Get Info: #best

My most popular posts of 2025

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:12:00 +0000

2025, eh? What a blast.

This year saw an incredible burst of creativity and exploration. I started the year shipping a multi-player arcade racing game for Sega Dreamcast, coded in bed making games on iOS using Love2D, made a little game that won at a PC gamejam thanks to Atari & Jeff Minter, and created everything from browser games to number one DJ mixes. One big milestone was my Macintosh Magazine Media project surpassed 1 million files (that’s over 30 million uncompressed files). Nerd alert!

The year also brought significant challenges—navigating community harassment led me to step back from the Playdate scene after nearly six years of creative work there. I decided to bang a drum about that and I now donate all of my Playdate earnings to charity. This year also opened new doors: I landed my dream job to build a game studio and my dream game. Pretty cool.

Through it all, I kept creating, kept learning, and kept sharing. Still trying to launch some apps and games that have been finished for months or years, and that I use myself every day. Maybe in 2026.

How many posts?

43 posts (up from 32 in 2024)

According to Google Analytics, my 5 most popular posts in 2025 were (most popular first):

How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet (11 Oct)
Slugs on a Cube: interactive animation (16 Jan)
When Playdate Stopped Being Fun (15 Apr)
Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993) (31 May)
Wormhole for Perplexity Comet (21 Aug)

Best of the rest

My personal favourites from the year (most recent first):

Music recommendations (2025) (12 Dec)
Donating my Playdate earnings to The Cybersmile Foundation (02 Aug)
Amazfit activity tracker and watch face asset generation (11 Apr)
Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons (1994) (30 Mar)
DREAM RIDE for Sega Dreamcast (and emulators) (05 Jan)

Still going strong

The following posts keep on truckin’ (most popular first):

Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh (17 Apr 2021)
Going back to the old (pre-X) Twitter iOS app (17 Aug 2023)
Pairing a Wii remote on macOS (21 Mar 2023)
Pixel-Perfect retro gaming on LCD 480p EDTVs (06 May 2021)
YOYOZO (or, how I made a Playdate game in 39KB) (21 Nov 2023)

Blog changelog

Improved replacement of “nouns” which are automatically-emphasised words (6 Mar, 11 May)
Improved sitemap and feed XML (14 Apr)
Added support for comments links to Bluesky and Mastodon (23 Apr)
Added wishlist of hard-to-find stuff (8 Aug)

Previous years

Music recommendations (2025)

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:00:00 +0000

As we complete another lap around the sun, I take stock of what has happened this year and filter my favourite music from the thousands of tracks I’ve listened to throughout 2025. Let’s go!

Suspended in a beam of sunlight

After my 2024 year end DJ mix (which I listen to a lot and am really proud of!) I produced a handful of other mixes throughout the year. I use the fantastic DJ.Studio app and a few other tools.

2025: over 4,000 tracks from over 600 releases, with a total listening time of over 30,000 minutes.

This mix saw me start out with 82 tracks totalling more than 5 hours of music, which over the course of a few days were whittled down to the final running order. I wanted to use samples to add some vibes, similar to my “Blade Runner” dnb mix. After a bit of back and forth I settled on Carl Sagan talking wistfully about the cosmos and our place within it, taken from “Pale Blue Dot” and “Cosmos”.

To get the vocal samples I saved the audio from YouTube, split it into stems to isolate the vocals, then cut and arranged them in DJ Studio taking care to either quantise, or not, to get a specific pacing of delivery. I ended up going with quite philosophical snippets. The most difficult aspect was the need to tweak the EQ of samples from different sources so they sounded like the same person.

Listen on MixCloud.

24 tracks with a duration of 1h12m22s.

