NotesThis is the talk and slides from the June 2018 London IF meetup, held at Elephant Studios in London South Bank University on 9 June 2018. I was invited to speak about Inform, past, present and future. via PocketUnfurl
NotesItâs hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out itâs cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans. via PocketUnfurl
NotesIt can be hard to write about the music of videogames while we are bathed in the projected glory of todayâs high-definition, 4K, 60-frames-per-second photorealistic graphics. via PocketUnfurl
NotesMy name is Sebastien Benard and I'm currently working as the Lead Designer on Dead Cells, a procedurally generated Metroidvania. As you would expect, questions about the quality of our procedural generation pop up very regularly, with both players and other devs. via PocketUnfurl
NotesThe first video game tournament was held on October 19th, 1972. Competitors gathered at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in Los Altos, California to do battle in the sci-fi rocket combat game Spacewar. via PocketFeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesFinancial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump â neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative? Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. via PocketUnfurl
NotesJeff Baxterâs sunflower-yellow Kenworth truck shines as bright and almost as big as the sun. Four men clean the glistening cab in the hangar-like truck wash at Iowa 80, the worldâs largest truck stop. via PocketUnfurl
NotesA couple of weekends ago I was in the mood to do some retrogaming and didnât know what I wanted to play so I asked for some suggestions from Twitter. via PocketUnfurl
NotesIn 2004, a blue-ribbon commission issued its report on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many lapses had allowed the plot to succeed, the report concluded, but the central failure was a lack of imagination. via PocketUnfurl
NotesJuly was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & GamesâŠfor the second time in 35 years. via PocketUnfurl
NotesEarlier this year, a sloppily doodled MS Paint comic appeared on Redditâthe online news aggregator and so-called âfront page of the internetââjuxtaposing images of 20th-century fascism with more modern symbols of far-right political thought. via PocketUnfurl
NotesThere's something uniquely satisfying about exploring the intricate 2D spaces of games modeled after Metroid and Castlevania. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesTraditionally, engineers use mixins, decorators, inheritance, and plain code duplication to add common functionality to a handful of components. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesThis post originally appeared on the NPR Extra blog. Since launching NPR One in 2014, weâve been working to deliver a news and storytelling experience that meets users in all the places they are now and will be in the future. via PocketUnfurl
NotesThe foundation of Donald Trumpâs presidency is the negation of Barack Obamaâs legacy. It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesIn August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that "there's no room in American society" for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK. via PocketUnfurl
Notes[This essay was funded through Patreon & Medium under the ZEAL project. ZEAL aims to provide high quality criticism of rarely discussed games and comics, and showcase the talents of exciting new writers and artists. via PocketUnfurl
NotesThe first Bitcoin paper was first released in 2008. My excitement about the potential of blockchain technology has been building ever since.  Decentralized digital currency, once just a far-fetched goal, is finally making inroads into the mainstream. via PocketUnfurl
NotesThis small system has been tested, and it works! The aim of this page is to show you how to breadboard a computer, step by step, for the purpose of understanding how a computer system works. via PocketUnfurl
NotesDonald Mustard remembers poring over previews of the sci-fi game Super Metroid in Nintendo Power magazine back in the summer of 1994. He remembers mowing lawns in the hot Houston sun so he could save up enough money to buy the game on launch day. via PocketUnfurl
NotesPICO-8 is a fantasy console to make, share and play tiny games and other computer programs. PICO-8 Zine is a 48-page fanzine made by and for PICO-8 users. via PocketUnfurl
NotesExcerpted from Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan. Out now from Simon & Schuster. On Wednesday, March 9, Kaplan will discuss his book in New York; for more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website. via PocketUnfurl
NotesAlex Gianturco was a successful corporate lawyer based in Washington. Then, in 2011, he gave up his day job at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and focused all his efforts on his other passion: being a space pirate. via PocketUnfurl
NotesThe worst part of my job these days is designing APIs for front-end developers. The conversation goes inevitably as: I donât even argue anymore. via PocketUnfurl
NotesIt may seem daunting to work with Hasu's wall of code but the files you need to modify are not many and you don't actually need to fully understand the code. I myself don't understand 100% of it, so if I write some bullshits I hope Hasu will chime in. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesThe brain surgery lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesHossein Derakhshan was imprisoned by the regime for his blogging. On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia Late in 2014, I was abruptly pardoned and freed from Evin prison in northern Tehran. via PocketUnfurl
NotesTributes to the genius of computer pioneer Doug Engelbart are flooding the web following the announcement of his death at the age of 88. His work transformed the way people use computers today by making them accessible and "personal. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesEver since a dying Steve Jobs reportedly said heâd finally figured out TV, the tech press has breathlessly anticipated the appearance of the mythical Apple TV, the Great Pumpkin of the tech world. via PocketUnfurl
NotesWHEN you are a visionary, itâs hard to get other people to see as you do. When you have a plan to save the world through men and computers working together, as Doug Engelbart had, itâs hard to enlist the guys at the water-cooler to take part in the crusade. via PocketUnfurl
NotesWhat follows are my extended thoughts and personal reflections a week two weeks after watching Bruce Sterling deliver a lecture on Alien Aesthetics. Itâs a look at the weirder side of cyborg life and our posthuman future. via PocketFeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesI don't know what to call it, really. Midlife crisis sounds so flamboyant, so ridiculous, so⊠exciting. And I haven't run off with a builder, or moved to Thailand to find my real self, or embarked on a brand-new drug habit, or taken up free rock climbing. via PocketUnfurl
NotesWhen Gary Gilbert lost his job, it was devastating. A tradesman, he had joined his employerâs company only because he thought it offered a bit more security than endlessly chasing the next gig as a freelance operator, and that he could then provide a better future for his son. via PocketFeedUnfurl
NotesThis spring, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put a new spin on the commencement speech, that most staid of genres. Speaking at Wellesley College, she didnât emphasize how the graduates had been helped by their education, but how they had been hindered by it. via PocketUnfurl
NotesReaders Nick and Riela have both written to ask how and when English colonists in America lost their British accents and how American accents came about. via PocketUnfurl
NotesOn the Net today we face a choice between freedom and captivity, independence and dependence. You may view that statement as melodramatic, but the near future will incorporate computers into more facets of our lives than we can imagine. via PocketUnfurl
NotesI spent the first 15 years of my life wondering why everyone was always in my space. I tried my best to be quiet and stay out of peopleâs way, but there always seemed to be enough of them pushing into my bubble. via PocketFeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThere was no one moment when Jon Stewart knew it was time for him to leave what he describes as âthe most perfect job in the worldâ; no epiphany, no flashpoint. via PocketUnfurl
NotesLoneliness can creep through your bones like a disease, wash over you unexpectedly as if a strangerâs vomit, or sit in the pit of your stomach for weeks like undigested chewing gum. Especially, it turns out, if youâre young. Of course itâs easy to be lonely in your 20s. via PocketUnfurl
NotesWhen it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. via PocketFeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIn a welcome sign of the coming singularity, Buzzfeed just announced that it has built a sentence generator that mimics the turgid writing style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. via PocketUnfurl
NotesItâs interesting to me that Revenge of the Nerds, while still full up of the nostalgia that the 80s lends us, is lately being repositioned in the zeitgeist. via PocketFeedEmbedUnfurl