-
An open letter to Senator Simcha Felder regarding the NYC "Bag Tax"
Senator Felder, I respect many things that you are working toward, and have signed petitions and voted through nysenate.gov on issues where you have called attention to them.
However, I do *not* support the effort to stop "the bag tax". Plastic bags are harmful to the environment, unsightly as they pile up in our trees, stoops, railways, and ( Read more... ) -
The Sputtering Propeller of the Singularity
In my last Emergence devlog entry, we started talking about what might delay a technological singularity, might make it sputter like an airplane propeller getting started. So let's play that out.
I think that non-scientific major crises could do it - war, or ecological disaster, anything that significantly diverts the resources needed for ( Read more... ) -
Something I don't get about Singularity theory
I'm reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, and there's something that I don't get about the theory of exponential growth, or even exponentially growing exponential growth. And that's physical or historical flukes.
This cycle of machine intelligence’s iteratively improving its own design will become faster and faster. This is in fact ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
Recently my friend pts described what I'm trying to do with Emergence as a "rogue-like narrative," and I think that's an interesting place to start. Rogue-like games have bits and pieces of moment-to-moment gameplay that are stitched together by programming into a seamless, more straightforward game experience. I am looking to do that with Emergence ( Read more... ) -
Armello: a pretty great digital anthro boardgame
I spent a chunk of this evening playing Armello, and I'll admit: I'm intrigued. I played the tutorial, which takes quite a while, and then played one game as a regular player. I won, though partly by luck, and therefore I like the game.
It has a lot going on. It has more mechanics than an F-1 race. There are four or maybe six win conditions, ( Read more... ) -
New versions of old hypertext tools
So as I've started to assemble the bits, the unusual lexia, of this game that I'm working on, I've been checking back in with hypertext tools that I haven't used in some time to see which might be up to the unusual story structure that I'm aiming for. Do you have any recommendations?
( Hypertext tools getting upgrades ) -
Mnemoscene: JRPGs and WRPGs
Sure, today I went to work and progressed my projects there, I am mostly recovered from the crazy muscle spasm that laid me out yesterday, but what I want to write about is progress on Emergence. Or, rather, progress documenting it, I suppose.
( At the risk of protesting too much ) -
Mnemoscene: back to the wikis
I mentioned, in the last entry, that I'm working on a digital RPG. Well, for me, world-building happens through wikis. Arguably, I think in wikis ... or, rather in hypertext. I appreciate how deciding the size of the lexia helps give a concrete border to the atomic size of an element. I like how forging links pushes me to consider what object ( Read more... ) -
Adventures in 5e
Hey, this journal still exists! I can post to it! LJ has gotten savvy to, you know, mobile devices, and I stand a chance of posting this without my head exploding (even from a desktop machine). So hello, journal, from the far side of the LJ Lull. No services have yet replaced you ( Read more... ) -
Steven Universe, just ... wow.
The Cartoon Network show Steven Universe just keeps not merely surprising me, but overwhelming me. For the last five episodes, I've choked up a little at something that it has depicted either really well or astonishingly depicted at all:
[Whoa, Nellie, the spoilers. (click to open)]- In the latest episode, Steven fails the test given but passes a much greater, unintended test. He realizes, as