"Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake." Loads of good stuff in this Sterling essay, but this is the leaper-out for me: the reminder – as I fervently behave – about truly understanding the things you work in. And in this case: the reminder that all the old metaphors of computation are rarely true. Computers are not intelligent; they do not see or hear. But nor are they stupid, blind, or deaf. They are just other.

If you're going to do an April Fool, this is how. (Those special features are pretty good, though).

"The process of going back and forth from painting to the computer became a continuous cycle. Midway through as I became more and more familiar with the outcome of how the actual texture would appear on the screen when tiled, my painting process became more specific to achieve the desired texture, color, darkness, stroke, range of value that I wanted for each feature on the map." Lovely stuff from Geraldine on painting, textures, and process.

"Tambour is a musical game about attacking and countering with rhythm." Really nice: definitely musical, interesting balancing mechanics, and I love the range of inputs. Also it looks good, which helps.

"Topics like linear algebra, topology, graph theory, and machine learning are becoming vital prerequisites both to doing daily work in these fields and, more importantly, to inventing, popularizing, and teaching the new creative tools that are rapidly arising. Without them, artists are forced to wait for others to digest this new knowledge before they can work with it. Their creative options shrink to those parts of this research selected by Adobe for inclusion in prepackaged tools. Instead of the themes and concerns of creative work driving the selection of tools from a growing technical cornucopia, artists find themselves turned into passive users of tools that are already curated, contextualized, and circumscribed by others.

So, I want to do something about this. I want to figure out a way to teach myself and others these more advanced mathematical and computational concepts with a specific eye towards applying them in creative technology."

This is going to be very good. (I'd quote the whole post if I could, but this leapt out at me hardest.) And: on the day Greg's book arrived.

"Imperfect and internal rhymes are two important features in rap music previously ignored in the music information retrieval literature. We developed a method of scoring potential rhymes using a probabilistic model based on phoneme frequencies in rap lyrics. We used this scoring scheme to automatically identify internal and line-final rhymes in song lyrics and demonstrated the performance of this method compared to rules-based models. We then calculated higher-level rhyme features and used them to compare rhyming styles in song lyrics from different genres, and for different rap artists. We found that these detected features corresponded to real- world descriptions of rhyming style and were strongly characteristic of different rappers, resulting in potential applications to style-based comparison, music recommendation, and authorship identification." Awesome, and something I am going to sit down and read properly.

"A series of informative posters detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key." Gorgeous. (If I had to pick, I'd take Voodoo Ray – which is a lovely piece of drum programming amongst many other things).

"My mom worries to unrational degree about my well being when I'm travelling. And she never reads her emails. So I decided to automate this process of informing my mom that I'm alive when I'm abroad. This small php script checks the ip address of the visitor calling it and if that ip address is not in Finland it'll generate a small email to my mom, mostly telling her where I am and that I'm alive. It does this emailing only once in 24 hours. This script is called from a small python script that runs in the background and tries to call this script every hour or so. So if I'm using my laptop (which I usually am) and I have internet connection this should automatically make me a better son." Hah!

"What about Scandinavia? After all, Monocle is forever claiming Copenhagen or Helsinki is the best place in the world to live. Brûlé looks aghast, revealing the conflict between aesthete and businessman. "The Scandis are a bit too socialist." He swings his hand around the office. "Everything in this room is from Scandinavia, but the maternity leave would kill us." So Copenhagen may be the best place to live in Brûlé's world, but it is no place to run a business." Oh, Tyler. Roughly what I expected, sadly.

"Sentiment analysis tool for node.js based on the AFINN-111 wordlist." Interesting; feel slike it could be ported to other platforms, too.

"Hacking is disruptive, and whether you code software, write books, or film movies, I believe bringing anything new into the world is a disruptive act. By being novel and compelling, the new is likely to replace something else and that something else isn’t being replaced without a fight." Great stuff from Rands.

"Sugar is a Javascript library that extends native objects with helpful methods. It is designed to be intuitive, unobtrusive, and let you do more with less code." Looks nice – and suitably Javascripty.