Jake Elliott on Christopher Strachey's "Love Letter Generator"

One Cool Thing

About This Episode

In episode 4 we meet Jake Elliott of Cardboard Computer who chats to Hannah Nicklin about Christopher Strachey's "Love Letter Generator".
Jake is probably most well-known for being one-third of Cardboard Computer, who made the era-defining and extraordinarily ambitious Kentucky Route Zero series. But he’s also a musician, runs an excellent Patreon where he teaches and shares his practice as a writer-programmer, and he makes ‘artware’ - art made with and about software.

Liner Notes

• Bletchley Park’s museum website
• An article Christopher Strachey wrote in 1954, in which he discusses the Love-letters program, for the magazine "Encounter":
• The Strachey article in Jacob Gaboury's "Queer History of Computing" series
• Jake stumbled through a quote from this essay also by Gaboury, from 2022: "the lack implicit in the future-oriented teleology of computation need never be repaired if we learn to love the lack, inhabiting that space in a way that does not feel shattering, dwelling in the gap between love and the letter."
• David Link is an artist & researcher who has explored Strachey's work in great detail in writing and in some incredible installation art.
• David Link's essay on "Love-letters"
• David Link on Strachey's "Draughts" program
• AdvX 2018 - Jon Ingold - Sparkling Dialogue: A Masterclass
• Jake’s Patreon

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.