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

signs of a passworld:↵- either embarrassing, or near-impossible to make sense of↵- very secret, only rarely shared between gods, usually monodeic↵- sometimes the echo of a past world, or a very slight variation of one

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.

Merfolk have legends about lost oceans, mythical fishing grounds displaced by rising continents, mighty civilizations that did not fall but merely retreated to inaccessible inland seas

sending up private space probes to stealthily nudge large asteroids onto collision courses with Earth so that governments keep maintaining their space programs

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.

📚 Finished reading How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

📚 Finished reading How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan

Introduction to Deleuze: Difference and Repetition - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUQTYlCTfek

How to Backup Your Allo Conversations Before Google Shuts it Down  https://lifehacker.com/how-to-backup-your-allo-conversations-before-google-shu-1830922541

Teaching kids to code: I’m a developer and I think it doesn’t actually teach important skills. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/against-teaching-kids-to-code-creativity-problem-solving.html

Welcome to the trip of your life: the rise of underground LSD guides | Society | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/06/lsd-guides-psychedelic-assisted-psychotherapy

Today in recruiter spam, somebody wants me to teach Latvian in Brooklyn. Why do they think I know Latvian? Why does literally every recruiter think I can commute to NYC?

To a reserve a table for my new hyper-exclusive resturant, cut a potato in half, put a twenty dollar bill inside, and bury it in your back yard during a new moon; if your application is accepted, we will contact you.

Is it normal to shut down the postal service when a former president dies?

Let’s be real, here. Approximately zero of you on this social network are not also on tumblr. (And, I am cross-posting this to several social networks.) The culture isn’t gonna change much with a post-tumblr exodus.

From Satori to Silicon Valley https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/satori/machines.html

Apparently a bunch of air bud sequels are leaving netflix tomorrow so if you really want to watch air bud sequels better get on that

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? – ALIENIST MANIFESTO https://alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/what-is-to-be-done/

We need to admit that parents sometimes hate their children | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/we-need-to-admit-that-parents-sometimes-hate-their-children

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Vallee is among the most lucid of the mid-century ufologists. The modern internet does to the global mind what a close encounter does to individual minds.

I Forced an AI to Watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians · Issue #33 · NaNoGenMo/2018 · GitHub https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2018/issues/33#issuecomment-443401950

Thread by @Aelkus: “Strange Days is seriously underrated The aesthetic of the movie, like Blade Runner is, very good and timeless due to its combination of futu […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1069354595527344128.html

Despite MST3K’s riffing, the thing that strikes me most about The Day Time Ended is how closely it hews to the tropes of actual close encounters (as Vallee describes). & this is why it’s a bad movie.

Welcome to CBDQ-Memegen! http://cbdq-memegen.glitch.me/

Suppose you have a Newcomb predictor. More interesting than posing one-two box problems would be to predict the subject’s actions and do them before the subject becomes aware them. Eventually, their mind may adjust to the backwards causality arrow and we will learn many things

Good design for developers & good design for non-developers don’t operate by different rules. Devs aren’t happy needing to memorize manuals, and end users can & will learn things if it makes their lives easier.

Larry Ellison deserves to be punched in the face. Discuss.

80: innocuous-looking, but refuses to output anything. instead, random things in my room go bump. ‘u’ reliably closes the curtains, while the first ‘del’ the made my room shake with generator hum. have yet to figure out where it is. help I can’t sleep

54: normal, except ‘end’ has so much travel that I lost a pen and a folding rule trying to determine how deep it went.↵55: keys are strangely soft and my fingertips come away red after a while of usage. once a fly landed on it and was digested

23: battered, but has actual any key. produces random character when pressed, useful for generating passwords. shift+any produces •, have yet to find a password box that didn’t accept it. useful, will keep.

17: visible but cannot be typed on, fingers hit emptiness.↵1?: invisible, produces characters indistinguishable from spaces. except when I try to run binary analysis tools on the output, which invariably crash.

13: expensive-looking. space runs some evil curlbash, return some similarly evil cmd line. have yet to find out what systems the other keys are supposed to infect, but I think I identified grub and plan9 already? whispers to itself at night. extremely cursed.

KEYBOARDS FOUND IN DUMPSTERS:↵2: great to type on. return randomizes the keyboard layout.↵4: black and white keys in weird arrangement. produces sound but no letters. may not be a keyboard.↵7: has a ticklish ‘a’ key and tries to edge away when I come near it↵10: enochian alphabet

What’s a useful programming language feature or concept that a lot of languages don’t have? - DEV Community ‘‍”‍’ https://dev.to/cathodion/whats-a-useful-programming-language-feature-or-concept-that-a-lot-of-languages-dont-have-2ep1

Interface usability in a nutshell: minimize how often the simplest way to do a thing the user wants to do is 1) hard to imagine before you see it, or 2) hard to understand once observed. Assume the user is more creative than you & less well-informed.

The Anarchist Case Against Borders – A response to Angela Nagle’s ahistoric revisionism | Self Certified https://selfcertified.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/the-anarchist-case-against-borders-a-response-to-angela-nagles-ahistorical-revisionism/

Bad idea of the day: require all ‘tech’ companies to be registered nonprofits – make them prove that they are putting their revenue into ‘changing the world’ instead of just saying it

Protip: leave recordings of old public access TV in languages you don’t speak on youtube on in the background, in order to encourage incorrect inferences & poorly targeted ads

Girlfriend Roleplay videos are racking up millions of views on YouTube, here’s why - i-D https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/gy7v9w/meet-the-whispering-girls-of-youtube-who-pretend-to-be-your-girlfriend?utm_source=idtwitter

Are there enough shared answers in the jeopardy questions & answers database to make a ‘Ladies, if he X, then he’s not your man, he’s Y’ bot from that corpus? Assume 4 questions per answer.

Hot take: until there is a convenient way to express regular expressions to a conversational voice interface, use of such interfaces will remain limited to mere consumtion

“Everybody‘s Brain Knows How to Run a Tail” https://logicmag.io/05-everybodys-brain-knows-how-to-run-a-tail/

GitHub - tiniuclx/CommentCPP: add confusing comments to an existing source file https://github.com/tiniuclx/CommentCPP

Hey guys, Evangelion is coming to Netflix in 2019. This will be the first time it’s been available on streaming services afaik

Bad idea of the day: get commit access to leftpad and make it so that it spawns a thread that loads amazon.com in an infinite loop for every injected space

Bad idea of the day: supercut of every numinous image set to yakkity sax

Bad idea of the day: time lapse of just really failing to build and paint miniatures

Band name of the day: pleasure in the failure to regulate

What universe does Marc Andressen live in, to call a group of wealthy upwardly-mobile careerists ‘extremely left-wing’ for voting Clinton? (Don’t answer that.)

Github is putting up a banner saying that the version of firefox I’m using is no longer supported. That’s fuckin’ wild to me. It’s 2018: if your website doesn’t work on Mosaic & Lynx, it’s broken.