I first discovered Vancouver-based Perfume Tree in 1998, at a big Borders bookstore in Bangor, Maine, up in the second floor which was largely given over to music and movies. It had listening stations set up for albums that the store’s management had highlighted, each one with a little placard blurbing the record and artist featured. You slipped on a station’s headphones and pressed its Play…
The day before I announced Crawlspace , I shared a link to the tool with the His Majesty the Worm Discord server. I received an encouragingly enthusiastic response from the community there, which made me feel good about posting a wider announcement. I also received a very mild bit of pushback, from someone who correctly noted that the tool looked like a lot of work had gone into it, and asked me…
Introducing Crawlspace , an online-play tool for the tabletop role-playing game His Majesty the Worm . It helps you play Worm online with up to five friends, by managing the virtual deck of tarot cards that the game uses as its sole randomization element. In particular, Crawlspace offers a full implementation of the Worm “Challenge Phase”, the GM-versus-players tactical card game which resolves…
John Gruber describes his experience using ELIZA, the famous proto-chatbot, from a contemporary perspective. He concludes: There’s something wrong with people who consider today’s chatbots to be their friends or companions. But there’s something really wrong with people who considered ELIZA a useful confidant. Like suffered-a-permanent-head-injury wrong. This past Monday, as I lay in a groggy…
I have a few follow-up thoughts on yesterday’s post . While my subjective description of feeling an internal activation after my Chicago experiences was accurate, I was mistaken about its novelty. Revisiting some older Fogknife posts reminds me that I have engaged in shifting my perceptive frame like this before—but, prior to that Chicago visit, I’d all but forgotten the fact. Reading Max…
A letter I composed to a friend today, about certain experiences I had last week while visiting Chicago. After sending it, I decided to share it here as well. While I was in Chicago, I listened to Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race as an audiobook while taking evening walks along the lake. I also walked backwards through the Field Museum’s excellent exhibit about the evolution…
I furtively took this photograph inside a certain European-style cafe near Chicago. The food was quite all right, but this sign reading “PARIS” over a mirror on one wall made me thoughtful. It’s very likely that multiple people were involved in the design, manufacture, selection, purchase, and installation of this sign, and apparently zero of them noticed that the “S” was upside-down. Or, anyway,…
For the first time since the pandemic, I have resumed active, public development of Plerd , the software that freshly publishes this blog every time I update a certain directory of Markdown source files that lives on my laptop. I also use Plerd to publish Venthuffer , my videogame-monologue podcast, and ’Twas This , my “commonplace book” of shorter posts. Oh, and the Plerd News blog, which I’d…
For my whole adult life, I sometimes get intrusive thoughts in the form of unsolicited and unpleasant memories from my own past, flashing against the walls of my mental-subjective theater with near-visual intensity. These memories all have something in common: they’re demonstrations of mistakes I made, usually social ones that hurt people in some way, and almost always committed decades ago. In…
Photo by Julia Ryans The pronouncement of certain programming languages as “dead” or “dying”—as has long been the prognosis of Perl, my own home-base language—has become far less relevant in the era of AI-assisted coding. The nonliving and tireless entities that generate an ever-increasing share of today’s new code have become profound mechanical experts in any sufficiently well-documented…