the personal blog of tilde.town admin, poet, programmer vilmibm
be advised that this post has sad and dark things within For my first seventeen years I lived in the same place in the same house with the same people. For my last seventeen years I have lived in fourteen different dwellings across four different states and moved in and out of relationships both platonic and romantic. However, in this volatile period, there was one consistent throughline: my cat,…
you will write with melancholy the difficulty of returning home for it is borrowed the taste of the pleasure the incense burned the surface of the earth salvage from the spinning the sense of freedom it deserves it is touching now too late made using trunkless sources: twenty-three and a half hours’ leave, charles dickens and music, hinduism and buddhism, an historical sketch, the chautauquan,…
I did another travelogue piece/page. This one has a little field recording soundtrack. I’m happy with how the design on this one worked out. check it out~
My house has lots of books. I have organized them according to a scheme intelligible only to me. One of the special bookshelves is exclusively for FICTIONAL CYBERMEDIA , a category of book I define as a work of fiction whose plot would no longer function if computers were removed from the narrative. I’ve worked to develop this collection for many years, scouring the shelves of every used bookstore…
Back in february I released a new album called DROWNED IN MY HEART BLOOD . I forgot to ever blog about it. DIMHB is a noise album made entirely on eurorack synth using a field recording I made of myself. Each track incorporates my voice in some way; often obviously, sometime less so. The recording was made during a long drive while I was back in my birth state on the occasion of my mother’s death.…
give him his medicine there won't be another chance his sweet throbbing body him still more beautiful in her heart they withdrew having returned most of his belongings still the music played made using trunkless sources: rich men’s children, children of the chronotron, the conflict with slavery, the lightning’s course, the mantle, and other stories, the younger sister: a novel, vol. ii, chronicles…
In a previous post I described how certain ideas, situations, and stimuli can cause my brain to act like it’s just seen a rattlesnake before my conscious self is even aware of what’s happening. For reasons inexplicable, the idea of sitting down and doing any amount of video game development has caused such fear responses. I was able to get through a class on Unity and ended up enjoying it rather a…
after 10 years of squatting in cloud company provided virtual machines, town is now planning a move to a physical server. you can read all the details on the tilde town blog .
I recently got a pomera because I struggle to resist purchasing small computers. I spent a day walking around the big city nearby with a stop amid a forested park to write. The pomera fit easily in my small bag (a faithful reproduction of a Musette Française modèle 1892) and was a total joy to work on. A big reason I got the pomera (besides my lack of self control) was its bespoke UI. I wanted to…
The story, called I Found Out My Real Father-in-Law is Vladimir Putin…And He Wants Me Dead?! can be read and downloaded for free on the Internet Archive . I have written fiction for as long as I can remember. I only write in spurts as the melancholic howl permits. Some unlucky few have read my work–teachers, friends, family. Many have given useful feedback over the years. Every shred of…
On New Year’s Eve, 2024, I went to see Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in 4DX. I had not seen the first two films in the franchise and had never experienced a 4DX theater before. My attending this showing felt accidental and was the result of a joke my wife had made on New Year’s Eve Eve that ended up becoming reality. About two weeks prior, I saw Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom , a movie from 1975 I have…
i'm shiver stalking through winter's wind chant crying: MAN IS AN ADAPTABLE ANIMAL I AM AN ADAPTABLE ANIMAL MAN IS AN ADAPTABLE ANIMAL I AM AN ADAPTABLE ANIMAL to every reptile and fly (they can't hear me) (they are asleep) i'm breaking off my frozen biles tucking chunks in tree holes prepping for unseen springs
In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson coined the term “soul delay.” It describes the sensation brought on by jet lag of your physical self being in one place but your inner self feeling distantly stretched somewhere far away. Your inner self is drawn back to you, slowly, as you adjust to being in some far away time zone. I don’t think jet lag is the only way to experience soul delay, though. I’m…
Today I am releasing Trunkless , a new web based soft ware for creating cut-up poetry from 1,267,620,693 possible phrases extracted from large quantities of thematic text. At launch, I’m offering five corpora to play with: gutenberg , the entire english text of Project Gutenberg . geocities , website plaintext extracted from the Archive Team geocities archive gamefaqs , the text of 20 years worth…
