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).

Using page.js as a really lightweight router for Svelte – worked very well, it turned out.

Whilst I'm an old-fashioned developer, sometimes I need to make something like an SPA, and I really like how lightweight and simple this routing library is – not to mention its excellent set of plain js examples. Really good.

Because we all forget things, and this is a nice, tidy list of simple HTML DOM wrangling (which I frequently have to do, and like to do as simply as possible).

Everest Pipkin's vast list of free tools and tool-likes for making games, interactive things, art, and so on. Comprehensive, worth diving into several times.

Great piece of games journalism from Duncan Fyfe: the history and legacy of Mastermind. Wide-ranging, great bits of research. Love it.

"The earliest reference to Bulls and Cows is in the work of Dr. Frank King. In 1968, King was studying for a PhD in electrical engineering at Cambridge University and looking for something to implement on the university's Titan computer, which had recently been equipped with Multics, a time-sharing operating system allowing multiple users to access one computer concurrently and remotely.

Thinking a game would be enjoyable, and something more sophisticated than Tic-Tac-Toe even better, King wrote a version of a childhood puzzle. "Good grief, you've implemented Bulls and Cows," he remembers other students saying, though he called it MOO."

Because I'm always losing this post when I'm looking for documentation for these scripts…

This is wonderful: Rrose talks about their process, which ends up on techno and psychoacoustics… but is mainly about player pianos as well. Very good indeed, and a great interview.

I have been trying to understand pointers for 25 years and this might be the clearest explanation I've read.

I still have an SSD full of music, that I own, and I too will miss iTunes when it is gone. I even have baroque ways of syncing MP3s to my Android phone.

More importantly, I too have long felt the reality of Inbox Infinity and lists that never end.

Even more importantly, para 11 is chefs-kiss-emoji.

Greatly enjoyed eevee's history of CSS and browser-based code; particularly, I enjoyed the moment where you're following along with things you knew… and then you viscerally go "oh, _here's_ where I began!" I twinged as I remembered where I began, my move away from table-based layout… and then the point where I started battling quirks mode for a living…

"Everything is Someone is a book about objects, technology, humans, and everything in-between. It is composed of seven “future fables” for children and adults, which move from the present into a future in which “being” and “thinking” are activities not only for humans. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this collection explores the point where technology and philosophy meet, seen through the eyes of kids, vacuum cleaners, factories and mountains.

From a man that wants to become a table, to the first vacuum cleaner that bought another vacuum cleaner, all the way to a mountain that became the president of a nation, each story brings the reader into a different perspective, extrapolating how some of the technologies we are developing today, will bur the line between, us, devices, and natural beings too."

Simone has a book out!