My furnace broke & the furnace repair guy is snowed in, & it’ll be going below zero tonight. So, I had to run to walmart & buy a bunch of space heaters, & I’ll be up all night making sure nothing catches on fire :(

Using Visual Studio Code in fullscreen on my main monitor while looking at other things on the other monitor. I did not expect to turn into one of John Siracusa’s millenial co-workers.

not looking forward to the buses being so crowded again

Back to the Future! | Jake Dunagan | TEDxUTAustin - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGEzmrYsJfg

Don’t expect too much, it’s rather basic, but already enough to read at least non technical books.

If anybody want to take a look on my new project: https://github.com/mdom/termpub - A epub reader for the terminal

Don’t expect too much, it’s rather basic, but already enough to read at least non technical books.

If anybody want to take a look on my new project: https://github.com/mdom/termpub - A epub reader for the terminal

Periodic reminder: submissions for the No-Budget Film Contest are open from April 20th to July 4th https://medium.com/@/announcing-the-2019-no-budget-film-contest-d7eb339a3ed5

Speaking to Listening Machines: Literary Experiments with Aural Interfaces http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/speaking-to-listening-machines-literary-experiments-with-aural-interfaces/

Millennial mysticism: why contemporary poets are turning to the occult https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/01/Spells-21st-Century-Occult-Poetry-review

What It’s Like to Be Allergic to Corn - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/what-its-like-be-allergic-corn/580594/

“xt” is probably one of the least pleasant key sequences to press

Out of the inventions to come out of Xerox PARC, which were the most grossly caricatured by others and which were t… https://www.quora.com/Out-of-the-inventions-to-come-out-of-Xerox-PARC-which-were-the-most-grossly-caricatured-by-others-and-which-were-the-most-thoughtfully-done

To what extent did the Xerox PARC Alto inspire the Apple Macintosh? - Quora https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-did-the-Xerox-PARC-Alto-inspire-the-Apple-Macintosh

Alan Kay’s answer to Was the Xerox Alto a prototype or a finished product? - Quora https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Xerox-Alto-a-prototype-or-a-finished-product-1/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1

It’s probably a mistake to believe we know what ‘human nature’ entails & how consistent or flexible it is.

GitHub - colinmorris/reddit-dubious-spelling: Analyzing words Redditors aren’t sure how to spell https://github.com/colinmorris/reddit-dubious-spelling

Putting Your Worst Foot Forward: Why You Should Play to Your Weaknesses as an Author | Tor.com https://www.tor.com/2019/01/09/putting-your-worst-foot-forward-why-you-should-play-to-your-weaknesses-as-an-author/

A thing I’ve learned: if you’re submitting a game to steam & you’re not sure if it should count as ‘mature content’, err on the side of ‘no’, because if you describe the content & they don’t think it’s mature enough they’ll assume there’s unmentioned/hidden nudity & won’t let you release it

anything to ditch those pesky google products!

still trying to figure out the best way to manage my calcurse files… scp is just so slow

Band name of the day: how to grow living skyscrapers

Nice to see TBL admits DNS is centralized; I’m still skeptical that SOLID can address aspects of web tech that encourage recentralization. https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web/

Manna for our Malices was accepted to Steam, & will be available on the 12th of February.

Can a bat know what it’s like to not know what it’s like to be Thomas Nagel?

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of cold takes by people who think they’re hot. Like, long-form explanations of how “you aren’t required to agree with film criticism” and “reading should be a pleasurable, low-pressure activity”. Am I just disconnected?

At long last, it’s done! Manna for our Malices is available on a pay-what-you-want basis until early February (to coincide with the planned Steam launch): https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices

Ever notice how the opening theme to Space Battleship Yamato has the same plot as The Final Countdown.

Giallo Is the Horror Subgenre You Need to Explore | Nerdist https://nerdist.com/giallo-horror-subgenre-need-to-explore/

Rain 🚱: “#rust iterators are sooo much nicer to write than…” - Cybrespace https://cybre.space/@grainloom/101379206180624438

Since it’s friday, if I have the energy, after work I’ll stream my final push on finishing implementing MfoM. Y’know, in case anybody wants to watch me write ‘code’ that’s actually mostly dialogue.

@metamurks@www.metamurks.org: CEC is solving one problem and introduces hundreds. Way to complex and overengineered https://github.com/floe/CEC/blob/master/extras/CEC_Specs.pdf

Graphs are to categories as lists are to monoids https://alhassy.github.io/PathCat/

We can try to define intellectual constructs as having ‘nothing but essence’ but maybe we should take a page out of Guy Debord’s book and say they are ‘nothing but appearance’. They can appear in contradictory ways because there’s no underlying structure.

