Favourites of April 2026

It’s May! What happened? This weekend was unusually hot! What happened? Everyone knows but no-one admits or cares… Anyway, welcome to another month of 2026. I like May. It’s got a lot of national holidays. It signals the start of lots of great local food: strawberries in abundance, a strong asparagus month that you should enjoy while it lasts as in June the season is usually over, and we already ate some fresh French artichokes. It’s getting warmer but not as scorching as some of the coming months (although given the start of this month, that remains to be seen). But most of all: the end of May usually indicates the beginning of the exam period, which for me as an examiner instead of student is always interesting. Let’s light a candle and pray for not too many LLM-only submissions.

Previous month: March 2026.

Games I’ve played

A miracle happened: I made some time to get back into gaming—and writing about games.

• I finally got to the Kirby spin-offs on the Game Boy: Kirby’s Pinball Land, Kirby’s Block Ball, and Kirby’s Star Stacker. They’re all really good!
• But then Robert and a GOG discount pushed me to finally try out The Drifter. What a thrill. I loved every minute of it. If you like gritty pixelated adventure games, you can’t miss this.
• After being turned off by the bad technical performance of Ruffy and the Riverside on the Nintendo Switch, I switched gears to other games. I picked it up and finished it. It’s an OK N64-inspired collect-a-thon that should be enjoyed on PC instead.

In May, we’re finally digging into UFO 50, in chronological order. If we play one a week we might finish in May 2027… So far, the first entry already is a home run.

Selected (blog) posts

• Speaking of Robert, his /concerts slash page is very cool: it contains scans of all concert tickets he ever went to.
• Kenneth Reitz tells us to separate our identity from our work/projects, otherwise bad things happen (via Roy Tang).
• Stefano Marinelli explains why he loves FreeBSD. The Power To Serve conveys such as strong message, its almost convincing me to jump ship! Until I read about the laptop gap. This year huh.
• Zakhary Kaplan stole the GBC logo from a ROM and made a cool web logo from it.
• Cal Newport’s In Defense of Thinking hits yet another nail on the head.
• Forrest’s essay On Pulling The Master Sword links Link’s (ha!) N64 behaviour to our capitalistic world. It’s a very long essay but well worth your time if you can stomach a game rant, some swearing, and philosophical questions about life and society.
• Drakenvlieg manages to pull more students into literature using journaling (in Dutch).
• Juhis shares his favourite two-player board games. Hive (pocket) is on the list!
• Chris Smith rates the movies he watched. I’m always interested in the rating systems other people employ when they do something like this.
• I liked blinry’s Do It Yourself soft drinks experiment. Translucent coke looks weird!
• Night’s Ham Stock examines the ending story of SKALD the video game I played in 2024. It was great but I couldn’t make sense of the ending. Now I still can’t…
• Kain Klarden’s Gex Trilogy review saved me from throwing money at Limited Run Games. Again.
• It Fits On A Floppy is a strong manifesto for small software that more developers should read and take heart.
• Eli (Oatmeal) re-iterates something very important: “choose to truly care about something.” But then he goes much further. I need to re-read this a couple of times and let it sink in.
• It was also Eli who pointed out the existence of picoSYNTH.
• Richard Moss, the author known for The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is writing a book on Age of Empires!
• Ruben Schade’s enthusiasm for the Commodore 64 knows no boundaries. The newly released C64 Ultimate looks very enticing, but where to put all these things?
• Amelia’s little blog website/host got hammered by AI bots. It’s yet another infuriating story but the visualisation part is very cool.

Other random links

• There’s an interesting upcoming documentary on Clojure the programming language that might be worth checking out.
• https://www.codingfont.com/ is a cool way to help pick a monospaced editing font. I’m using JetBrains Mono for now.
• Did you know Windows was released for the Game Boy:

• I didn’t know palm rejection was a thing on Linux/KDE.
• The Underkeep Steam demo looks very promising; something to keep close tabs on!
• I don’t know what this is, but Listography looks like a lot of fun. I happen to like lists so I should be liking this.
• Isowulf is a very cool isometric perspective Wolfenstein 3D mod.
• You can build retro games using WebAssembly with https://wasm4.org/
• I love the GoodEnough guestbook that even used to print the drawn images on thermal paper!
• Thomas Lehmann, the designer of one of my favourite card games ever Race for the Galaxy, took the deck building genre for another spin. The result is Dark Pact. Needless to say, it’s on my list.

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