"Finish Weekend helps you get it done. Come finish those projects you've put off to the side. Maybe you just need a bit of web help, a logo, or some code written. We'll help you finish." Heartily approve. I could do with a lot of these.

Gorgeous Moroccan restaurant in Paris. Pretty cheap, super-tasty. I am very full.

"You know, maybe aliens know all this, and we’re come-latelies to the whole comprehending-everything thing, but there isn’t really any more you can do in our current Universe than this. It’s the top thing. It is everything. This makes us amazing." James has basically said everything about our trip to CERN that is worth saying. This is all true. It was great and humbling. I'd also point out that every time you step out, you're under the Alps, and they're also phenomenal and humbling.

"There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had." John Steinbeck is wise, and a good father.

Network connected thermal printer. Bookmarked for future reference.

"Proteus, in the end, helps me move further into a design philosophy that avoids blacks and whites, finding a comfortable home in the much less solid greys.  Videogames aren’t about mechanics.  They aren’t about visual or audio either.  They aren’t about the ideas of the author or about the experience of the player.  They aren’t about story or actions or strategy.  They aren’t about controllers or processors or screens.  They aren’t about technology or culture or ritual.

Videogames are a combination of all these factors, or a combination of some of these factors.  Videogames are whatever we want them to be.  For Ed Key and David Kanaga, while making Proteus, videogames are about the beauty of walking, looking, and listening." However much I bang on about rules/systems/you know the score, I still very much agree with this. I still like the abstract.

"I would call him the greatest puzzle designer of all time, but that implies that there are lots of people who do what he does and he’s better than them, and that’s not quite right. What I mean is to say is that Raymond Smullyan is the Marcel Duchamp of puzzles, he’s the Brian Eno of puzzles. His work is singular, transformative, genre-defining, in a class by itself."

"Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem's remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving's, since it was Kareem's perfect defense that made Erving's instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible—thus the joy, because everyone behaved perfectly, eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened—thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules." This is phenomenal writing.

"There’s no demonstration of life’s futility or language’s emptiness that is so profound, it can’t one day be turned into a reassuring fridge magnet, and that thankfully helps put pessimism back in its place."

"Unless you design, build, experiment and test in the real world in a tight loop, you can spend a lot of time on the wrong problems" Yep.

"Seventy fifth birthday looming up and a small self fest to celebrate." All excellent news. Also: 40 years of "20 sites n years"; wonderful.

"Every time you throw in a quick fix for something because it’s Getting Late(tm), stop and see if you can fix it correctly right then. Pragmatism says it might not be possible in the time remaining, and that’s ok; “Real artists ship” and all that but a ruthless artist will fix the problem first thing in the next release so they can keep shipping again and again and again." Unhuh.

"Encoder counts pulses from quadrature encoded signals, which are commonly available from rotary knobs, motor or shaft sensors and other position sensors." Ooh, new rotary encoder library. Will use that.