getty @aysamanra@sometimes.when.computer

I'm working on a small-ish TTRPG project inspired by the show Lost, and I gotta say, trying to do Dharma Initiative-inspired graphic design is actually a lot of fun.

Yesterday while I was cleaning I thought, "Hm, it would be nice to have a little box for these things," so 20 minutes later I had laser-cut a little box for those things.

This is sort of a take on something like Tracery (https://tracery.io/) but approaching it as a programming language problem. I think it's a lot easier to do deep structure with Matzo, but also I made it, so of course it's a tool that fits my brain well.

Over the last decade, I've made three major attempts to write programming languages for producing random text. Here's the first: Matzo, a simple dynamically typed language for random strings, which I've reimplemented somewhat more cleanly and released today: https://github.com/aisamanra/matzo

(…yes, I wrote a custom static site generator in Scheme: that's what powers my blog at https://what.happens.when.computer/)

I've been wanting to get a better homepage set up for a while now, and I'm finally writing it, but I keep getting nerd-sniped by setting up Bazel builds for my static sites (which will eventually require making Guile work in Bazel as well.)

I had a new idea for a medium-sized TTRPG project the other day and I tried really hard to forget it but it's such a fun idea that I guess I've got Yet Another Project To Procrastinate On now.

This weekend's project: a custom shogi board. The board is maple and poplar and the pieces are cherry, all laser-cut and hand-assembled. The symbols are my own creation—traditional pieces have Japanese characters.

This is pretty different from my usual fare, but I wrote a blog post about why I think it's useful to build TTRPG mechanics around social interaction: https://journal.librarianofalexandria.com/social-mechanics-in-ttrpgs

(…yes I am aware that I am doing the thing I am snarking about, but at this point I am equally tired of "discourse" and "discourse about discourse".)

Wow, Marcus Aurelius really said it first!

Weekend project #2: experimenting with a sketchy faux-block-print style for a tabletop project.

Weekend project #1: a laser-cut lamp prototype, which I plan to eventually cut with wood and frosted acrylic.

…well, I wrote a hasty terminal-based clone of Wordle but for Toki Pona, for some reason: https://gist.github.com/aisamanra/2dea5f9e324fa2d66029bf821064646a

A quick blog post about an error-handling mechanism I want to experiment with in a future programming language: https://journal.infinitenegativeutility.com/structurally-typed-condition-handling

Boba Fett boba fête

No, see, one is a pampas grass, the other is a pompous ass.

…a good name for a cooking blog would be "Et Allia"

I might want to do a bit more with the colors, but I like it as a first pass.

…I promise that I don't think about the Klingon language in real life as much as I've been posting about it, but: I am now working on a cross-stitch pattern that includes a Klingon saying and a Bat'leth.