We said goodbye to Rumi today. He had a good life, went on many great adventures, and made a lot of friends along the way. He's my daughter's dog but has lived with us for a few years on and off, loved by everyone. He was a good boy.

I updated visual studio code this morning on my Mac. It said something about co-pilot but I just closed the popup. Go to edit some code and co-pilot is on! I've never opted in for that. So now my codebase is in the training data? Uggh. I hate that this broken AI bs is being forced on us.

I can say from personal experience that Putin is threatened by strong women. As I argue in a new piece in @foreignaffairs.com, he and his fellow autocrats have reason to fear us: Defending women's rights and combating authoritarianism is the same fight. www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

I'm moving back to 1975.

Anyway, here is a link to the early screenings of project hail mary that no one told me about, so maybe I'm the bud who tells you 💖 Let's cry in a dark room together 🌚

No.

Well then. Now I have to find my blu ray player. Really looking forward to watching these remastered episodes.

Important thread, and the only kind of response to genAI that matters. Keep making games. Keep playing. 🧡

Winter Olympics has a new super star athlete? He's a good boy who looks after his humans at his local bed and breakfast. Apparently they went to see the Olympics without him so he went on an adventure to find them. www.npr.org/2026/02/18/n...

We did magic bitboards in class today. Always fun. Always confusing first pass through.

I made games for most of these systems. They were absolutely incredible machines, each one of them, and the Sinclair computers in particular led to the UK being the worldwide catalyst for the whole game industry.

Stephen Colbert is a gosh darn national treasure. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh7D...

Do I do magic bitboards tomorrow or templates/pawn movement? Or... lecture from 1972. Thursday is our Connect-4 tournament and a few students seem to be going all in on opening books and deep searching.. so want that to stay on track.

Queen of Chess documentary. 10/10. Excellent. youtu.be/8pmJgtLKBXg?...

A prominent Bluesky elder already hosts Jeopardy

What a talent. Every time I saw him he always felt like he was there in the that fictional world existing and being awesome. Of course, I loved THX 1138 and Deep Impact, but his range was as wide as the horizon. Rest in peace.

Slides done for today's class. Huge update to my things I've learnt over the years deck.

Thankfully, the light comedy show with John Oliver starts its new season tonight. I've been living in existential dread about the state of the world so I'm excited to watch something lighthearted.

Working on a game right now as an indie is terrifying. My game may be released on the same day as 1,000 AI generated games. I assume this is happening in all creative industries (books, art, music). AI slop will kill us. How do we stand out against it?

Interstellar (2014) Directed by Christopher Nolan

I was all, "yay, tomorrow is a holiday I don't teach!" (yes, teachers do that too). Then I looked at my schedule and now I'm all "yay, class tomorrow! I better make slides!"

I dreamt last night of writing a new assembler (machine code). It was a very of Knuth's MMIX language, but with structure in the assembly code like MACROSS. Kind of wish I had kept on dreaming..

There’s a new movie about someone who hates that their birthday is on Valentine’s Day and maybe it’s a thriller or horror movie? Anyway. They didn’t consult me and I think maybe I will boycott it. Maybe.

Free birthday Starbucks road trip!

Many moons ago my friend @andylanning.bsky.social made this for my birthday as a complete surprise. It comes up on my phone as my birthday approaches and reminds me I am lucky to have such good friends in this world.

I am stealing this and making it a slide for my next class.

People can probably tell that Full Deck Solitaire is mostly programmer art. Making the cards though was very analog. We poured tea over sheets of paper, baked the paper a bit, and then scanned and blurred them before compositing the vector card.

Birthday weekend. Today is my last day enjoying a 5 as the first digit of my age. I have a life rule to always take my birthday off, you only get so many, so I'm going to roll with that today hanging out with my best buddy.

There is a lot wrong with corporations like Amazon, but I will give them this. They make physical editions of their streaming tv shows.

The interesting thing, for me, about coding is the walk. I have a problem I've already solved, detecting a win in chess for example, but I want it to go 100x faster. So I go on a walk and think about it, visualizing it differently, walking around the problem, and seeing it from a new perspective.

Thank you Vince. #DICEAwards

Class today went much better. Chess movement via bit boards. Managed to get the demonstration code written without resorting to "code I prepared earlier" hand waving. Bitboards and bit manipulation are a big part of my advanced programming class. Making stuff go 50x faster by doing it all in bits.

Re-reading the Halo Wars script and I'm sad we didn't get that final Serina quip in there.

Had a horrible class today. Trying to go over how to use the Tiled level editor to students. When it goes badly, it's pretty much always my fault because I'm not teaching the information well, and today was no different, but it's always frustrating when it happens.

Yay. First UCSC power outage of the year!

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

These are stunning. Be sure to click through and see the rest of the images in the thread:

Don’t worry about me. Just here in the corner having a nervous breakdown because my slides to show how you can detect a connect 4 win using bitboards via eight shifts and 4 ands is not clear enough. Normal stuff. It’s fine.

🥳 The sale at The Game Crafter is now live! Most of my games are discounted. If you missed out on the #Crownfell crowd sale, or had your eye on any of these other games, now is a great time: www.thegamecrafter.com/designers/we...

I’m not sure that AI ad with Mathew Broderick really thought through the message “let AI do the work so you can go home”. AI sending us home forever is what we /don’t/ want to happen.

I think Seattle might clinch this.

Together we are America. A rare glimpse of the country I want to live in every day. Bad Bunny was the unique voice and performer speaking for us all. Love. Together.

War and Peas is easily the best Patreon I subscribe to. Every month we get stickers and cool items in the mail, early comics and funny sketches. In this world there is not a lot to make you laugh, so I support what does.

Fell asleep on the couch for an hour. 10/10. No notes.

Apple used to let you make these beautiful physical books from your photos.

I didn't think that he could go any lower.

Back at emergency vet with Rumi. :-(

Hey all you Star Trek Starfleet Academy fans. I know may of you really enjoyed the new episode and are excited to talk about it. I really enjoyed it too. But please try not to spoil for those who haven’t watched it yet. If you want to share screenshots, please mark them as sensitive content. 🖖

Some of my students this semester are making incredibly cool games already. Here’s the play card for one based on a cat show.