Progress

A work week.

Less progress than I'd wished on my hosting script.

Also less progress than necessary on my secondary customer. Must do more next week.

Ideas

Sometimes I'm fascinated by how good neural networks have become. For example, there is a mod for Skyrim that seamlessly inserts the player's name into spoken text. But what if we took this technology and turned it into an actual game.

This: The telephone game. You are a detective, working from home, trying to solve a criminal case. You can do some googling and that'll give you some information and news, but your best weapon is your telephone. Given a phone number, you can call people and question them. When you have sufficient evidence/enough statements, you can call your colleagues and send them to clean up the case. The entire game is fully voiced, naturally, and contains some procedural elements.

The real trick however is that you can call any number on your phone. You'll be connected to any of a number of (fully voiced) chatbots that you can talk to about anything you desire. Some might even give you clues for the real game...

Articles

• The Littly Lytton Contest asks submissions to write the first sentence of a good novel -- but the sentence must be as bad as it can be. This is absolutely the best thing on the internet and you must read it all, like I did.
• What happened when the rich stopped intermarrying: spoiler alert: Everyone but the richest people were better off.
• Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches
• Mathematics and Magic: the de Bruijn Card Trick -- The n-Category Café: simply learn this sequence by heart or perform this simple algorithm on stage in your head without anyone noticing and you'll have a great trick on your hands. No, but really, encoding 5 bits and then finding a sequence where the positions are uniquely encoded with these 5 bits is amazing.
• If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson: "The relationship between money and happiness is surprisingly weak, which may stem in part from the way people spend it. Drawing on empirical research, we propose eight principles designed to help consumers get more happiness for their money. Specifically, we suggest that consumers should (1) buy more experiences and fewer material goods; (2) use their money to benefit others rather than themselves; (3) buy many small pleasures rather than fewer large ones; (4) eschew extended warranties and other forms of overpriced insurance; (5) delay consumption; (6) consider how peripheral features of their purchases may affect their day-to-day lives; (7) beware of comparison shopping; and (8) pay close attention to the happiness of others."
• BMW F Series Gear Selector, Part Two: Breakthrough – Project Gus

Libraries, programming, etc

• Modern Cloud for Multiplayer Games
• Let's Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points - In Pursuit of Laziness
• Sorting algorithms/Sleep sort - Rosetta Code
• Oliver Jumpertz on Twitter: "GitHub hosts more than 200.000.000 repositories. But only a fraction of them are valuable resources for specific niches. Here are 10 of my favorites repositories that help you grow as a software developer:"

Books

• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: It's an epic love story and you should read it. 8/10

Backlog

• Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus: An Adult Romance Novel by Chuck Tingle: apparently this started out as a spite novel against public transphobe J. K. Rowling, but it is said to be good in its own right? Or good-ish? Or partly good? Or containing good ides? And also there's a second part? Anyway, this thing is just so weird that I have to read it.

Games

• Snowrunner for a relaxing evening with Simon.
• The Witcher 3: The game is gorgeous, even if it is seven years old. I did not know that the Emperor is played by Tywin Lannister. Even the loading screens in this game look better than some entire games. The writing and the message are just so good. But I am done. I got the good ending, which is also kind of sad. And, of course, Yennefer.

Backlog

• Car Mechanic Simulator (from free EGS)
• Moonglow Bay (from waitlist)
• Instruments of Destruction (from waitlist)
• Call of the Sea (from Humble Choice)
• Gamedec (from Humble Choice)
• Pumpkin Jack (from Humble Choice)
• I Am Fish (from Humble Choice)
• Star Wars: Squadrons (from Humble Choice): not sure about this one, since it's one of the EA games.

Other media

• The Witcher 3, The Last of Us, and the "Daddening" of Video Games -- Just WritePlease don't read the books, they're mostly not that good. Well, the first ones are, but not the latter ones. Kind of like the TV series.
• How to lie using visual proofs - YouTube
• New Discovery for Minus World in Super Mario Bros! - Behind the Code - YouTube
• Lots of Matt Parker. Really, go and subscribe to him!