thought as much about balance as I do in my work probably felt some threat to their balance?” After a long pause, she added, “Of course all adolescents are out of balance, and very aware of it. To become adult can certainly feel like walking a high wire, can’t it? If my foot slips, I’m gone. I’m dead.”" Wonderful profile and interview with/of UKLG.

What it says on the tin. Thoughtful and insightful.

A scan of a six-page conversation between De Palma and Coppola about "The Conversation" (which is, still, probably my favourite film).

Good overview of a straightforward approach to mastering.

"Which is why this scene wrecked me so hard. The Web that they are talking about on the show, the open Web, is ailing, dying. It was like listening to a eulogy at a funeral, this thing that I love, poured the best of my self into, gone forever. Of course that’s not strictly true, the Web is still a fabulous place where anyone can set up a site to do, say, or sell whatever they want, but instead of the promise of small pieces loosely joined, what we mostly got was large pieces tightly coupled. Today’s Web browsers and apps are Holland Tunnels that open up right into shopping malls instead of open city streets." It's hard not to feel like a bitter old person, but I often miss that world too. Still, I have my own place where I put nonsense, and that's a start, right.

Bloody marvellous: Aubrey dives deep on _precisely_ why strafejumping works, with references to the right bits of the Q3 sourcecode in github. I love this sort of videogame forensics combined with clear explanation.

Opensource alternative to Mou, which feels a little neglected – good to know there are alternatives (with richer features, too).

"The lesson games have for design is not really a lesson about games at all. It’s a lesson about play. Play isn’t leisure or distraction or the opposite of work. Nor is it doing whatever you want. Play is the work of working something, of figuring out what it does and determining how to operate it. Like a woodworker works wood. By accepting the constraints of an object like a guitar (or like Tetris), the player can proceed to determine what new acts are possible with that object. The pleasure of play—the thing we call fun—is actually just the discovery of that novel action." Not just this quotation, but all of this article, really. So good. Immaterials, again.