Timestamp	Artist	Song (Video)	Year
00:00:00	MPC GIRL USAGI	Essence	2025
00:01:23	MPC GIRL USAGI	Music For Tonight	2025
00:05:51	Uilou	Perfect Tokyo	2025
00:07:45	Pacific Coliseum & Teen Daze	Club Memory	2025
00:09:50	Alex Metric & Damian Taylor	Right Here Forever	2019
00:12:27	Sezer Uysal & Spennu	Je te veux	2012
00:14:25	Chris Coco & StoneBridge	The Beach (2025 Mix)	2025
00:15:24	QPLO feat. YOCO	Beautiful Dreamer	2024
00:18:22	Noche feat. NIA NADURATA	Feel something	2025
00:20:11	bane & A.G.O	Contrast	2025
00:23:02	Muscle of the Soul	I Never Tell You My Hurt	2025
00:26:03	Tensnake	Free	2025
00:29:01	Sofia Kourtesis	Nitzan and Aminaa	2025
00:30:50	Yuki Kawamura	R.I.P. Sunset (KAITO MIX)	2024
00:36:41	iri	otozure	2025
00:40:09	Antony Szmierek	Big Light	2025
00:43:35	Snowk	Mist	2025
00:45:31	Hina Ota	Inner Trip	2025
00:48:38	Soichi Terada	Low Tension (Alternative Version)	2015
00:52:25	Danou P	Kaguya	2024
01:00:20	B FROM E	Diamonds	2025
01:01:49	Uilou	Found You	2025
01:04:02	Idiot Pop, hajimepop & Novaurelia	Toumei	2025
01:06:27	Lorenzo Senni	THINK BIG	2020

Playlists

Platform	Link
Apple Music	Listen
Spotify	Listen
YouTube	Watch
Download	Grab

Catch the Vibe

If you want to listen to a couple of tracks that gives the vibe of this mix try these:

“Music For Tonight” by MPC GIRL USAGI (2025)

“Diamonds” by B FROM E (2025)

…and my song of the year:

“otozure” by iri (2025)

Bonus: music of the year

Type	Artist	Title
Single	iri	otozure
Single	bane & Grooveman Spot	Pluto
Single	Egoism	Getting Older
Single	Etherwood feat. Grace Barton	Where The River Meets The Sea
Single	Tokyo Prose feat. Jolliffe & Ruby Wood	Embrace
Album	Winston Surfshirt	Winston
Album	Egoism	And Go Nowhere
Album	Twin Shadow	Georgie
Album	Antony Szmierek	Service Station At The End Of The Universe
Album	MPC GIRL USAGI	Balance
Album	Your Smith	The Rub
Album	Yuki Kawamura	Love Forever
Album	Osamu Fukuzawa & Kazuki Isogai	Inner Orchid
Album	Small Circle of Friends	Slow
Album	Doja Cat	Vie

My most popular posts of 2024

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:59:00 +0000

2024 was a bit of meh year for me. A lot of time away from working, which was necessary but a process that I find difficult as I’m at my best when I’m creating. Here’s to 2025!

Two viral blog posts dwarfed all other writing: Emoji history: the missing years (10 May, 15K views) and Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app (10 Aug, 14K views) which heralded the start of me trying other things development-wise. I’ve created macOS and iOS apps using Swift and SwiftUI, tools using Python and Qt, blog extensions using Ruby, text editor extensions using JavaScript, games in Lua for Playdate and PC, and I ended the year writing a game for the Sega Dreamcast.

How many posts?

32 posts (down from 40 in 2023)

According to Google Analytics, my 10 most popular posts in 2024 were (most popular first):

Emoji history: the missing years (10 May)
Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app (10 Aug)
Taking command of the Context Menu in macOS (30 Jul)
PSA: Internet Archive “glitch” deletes years of user data & accounts (1 Aug)
Mouse Support for Playdate (11 May)
This behavior is by design (28 Aug)
Automating the most annoying aspects of blogging (11 Oct)
Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005) (24 May)
Interview: Kenta Cho (Japanese indie game developer) (10 Feb)
A year in the life of a Playdate game developer (7 Mar)

Best of the rest

My personal favourites from the year (most recent first):

Music recommendations (2024) (31 Dec)
New 3D Golf Simulation (video game series) (9 Nov)
Extensions for Nova editor (17 Oct)
Shibuya Pixel Art Contest 2024 (14 July)
Adding your own multi-channel audio to Music app (9 May)
Per-game skins in the Delta classic video game emulator for iOS (18 Apr)
Barbara Nessim at The Ginza Art Space (1986) (15 Feb)
JINZO Paint: vintage mobile drawing app (22 Jan)

