I'm about a billion years late to this review. But that's OK, sometimes it is nice to wait until all the bugs have been squashed and all the walkthroughs written up. TWA is a lovely little puzzler. Move blocks around until they fit in the right holes. It is the sort of game which could have been written for the ZX81 back in the day. I played it with the Director's Commentary switched on. How weird that we now have games designers doing that! It was a lovely experience. Mike Bithell gives…
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Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets. It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost though chess, backgammon – every game under the sun. But those whom fortune favours may be invited to compete in the higher league where the games played are of politics and nations, of economics and kings. It is a contest where Capture the Castle involves real castles and where hide and seek takes place on the scale of a continent. Among those worthy of competing in …
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An idle thought on a long weekend. Is it possible to create an executable binary which is a palindrome? It's trivial to create a palindromic program in, say, Python: print("hello") # )"olleh"(tnirp Save that as test.py and then run cat test.py | rev | python3 and it'll work. But that's boring! You could do the same by reversing the bits, rather than the characters: 01110000 01110010 01101001 01101110 01110100 00101000 00100010 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100…
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When it comes to racial justice, how do we transform demonstrations of support into real and meaningful change? With intellectual rigour and razor-sharp wit, Emma Dabiri cuts through the haze of online discourse to offer clear advice. This was a refreshing and necessary book to read. Refreshing because so much of the discourse on race is driven by the USA's cultural hegemony - whereas this book is rooted firmly in Ireland and the UK. While it does cover some of the US experience, it isn't…
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We live at a time when billions have access to unbelievably powerful technology. The most extraordinary tool that has been invented in the last century, the smartphone, is forcing radical changes in the way we live and work - and unlike previous technologies it is in the hands of just about everyone. Coupled with the rise of social media, this has ushered in a new era of deeply personal technology, where individuals now have the ability to work, create and communicate on their own terms,…
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This is a Bad Book. It is probably the most profoundly disturbing book I've read about the misuse of personal data. Not because it exposes the horrors of algorithmic harassment and discrimination, but because it joyfully revels in them. The book's central thesis is that slurping up personal data, without explicit permission, and using that information to target people is a good thing. While books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Privacy is Power are deep, scholarly works which…
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