e537 — Reading, Listening & Building Together

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guitar chord
Photo by Scott Gruber on Unsplash

Published 4 January 2026

e537 with Michael M and Andy – ringing in the new year with the amazing power of music to move and heal, LEGO and retro builds and a whole lot more.

Andy, Michael and Michael would like to wish all of our listeners a very happy 2026!

Michael M and Andy start off 2026 on a good note – or perhaps better said – a series of good notes.  Michael shares some of his vacation reading, beginning with the book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel Levitin.  In this book, Levitin highlights the power of music to move and heal, and provides a Linktree to listen to the songs featured in the book, which is included in the show notes below.  One particular example from the book was the Ella Fitzgerald recording of Mack the Knife in Berlin, and the magic she created in the moment when she forgot the lyrics.

Andy highlights an amazing musical creation moment with Jacob Collier’s improvisation with the National Symphony Orchestra.  This reminded Michael of Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander’s book, Art of Possibility, and maestro Zander’s TED talk on the power of classical music.  Michael also brought up David Byrne’s book, How Music Works, and his learning in Puerto Rico on how dancers conduct the musicians as they perform together.

Byrne discussed mixtapes in his book, and the modern equivalent of them are the playlist, which is exactly what Levitin’s Linktree leads to.  Michael created a mixtape to express musically what he was trying to say in words for his NCSSM convocation speech at the start of the 2025-26 school year.  Andy shares a couple of intriguing ways to create music through retro devices and common household products – all of these are in the links below.

Moving to the building part of the episode, Andy and Michael start off with LEGO, and this is about to be a banner year for the company with so many new sets coming on the market.  There’s a new LEGO Icons building, which has in it a music store and includes a sousaphone player minifig.  The cohosts touch on the Star Trek Enterprise set which was also just launched, which includes a minifig of Commander Riker with his trombone.  Andy describes the awesomeness that is the LEGO GameBoy with the inventive buttons on the device, and the team then touch on a couple of retro consoles such as the Commodore 64 reboot.

The team wraps up this episode with a mention of Andy’s grumpiness on the year end Tech Grumps podcast.

What music has inspired you in 2025?  What builds (LEGO, retro or otherwise) are you planning for 2026?   Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Reading

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel J Levitin

Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Die Driegroschenoper – listen to the “Moritat von Mackie Messer” excerpt sung by Bertholt Brecht in the Featured Audio & Video section

Games at Work e485: Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar (for flow, and of course Barbara’s Rhabarberbar)

Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander’s TED talk: The transformative power of classical music

Games at Work e9: Reality is Broken (for Jane McGongial’s book, and Benjamin Zander’s Ode to Joy)

How Music Works by David Byrne

Listening

Wikipedia article: Mixtape

Listen to the songs featured in A Secret Chord – https://linktr.ee/secretchord

Michael M’s Apple Music Mixtape for NCSSM’s convocation

Michael M’s Spotify Mixtape for NCSSM’s convocation

Making of Boléro by Linus A Kesson

Building LEGO and more

LEGO Icons Shopping Street #11371, with sousaphone musician (see picture 13 in photo gallery)

LEGO Icons Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D™ #10356 with trombone player Commander Riker

minifigs.me 

LEGO Gameboy #70246 build and additional new Retro Console #31380

Wired article: Review: Commodore 64 Ultimate

The Lost Outpost blog post: Retro-tastic!

Other Stranger Things

Woe Industries game 

TechGrumps 3.3.5: – Bless The TechGrumps (Special holiday special) 

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

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e536 — Can we skip all AI this time?

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Photo by Alexander Grigoryev on Unsplash

Published 22 December 2025

e536 with Andy, Michael R, and guest host newly-retired Ian “Epredator” Hughes – a dive into gaming in 2025, retro computing and games, how to fix old paintings, and what’s coming to the public domain on January 1st.

The show kicks off with a number of gaming topics, discussing what the hosts have been playing lately, including the results of the Steam Replay for 2025. There’s also a chat about Commodore (joysticks, and the new Commodore 64 Ultimate), ZX Spectrum, and other retro machines. Netflix has been making acquisitions in the gaming space, where will they lead?

Michael is fascinated by the process of restoring old paintings; Andy and Ian have seen a lot more of this on TV in the UK!

In the wrap, the hosts cover an incident of apparent smart glasses-induced rage on the subway; and briefly talk about what’s coming into the Public Domain on January 1st 2026.

Wishing all our listeners a happy and peaceful break to close out 2025, and we’ll be back with new episodes in 2026.

Selected Links

Gaming

Makers

Media

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e535 — The Poetry of DOOM

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Writing poetry on a typewriter
Photo by David Klein on Unsplash

Published 15 December 2025

e535 with Michael M and Andy – adversarial poetry to jailbreak LLMs, iFixit’s FixBot, power of digital twins, putting the breaks on Rewind, Nintendo Virtual Boy and a whole lot more.

Michael M and Andy start things off with a most intriguing concept – adversarial poetry.  By using ‘memetic language’, researchers formulated prompts with imagery and metaphor instead of direct operational phrasing to trick LLMs into providing unsafe responses.  Michael makes the point that AI prompts are becoming more and more like spells or incantations.  See the show notes below for a link to the paper for any budding AI poet laureate wannabes.  Perhaps Jabberwocky can be used in a snicker snack way.  

