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Welcome to this installment of Pixel Perfect Picks. Here I'm sharing something that I heard, read, and saw. You can subscribe to this newsletter here. I'm additionally publishing a more extended essay about software development, design, and freelancing every month.

The Whisper Man Movie, feels like a very solid end-of-summer pick. Adapted from Alex North’s novel, it follows a widowed crime writer whose son is abducted and whose estranged father once caught the serial killer at the centre of the case. Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, and Michelle Monaghan make for a surprisingly strong lineup, and the premise has exactly the kind of unsettling energy I’m always vulnerable to.

A post from Gabriel Santos about a free Claude prompting walkthrough points to the useful, unglamorous layer of working well with an agent: project instructions, memory shortcuts, parallel sessions, and repeatable prompting patterns. The linked video is 28 minutes long, so this is less a grand theory of prompting than a compact practical rabbit hole. It is a good reminder that the quality of an AI workflow often comes down to the small systems around the model, not one perfect prompt. Worth saving for the next time a workflow starts feeling unnecessarily manual.

The Hugonauts’ ranking of the 2026 Hugo Award nominees is a nice alternative to simply reading a nominees list and hoping for the best. Cody Troyer and Brent Gayford work from worst to best through this year’s six nominated novels, then bring in books they think deserved more attention. The conversation gets specific about what makes a series opener satisfying, why a premise lands or doesn’t, and which books are genuinely worth the time. A useful starting point if you’re looking for the next sci-fi or fantasy book to disappear into.

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-Marvin