Recently in glitch
Infocom-related mishaps
dept. of side projects
Corduroy is a Python library for using CouchDB with Tornado.
book cover doodle
i have no idea why i made this…
scale error
coordinate transforms will always be a trial and error affair i'm afraid
the rules of the game
13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project. all told i ended up cataloging a dozen books from the early-to-mid 80s, looking for patterns in their construction and in the paths made by different readers through them.
these short, simple books had a surprisingly complicated structure with their interlocking pages & choices. as a kid the idea of writing one and keeping all those pages straight boggled my mind. what was lost on me at the time was that even a list of hundreds of page numbers can be comprehensible if it’s redrawn as a diagram. these days i feel like i approach everything that way.
so here is my look back at an obsession from my past, using graphical obsessions of the present to guide the way.
Bookmarks
so the funny thing is that all these contentious bits really amount to product placement, yet they're used in the game to build up this nicely twisted picture of america. it's like franzen's thing about using real brand names in his books. all the same it feels weird to be arguing for the inclusion of all this advertising on the basis of the game's artistic integrity. also: who knew there were so many beatles references buried in there...
the most perl thing i've ever heard of. rather than counting the number of times you escape a string and unescaping appropriately, you just keep unescaping until recovering a sentinel value. so many clever ways to be lazy...
this is some of my favorite stuff in delirious ny, ocr-mojibake notwithstanding. (best typo: “without corresponding 1055 of legibility”)
darkness in games finally used for more than the threat of being eaten by a grue.
this mishmash of ‘coding ui’ ideas (c.f., processing, mathematica, python, max/msp) gets more interesting by the day. the lines demo shows a really nice alternative to the parameter fit/compile/debug approach computational drawing usually forces on you.
i dig that he focuses on the naming scheme of the post office/mailbox as one of the important design wins with this framework. how you explain your abstraction may seem like a superficial detail, but providing a pre-packaged mental model to go along with your black box of code is a courtesy few libraries show.
so very many wonderful albums posted here. but maybe i'm just being nostalgic for my wild youth spent sitting in my room next to my turntable...
sketchpad and dynabook, engelbart and papert, piaget and tim gallwey. kay (like hofstadter) shows how it's done when it comes to casting a broad intellectual net to guide cs research.
it always sounded like a stressful traffic pattern to negotiate, but in language form it's a great strategy.
the prisoner is about as trippy as tv has ever gotten – lynch included. great attention to the invisible details of the titles sequence, esp. the static ‘high speed’ car shots.
aside from falling for the whole bioshock-is-good meme, he gets most of it right. something that can't be said for most haute critics dealing with video games and what to do about them.
developers are neck-and-neck with realtors in the race for the fanning-the-flames-of-alexandria title
unspeakably great. and well timed too. i stare at the akzidenz e every time i'm at bedford these days
the addition of nerds and software replaces the song's robert plant affliction with a new one
another post-Processing graphics framework, but it seems to have made all the right decisions at the bullet point level at least. interesting....
some beautiful animations showing how the drawing algorithm works at the bottom of the page
beautiful and effortless in the way it embeds placement on a given weekend versus the trend over time in stacks and chutes.
it's neat to see python doing matlab-type tricks. zip is the new ' operator
not much to look at but pretty incredible for interactively finding patterns & trends in the dataset
creepy and strange and staggeringly gorgeous. the river sequence is enough to make you wish color film had never been created
possibly misnamed. it seems to be more of an ideal C for the MVC setup flash basically demands you concoct for yourself...
funny to see that he was a real human being, even when faced with that gasbag
about the most appropriate tribute to dfw i could imagine
some ancient sid lore from a cocky c64 coder. from a deleted geocities page (natch)
the traces of planes circling before landing is stunning in a lorenz kind of way
Found
oh the cap center. suburban maryland represent.