Notices by Ivan Reese (spiralganglion@mastodon.social)

secret weird things people do

When I get a new game, I always open the Options menu first.

When I get a new program, I always open the Preferences menu first

When I get a new device, I always open the Settings menu first.

@annika what's the purple on the building?

@annika @TodePond Whose word?

Lately I've felt a lot of "big feelings” — pain, yearning, confusion, frustration, desire — about computer programming.

I can't quite explain how I feel. Certainly can't write it down. Most definitely not in brief.

So I did the only thing that comes naturally: felt my way through it, out loud, exploratively.

Titles are hard, so it's called "Live as in Alive”, perhaps glancing sideways at the recent d-d-discourse about live programming vs live coding.

#40 —> https://ivanish.ca/hest-podcast/

@annika Faultymedia

The Future Off Computing

@TodePond so close to looking like "tadi men"

@annika I hope not. My sense is that telegram fucked up by not actually being E2E and yet refusing to work with law enforcement merely on principle. Whereas Signal, iMessage, et al are actually E2E so there's nothing those services can do even if they wanted to. So so long as encryption remains legal, anyone doing true E2E isn't technically refusing to cooperate with cops by not turning over user data (cuz they don't technically have any)

@inthehands @zens Alan Kay was an advisor on this project. They're all quite firmly of the original OO school of thought, not the Java perversion.

dynamicland.org

Highly recommend spending some time exploring the site, watching the videos, etc.

I do not give a single grain of shit about what npm packages (or whatever) it takes to make [attached] happen.

But I am *dying* to know more about what it means when objects become dynamic.

Like, if everything in my house were suddenly computationally dynamic… what's the first thing I'd want to go play with? My guitar? My cutlery? My shoulders?

I have no idea, and I want to find out.

If I want to do Dynamicland at home, I don't need the software. I need to understand what it means for computation to be a property of an object, like color or temperature. That's a radical new idea. If I understand that idea, I can find my own way to make that happen with stuff I've already got.

But if they give me software to run, I've got to figure out how to run C code on my Mac, and buy the right kind of projector, figure out how they do calibration, figure out how they persist state…

Calls to “release the Dynamicland software” make just as much sense as asking for the J.S. Joust software (code, binary, whatever).

Having JSJ as software would make it *harder* for me to play the game.

Does it run on my Mac? Where am I gonna get PS Move controllers anymore?

Instead, how about we… just hold plastic cups full of water… and the last person with water left in their cup wins! Yes!

I have knowledge about the game. I have the design in my head. That's more portable than software.

@annika You don't watch the last episode of a TV series before watching the rest of the series? (Or.. instead of watching the rest of the series)

@annika Roguelight

@annika @TodePond Hey, that was my same joke I made that you totally couldn't have seen because you weren't there. We can't "share" a joke, Annika. You're funnier than me, it's not fair.

A sneak peak of what we've been up to on the Ink track at Ink & Switch:

Flux — a fuzzy, flexible way to select things on a canvas. It's particularly nice for handwritten text.

I have, at times, described flux as "living science created in a lab” 🧪

https://www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/dispatch-005/

@TodePond automatoes

@annika wet baguette

The year is 2024.

I'm still writing coffeescript.

I cannot be stopped.

Let's say I wanted to make my own webfont from scratch. Like, even drawing my own glyphs. Where do I start? Good tutorials?

Also, let's say that I care a lot about the number of bytes in the font. Then what?