Switching to another AI use case, Andy and Michael discuss the iFixit FixBot.  The FixBot provides expert advice and guidance for repairs, by talking to the human who likely needs both hands to effect the repair.  
Next up are a couple of stories on digital twins, and how they leverage game technology.  By taking sufficient data points to create a digital twin, multiple attempts can be made virtually to see the improvement before applying the capability to the non-digital twin.  Andy is reminded of an article that outlines the affinity between the metaverse and digital twin concepts.  Nvidia has a concept of this in their Omniverse capability.  Another example of a digital twin with a game overlay is the Job Simulator Game.  This game is written as a 2050 historical virtual reality environment allowing the player to experience what it was like to have a job in 2020.  This fun VR historical reenactment experience is one of the stories that Tobi Lütke discussed in his recent interview with the Acquired team.

Staying on the VR simulation theme, Andy and Michael take a look at the Rats Play Doom game which trains rats in an immersive way to play Doom.  

In the last section of the episode, the team takes a look at some metaverse news.  Meta has acquired limitless.ai and is shutting down Rewind on the Mac, and is also shifting more investment from the metaverse to AI.  Wrapping up the episode, Michael and Andy look at the Nintendo Virtual Boy and Xteink 4.

What poetry would you write to prompt an LLM? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

AI

PC Gamer article: Poets are now cybersecurity threats: Researchers used ‘adversarial poetry’ to trick AI into ignoring its safety guard rails and it worked 62% of the time

arXiv paper: Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models

Gilbert & Sullivan: Hail Poetry

The Verge article: iFixit’s FixBot helps with repairs ‘the way a master technician would’

iFixit: Introducing FixBot: We Built an AI That Actually Knows How to Fix Things

Digital Twins

ComputerWorld article: Digital twin tech is a double-edged sword

ComputerWorld article: ‘Digital twin’ tech is twice as great as the metaverse

Nvidia Omniverse

Job Simulator Game

acquired.fm AC2 interview: How to Live in Everyone Else’s Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)

Games at Work e490: Codename – “Amelia” (for digital twins)

Doom

Reddit post: Open-source VR framework for training rats to play DOOM

Rats Play Doom

Metaverse

9 to 5 Mac article: Rewind Mac app shutting down following Meta’s acquisition of Limitless

limitless.ai 

WSJ article: Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away From the Metaverse

Retrododo article: Virtual Boy Accessory For Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 Is Available For Pre-Order

My Nintendo Store: Virtual Boy for Nintendo Switch 2/Nintendo Switch

Tech

The Verge article: This tiny magnetic e-reader sticks to the back of your iPhone

Xteink x4

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

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e534 — Hiding in Plain Sight

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facade of the Musée du Louvre
Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

Published 24 November 2025

e534 with Michael, Andy and Michael – AI and ML training data, camouflage, ppen source Zork, Deadpool VR, NPH movies and a whole lot more.

Michael, Andy and Michael start things off with with an intriguing AI analysis of the heist from the Louvre.  The Ars Technica article takes the examples of mathematical machine learning and human psychology to show how both were defeated what was considered to be ordinary versus suspicious.  This is a terrific reminder on the importance of the training data sets used for AI models and how the “performance of normality became the perfect camouflage”.  Michael R highlights the On Intelligence book, and Michael M brings up visual pattern recognition of the human form which ghillie suits help disguise.

Switching to a hackster.io article, the die is cast – or rather the die is 3d printed.  Andy shares his thoughts on this bluetooth enabled die, and mentions how dice have featured prominently in the the podcast over the years.  E132 from 2016 appears to be the earliest reference to dice in the show notes.

Next up is Microsoft’s announcement to open source the Zork family of text based adventure games from Infocom.  Zork is another favorite of the podcast, and e78 from 2014 is the earliest reference!  Then the team discusses the Deadpool VR game.  The Kotaku article mentions that  Neil Patrick Harris does the Deadpool voice acting in the game.  This leads the cohosts down the rabbit hole of NPH acting with a number of movies and TV shows.

Oh, and the reason for the “I don’t want a McRib” part of the show title was because the Kotaku article kept serving up McDonalds McRib ads to Michael M, while Michael R with his PiHole does not get such ads.

What is your favorite NPH movie or tv show?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

AI

Ars Technica article: How Louvre thieves exploited human psychology to avoid suspicion—and what it reveals about AI

Wikipedia article: On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines by Jeff Hawkins

IMDb: Now You See Me: Now You Don’t 2025 movie

Wikipedia article: Ghillie Suit

Bluetooth Dice

hackter.io article: Travis Bumgarner’s Dice of Sending Are Bluetooth-Connected Dice for Fairer Digital Roleplays

Games at Work e132: Wake Up! (For earliest description of dice)

Games and NPH

The Verge article: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

Games at Work e78: The Show is Already in Progress (for earliest reference to Zork)

Kotaku article: Deadpool VR Is A Game For Deadpool Fans And Nobody Else

marvel.Fandom.com : Wade Wilson (Earth-616)

IMDb: A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas

IMDb: Starship Troopers

IMDb: Doogie Howser, M.D.

IMDb: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:22 — 41.0MB) | Embed

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