Blog changelog

Optimise SASS compile once in plugin rather than header of every page (23 Feb)
Added about and support pages (28 May)
Multi-carousel support (14 Jul)
Rewrote the main page of my non-blog website (3 Aug)
Optimised all includes and templates to reduce build time (19 Aug)
Automatic transformation of local images urls to CDN urls (19 Aug)
Automatic smart quotes in post titles (19 Aug)
Improved replacement of “nouns” which are automatically-emphasised words (3 Sep)
Better YouTube embeds using lite-yt-embed (11 Sep)
Added OpenSearch to allow searching blog from address bar (15 Sep)
Created Markdown File Linker to make linking easier (8 Oct)
Created YAML Tag Picker to make tagging easier (8 Oct)
Embed Gists using custom gist tag plugin (12 Oct)
Improved noscript experience (12 Oct)
Auto-migrate SASS to use its module system (17 Oct)
Migrate from EasyEngine to Caddy server (1 Dec)

Previous years

Music recommendations (2024)

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:55:00 +0000

Initially I had thought this year wasn’t as good as last year in terms of music, but listening again to the best tracks from the first 40-something weeks of the year proved otherwise. It was a great year.

Most music I was sent by the Apple Music algorithm continued to be Japanese, thanks to my ongoing deep dive. During the initial playlist curation I was struck by a fairly clean divide of dance and not-dance. I was also still listening to Soichi Terada’s Essential Mix from 2022. All of this merged together in my mind and I wondered if I could make a DJ mix? In 2024 surely there is software that can assist? There is.

My first DJ mix

I pruned 50 tracks down to about 30 and set to work sequencing the tracks so their key and BPM flowed nicely. Each transition became a puzzle, gamifying the whole process. I had been listening to a loosely arranged playlist of 26 tracks for about a week, and two of those didn’t make the cut for the final mix.

It was possible for me to create my first ever DJ mix thanks to some fantastic called DJ.Studio that makes light work of some difficult and cumbersome process. Listen on MixCloud.

24 tracks with a duration of 1h18m58s, a mere 12 seconds longer than last year. Bonus points for consistency. It also meant I could run off some CDs and MiniDiscs for friends and acquaintances.

Timestamp	Artist	Song (Video)
00:00:00	luvis	Whales
00:02:44	yomm & Moto Kawabe	Alice
00:06:56	macaroom	Geinin
00:09:58	leift	Orangette (feat. 安次嶺希和子)
00:12:50	Ai Kakihira & VUIZE	超機車的機車人 ~Super Auto-bike~
00:15:24	Swimming Sheep	Supermoon
00:17:47	leift	Soda (feat. kim taehoon)
00:20:13	ASS MAGIC	Corn Soup Baby
00:21:14	voquote & Lil Summer	YOUR LAST
00:24:07	Pasocom Music Club	Colors (feat. Haruy)
00:28:27	Shōtaro Aoyama	Once (feat. SHOTA ARATANI)
00:32:08	AKIRA	Jet (feat. SPENSR)
00:35:30	HOME	Plastic Romance
00:40:11	Shōtaro Aoyama	Nowhere (feat. NAGAN SERVER & Yunoa)
00:44:28	DE DE MOUSE & hitomitoi	Skyscraper Starlight
00:47:23	kei	Girigiri Tamotteru [Instrumental]
00:50:25	Omodaka	Hokkai Bon Uta [Instrumental]
00:54:29	Natsudaidai	Dusky Dolphin
00:57:14	Steroid & Y.A.	Arson
00:59:38	showmore	Fruit
01:03:02	hitomitoi	Dive
01:07:14	yanaco	Your Orbit
01:11:13	Fried Banana Shop & Julia Takada	Fever
01:15:16	Lucky Kilimanjaro	Koi AoAoto

