"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

What magic smells like.

"Oddly, it feels a bit weird to watch the videos from inside MAST. There’s something about the combination of these being taken in the visible light spectrum inside a reactor, at super high speeds, with a CCTV-like aesthetic, makes me feel like I shouldn’t be able to observe what’s going on. Somehow reams of sensor data is fine, but watching the actual reaction feels… wrong. Like you’re looking into the soul of something amazing."

"High time resolution video of a MAST plasma showing the L-H transition (transition from low to high quality confinement) and ELMs (a form of instability in the plasma)." Wow. And: this is visible-light spectrum. Double-wow.

"Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines." yes yes yes a thousand times yes (the most wonderful sentence in James' write-up of a non-conference I didn't attend).

"It still amazes me that with the Practical Application of Codes and Pictures, 1145 lines of gobbledegook and 554KB of compressed images can be turned into this." Making stuff is awesome.

"While the two games have similarities, the consensus is that the collective poker success results more from the experience competition provides than the tactics and skill set utilized in 'Magic.'" Successful Magic: The Gathering players are moving over to professional poker. I particularly liked: '"I never want to play poker in my free time. 'Magic' you can. You can't make a living at 'M:TG,' but it's just the more enjoyable game.""

This isn't helping my suspicions that Melodyne is some kind of dark magic. Incredible.

People love mysteries and myths so much that they create them when an explanation seems too simple or straightforward.