Happy retirement, @planet4589.bsky.social ! I've always been in awe of your work and look forward to seeing what comes next. I hope you'll be able to visit us in Cambridge (UK) before long!

I'd be curious to know more about how Superior developed the loading screens for BBC games. Doing low-res four-colour art must have been a special skill, yet they always looked great. Who did this, and with what tools?

Nice! I made a labeled version of a similar animation here: in-the-sky.org/news/eclipse...

I would have thought being an ex-FRS would look pretty awesome on your CV. Also: how often do professors with FRSes ever need to write a CV?

Thanks... it took me a while to figure out who you were referring to. Their bio is weird but not totally terrible; you have to go through all the individual CVs to find the really exciting paragraph...

3/3 As an advocate of open-source software, I have published some of the charting software I wrote to generate the charts on GitHub (though the charts in the books received a lot of tidying-up by hand): github.com/dcf21/star-c...

2/3 Whilst working on this, I was saddened to learn of the death of Storm Dunlop in January. The annual Guides were originally started by Storm and Wil Tirion many years ago, and now both the original authors are gone. I hope that in taking it over, we have done justice to the series.

Yes! The photo is taken underneath the Swedish end in Malmö. The Copenhagen end is on the horizon.

@giobusso.bsky.social Is this bridge big enough for you?

That's super interesting, thanks! Did the timings work unmodified on the Master? I've always assumed Superior must have had to do a heck of a lot of testing on all the Acorn hardware variants.

I misspent some of my teenage years reverse-engineering Beeb games to see how they worked, and recall some of yours had really fun encryption (I recall self-modifying EORs). I always wondered why? Presumably it didn't prevent piracy - cloning tapes was easy. Was it to stop people stealing your code?

Presumably when the BBC was released in the US, Acornsoft had to be a bit careful about what software they offered the US market? I'm a bit surprised Superior even re-released Snapper on Play It Again Sam 7, seemingly without fear of litigation.

Absolutely agree! I think we don't worry enough about the PhD 'rite of passage'. So much depends on a good supervisor, and I can think of some really bright students who've quit after 1-2 yrs. I'd say many of the most delivery-focussed people in PLATO have spent time outside academia. :-)

Long ago, I used to make cakes by melting the butter, and the sponge always came out greasy. And so you and KT told me not to do that, and then the cakes were much fluffier. I always wondered what chemistry is going on there...

If I split my time between my flat and my partner's, should I calculate the time-averaged number of cheese graters in my current abode, together with standard deviation?

I feel like I saw the future working in Sweden, where there are basically no titles for anyone. But at times it felt deeply weird. For example, I couldn't quite bring myself to start a job application "Dear [first name]", and so wrote "Dear Prof X" despite knowing no Swedish person would write that.