Today marked my first day as a full professor. This professor-ing thing has been a wild ride and it's been pretty great, thanks to all the people I get to work with! I celebrated by not working, and instead hiking through a coastal forest to a beach in Olympic National Park. Can strongly recommend.

I'm delighted to announce the forensic recovery of the original single-stroke font data from Vib-Ribbon (1999) — exhumed from Playstation ROMs — and now part of my archive of procedural skeleton fonts for #p5js: github.com/golanlevin/p... #mediaArchaeology #typography #plotterArt #creativeCoding

evangelicals have finally created. the golden calf. from the classic bible story “don’t create a golden calf”

So an entirely after-hours (for US east coast) downtime for a single piece of software felt like an existential threat. This seems kind of unhealthy, no?

Advice from my Serious and Applied Games class this term. I asked them to make a manifesto based on what they've learned and done, and then to adapt it for different audiences. Then, we rewrote it to be a call to action for ourselves. (First one is mine, the rest is from the students.)

75% of 1980s video games tracked by the LGBTQ Video Game Archive are preserved & accessible in some form. 25% are still at risk or unavailable. Preservation isn’t automatic. 📚 Read VANISHING CULTURE 📖 Download: archive.org/details/vani... 🛒 Purchase: www.betterworldbooks.com/product/deta...

[ slaps top of game theory game] All right then, if you’re not satisfied let’s fit some stakes into this busted jalopy

Faculty in CA in the 1990s successfully protested mandatory online components of their classes largely on the grounds of IP and labor intensification. We don’t have to accept this. We can start with abandoning the LMS.

It's IMGD Presentation Day! We have a full-day student conference of creative and technical research. Graduate students present in the morning, undergraduates in the afternoon. If you're interested you can tune online, and I'll be sharing project work here too. echo360.org/section/b7d6...

My 10yo got a letter from the library notifying him of an overdue book fine. He is convinced that because our library uses a computer for checkout and the letter is not hand-written, it must be AI-generated. Which means it can’t possibly be real. Parenting through this moment is just really weird.

I've written a book! Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves is the story of procedural generation - the tech behind games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. It's about how it works, the games that use it, and the art and magic behind it. Out May 7th, in bookshops: linktr.ee/next_level 🎲🔮

I think the people positioned to fund games are really sleeping on how many people are struggling to make friends IRL after COVID. A year ago if you’d asked me where to put money, it would have been IRL connector games (something like Pokémon go but smaller/with less infrastructure)

I've just published a new userscript that remembers the path of your cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia, averaging and wearing them into the page, showing your browsing history over time Install at greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5... or read more about it everest-pipkin.com#projects/des...

As more academic names keep coming up in the Epstein files, I keep thinking about this NYT interview with the Bard president from a few years ago, and wondering how many people were rationalizing in similar ways. www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/u...

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

whenever people would go "well it's not popular enough yet" i think not only of all the popular things they ignore anyway, but how apparently the expectation is for everybody else to the job of politics for politicians so they don't have to

YES THAT'S WHAT MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS AND THATS WHY WE DON'T USE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

A joke for the history buffs: Germany’s satirical newspaper @der-postillon.com titles: “Vienna Academy of the Arts offers Trump admission as a student — They don’t want to get blamed again“

UPDATE: The awards ceremony will now be at 12:00 PST! The best place to watch is on steam: store.steampowered.com/sale/IndieCa... In the meantime, why not check out some of our incredible nominees?

"Two to three thousand armed agents of the federal government have been deployed to Minnesota. Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live."

#genuary12 Boxes only. A tiny and simple sketch before my evening screen time cutoff. I do like the texture, though! #genuary #p5js

One day late #genuary9, playing with cellular automata rules based on hue. #genuary #p5js

#genuary8 A monochromatic city generator. #genuary #p5js

“The wrong ICE is melting, the wrong Amazon is burning.” (Written on the back of a frozen pizza box)

friends! acquaintances! help! i'm looking to hire a game designer (living in the Netherlands) to help build games in The Hidden Folks Universe, starting with a sequel to the indie hit game Hidden Folks. know someone who's a good fit? pls forward this, ty! hiddenfolks.com/job-opening/...

