Broken down, chapter-ified version of the Mother of All Demos (made by Bret Victor and Christina Englebart). And now easily pointed at.

I've fallen behind a bit, but Junto has been great for my musical output and also my approach to composition/recording/production. Ethan's survey captures some of the why – including the other great brains you get to run into doing it.

This is a nice write-up, and also a good reminder of why SO is popular and useful. And yet: I remember doing this job pre-SO. It was largely fine.

"You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel explained, the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be a bat. But the imagining? The attempt? That is a good and important thing. It forces you to think about what you don’t know about the creature: what it eats, where it lives, how it communicates with others. The effort generates questions not just about how being a bat is different but about how different the world might be for a bat." Animals as the emphatically non-human; as with all Macdonald's writing, great stuff.

This is really good. I had some beginning-threads of thought at the time of the Bogost article that I just couldn't frame, and in the meantime, CJP has run with similar threads, a good dose of history, and come to some sharp conclusions, and basically reminded me what I actually think. So I'm just going to point at this to say "yes, I think this, and this is better expressed than I could ever have put it". Strong stuff.

Excellent stuff – as always – from Matt B; I'm somewhat envious of his focus and the quality of his output. Nodded along heartily throughout.