Books

Programming

• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Where the Wizards Stay Up Late
• Soul of a New Machine
• Nine Algorithms That Changed The Future
• The Elements of Computing Systems
• The C Programming Language, Kernighan & Ritchie.
  This is The Real Book for those in software development.

Persuasion

• Impossible to Ignore, Carmen Simon
• Influence, Robert Cialdini Ph.D.
• Pre-Suasion, Robert Cialdini Ph.D.
• Salt Sugar Fat, Michael Moss
• The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

Games

• Earthbound
• Firewatch
• Hylics
• Omori
• OneShot
• Outer Wilds
• Rhythm Heaven
• Sky: Children of the Light
• Undertale

• The Legend of Zelda

• If you’re down for a weird time, Cruelty Squad

Music

• SiIvagunner (i’m sorry)

Musicals

• Next to Normal
• Wicked

Movies

• Spirited Away

Software

I strongly encourage the use of free and open source softwares. Most of those involved in my creative process, development workflow, or anything else I do are listed here.

Audio, Music

• Lilypond
• Tenacity

Video

• Kdenlive
• Openshot
• Blender

Image

• Gimp

Text

• Vim

Graveyard

The graveyard has discussion of any media I once enjoyed, or software I previously used, but would no longer recommend to others. There are a variety of reasons for my opinion on something to change like this; for software, it often happens due to the entity controlling the software changing properties of the software for the worse.

Software

I would have listed Audacity here. After Muse Group acquired Audacity, Muse Group altered the privacy policy for Audacity to include a extreme degree of permission for capturing your data. I have no issue with telemetry; open source projects without opt-in telemetry struggle to identify some kinds of issues with their tool, such as those which an end user glosses over by restarting the program and never reports. Audacity’s privacy policy changes are not exclusively for telemetry, and arguably not for telemetry at all. See here for more information and discussion.

For the same reason as Audacity, I cannot recommend MuseScore for its apparent malicious privacy policy and the antagonistic behavior of Muse Group.

Aseprite is a quality piece of software that became proprietary in mid 2016. Aseprite’s source code is still publically available, but it was formerly GPL and is no longer. Instead, there’s Libresprite, a fork of Aseprite from its last version before becoming proprietary.