Ask Iwata by Satoru Iwata

This book is a collection of thoughts, insights, and “words of wisdom” from the late Nintendo president. The book goes through his career, sharing relevant insights along the way about management, leadership, and working with others. This one is essential reading for anyone who has an interest not just in game development, but I feel creative collaboration in general.

I first read this one back in 2021, and just re-read it a week ago. I find it more applicable each and every day, and have kept things he’s talked about in my brain since the first time I read ‘em. 

Early in the book it goes into his gifted skills in programming. How does he then become the president of HAL, then Nintendo? I think one of the main points the book makes, is Iwata’s thoughtfulness with collaboration and working with others.

Becoming a programmer doesn’t make you business savvy or a talented leader. I believe being a programmer that had his mind open to the ways others work, think, and create enabled Iwata to lead Nintendo into their successes in the 2000s, and pushing to create not just for the kind of person playing games currently (the GAMER), but the people who could be playing games for the first time ever. The person who hasn’t fallen in love with gaming, yet. 

Make Something Wonderful by Steve Jobs

History of Steve Jobs time at Apple, Pixar, NeXT, and his own upbringing. A bit of a biography of Steve + Apple via a documented collection of interviews, writings, emails (to others, and himself), and presentations he’s made. The throughline is his optimism for technology, collaboration, leadership/vision, and most importantly, creativity and artful intent.

In another age, Steve believed, the people on the Macintosh team would have been writers, musicians, or artists. “The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter,” he said. He called their work a form of love and their product “a computer for the rest of us,” with a mouse as well as arrow keys, desktop icons instead of programming commands, and, at startup, instead of a blinking cursor: a smile. Macintosh also represented the first time Steve led a team developing a product that he believed had changed the world. “It ushered in a revolution,” Steve recalled twenty-three years later, during the rollout of another world-changing innovation: the iPhone. “I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together, and we said, ‘Every computer is going to work this way. You can’t argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can’t argue about it anymore.’”

It could be easy to dismiss the things Steve Jobs may have done or pushed for, maybe you saw him as just a salesman, or think he just took credit for others inventions/ideas! I think this book deeply goes into the profound respect Steve Jobs had for the future of technology and where it could go with Apple’s input, through his entire life. There’s no limit to what you can contribute into the world. We would be living in a different world without the impact of the iPhone, Macintosh, Apple II, Pixar, etc. We live in a world where Steve Jobs believed in technology, and believed in making something wonderful. 

Freely available in it’s entirety on the web at https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/ and if you prefer ebook format, downloads are available here: https://stevejobsarchive.com/book/download 

also available on Apple Books app for free!

README.txt by Chelsea Manning

I’ve been aware of Chelsea Manning since I read the “main” Wikileaks book, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy”. I read that when I was a teenager, and my brain was still developing a bit, and much of the American politics were lost on me. As a Canadian child during the United States’ “War on terror” I didn’t keep too close of an eye on these things! However what I did enjoy about that book was the HACKING and COMPUTER STUFF. So Chelsea Manning has been someone I knew of for quite sometime now!

README.txt is an autobiography from Chelsea Manning, who is a trans woman who served in the army as an intelligence analyst during the late years of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The book recalls her Oklahoma childhood, the gender dysphoria she’d felt her entire life, leading into her time in the army, and recounts the inhumane experiences she had in prison, after leaking hundreds of thousands of documents relevant to America’s war in the Middle East.

When her leaked documents reached the public, society was able to see and learn about the horrors and suffering that USA was contributing to and enabling in the middle east. True civilian casualty counts. Full unedited footage of an Apache helicopter slaughtering civilians. Soon after, Chelsea was arrested and detained in Kuwait for 2 months, before being transferred to U.S. and eventually getting sentenced to 35 years in prison.

During her time in prison is when she began transitioning, where as a prisoner she had to fight and push the American government for hormones, transition surgery.

The conditions and instability of prison, gender dysphoria, and the bleak future of decades worth of detainment lead Chelsea to attempt suicide multiple times. Very fortunately she didn’t succeed in killing herself! In this book she was been able to tell the story not about America’s politics, leaks, the media, but the story about herself and her life, in her own words, on her own terms.