Playlists

Bonus: albums of the year

Artist	Album	Release Date
Yo Irie	Love Affair	2024-02-14
The Painted Word	Lovelife (reissue)	2024-02-14 (prev. 1989)
macaroom	Burning Chrome	2024-07-10
Hazel English	Real Life (compilation)	2024-08-16
leift	Citrus	2024-04-03
Fabiana Palladino	Fabiana Palladino	2024-04-05
bog band	Vanity Project (EP)	2024-06-12
showmore	Liquid City	2024-09-11
Sabrina Carpenter	Short ‘n Sweet	2024-08-23
Betty Boo	Rip Up The Rulebook	2024-08-30

Apple Music
Spotify (missing my number one album)

Remix: Hitomitoi - LIKE A FIRST KISS feat. Wild Nothing

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:04:00 +0000

I made a 12” extended remix of Hitomitoi’s “LIKE A FIRST KISS feat. Wild Nothing”. I’m calling it the Lingering Mix.

Japanese music recommendations (2023)

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 22:37:00 +0000

In April 2023, after I’d been listening to a bit of Japanese music during the last stretch of making the game Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate, Apple Music started recommending me Japanese music in the weekly #NewMusicMix playlists. Every week I post my favourite track to social media, keeping the best of each week as curated playlists. You can follow me on Apple Music @mattsephton.

So I thought it would be nice to make a summary playlist of the best of the best! It consists of the tracks I’ve listened to the most, with a couple of other favourites thrown in to help perfect the running order: 18 tracks with a duration of 1h18m46s.

Song	Artist	Release	Time
Closer	ROTH BART BARON	8	3:37
All Sunlight Must Fade	Half Mile Beach Club	Glare - EP	5:33
The Magic of Creation	Bitei Matsuki	THE MAGICAL TOUCH	3:09
Bloom	Low Fu	Links	4:16
Distraction Girl	Yuzame Radio	Distraction Girl - Single	4:15
Halo	Aaanna Japanese Special	Follow Your Heart - EP	2:46
Caution	Odd Donuts	Caution - Single	4:10
Train II	Clute	Loomie	4:53
i&i&i	Thiiird Place	i&i&i - Single	4:05
Ame ga Sekai o Nadete	MUSEMENT	Song Pavilion	4:36
Anshin to Manshin	Shima Hitachi	Anshin to Manshin - Single	4:55
A world of nothingness	Nathalie Wise	Nathalie Wise - EP	3:43
empty	South Penguin	empty - Single	3:42
2010	Nariaki Komatsu	2010 - Single	4:20
Hanagumori	CHIAKI SATO	Hanagumori - Single	4:03
Porch	Asami Tono	House - EP	4:43
shira-shira-ake	AOKI & hayato	yoake	5:21
Some steps under the sky	sphontik	wave wave wave	6:40

Playlists

My most popular posts of 2023

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 19:41:00 +0000

2023 was a year where I feel my blogging really hit its stride.

I’ve spent most of the year trying to comprehend 2022’s traumatic events, the lingering impact of which continues to affect me daily. Positive outcomes are that it gave me a little more time to write, and I developed some small games that might not have existed otherwise. And one of those, YOYOZO, has received a Game Of The Year accolade!

How many posts?

40 posts (up from 18 in 2022)

According to Google Analytics, my 10 most popular posts in 2023 were (most popular first):

“The Famous F40” vector illustration by David Rumfelt (15 Jul)
YOYOZO (or, how I made a Playdate game in 39KB) (21 Nov)
Going back to the old (pre-X) Twitter iOS app (17 Aug)
Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984) (9 Nov)
Back In Time: Vintage Maps of Akihabara (1976–2001) (1 Jul, updated old post)
Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games (9 Dec)
Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator (1997) (25 Aug)
Ball und Panzer Golf: making a Playdate game in a week (26 Jun)
Kenichi Shinohara’s pixel art Ukiyo-e (13 Oct)
Ordering photocopies from Japan’s National Library (24 May)

Best of the rest

My personal favourites from the year (most recent first):