An Incomplete List of Things I’d Need to Know In Order Not to Be A Total Impostor | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling https://emshort.blog/2018/09/02/an-incomplete-list-of-things-id-need-to-know-in-order-not-to-be-a-complete-impostor/

People have said to me that an electron is a probability distribution. Is this true, a simplification, an artifact of measurement, misleading, a nomenclature issue, or what?

”[The internet] never made it [to] Stage C […]. A truly networked cosmopolitanism needs to be more distributed. It can be local without being parochial” - James Bridle in https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-of-the-World-2019-page02.html#post30

i have got to get out of the apartment… i actually put on clothes this morning to help that happen, but idk if it’ll matter

We need an ‘AI sidekick’ to fight malicious AI https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/01/08/we-need-an-ai-sidekick-to-fight-malicious-ai/

Another take on the ‘user agent’: https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/01/08/we-need-an-ai-sidekick-to-fight-malicious-ai/

I wrote a proposal for a high-performance OSMIC backend: https://medium.com/@/proposal-for-a-high-performance-storage-system-for-osmic-branching-histories-7cb324c7df2d?source=friends_link&sk=40fc22e94810bd20995286d1f8815a6c but it occurs to me that I don’t have a good intro to OSMIC so that’s next.

People become what they can imagine becoming, & access to tools has as much to do with this as representation. If it’s easy to fall into programming accidentally, then it’s easy to imagine yourself programming regularly.

Trendism follows the logic of capital. The more capital you have, the less risk any investment is & the more you stand to gain from it. Given a diverse portfolio, a large investment will grow while a small one disappears: capital’s gravity at work.

Underclocking the ESP8266 Leads To WiFi Weirdness | Hackaday https://hackaday.com/2019/01/04/underclocking-the-esp8266-leads-to-wifi-weirdness/

This is an interesting take, but the author fails to note that the primary result of speculation is fantasy – i.e., price deviation from ‘natural’ value: https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/

Email icon https://www.topic.com/giant-mirrors-ocean-whitening-here-s-how-exxon-wanted-to-save-the-planet

The Changeling & Don’t Look Now are on shudder now so it’s your opportunity to see ‘em. They’re both great & long out of print.

Watching these featurettes about Bandersnatch & the bits that they’re making out to be a big deal or super difficult are the ones I (and every other VN dev) do all the time. Meanwhile, they barely mention working with actors & shit.

Introduction to PROLOG - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHLfeGN5OMk

Over 20 years after AUM terror, cults in Japan still seeking to recruit youths - The Mainichi https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180727/p2a/00m/0na/022000c

I documented what I’m trying to do with MfoM, so that I can write a proper postmortem later: https://medium.com/@/mfom-pre-postmortem-92683b15ff2c

The Men Peddling the ‘Secrets’ to Getting Rich on Amazon - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/men-peddling-secrets-getting-rich-amazon/578443/

An interesting alternative to my ‘big vs small computing’ distinction is the wizard vs engineer distinction discussed here: https://www.tedinski.com/2018/03/20/wizarding-vs-engineering.html

Manna for our Malices is story-complete. You can now play through to all endings. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices

Progress report: the current build of Manna for our Malices should actually be playable to completion. Gotta double-check, but in theory everything should be reachable. Remaining work: fill in fluff like the rest of the school day.

Anybody have a good reference for japanese subcultures from the 60s to the 80s with images of the fashion? I’m trying to remember the name of a kind of non-bosozoku predecessor of the yanki…

Dave Snowden | How not to manage complexity | State of the Net 2013 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFQJaQTXhY

Folks, journalists don’t even get to write their own headlines. If I get one more person telling me it’s hypocritical to write an article criticizing tracking on a site that has cookies, I’m gonna blow. Purity is shitty praxis: if you want to stop tracking, you need to complain on a site with tracking.

Periodic reminder that, by using third party trackers, you are paying somebody to grep their http access log instead of greping your own. So, like, maybe roll your own analytics if you need them?

Economists calculate the true value of Facebook to its users in new study | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/economists-calculate-the-true-value-of-facebook-to-its-users-in-new-study/

Shinto shows the debt to animism of organised religions today | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/shinto-shows-the-debt-to-animism-of-organised-religions-today

Today is boxing day. Celebrate by casting to Object.

New repository: aquilax/colorcount - Command line tool to count colors used in image

Screw the notional Zizek vs Peterson debate. I wanna see a Zizek vs Land debate. Or Zizek and Land debating Mark Fisher through an Ouija board. (The board doesn’t need to work. Better if it doesn’t.)

