Goodbye, July 2023---hello, August, and with it, complete radio silence from my academic peers. I'm starting to resent these months. Good thing there's a high chance it'll be the last one that plays out like this. Taking care of our daughter sometimes feels like an additional full-time job, so that silence is sadly just a figure of speech. She turned four months yesterday! The sensation of time is so weird.

The Creative Programmer (finally) received three (great) reviews on Amazon.com. Thank you! I hope word of mouth will eventually do its work.

Previous month: June 2023.

Books I've read

• I tried getting into Ann van Sevenant's Levenswerk---Life's Work or the philosophy of acceptance---but I couldn't. I wish philosophers would stop writing completely inaccessible works like this.
• Monica de Ruiter's Kijk als een kunstenaar (Look like an artist) was a lot more interesting. At least the first half of the book was, where de Ruiter examines painting techniques and materials that influenced art history. Did you know that van Gogh sometimes painted on tea towels when his linen supply was running low?
• Mark Todd and Ester Pearl Watson's Whatcha Mean, What's A Zine? is a lovely little introduction to the wonderful world of zines. The booklet is from 2006 and does mention blogging as an alternative creative outlet, but it could do with a revision. Austin Kleon creates zines for fun, so why can't I?

Games I've played

Previous month, I wrote almost nothing?---this month, I'm afraid I'll have to write very much nothing. Not even a quick Game Boy game of five minutes.

Well, that's not completely true, if you also count board games. A friend brought Clank! and we played that for the first time, which is a combination between a deck builder and a board movement (the get-the-hell-outta-here kind) game that was a lot of fun. I also enjoyed a few rounds of Dominion and Hero Realms, to stick with the deck building theme. On top of that, Kristien & I managed to get out The Quest for El Dorado. I forgot how much we enjoyed that one.

Selected (blog) posts

Lots of fountain pen related stuff this month. I'm getting obsessed again. I bought two new pens---more on those later!

• William Woodruff explains how to run your own radio server with Liquidsoap. I love his audio-related blog posts, they inspired me to fiddle with it myself.
• The Tao of Gaming claims Pastiche: Birth of a Masterpiece to be an underrated card game. It certainly sounds interesting enough to check out.
• Tim Baker wrote a Beginner's Guide To Flex Pens, where the difference between vintage and modern flex nibs are explained and inspected through the lens of an artist. The post contains a lot of pen porn and test sketches, great!
• Teoh Yi Chie inspects both old and new Sailor Speciality Nibs. The new bodies look hideous in my opinion, and the steep price increase is well beyond my average pen budget. I wish I bought a Cross Point back in 2015.
• Speaking of stacked nibs: Tokyo Station Pens dissects these in The Anatomy of a Stacked Nib. See also When One Nib is not Enough on The Pen Addict. I'll try to stop now.
• Ineke Berentschot writes (in Dutch) how she tracks the pH level of her sourdough breads using a simple pH meter for a swimming pool. That smells like a fun future project to me!
• Thomas M. Semmler mounrs his obsolete skillset (via Simone's Yellow Brick Road). A must read for any software developer trying to catch up with crazy framework trends.
• Alex Bilson's blog's structure is full of originality, from "organic thoughts" to "stones" and "gardens" in the form of a fantasy image map.

Another shout-out to Teoh who reviews the aforementioned speciality nibs on YouTube, not as a writing but as a(n expensive) sketching pen. Here's an example where Teoh draws with the Cross Emperor nib:

{{< youtube Ry7xrS4wiho >}}

Other random links

• Ever wanted to see which limited editions Pelikan ever released? Here's an overview on the M600 series!
• Windows Update Restored does what Microsodon't---Microdon't---Microsoftnt? Nintendon't is the better fit indeed.
• Those Sailor nibs sure are something to marvel at: here's the history of the Naginata Togi over at Yoseka Stationery.
• In case you ever need the cash, Izods buys your pen at "reasonable prices". According to the Fountain Pen Network, they're reputable.
• Clerk is a live programming environment for Clojure, like LiveBook is for Elixir and Jupyter is for Python.
• Ink is a narrative scripting language for games that's an excellent driver for interactive fiction. I think I encountered this one before but I have yet to try it out.
• Ian Scott created picoGUS, ISA sound card emulation using the RaspPi's Pico's microcontroller. It's primarily intended to recreate the famed Gravis Ultrasound card. The Raspberry Pi is attached to a homegrown ISA card. I love hacking projects like these, especially since the original card is getting crazy expensive on eBay. Ian is looking for support, there's a Ko-Fi link on GitHub. Toss a coin to your hacker, oh valley of plenty...

I could do with another retro sound card next to my Sound Blaster 16!