@DaveyCraney absolutely agree — I've been taking my time 100%-ing each area, and it truly feels like a spiritual successor to Super Mario Galaxy. I've also been endlessly charmed by the PlayStation nostalgia, which hit harder than I thought it would for me.

@manton sorry this happened to you — that sucks.

Monument Valley blog.zioibi.com

@sherif I’m excited for that Nilüfer Yanya record for sure.

Just time for me to jump in before festivities kick off this evening for the 2024 Mercury Music Prize, and say that The Last Dinner Party should walk away with all the trophies they can carry, as well as possibly shocking a casual BBC viewership with an uncensored performance of ‘Nothing Matters’.

Silvio Rizzi just launched an all-new version of Reeder — his excellent RSS client. I’ve used every iteration of the app over the last 15 years, and I bet there have been far more days when I’ve opened it than days when I’ve not.1 I’ve written a bunch here about the ways in which the current state of the ... blog.zioibi.com

For apps / services that support both manual and auto-saving on text entry fields, I would be interested to see a chart of manual save frequency plotted against age. I’d be willing to bet that, even though autosaving has been pretty near ubiquitous for a while, folks my age still hammer that manual save ic... blog.zioibi.com

@TheMacPsych you are absolutely correct. I’ll likely have to settle for an annual pilgrimage to Muji until I can get back to Japan at some point! Hope you love your trip — send a postcard!

Wishing a happy Hobonichi Techo launch day to all who celebrate. I just spent an enjoyable half hour selecting some neat accoutrements to accompany my 2025 planner.

@bjhess woot! Are you going to record something or write something for podcast hosts to read?

@ronkjeffries thanks — I appreciate that!

@bjhess congrats Barry, and thanks for your significant contributions to the blogging and indie web space! 🌈

@manton Netflix’s suite of games is actually ridiculously strong: Laya’s Horizon, Oxenfree, Hades, Immortality, Spiritfarer, Into the Breach all wonderful… and so many more!

@robertbreen one of my absolute favourites — enjoy!

@robertbreen thanks Robert, that's really kind — I have to get through five more weeks of this year's read-along first! 😄

Today’s a full moon, and so a new issue of the lunar-cadenced newsletter miscellany Syzygy Business just arrived with subscribers. This time around: voice notes; computational photography; Esa-Pekka Salonen and more. You can read it online right here, and consider signing up for future issues. 🌕

@robertbreen very interesting, and yes — hard to compete with Charlie. Demon Copperhead was last year's pick for my read-along project, so if you want to read my thoughts (and others') on the book, you can find those at zioibi.com/siv9

@DaveyCraney thanks, I actually took it as part of my own Halide 2 'zero process' testing. (If you want to see the comparison, it'll be in tomorrow's issue of the newsletter: syzygy.business)

@robertbreen what did you think?

@adam thank you for writing this, it genuinely unlocked a new level of understanding for me!

@DaveyCraney ha yes! So many good lines. I’m trying to convince my special lady friend to play it, so I can experience it again over her shoulder.

@bjhess that’s where I played it — wonderful stuff! 🥧

@DaveyCraney I finished it a few days ago, and I’m still walking around saying things like “I’m a chartered surveyor, and I’m in trouble!”

As soon as I saw the reveal trailer for Thank Goodness You’re Here, I added the game to the very top of my mental must play list. This week, I made my way through it in a couple of sittings, and loved every moment. That trailer, and these screenshots, go some way to conveying the game’s defining char... blog.zioibi.com

@DaveyCraney sick dude — way to go! 🛹

@johnchandler I did this exact thing a few weeks ago and suffered a relatively nasty burn. Hope everyone at your end made it out unscathed!

@adders Ah, you're a veritable stone's throw from me.

@Burk this confirms for me that my most anticipated iOS18 feature is the option for icons without text

@bjhess that’s not great. Hope you can get it resolved.

@DaveyCraney I’m a full convert to Easy / Story mode — helps so much to get through more games!

@bjhess I did. I got a kind of auto response, and a few weeks later a request to confirm my address.

Robin Sloan has a new book out: Moonbound, with the exceptional tag line: ‘The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon.’ 1 I really enjoyed his earlier novel — Sourdough (2017) — and as a subscriber to his newsletter in long standing, I’d been intrigued for some time by the information he’s drip-fed a... blog.zioibi.com

@DaveyCraney word dude – my backlog of lengthy games is ridiculous, but I find I really cherish short(er) games that I can more easily finish. Recently Indika, currently Filmechanism, next up Thank Goodness You're Here.

Favourite Novels of the 21st Century (So Far) blog.zioibi.com

Good morning from the newsletter factory, where it’s a double-issue Sunday for me. It’s a full moon today, which means subscribers to the Syzygy Business lunar-cadenced miscellany just got their monthly dose of what’s been on my mind (bovine-themed art trails; the Fields Medal; visual inspiration; independ... blog.zioibi.com

This morning I happened to spot a loose balloon, drifting up from behind a house across the street. Grabbed my phone and snapped exactly one photo, which somehow turned out perfectly. Happy birthday to whomever this belonged to; sorry you lost your balloon.

I recently hit two years using Arc as my every day browser on macOS. As an experiment, this week I switched back to Safari for a couple of days, and I was surprised by how many of Arc’s little tweaks I’ve become habituated to. It’s not that I love every design decision The Browser Co have made, but on bal... blog.zioibi.com

Sometimes, when Elizabeth’s alarm goes off at 06:45 on a Sunday morning, so that she can make the early ‘heads’ rowing session… I’m not super excited to have lost the chance at a little more sleep. However, when she returns via Proof Social Bakehouse, all is forgiven. Almond croissant; lemon curd crown; p... blog.zioibi.com

The shortlist for this year’s World Architecture Festival has been announced, and is full of astonishing projects. As one example, I love all of the textures, lines and punctuation at work in this ‘6x18 Slender House’ by Spaces Architects@Ka: Also shortlisted, the redevelopment of Oxford’s Rhodes House, b... blog.zioibi.com

By no measure amongst the most egregious or deplorable actions of the Putin regime, but it always strikes me when reading stories like this — Russian playwright and director given six years in jail for ‘justifying terrorism’ — that such censorship is always a sign of weakness rather than strength. The abil... blog.zioibi.com

The English Winter — Ending in July blog.zioibi.com

Indika (2024) blog.zioibi.com

Last call for the tenth annual Sipped Ink summer read-along: starting tomorrow we’re tackling Stephen King’s The Stand (Complete & Uncut) (1990), at a pace of ~100 pages per week, for the next twelve weeks. There’s still time to sign up, read with us and get an email each Sunday discussing progress.

Today is host to a full moon, and that means a new issue of Syzygy Business just landed with subscribers — you can read it online here. Sign up to get future issues at syzygy.business

Next up in the hopper, from new roastery All Things Bloom