August was my summer vacation month. Therefore I had more time on my hand, some of which had been utterly wasted. In general, though, I think I had a good month of new activities, a weekend in Tuscany, friendly human interactions, and a good chunk of consumed media (I put a big dent in my extra-large-neverending watch/read/playlist).

I’ve also finally updated this blog with an extensive article. The funny thing is that it was not any of my “currently in draft” articles. Instead, I tried to intervene in a bit of drama between the artist community, the recent progress of Computational Creativity, and the state of the art in “AI-Generated Images.” So if you don’t know what I am talking about, but if you like AI, are an artist, or simply want a freakout-free guide to “AI Artists,” you are the perfect audience for my article.

Every time a new month begins, I start looking for something different to do. Something that would create a memorable milestone in the journey of life. Unfortunately, when I reach the end of the month, I realize that I often fail at this simple goal. It is not easy to break the routine and create something memorable every 30 days.

But July was not one of those months. In fact, when it started, I was sitting at a beach bar in Attica, Greece, looking at the moon reflecting on the nigh sea after the first day of the company retreat (to be precise, the first retreat after the pandemic pause).

Hey, everyone. As you know, I am not particularly present recently (I need to find out how to handle this blog while my interests spread out on non-technical stuff, but this is something for another time).

However, I am back with an announcement: I have recently published the fifth edition of Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming.

Not only have I updated the book for Unity 2022, but the book is also a massive improvement over the last edition in terms of code quality and consistency (and I really need to thank Kazimieras Mikelis for the extensive and detailed review). Moreover, I added a chapter on Procedural Content Generation because it is my main interest, of course.

Last year was an excellent year for reading. I’ve read 31 books, totaling almost 10,000 pages: 17 fiction books (way more than last year), 13 non-fiction (as a surprise, because I usually read non-fiction faster), and one graphic novel. Some books were unbelievable literary mistakes. Others were absolute gems that I’ll keep in my mind and heart (it is wise for the Chinese to have a single word for both: 心).

With this new year, let’s try a new format. Marginalia will be a series in which I’ll share notes and comments on interesting books I read. The name is directly inspired by the old word indicating the small notes on the margins of books.

It will be a chance to discuss my readings without the need to write a full-fledged article. I hope it will be interesting as a review of the book or as a discussion starter. So, let’s start.

The new edition of Unity Game Optimization is finally out! I already announced that in my December monthly update, but I think it is worth to spend a bit more words on it.

Some time ago I found on my grandma’s house an old Italian book on cryptography from 1897. Why a 120 years old book on cryptography was on my grandma house, is a mystery. I’d like to think that some grand-grand-parent was a late 19th century hacker. Anyway.

The book title is “Crittografia ossia l’arte di cifrare e decifrare le corrispondenze segrete” of Count Luigi Gioppi of Turkheim.

Well, I don’t know if this book is hard to find. In any way, I decided to take a photo of every page to share and preserve this book. The book is very old and some page is ruined, sorry if the quality of the photo is not optimal. I’ve done my best for not destroying the book in the process. :) I will release the photo one chapter at the time. Keep this page in the bookmark.