This week

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

The song for this post is Barenaked Ladies' One week but all of the instruments are replaced with "Its Been", by edes421.

Late by a day, but as with last week, here are some nice things for the week:

Long-form inspiration

I enjoy watching tech talks, but the best ones connect the use of tech with wider questions of purpose and being. One that gets a lot of love and traction is Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle, which I recommend.

But! Recently I came across one of the more inspiring ones I've seen in years, which was Matt Might writing about Precision Medicine:

If you have the time, take a look.

Speedrun magic

If you play video games or program computers, and haven't gotten into speedruns, my friend, there's a beautiful world there. It's a beautiful mix of human creativity and persistence applied to the engineering realities of games. It fosters rich communities. The challenges are bottomless. As Jake Eakle has said, eat your videogames! They're better for you that way!

He pointed me to this lovely explanation of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning:

If you're hungry for another shot at this kind of thing, this writeup of Spelunky's eggplant run is tops.

Pixel Art

This is an old favorite: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art, by Blake Reynolds, which goes into art, aesthetics, and authenticity in the context of giving up one of their preferred forms. Any article that does an animation comparison/breakdown with this gif:

really deserves to be read.

Bonus: Previous "5 Points"

I mentioned how this post was inspired by an email I got every week from a friend. He recently retro-published all his 5 Points emails, so give them a look for some lovely findings!