V Cool T-shirt: Codierung Gedanken

1 December 2020 · Updated 26 February 2026

Designed a T-shirt that I’m unreasonably pleased with. It’s inspired by Heinrich Heine’s Nachtgedanken — “Night Thoughts” — which is a poem about lying awake at night, unable to sleep because your mind won’t shut up about Germany. Every coder knows that feeling, except replace “Germany” with “that bug in the sprite multiplexer that only triggers on badline 51.”

The Adaptation

The original poem opens with Heine being kept awake by thoughts of his homeland. I reworked it into:

Thinking of Coding in the eventide,
I am of my sleep deprived.

Below the text there’s a pseudo-code visual representation — a nod to programming logic rendered as a visual pattern. The whole thing looks like something between a concert T-shirt and an obscure European art print, which is exactly the aesthetic I was going for.

The Coder’s Insomnia Problem

This is painfully autobiographical. Working on Parallaxian and Deep Winter simultaneously means there’s always some unresolved coding problem rattling around in my head at 2am. You close the assembler, you step away from the monitor, you get into bed — and your brain immediately starts optimising that IRST chain you were struggling with earlier. Or you suddenly realise why your NMI handler is dropping sprites on the third multiplex pass. Or you spot the off-by-one error in your scroll offset calculation that’s been causing that single-pixel glitch for weeks.

The worst part is that the 3am revelations are usually correct. So you can’t just dismiss them and go to sleep. You have to get up, scribble the fix on a notepad (or, let’s be honest, fire up the assembler again), and then try to sleep with the smug satisfaction of having solved the problem but the certain knowledge that there are fifteen more waiting for tomorrow night.

Heine had it easy. At least Germany wasn’t going to crash with a blank screen if he got the raster timing wrong.