Mike Cook

Endless Winters by Michael Iantorno A lo-fi ambient hack of EarthBound

Inspired by lo-fi study beats and driven by my desire for peaceful winter ambience, Endless Winters is a simple hack of EarthBound that perpetually pans over a snowy landscape.

Designed for original hardware, it functions as a installation piece that can be quickly installed using a SNES and a CRT.

UK games industry is having a fuckin moment this week.

Jesus Christ.

New @draknek.bsky.social game looks pretty cool.

Do you have any sense of shipping times to Europe?

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

YouTube video by Ill Omens Make A Bot In Your Lunch Hour - Part 3/5

Part 3 of the #procjam series on making a text generator is out, and today we actually start looking at patterns and making things feel generative! Exciting!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhfX...

Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️

Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown!

Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵

And then some mail clients will cut the email subject line after 80 characters and you’re staring at your inbox

YouTube video by Novara Media Rockstar Games’ MASS Firing Of Unionised Workers

Last night's interview with Novara on the Rockstar firings is now up as its own standalone video, if you'd like to watch.

Delighted to see the story picked up by the wider media in this way, as surreal as it felt to appear on a show I've been watching for years now.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxuP...

KCL UCU are hosting the final stop of the Campus Voices for Palestine tour this Friday at 5pm - a great opportunity to hear from important speakers, and it coincides with the end of the strike ballot period too. Anyone can come: luma.com/go15utyg

Captura de tela de tweet de @STALLE0N com um emoji de uma galinha e um emoji de carro. O post diz "Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken. It is bigger than the car". O emoji de garnisé é de fato muito maior que o emoji do carro vermelho. O tweet foi feito em 03 de Agosto de 2021.

🚨🚨 Calling on all KCL UCU members: TODAY is the last ⭐️safe day⭐️ to post your ballots for both national and local disputes! VOTE today, VOTE yes and put them in the POST!! 📦 📦 ➡️ ALSO if your ballot papers arrive later than today please contact us as we can deliver in person on Friday afternoon 💫💫

I guess we will soon see if “don’t use unsafe thing to do unsafe things” is a sound legal defense.

I'd appreciate if any audio tech folks could help circulate this exciting call for a fully-funded PhD position working in multichannel audio design for galleries.

It's part of an ARC funded project 'From Noise to Signal: Improving Sonic Experiences in the Gallery'

www.unsw.edu.au/research/hdr...

For lack of better ideas for #procjam, I was going to remake my old Fantasy Manor (basically, a roof generator). After spending a day on it, I realised that it was boring, so I still need to come up with something. But Dwellings are going to have better roofs now.

UFO 50 has been shortlisted for Best Game at the 2025 #GameMaker Awards! Fantastic group of games we're a part of - it's an honor.

Our team members have been using GameMaker to make games for a long time. Big thanks to everyone at @gamemaker.io!

🗳️You can vote for us here: opr.as/GMA25-Vote

oh thank god, i was worried it was serious

we sold all of them to tourists!

Something that sounds a lot like an air raid siren keeps going off somewhere in central London, not sure if that's generally a good or a bad sign, maybe someone can advise.

Bad use of Wiki is definitely baked into the principle of the information being free - but when I'm signing a contract for a job (which I'm used to doing) that has ramifications for everyone else's job and my own future jobs, that feels like an exponentially more complicated calculation.

It's slightly a victim of word count but the original phrasing was "impossible to sign away your data for model training", people definitely do understand contracts sometimes but I don't think anyone can imagine the implications here, given the high volatility of AI+creative industries right now

I think it's a simpler case because you don't have anything you want in return from Wiki*. You're giving work freely with the intention of not needing to know its use. In fact your motivations for contributing in the first place are probably more generous than the things you're agreeing to.

it's good advice and i'm gonna try my best to follow it! i think especially when weaving it in as part of other jobs, routine is probably quite helpful.

hey i saw MULTIPLE finished projects in the AIIDE proceedings from you

Most technology has harmful side-effects. You can argue that the benefits outweigh them if you want. It's okay to believe this! Please stop pretending you can just mitigate the harms by getting someone to sign a piece of paper that says "I have not been harmed by this" and handing them ten bucks.

These agreements mainly exist to make people feel better about liking generative AI, especially (mostly progressive) people who struggle to reconcile their love of the technology and their dislike of its negative side-effects. They do almost nothing to reduce the harms caused by its use.

Embark Studios are driven by finding uses for AI (or things they can call AI) in their games, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. The voice changer thing makes sense to me as a feature, but their other uses of AI voice synth are just obvious forced use-cases. They don't need an advocate.

They also present an optimistic view of legal power balance, too (like Herndon and Dryhurst's The Call). Arc Raiders is published by Nexon, who make billions in revenue every year, and the law surrounding these contracts has barely been tested in court. What would a violation of it even mean?

It's also notable that this technique is largely used in professions that are already highly exploitative - voice acting, modelling, music. These are people who already struggle to find good work, and can't easily advocate for better deals. So there's not a lot of negotiation going on.

It's impossible for anyone to sign away the rights to their data and understand the implications of it. Framing it as artistic control is extremely silly - how can the person know what the ramifications of it will be for them five, ten years from now? It's legal theatre, essentially.