Matthew Gatland

After several nights of practice, my son can fall asleep while holding a Hotwheels car in each hand without dropping them or releasing his grip

From magic to malware: How OpenClaw's agent skills become an attack surface | 1Password The same capabilities that make OpenClaw a groundbreaking tool also make it an urgent security risk. This blog contains confirmed examples of agent skills being used as malware vectors, and advice on ...

1Password not mincing words here:

"If you are experimenting with OpenClaw, do not do it on a company device. Full stop."

"If you have already run OpenClaw on a work device, treat it as a potential incident and engage your security team immediately."

1password.com/blog/from-ma...

This NYT-Connections-alike is very upsetting thomaswc.com/2025.html

And he said, "If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream. It means it's conventional. It means it's already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don't want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something."

Keep thinking about this term "pre-digested" that Kojima used to describe art that's instantly gratifying. And how it's better when people grow to love something instead.

I've gravitated, as player and designer, toward the latter, but that term "pre-digested" is new and feels very strong.

at a certain level of any creative or intellectual collaborative job the main task is sin-eater: to fix what you can and get blamed for what you can’t, secretly knowing how much worse it would have been if you hadn’t done what you did.

The Space Exploration Logo Archive Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. There is also a book, but it looks like it was only

Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. [kottke.org]

friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.

We got some lightweight hoodies from Alternative Apparel with subtle branding that lots of people still wear years later

I want to get a good price on a Lego set that’s retiring at the end of this year. I’m watching the price in maybe eight different stores, seeing it get discounted (but not enough for me) and then sell out in more and more of them. Will anyone have stock left for the big Black Friday sales?

This might be the one I use the most:

developer: put it down. we don't need another one

concept artist: (clutching tighter) no. this is my emotional support sky whale

I can’t believe I didn’t know this. The feature was added in 1993!

Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) to direct a "Moomins" animated feature film.
variety.com/2025/film/ne...

a giant lego skeleton made out of styrofoam as a halloween decoration

OMG this is amazing

www.instructables.com/LEGO-Skeleto...

it's frustrating when, for example, in a platformer, there's a really hard jump right at the end of the level. so you can come up with game design rules like don't put hard jumps at the end of the level, put something that looks scary but is actually easy to make the player feel good, etc.

My son pointing when a train goes past

So You’re Making a Pixel Art Game? The brutal 5% success rate and how to beat it

Really nice marketing analysis on pixelart games. Writer knows his datapoint. I was very impressed.
opgamemarketing.substack.com/p/so-youre-m...

It was back in the early 90s, a time when there was no internet, no email, no Excel, no text files, no TrueType fonts—nothing of what we have today. I had to come up with a solution to deliver all the text data to the developer in Hungary (Novotrade), where no one spoke Japanese. First, I created bitmap images of all the hiragana and katakana characters, as well as commas, periods, exclamation points, question marks, and two types of overstrikes (two dots/circles), something like this: ・・・■■■・・・・・・・・・・ ・・・・■■・・■■■・・・・・ ■■■■■■■■■■■・・・・・ ・■■■■■■■■・・・・・・・ ・・・・■■・・・・・・・・・・ ・・・・■■・■■・・・・・・・ ・・・■■■■■■■■■・・・・ ・・■■■■■■■■■■■・・・ ・■■・■■・■■・・■■■・・ ・■■・■■・■■・・・■■・・ ■■・・■■■■・・・・■■■・ ■■・・・■■・・・・・■■■・ ■■・・■■■■・・・・■■・・ ■■■■■・■■・・・■■・・・ ・■■■・・・・・・■■・・・・ ・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

I then printed all characters page by page and FAXED nearly 100 pages to the developer, and their artist converted them into nicely shaded Japanese fonts. Each character was assigned a code based on rules such as: H for hiragana, K for katakana 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 for vowel rows A, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W for consonant columns d for overstriking dots, c for overstriking circles sp for space (Note: I might not remember all the rules perfectly now, lol.) For example, the phrase "こんにちは" should be converted to something like: H05K, H05W, H02N, H02T, H01H The developer sent me all the in-game dialogues via fax. I translated them and assigned each string a number for easy reference, instead of saying something like "the third window of the second dolphin in stage 2." Now here's the best part: once I finished translating all the dialogues, I typed them into a word processing program (like an early version of WordPad), then converted each letter to its corresponding code, character by character.

I printed all of this out and faxed dozens of pages to the developer, who then had to convert them back into dialogue data. To my surprise, the system we created was quite robust. There were only a few text-related bugs, mostly caused by my typos. I still work in game localization. It feels like we were in the stone age compared to today's methods, but I still cherish those moments.

Ryoichi Hasegawa on the localisation process for the Japanese version of Ecco the Dolphin (released in June 1993 in Japan):
xcancel.com/rio_hasegawa...

cover of James Gurney's "Dinotopia"

cover of "Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons"

screenshot of the cool "guys with weapons sneakily floating up a rock" intro scene from Dune Part 2

cover of "Redwall" by Brian Jacques

game narrative people like to talk about how worldbuilding isn’t storytelling. i agree; in fact i think worldbuilding is actually its own emerging creative practice, with its own virtuosos & masterpieces; it overlaps with storytelling but often feels to me more like architecture, hypertext, collage

The background on this waterfall, from the game's director Takatsuna Senba

(the whole interview is pretty great stuff:
web.archive.org/web/20191230...)

I will DM you!

3yo in her play kitchen: mommy make food with me!

me, half asleep bc it's 6am: mommy's tired but i will provide thoughts on your cooking strategy

3yo: why isn't mommy making food

me: i am involved in the work, just at a different layer

3yo, stamping foot: mommy you aren't DOING anything though

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

‘Superman’ Test Screenings Asked ‘Why the F— Is He Saving a Squirrel?’ and James Gunn Originally Cut It Out: ‘I Put the Squirrel Back Despite Protestations’ James Gunn says "Superman" test screenings revealed audiences hated when Superman saves a squirrel. He refused to cut the moment.

Sometimes in focus tests you get a phenomenon where instead of articulating a real feeling they had, the test audiences start to self-consciously look for stuff to critique and so give a bunch of weird notes that don't match any real audience sentiment.

variety.com/2025/film/ne...

I didn't even think it was possible to *have* a favourite page of a freezer manual…

I don’t know what it is about videogames that make people into some sort of soldier role but it sure is something that surely cannot backfire on anyone at any time

Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy A.I. programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player's real-time movements.

This is an insane thing to write about game development. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/a...

Some Lego parts including a rod and a circle with four bumps on top that the author remembers from their childhood

I’m getting back into Lego after a 20 year break. There are so many new bits! But when I see one I recognise from before it feels like meeting an old friend.

The rise of Whatever This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of eve...

down with Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07...