"It now makes absolute sense that this comes from a nation a non-trivial amount of which is below sea level and who’s storied history is in fact chock full of water engineering feats. It stands now to reason that this could only come from the Dutch. Or some kid from Nebraska who just loved water parks as a kid, ended up baked out of his mind on the streets of Amsterdam for nine years until he discovered his long lost passion and talent for making side scroller games. Chances are it was both." Jim is writing about games and it's a delight.

Good notes on running a course online that's accessibile to as many as possible, by Alex McLean. (Useful notes for a future idea, anyhow.)

Loving Mohit Bhoite's circuit sculptures. where resistors, LEDs and brass rods take on structural elements within the circuits to beautiful effect. Just gorgeous.

"COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. And it’s often the case that people making the jokes have never actually written any COBOL. We plan to give them a chance: COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers."

Not an April Fool; instead, a deep dive for newcomers to COBOL, a platform to make it on, and some movie trivia. Great blogging all around.

"Features: {…} Closing your laptop now types the letter E instead of locking"

"Finland became the forerunner of understanding and accepting digital culture in general and the Demoscene in particular as cultural heritage. Right before the Easter weekend the Finnish Heritage Agency announced, that the Ministry of Education and Culture listed the Demoscene on proposals from the National Board of Antiquities and the Intangible Cultural Heritage Expert Group as national cultural heritage of humanity together with eleven other cultural practices." Superb.

I always love developers showing their working, and none more so than Valve. Here are ten dense minutes on the teleportation mechanics in Half-Life: Alyx. I like this because you're not just seeing some opinions; they're showing glimpses of the research and testing that informed those opinions, as well as early prototypes, coupled with being a studio with some really deep time invested in VR; it's fascinating seeing them come to their conclusions. Also, as ever, I love seeing how bit a role sound is in presence.

Notes on the passing of John Conway, but also, a delightful set of comments sharing first-hand memories of Conway – particularly being taught by him – that bring him to life.

Finally, a set of links I don't feel ashamed to send people. Good. (Via Phil).

"It’s a simple polymeter, but the execution is hair-raising." Yeah. What a perfect sentence from Ethan Hein

"While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire." Ted Chiang on what stories about change and revolution do (and what _actual_ change and revolution also do).