Tilde.town turns ten in october! To celebrate, i’m planning a low key conference with both in person and digital components for october 11th and october 12th. In person stuff will take place in Chicago, Illinois, USA. If you are a townie reading this please do me a favor and log into the server, check BBJ for the town con post, and look for the call to action there to help me capacity plan for the…
Tonight I had a proper walk about. I let my feet take me wherever they felt led to go from the Hammer museum back to my hotel. I did not give in to fear. I reached a place of peace. I thought about horror movies in the shadowy sculpture garden outside of the UCLA theater. I thought about horror movies as I was spooked by a woman standing among the sculptures for a photo opportunity. I was spooked…
I now have a portfolio page
my friend E sent me a link some weeks ago to a short youtube video about hauntology; specifically, cultural hauntology: the video on youtube The following is an e-letter to E I wrote out immediately after viewing: I have been giving myself the brainspace today to catch up on my tab queue and finally watched that Hauntology video you sent me. I liked it a lot. I appreciated ending on the…
a lonesome death needs not be the only future for a life lived as a tear wet apology
(content warning: suicide) I don’t know when I came across the memory palace technique but I thought it was interesting. I historically do not think of myself as a person with a “good memory” so I filed away this concept to try at some point. What ended up sticking with me and resurfacing was not the idea that a memory palace could help me memorize things but instead wonderment at the idea of…
I made a new thing: a website for making blackout poetry with over nine million chunks of text extracted from Project Gutenberg. It’s here at blackout.tilde.town . Ever since ~kc posted this page I’ve been inspired by blackout poetry. I wanted an interface not only for doing it, but for giving me novel text to work with as well. I used Project Gutenberg’s robot access instructions to get about 12…
I made a new piece of software . It’s a command line piece of art. The software accepts any number of filenames as arguments. each file is then interleaved, character by character, into a grid. the grid of characters is then ignited and the fire spreads downward. characters eventually become smoke particles that float upward and wisp away into nothing. You can read about the practice that inspired…
I got a new computer. It’s a thinkpad (x1 carbon gen10) and came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I often say this about new computers, but I really like it. I tend to get to a point when I’m mad at the new computer and then all feels lost until the next one. This one feels different; it feels like home. This is a blog post about bookmarks but first: a tour through computing disappointments from the…
tl;dr I’m fully rewriting the tildemush MOO engine as hermeticum and actually plan to release it for real this time ^_^ huh what A few years ago I shipped an alpha version of a new MOO style system called tildemush . It was crude in many respects, but did function. In addition to basic account creation and chatting features, it supported: a custom lisp-like language called WITCH for scripting…
driving from chicago to berkeley we chose to go through south dakota because to my friend and me it was a mysterious, unvisited place. the wall drug signs begin soon after crossing the border on 80. i was unfamiliar, but my friend filled me in: a place that exists self-referentially. it doesn’t offer services beyond that of any typical rest stop, and the draw to go there is the chance to…
i have moved to berkeley. of chief importance is finding the coffee. the following is the result of initial recon bike rides. artis. the first espresso i had here was capital P Perfect. the second two were Pretty Good. the cafe music switching over to top 40 at some point was disconcerting. réveille coffee. it was pretty good, though i wasn’t too into the breakfast burrito. Further recon revealed…
taking dark steps and eating half the breadcrumbs is how i live. i no longer try to find the exit, just remember the rooms. meal time with the minotaur. the maze has it all: a trade in lunacy, nickelodeons, international coinage, soliloquies, eulogies, biscuits. when the imagery gets vivid i don’t depart in death–it’s just imperative to keep moving. it’s imperative to keep moving and not get stuck…
I made a blog. I haven’t had one in years. When I did it was mostly for dream logging and poetry. I was always pretty self conscious about what I put there. I published my town feels posts as a “blog” for a while, but that never felt right. My feels content was overly personal, diaristic, and vulnerable. I used to think you could either be authentic (vulnerable to a fault) or inauthentic (crafting…