Garfield phones, x-ray records and phone tombs

Programming

• Exercises in Emulation: Xbox 360’s FMA Instruction

Articles

• (quote) Algorithmic recommendations […] are failing users by encouraging them to take their interests to the farthest maximum: a you like coffee; have you tried cocaine? kind of effect. Are these features necessary?

• What Achilles should have said to the Tortoise

• Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved after 35 years

• Procrastination Sucks — So Here’s The “Eat That Frog” Way to Powerful Productivity

  TL;DR start with the things that intimidate you the most because they are likely the most important ones anyway.

Art

• X-Ray Audio is an archive of old Soviet illicit records scratched onto discarded x-ray films.

• As an addendum, here’s an auction for some newly-produced ones.

• The Tomb and the Telephone Box: Soane’s Mausoleum (1816)

  And here’s how the classic british phone booth shape is inspired by some tomb.

Games

• Still playing Trials Rising on Switch, it’s a nice game (and if you buy it on cartridge, you get a set of stickers, which is nice).

  Sadly, it drops frames at times (mostly on fade-in/out between screens, so it’s not like it affects gameplay a lot, but still).

  More sadly, there’s a lot of resource popping, e.g. when you die and restart the track, you clearly see that the textures for the beginning of the track has been unloaded already and can take some time to load.

  EVEN MORE SAD ARE MICROTRANSACTIONS AND LOOTBOXES

Books

• Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut

  A collection of interviews, essays and lectures (and one short dramatic piece).

  His review of Hesse’s Steppenwolf made me read that as well.

Music

No albums from the last couple of weeks really retained in my memory.

However, I’ve seen Prurient perform live, and it was way too awesome!