Ehhh... What's up, September? Strange, and just like that, Summer is preparing to pack its bags. The continuous downpour of yesterday served as proof, even though we've had more than enough rain during the last two months---good for yet another climate-related record. Perhaps Summer is only feinting to leave for the year, only to strike back twice as hard with its sunrays in September? I wish.

As part of my The Creative Programmer book promotion, last month I wrote an article on CodeMotion called Combating AI Code Generation with Creativity on finding the right balance between using AI-assisted code generation tools and creativity. I usually hate writing about AI but this was a fun diversion, since I start with a reassuring message (AI won't replace human creativity) and I focus on how to leverage these tools (up to a point) to boost your own creativity.

Previous month: July 2023.

Books I've read

Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking has been lying on my nightstand for months now. I tried many times getting into it, but as much as the alluring topic kept drawing me in, the enormously long-winded writing style kept pushing me back. Every odd sentence, I completely lost what I was trying to read. Fatigue or a mediocre Dutch translation might have something to do with it, but I blame the author's attempt to build too prose-verbose chapters. After 170 pages, I gave up---again. This time, for good. I gave the book away.

I then switched to Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer's Brieven uit Genua (Letters from Genoa). What a relief! I knew this was going to be good as I love letter-style books and Ilja's Grand Hotel Europa. It's a thick tome but reads very smoothly.

Games I've played

I got back into nineties DOOM clones, or more modernly called, boomer shooters. I suck at them, but they're loads of fun to relieve (or induce more?) stress.

I finished Outlaws, a classic Western LucasArts shooter from 1997. As a kid, I somehow never made it beyond the canyon level. LucasArts' story-based shooter oozes with charm and there's never been a game quite like it. Next up is the seminal Quake, id's first fully 3D-rendered brown drab, of which the 2021 remaster done with the KEX Engine is quite impressive.

For the DOS Game Club, in August, we played Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Megagames' Sonic imitation for PCs. I remember being completely blown away with it as a kid, but now that we took a second look at the game, it only left a mediocre impression, which admittedly was a bit depressing. DOS Game Club, Destroyer of Happy Childhood Memories? Expect an in-depth review to be up soon at the Codex.

Selected (blog) posts

• Brian Evans loves photographing piles and piles and piles and I loved reading about it and being amazed by the pictures.
• Birgitta Böckeler explores Generative AI and its use at ThoughtWorks, but there's no single mention of the ethics involved, which for such a big and famous company is a big let-down. I think every software developer should know where the generated code comes from before deciding to use these tools.
• Rona Akbari wrote a how to make a zine guide on The Creative Independent. What a lovely website, by the way!
• Speaking of zines, I'm sure everyone knows these by know: another shout-out to Julia Evan's Wizard zines on programming!
• Rock Paper Shotgun published their RPS 100: Reader Edition for 2023: the favorite PC games of all time, according to the readers. That list was a bit less baffling than the editor's list. My beloved Baldur's Gate II is on #21. Disco Elysium is the winner here.
• Jessica Kerr summarized Carol Sanford's No More Feedback. According to Sanford, the benefits of feedback are purely mythological---feedback as in, corporate core competencies evaluation bullshit feedback.
• Ruben Schade tell us that camera specs aren't telling the whole story, and we experienced something similar lately.
• Dave Rupert links the gist of two books together in personality test and nazis, where Myers-Briggs possibly helped nudge towards right fascism. An eye-opener, for sure!
• Jim Nielsen calls the careless usage of others' data by LLM models knowledge laundering and I love that term: it's spot-on.
• John Walker points us towards Frog's Adventure, a lovely micro adventure game in which a frog is suddenly given a brain.
• Via Winnie Lim: Paul Klee's notebooks---3900 pages, no less---are now available online. And I thought my handwriting was small...
• Matthew Byrd explains how Quake sparked a filmmaking revolution over at Den of Geek. Before listening to the 2022 Quake DOS Game Club podcast episode, I never heard about machinima.

Other random links

• Something that might once come in handy: there's something called the Alliance of Independent Authors.
• In need of more focus? Here's a Data Detox Kit just for you!
• Have you ever obtained the Triforce in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with nothing but N64 and ROM hacks? I bet you did(n't).
• Have you ever played DOOM (II) with a 3D voxel graphics mod? It looks amazing:

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