Steve Agland

Oh Kevin you rascal

I once connected my VCR to my dad's tape deck and recorded sounds of R2D2 bleeping and falling over. Then I put the tape in my Walkman and connected it to my Sound Blaster microphone port. Pretty soon I was shooting up droids in my very own Doom 2 mod. Not sure I've done anything that cool since.

Before you know it they're off to college. They scale up so fast. 🥲

A lambertian-grey Stanford bunny hovering in a red/green Cornell box. Courtesy nvidia

Computer graphics would like to submit a Stanford Bunny in a Cornell Box for your consideration.

This weekend I finished watching Devs (2020) and playing The Drifter (2025) and curiously both of them taught me that building a covert quantum research lab is an inappropriate way to deal with guilt and grief.

Also despite being stylistically worlds apart, both were fantastically well made.

The sequence near the end of "Alba: A Wildlife Adventure" where the POV switches to the grandpa.

This is like the opposite of the "Odysseus tying himself to the mast" gambit. Instead of arranging the situation so it's impossible for you to do the irresistible bad thing, you're arranging the situation so you're forced to do the procrastinatable good thing.

Oh well, third term lucky?

Speaking of which, the fact that some operations are unary and (length, abs) and some binary (plus, cross) makes having a single Math node harder. Also some operations only work with certain data types.

Yep, good point. Nuke does this with it's "Merge" nodes and it's reasonably pleasant to use. In that situation changing the operation later is common as you experiment with "looks" (ala Photoshop layer blend modes). In other contexts its much rarer you'll want to change operation later.

Yeah it's definitely spending implementation complexity for user simplicity...

And yeah, we have a Math node in one of our systems, with a dropdown for the operation and I hate it. No-one thinks "ah, now that in have two numbers I want to do some math. And that math is Plus." They just think "plus", and that's what they should select from the node library.

Polymorphic types but a node for each operation strikes a good balance. Two points: 1) users only want to express the op when creating a node. 2) it's very important you can "read" what the op is by glancing at a node in a graph. If you can tell + from a * you can read the formula.

Coca-Cola mulling wine

it is CRAZY to me in the year 2025. — when literally every publisher is desperate to find a way to directly reach their audience — that news outlets do NOT enthusiastically support RSS feeds with options like feeds for individual authors or sections!!!

The game actually has a bibliography accessible from the main menu, which reveals a truly absurd list of sources. But also, more games should have this!!!

I once witnessed one of these bad boys dragging a comatose huntsman beneath my letterbox when all of a sudden a redback leaped on it out of the shadows and this whirling multicoloured clash of the titans ensued. Summertime in Sydney ♥️☀️

I love libraries. As a latchkey kid I basically grew up in my local library. As an adult, finding my books in the library is how I knew I had made it as a writer. Please use and support your local library, they're incredibly important to your community and to the country.