The Weekend Nerdiary

Episode 7: Happy fun time gaming edition

Having recovered (sort of?) from stock market craziness last week, let's spend this week having a bit more fun. We'll play some (new and old) games, watch spaceships go boom, prepare for the quantum revolution, and learn a bit about...Tom & Jerry?

[Side note: Gmail seems to like clipping this newsletter. This week is a long one with lots of good stuff! Sorry about that.]

Play time

From Keen to Doom: id Software Founders talk 30 Years of Gaming History - A fun read celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of one of the world's great game studios. If you're into this sort of thing, I *highly* recommend reading Masters of Doom.

I have been told that my having been super into Magic: The Gathering in high school puts me at the absolute apex of nerdery. I am not ashamed of this.

And so there's a new Diablo-like Magic: The Gathering PC game called Magic: Legends coming out soon and I am suuuuuper psyched to try it out:

Delta Emulator - Have a hankering to play Super Mario Brothers on your iPhone? Check out the Delta Emulator (via the Alt Store, a semi-hacky way of sideloading apps on iOS devices). It supports every NES, SNES, N64 game (and more) and works with external controllers. It works. It's awesome.

Cab Ride: Drive a train through a dreamlike land - This is the definition of "slow gaming" and it's fantastic. Procedurally-generated and never-ending, this is a super chill 8-bit experience. Works in-browser.

And last but certainly not least on the gaming front, my friends Asi & Dave released a game! Check out IncrediMarble. It's a Rube Goldberg-style marble slide building game and it's both super cool and super fun (for PC, macOS, and iOS).

(( Sound(e)scapes ))

Sonic Pi 3.3 released - Sonic Pi is a "music from code" system that lets you write songs in a Ruby-like language. They just released version 3.3 with a host of new features. Check out the video below to get an idea of what it can do:

@@ How it works @@

The Cloudflare & Backblaze peering arrangement - a fascinating comment from a reddit thread that dives into the inner workings of how Tier 1 peering works and how Cloudflare & Backblaze came up with a clever solution...in the form of a patch cable.

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election - The New York Times has brought back their interactive, precinct-level map of the 2020 election results. The data is still flowing in (California is sparse at the moment), but this is a deeply fascinating look at how the country voted. I think the most interesting takeaway for me is that with few exceptions, urban is blue and rural is red, even in the reddest of red states (so, by extension, a red state is really just a state with a bigger rural:urban ratio). Worth exploring:

!! Truth is stranger than truth !!

Here is a Myanma woman filming herself doing an exercise video while, unbeknownst to her, a military convoy arrives at Parliament behind her to begin its coup.

Here's a guy who...made his own COVID vaccine. I, well, I mean, do not under any circumstances try this at home. But a fascinating read...

=- Space invaders -=

Here's an awesome 14-minute video of the SpaceX Starship SN9 flight test that ended, well, not ideally. But an amazing watch:

A bit more on what went wrong:

And here's the moment of glory...

[[ Shiny new things ]]

More on Apple's rumored VR/AR headset (which I continue to be absurdly excited about). Apparently the price tag could be $3,000 and it could have 8k screens (!) in each eye.

And here's a sketch of a render that The Information (paywall warning) claims to have seen:

The render makes sense -- it's got design elements from the new AirPods Max and the Apple Watch sports bands, and Apple is known for this sort of design consistency (sometimes).

A desktop quantum computer for $5,000 - 2 qubits, but it's a start. Remember, conventional home computers cost about this much when they first launched too. Let's hope a quantum Moore's law works similarly...

Google launched their new US <-> Europe undersea cable - It handles 250 *terabits* per second over 12 fiber pairs and connects Virginia Beach and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast.

!@# Animatia #@!

Here's way more than you'd ever expect to read about classic Tom & Jerry cartoons and how best to enjoy the series (and why HBOMax isn't the answer).

This is AWESOME:

:: Pretty pixels ::

Here's an amazing collection of CSS frameworks inspired by some awesome classic UIs:

Same Energy is an experimental visual search engine. It uses deep learning to find visually-similar images based on a prompt. Check it out - very cool:

.. /dev/urandom ..

Here's MayTree, the Korean acapella group, back again. This week, with iPhone sounds:

Oh and let's just throw in their doing the Super Mario Brothers theme for good measure (ha ha ha). I couldn't resist:

And finally, the best 38 seconds you'll spend all week:

That's it for this week! Thanks again for playing along. If you enjoyed this, feel free to forward to someone else who might as well. If you got this from a friend, subscribe here.

Until the next one,
--Noah

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