Ah, an opportunity to recommend the great book, “More Work For Mother” by Ruth Cowan. Because obviously, no, AI won’t do this. And historically, domestic “labor saving” technologies have only entrenched domestic labor expectations while shifting the specifics of the work.

#genuary7 Inspired by boolean algebra. I don't feel much like making silly art on this horrifying and sorrowful day. But it's been nice seeing a bit of art show up tonight, as I struggle to stop doomscrolling. #p5js #genuary

10,000 people honoring Renee Nicole Good at the site of her murder

#genuary6 A tiny city that becomes that little bit more complex every time you turn out the lights. Until, suddenly, your city is gone and a new one takes its place. #genuary #p5js

#genuary5: write "genuary" and avoid using a font Handwritten text used as a mask when generating surrounding shapes. (Looks a bit like a colorblindness test, especially when I make "genuary" green!) A fun, quick sketch that also made me want to draw with my iPad more often. #genuary #p5js

#genuary4 lowres This was a lot of fun! Started out making a cross-stitch pattern generator (my favorite low-res non-digital rendering technique) and ended at making dragon scales. #genuary #p5js

#genuary3 prompt is the fibonacci sequence: I used the fibonacci numbers for mapping circle color and position within each bloom. #genuary #p5js

It's #genuary! Today's prompt: one color, one shape. Keeping it simple for #genuary1. Hoping to keep this up at least until the new term starts. #p5js

New Year’s Day with my husband’s great uncle. He is 101 years old and has lived in the same farmhouse in Central MA for 100 years. His granddaughter found a ledger from the farm’s old creamery covering 1895-87. It has absolutely perfect penmanship and later became a kids’ sketchbook. I love it.

🥳 Welcome to the Public Domain: creative works from 1930 & sound recordings published in 1925! Duke Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has highlighted some of the most anticipated works entering the #publicdomain in 2026! More ➡️ blog.archive.org/public-domai... @dukelaw.bsky.social

Back in 2019 I took a class about procedural generation in game design and made a really cool LED board project that I promptly misplaced before I was able to hang it up. For the holidays this year I decided to buy myself the parts to build an upgraded version of it!

I read this article every time I see it.

By any reasonable historical standard — including that of the technology industry! — ChatGPT should be pulled from the market and its product managers and executives held accountable for creating a product that ROUTINELY tells teens to kill themselves. This is a basic, common sense standard.

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case

YEAAH GENUARY 2026⋆˚꩜.ᐟ.ᐟ genuary.art GENUARY is the most GENERATIVE (creative code based) ART month of the entire universe // There are 31 creative coding prompts for you to play with for daily challenge // beepboop // please enjoy // time travelers welcome #genartclub #generative #creativecoding

“School officials have created a Microsoft Copilot prompt to review course descriptions with an eye toward avoiding ‘advocacy-oriented or prescriptive terms.’” Terms: “dismantling, decolonizing, interrogating, challenging, centering, combating, liberation, resistance, activism, justice oriented”

Last December, a student came into my AI-Based Experience Design class excited about his prototype. It didn't use AI in any way but he was inspired by critical AI literacy. He wanted to explore mechanics where meaning and form are divorced. Fast forward a year, and his demo released on Steam today!

Love this video walkthrough of GIS crochet! #DHmakes

I was asked to supply a title for my December talk at Stanford. I've settled on: "Nobody Wants This: Please Stop Ruining Everything."

very excited to share this story about an emerging video game genre: games that live on bottom of your desktop screen. my first story in the NYT, featuring @mistermorrisgames.bsky.social, @toadzillart.itch.io, and more! www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/a...

Proud papa moment: my son J published a letter in the @nytimes.com today (in print tomorrow) on the need to think our definitions of autism.

The OTHER project at CDPR's Boston studio is hiring a Lead Writer. (FT, onsite preferred) Come work with a very chill and creative team on Project Sirius ✨️ jobs.smartrecruiters.com/CDPROJEKTRED...

We're hiring!! WPI IMGD seeks a new Assistant Teaching Professor to support and grow our multidisciplinary, project-based curriculum in technical and design areas of our undergrad (BS, BA) and graduate (MS, MFA, PhD) degrees. More details here: wpi.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/WPI_External...

Friendly Reminder: If you're planning to apply to the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant, you have until 23:59 PST TODAY to get your application in ⏰‼️ grants.draknek.org