List of vintage Japanese pixel/dot art software the one where I list 200 old apps
Tom Moulton, Father of the Disco Mix (1976) the one a student copy-pasted for me
Fake Steve Jobs & Letters from BILL G the one that nobody read
Review: GTi Club Supermini Festa! the one about an amazing Wii game
Where can I see Hokusai’s Great Wave today? the one about The Great Wave

Blog changelog

Added tag cloud to improve discoverability (12 Aug)
Added site search to further improve discoverability (27 Aug)
Added Google search link if there are no site search results (1 Dec)
Fixed site search issue which meant some blog posts were being skipped (22 Dec)

Previous years

My most popular posts of 2022

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

2022 was a mixed year for me.

I secured my own studio and continued to be hugely productive, creating some of my best ever work. Unfortunately, I experienced multiple traumatic events, and their lingering effects knocked out the last third of the year and beyond. Life-changing, and not in a good way.

How many posts?

18 posts (down from 55 in 2021)

According to Google Analytics, my 5 most popular posts in 2022 were (most popular first):

Accessing Yahoo! Japan from Europe (7 Apr)
Kawase Hasui’s Imaginary World Tour (29 Dec)
Displaying Full Referrer URL in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) (17 Jan)
Accessing Yahoo! Japan from Europe (7 Apr)
Bender for Playdate (20 May)

Best of the rest

My personal favourites from the year (most recent first):

Gaming Advent Calendar the one where I mention games I’ve played
Fixing bugs using Bird on Palm OS the one where I nerd out
Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate (Early Access) the one where I launch a game too early

Most enduring posts

According to Google Analytics, my 5 most popular posts from previous years (most popular first):

Building BasiliskII for iOS (21 Apr 2021)
Recovered: Forgotten SEGA Exclusives on Palm OS (24 Apr 2019)
Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh (17 Apr 2021)
Pixel-Perfect retro gaming on LCD 480p EDTVs (6 May 2021)
Playing old 32-bit iOS games in 2021 (14 Sep 2021)

Previous years

My most popular posts of 2021

My most popular posts of 2021

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

2021 was the year I got serious about blogging.

Thanks to friends for the encouragement to do so! I set up this current incarnation of my blog on a software stack I dislike (ruby & jekyll), but I probably won’t change things until it breaks beyond repair. Anyway, I (re)launched the blog filled with my collected writings spanning the past ~20 years.

How many posts?

55 blog posts (up from 42 in 2020)

According to Google Analytics, my 5 most popular posts in 2021 were (most popular first):

Tomoya Ikeda - Macintosh Artist (16 Dec)
Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh (17 Apr)
Daily Driver: Channelling RGB into 1-bit (5 Jun)
Aquaplus P/ECE (vs Panic Playdate) (19 Aug)
Pixel-Perfect retro gaming on LCD 480p EDTVs (6 May)

Looking back

My personal faves from the year 2021 (most recent first):

Band-kun バンドくん (1990, KOEI) the one where I discovered a cool old game
Electric Brain, et al. the one where I scanned a load of magazines/fanzines
The BeOS Bible the one where I scanned an absolutely massive book
Daily Driver: Showreel the one where I showed off a game
Iwata Asks: Downloader the one where I scraped the web

Get Info: #best

My most popular posts of 2025

How many posts?

Most popular posts

Best of the rest

Still going strong

Blog changelog

Previous years

Music recommendations (2025)

Suspended in a beam of sunlight

Playlists

Catch the Vibe

Bonus: music of the year

My most popular posts of 2024

How many posts?

Most popular posts

Best of the rest

Blog changelog

Previous years

Music recommendations (2024)

My first DJ mix

Playlists

Bonus: albums of the year

Remix: Hitomitoi - LIKE A FIRST KISS feat. Wild Nothing

Japanese music recommendations (2023)

Playlists

My most popular posts of 2023

How many posts?

Most popular posts

Best of the rest

Blog changelog

Previous years

My most popular posts of 2022

How many posts?

Most popular posts

Best of the rest

Most enduring posts

Previous years

My most popular posts of 2021

How many posts?

Most popular posts

Looking back