We tried teaching an AI to write Christmas movie plots. Hilarity ensued. Eventually. - MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612644/we-tried-teaching-an-ai-to-write-christmas-movie-plots-hilarity-ensued-eventually/

Re: code – keep throwing it away and rewriting from memory until implementing it doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore. At that point, it might be marginally OK. (Or maybe you’ve just acclimated to your failures.)

GitHub - orbitdb/orbit-db: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db

What to write with? Styli for clay tablets in the ancient Aegean and eastern Mediterranean https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/what-to-write-with-styli-for-clay-tablets/

Spotify’s ‘release radar’ seems to use artist name instead of artist ID, which is annoying now that there are mediocre french soundcloud rappers named Devo and Rush

Peer to Peer Routing http://ctvr.tcd.ie/undergrad/4ba2.05/group6/index.html

I’d love to see Trigger do a Geobreeders series. The premise had so much potential: a multi-generational war between chuunibyos with computer sigils and shape-shifting cats made of radio waves who live on the internet.

Periodic reminder that cash is more anonymous than bitcoin (because the serial numbers of bills are not recorded with every transaction). If you want to really be anonymous, do all your buying in quarters, from venting machines

If you find yourself mentally replying to the title of an article before the text actually loads, maybe close it, because you’re probably being fucked with.

It’s Time For Games To Own Their Politics https://kotaku.com/it-s-time-for-games-to-own-their-politics-1827320727

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Lecture notes! Intro to Quantum Information Science https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3943

Bad idea of the day: set your terminal font to Brand New Roman before starting to code

Some seasonal music to get you all in the spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvgZmAygX4

youtube-dl –extract-audio –audio-format mp3 is a life safer to get audio from youtube.

Some seasonal music to get you all in the spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvgZmAygX4

youtube-dl –extract-audio –audio-format mp3 is a life safer to get audio from youtube.

Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death | Tor.com https://www.tor.com/2018/12/17/star-wars-is-really-a-cautionary-tale-about-devoting-all-technological-advancements-to-death/

Fracturing left unity to own the libs

Mark Zuckerberg did everything in his power to avoid Facebook becoming the next MySpace “ but forgot one crucial detail… • The Register https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/20/facebook_disaster/

How to See the Poetry in Plants - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/atlas-of-poetic-botany

Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-to-google-and-that-should-worry-us-all/

Aquaman pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft. It’s his worst nightmare. https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/aquaman-movie-hp-lovecraft-racism-miscegenation.html

Sedimentation: the existentialist challenge to stereotypes | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes

Rewriting Pagenode
Today I released Pagenode – a project that I started 14 years ago. Pagenode began its life as a full-fledged Content Management System and now, after countless rewrites, became a simple library. Pagenode’s journey mimics my own as a developer. Its current iteration expresses my desire for simplicity.

In 2004, after dabbling a bit with PHP and finally grasping MySQL I set out to build my own CMS. I previously looked at a lot of different CMSes on the market and found all of them to … ⌘ Read more

How to Make Your Own Mead - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YwAvLru2ec

Is It Time to Redesign Scrabble? http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/does-scrabble-need-to-be-fixed

View of Roundtable: Should library workers learn to code? https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/4121/4134

‘User empowerment’ is a useful idea that gets abused to glorify user-hostile design. It’s usually used to refer to situations where the user is empowered to do as we (devs or PMs) tell them, or where the empowerment is too abstract to be proven.

One of the reasons I’m so hard on the original macintosh is that the team appropriated fantastic ideas from better projects that they were totally unprepared to do justice to, then delivered warped & broken versions of them.

There’s this approach to computing history where we focus on work that looks shallowly similar to current norms, claim that work was ‘prophetic’ or ‘ahead of its time’, & mostly ignore differences & intent except as quirks. Fuck that.

Bad idea of the day: a campaign to ensure all life extension therapies are completely covered by medicare, medicaid, & ACA-compatible insurance

Command-Line Options10.Configuration”/>http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch10s05.html

Cragne Manor, an 84-room horror “exquisite corpse” text adventure that’s a tribute to the classic game Anchorhead / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/12/09/massively-multi-developer.html

Today, on the 50th anniversary of Englebart’s Mother of All Demos, is a great opportunity to introspect about why personal computers still basically don’t exist & the needs nLS was intended to fulfill still aren’t fulfilled.

Would we be worse off if we chose presidents by lottery? We’d probably be better off. If there was nothing someone could do to increase their odds of being president, it wouldn’t attract the mercenery & power-hungry.