Last Friday was graduation day! At an excellent venue, the Wacom Experience Center at Düsseldorf Medienhafen, our game design Class of 2019 received their freshly minted B.Sc. diplomas in the course of an acutely enjoyable ceremony. While this class had started out in October 2019, my first lecture fell into their second term, and by then COVID-19 was already in full swing. Thus, while many of them had attended our end-of-term presentations and subsequent celebration five weeks ago, and I’d met others during oral exam week, there were still one or two students I’d never met outside of Discord or Zoom! After the ceremony, we had dinner at Space Burger’s, our long-standing traditional Duesseldorf Altstadt venue for hungry game design students and faculty, and then went to have drinks. Cocktails, to be specific. Also, Tequila shots. [dolly-out / sound fade-out]

Contrary to last week’s New Week’s resolution, I was once again too focused on the latest LLM developments to publish anything at my between drafts and Voidpunk blogs. Shame on me. At just drafts, you’ll find a post on atrocious industry practices, Levi’s to Use AI-Generated Models; three posts on #AIHype, Pausing the AI Hype, An Open Letter Response, and Adam Ruins Everything; and two posts about refreshingly unhypey takes by Bill Gates on “AI/AGI” and “Autonomous Driving.” Then, I uploaded a new album to Flickr with 20 shots I took in Namsangol Hanok Village in Seoul, South Korea, and there are my daily vintage-style squaries at Pixelfed and fresh Instagram entries at betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.

For the Sunday funnies, I decided we didn’t have enough cats lately. Thus, enjoy this kitteh special from last week’s #Caturday on Mastodon: cats where they shouldn’t be, where they shouldn’t be either, and where they display their most regal behavior. Enjoy!

J.