Sorry deleted something flippant. I have no clue; but, ink, I suppose

What’s that thing - you ship a game at exactly the moment when you finally figure out how to make it

Well, y’know. Tools are good but fluency is better, and you can get fluent in ANYTHING, and you clearly have at this point

I’ve started making spreadsheets that export ink database functions and tbf that’s quite useful

People sometimes request json data support and when I point out that a database function literally *is* json data with a tiny bit of extra syntax they don’t agree. It must be a programmer distinction of which I am not worthy

For mouthfeel I like “washing“. For sheer arcane power I like “modulo”, with “apropos” a close second.

To be fair I do this a lot in the ink too; we externalise the function to a faster version in code but - as far as I’m aware, it’s string matching. (Also our new thing has a string based database. Guess how THAT works)

Type Help

Hang-gliding

No

Humans. I had a good look too but that’s all I’ve got

Tiddlywinks

Thank you. At the time I think they were between renovations or something, nothing was labelled. It’s a very organised exhibition space now but I can’t remember if the bombe replica you can watch in action looks the same as what I saw. I rather think it doesn’t? The current one seems … organised

But now, looking back, I can see it clearly. I wish I'd taken a photo! But I'm not even sure I had a camera phone back then. And maybe I'm remembering it wrong. But I don't think I am, because when I saw that code again in a bridge pad, I recognised it. TR49.

I think I noticed it because I was thinking about movies, and movie-making, and it reminded my of the monolith in 2001. So I gave it a closer look. In the corner of the photograph - almost cut-off by the frame - was a mark in pen. I didn't think anything of it at the time, of course.

In between takes and lunch, I went exploring, and found a hut full of photographs. Like I say, I don't know if it was material for the film or archival. There were no signs - also no barriers. One photograph caught my eye: it was a group of men and women around a complex-looking machine.

Anyway, that was the first time I'd been to Bletchey, ever. There's quite a fancy museum there now, but then it was just mouldering huts. The Bombe (or a replica? I'm actually not sure) was in a leaky building. It was hard to tell what was original and what had been built for the film, anyway.

They hired me. (I was very cheap, and knew someone on the production staff.) There's a shot of a notebook in the movie -- I can't find a still of it now, but it's there, and it's in my handwriting (my very best handwriting, which is almost legible). Benedict, incidentally, is really nice.

The reason I was at Bletchley was unusual. I was there working on a movie - The Imitation Game, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing. He had, apparently, requested a mathematician to talk to, to help him play the character better -- and they wanted some mathematics for a notebook.