Resources

Things I like and use

Coding

• Rider - best IDE out there

• Claude Code - my AI intern

• Fork - solid Git client

• Unity - don’t bother, RIP.

• Arduboy - Arduino Library for making Arduboy games (I’m using PlatformIO in VSCode)

• Pico-8 / Picotron - fantasy game consoles

Art

• Modo - 3D modeling

• Affinity Photo + Affinity Designer - These have turned into truly awesome tools. Wouldn’t switch back to PS for anything!

• Substance Painter - I’m still on the Allegorithmic version, because f*** Adobe and their subscription model.

• ZBrushCore - don’t use it a lot, but love it when I do. Looks like Maxon scrapped the perpetual license for ZBrushCore. 😟

Audio

• ⏺️ Bitwig Studio - my favourite DAW, does Ableton-style grids just as well as track-recording.

• 🥁 EZDrummer - simple and easy to get something going, fantastic when you plug in a digital drumkit

• 〰️ Valhalla VintageVerb / Delay - everyone needs reverb / delay

• 🎸 Guitar Rig, ToneHub, Helix Native as virtual amps, all the Evolution plugins are great virtual guitars, and so are all the AmpleSound plugins!

• 🎻 EW Hollywood Orchestra Opus Ed. - all the classic orchestral instruments (strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion) you need. Nucleus is great as well and has a Lite version.

• 🎹 Phaseplant - superb modular synth playground

General

• Notion - best note-taking app (though I’m watching AnyType develop with great interest!)

News and stuff

• Manning has some decent books about software development. And I quite like the Manning liveBook feature.

• Pakt is giving away a free ebook every day - if you stay around for a looooong time maybe you’ll eventually get one you’ll actually want to read. 😉

• I quit X(Twitter) and use Mastodon instead. - No ads, fewer crazy people.

• Daring Fireball

• NY Times

• List WIP - which sites do you check every day?

Favourite Tabletop Games

• Arkham Horror - The Card Game - Deckbuilding + endless misery. It’s glorious!

• Moonrakers: Titan Edition - Negotiate like there’s no tomorrow

• Final Girl / Hostage Negotiator - my favourite solo games

• Carcassonne - a classic! Still interesting after 20 years of playing it.

• Go - huh, now where do I go if I already called the last game a “classic” 😬

• Stratego - 2-player battle of the minds; more than stood the test of time for me.

• Kiri-ai: The Duel - taking rock/paper/scissors to the next level

• Thousand Year Old Vampire - A solo journaling game that helps you explore your dark side, should you want to do that.

Favourite Computer Games

• Shadow of the Colossus - best world-building ever, love it so much!

• Jagged Alliance 2 & 3 - Sic semper tyrannis!

• Uplink - hacking with permadeath

• Stardew Valley / Minecraft / Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - Multiplayer with the kids

• Kerbal Space Program - that feeling when you first manage to dock to your space station…

• Fez - it’s a work of art

• Spintires / MudRunner / SnowRunner - most fun I’ve ever had stuck in the mud

• Civilization II - enough said

• Rocksmith 2014 - rocks!

• Elden Ring - epic. about the experience

Favourite Books

• 🔪 Brenner Series (Wolf Haas) - Contemporary Austrian Crime at it’s best. But I don’t imagine it will translate well. Learn German, might be worth it for this glorious series of books!

• 🧠 The God Delusion (Dawkins), God is not Great (Hitchens) - Essential Atheist reading.

• 📗 Old Man’s War Series (John Scalzi) - Good Sci-Fi

• 🛰️ Bobbiverse Series (Dennis E. Taylor) - Maybe even better Sci-Fi…

• 🚀 The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Becky Chambers) - Sci-Fi from a fresh new perspective

• 🧺 Roadside Picknick (Strugatsky Brothers) - beautiful Sci-Fi from the 1970s

• 🎣 The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) - A fisherman and a fish - and yet it’s so much more than that.

• ☁️ Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (Gabriel García Márquez) - The beauty of sadness

• ✖️ Gödel, Escher, Bach (Douglas R. Hofstadter) - A mindbendingly clever book. And one day I’ll finish it!

Favourite Music

• Pixies - Surfer Rosa - Raw Perfection

• Weakerthans - Left and Leaving - Poetic, smart, pleasant

• Songs Ohia - Axxess & Ace - Some of the saddest songs ever written

• Magnolia Electric Co - Josephine - Not about Napoleon’s lover after all. Turns out Jason Molina just knew a girl called Josephine. Whatever. Still great.

• Weezer - Pinkerton - Raw Feelings. Too bad they split up after this and never reunited. No, they did not.

• The Beths - Expert in a Dying Field - some of the best music coming out of New Zealand right now

• Beulah - When Your Heartstrings Break - won my heart

• Bloom o5 - Lonesome Solar Surfer - “In your mirror” is one of my favourite songs

• Slut - Nothing will go wrong - Easy to Love indeed

• Element of Crime - Essentials - German songwriting at its best