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@mastodon.social (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.
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
The weekly conversation hosted by Michael Rowe, Michael Martine, and Andy Piper, Games At Work dot Biz, explores the intersection where our digital play and professional lives collide. This isn't just a review show; it's a deep dive into the technology that powers our hobbies, the business behind the leisure, and the cultural news shaping both worlds. Each episode feels like pulling up a chair with three friends who are as passionate about the craft of game development and the evolution of hardware as they are about the pure joy of finding a great new title. You'll hear specific discussions on everything from the latest graphics card impacting performance to the narrative design of an indie darling, all filtered through the lens of professionals who live in the tech space. The Games At Work dot Biz podcast operates on the belief that the games we play and the tools we use are inextricably linked, offering listeners a consistently thoughtful and engaging analysis that goes far beyond a simple score. Tune in for a regular dose of insightful commentary where the serious business of technology meets the serious fun of games.
Author: Michael Rowe, Michael Martine, Andy Piper
Language: en-us
Episodes: 50
Photo by Kindel Media from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-robot-toy-on-gray-concrete-floor-9026299/ Published 29 September 2025 e530 with Michael and Michael – an AI extravaganza with vibe coding, AI gaming c…
Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash Published 15 September 2025 e529 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AR glasses & snarky AI wearables, Carrot Weather, Rabbit OS2, shaking to summarize, Doomscrolling and a who…
ChatGPT 5 generated image of a banana in the midst of an atom cloudgenerated 31 August 2025 Published 8 September 2025 e528 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI image editing with Nano Banana, GAN enabled LL…
Photo by Daniel Hooper 🌊 on Unsplash Published 1 September 2025 e527 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about AI restaurant experiences, historical LLMs, zoetropes and a whole lot more. After Michael R gives his im…
Photo by Michael Martine, Chapel Hill, NC August 2025 Published 25 August 2025 e526 with Andy and Michael M – stories about focus – finding things that are missing, reducing distractions with apps like Focus Friend and B…
Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash The Michaels take some time to talk about AI, Apple and Gaming this week, while Andy is out. While we are not an all Michael podcast, we did see a few Mike posts on Mastodon from Mike El…
Googlenight, AI virtual book cover Published 11 August 2025 e524 with Andy and Michael M – stories about AI generated goodnight stories, Med-Gemini, GPT-5, skeuomorphism, scrobbling, seeing through doors and a whole lot…
Photo by Pete Godfrey on Unsplash Published 4 August 2025 e523 with Michael R and Andy, possibly arriving via carefully-arranged starlings? – stories about AI again, obviously; iPadOS 26; games, old and new; and, an inno…
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash Published 28 July 2025 e522 with Michael M and Andy – stories about AI in multiple forms: bees that listen, a cat that chats, and then some fun with animating fish you draw, a GameBoy you…
Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash Published 21 July 2025 e521 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about expressive robots (Shoggoth Mini, Apple ELEGNT, SpiRob & facehugger), newly reengineered Commodore & Sinclai…
