Favourites of June 2026

The beginning of this month marks the official end of my own company. After just two years of establishing and owning Brain Baking BV, the notary ended it. There have been no professional activities related to the company since I switched back to education in December so for me it made little sense to keep that door open only for the monthly administrative costs to pile up. I hope to build a bit more stability this time around, both on personal and professional level. My statute as lecturer has been extended for a year: so far, so good!

Previous month: May 2026.

Games I’ve played

A few very short ones and one quite big one that I ended up enjoying very much.

• The Aching—a Sierra On-Line-like adventure game weighing less than 1 MB that runs on any 8086 machine. It also happens to be good, even though it feels more like an introduction of this horrified world.
• Serious Sam: The First Encounter—I started replaying this two years ago and finally pushed forward a bit more. After endless complete freezes of my Win98 machine I gave up. AAAAAHHHHHH boom. I remember liking this a lot more: it’s…. bland?
• Dread Delusion—A weird looking game that I was drawn to the first time I laid eyes on screenshots a few years ago. I remembered it and felt the time was right to crack this one open. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in the last years. I recorded a playthrough log to convince you to drop everything and go play it as well!
• Lucy Dreaming—A lovely classic nineties adventure game that’s perhaps playing it too safe to try to be an homage to Monkey et al.? I still enjoyed myself but the abrupt ending was a bit of a letdown.

DreadXP, the developers behind Dread Delusion, also recorded dev diaries on YouTube:

Selected (blog) posts

• Speaking of The Aching, the developer explains their philosophy behind the Gorgon Engine.
• Interestingly, Gorgon is designed to be small and able to run on older original hardware, while new adventure games that look and feel old like The Telwynium are made with PowerQuest for Unity and require hundreds of megabytes. Nobody really cares, but I do.
• This ACM paper on a conceptual model for ownership types in Rust sheds new light on how the borrow checker works from an educational point of view.
• More Rust-y stuff—even though I have yet to touch the language—Michael Neumann investigated how long it takes to compile Rust from source compared to other languages. Hint: looooooonnnnggg. As in lonngggggggggg.
• James also printed his blog in book form years before I did! He selected all coffee-related articles to create a lovely personal caffeinated hardcover.
• Games That I Missed documents progress on their pinball machine projects. That old electronic stuff inside the machines is mesmerising.
• Phil Gyford laboriously kept track of how much money he spent each year on music for the past 30 years (via ruk.ca)
• In a timely manner, Miss Booleana wrote about Claire Dederer’s Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People?. I asked myself the same question recently and added the book to my toread list.
• Andrew Webster publishes a Great Truth on The Verge: The Nintendo DS is still the best gaming handheld for travel. Yup.
• Another paper that confirms LLM-driven gender bias in citations in academic work.
• James Pennebaker confirms what I’ve been thinking and feeling: expressive writing can influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The link is a past event but a good starting point to find publications by Pennebaker.
• Chris Kirk-Nielsen begs us to start playing indie games. Stop that Assassin’s Creed nonsense: scroll up and watch the Dread Delusion dev diary instead!
• Nic tringali sometimes feels the creative drudgery. A surprise ending is in it for you if you decide to read it.
• Jeff Gerstmann finally decided to apply Rigorous Science (TM) to compile an exhaustive (!!) list of the best NES games ever released in USA. Number one is NOT Mario nor Zelda!
• I particularly enjoyed Erik Hane’s piece in Typebar Magazine on fandom strain and the IP illness killing Magic: the Gathering. The magazine really is “An interesting thing to read on the internet”, as their footer claims.
• In a post called Cultures of making and relating, Konrad Hinsen brings the recent Cultures of Programming book our attention. It’s been an open browser tab ever since.

Other random links

• Memray looks like an interesting memory profiler for Python, if I ever would need one.
• GentleOS is a friendly hobby OS for 32-bit PCs.
• The Corporate EU Observatory revealed that Big Tech invested almost 50% more in lobbying throwaway money (€382 mil!) compared to 2020.
• Diablo II has a new class: the Warlock. I really wish it was playable without the remaster though.
• Warp Point is a curated list of indie video game websites and Jefklak’s Codex is in it.

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