getty @aysamanra@sometimes.when.computer

The elevator pitch for Matzo is something like, "What if Tracery but more of a programming language?" Pretty firmly alpha-ish software, but I already use it on a regular basis for stuff like quick random generation while running tabletop games.

At some point I'm going to make a proper website for the language, but I now have a working and reasonably polished "try in the browser" for Matzo, my random-text-generation language: https://gdritter.com/mtz.html

I finished watching Lost for the first time last night, and it's wild that the pop culture takeaway from that show is, "They were all dead the whole time," when it is abundantly clear that that's not the case at all.

It's that time again. That's right: hand-drawn pixel art normal map time.

Decided to put together a little page about all the tabletop games I'm currently working on. It's still kinda rough, mostly pitches for unfinished stuff, but still: https://gdritter.com/tabletop/

(My secondary Twitter username—uzhdanra—is from the same conlang, and means "one who has spoken". My previous Mastodon account—when I was @keweddji—is from a different old conlang, and that word means "bullshit".)

I don't know if I've said here, but aysámanra is a word from an old conlang of mine and means "dreamer" (aysám- "dream" + -anra "-er".) I'm still aisamanra (with an i instead of a y) on Twitter because I got that account in 2009 and then did some conlang spelling reform in 2011-ish.

Still don't have the posting bit yet, but I've staked out an account for good measure: https://cohost.org/aysamanra

This Tumblr post conveniently doubles as my review of both Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Book of Boba Fett. (…it's a tiny bit harsher than I come down on it, but it's the right ballpark.)

So, what's the over-under on how many of the green-highlighted GPT AI text prompts are faked so people can show off their "wacky" surrealist writing and get that sweet sweet meme SEO?

My brother also suggests using one of the Hylian writing systems—I'm particularly fond of the katakana-ish one from Wind Waker—to make a sampler that says, "Well, excuse me, princess!"

Now that my Klingon-language cross-stitch is done, I need to start designing a few more. My brother has already requested a cross-stitched version of one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, and I'm nervous but curious about trying to represent the Vulcan writing system in cross-stitch as well.

See, it's a place where all the businesses are built around risible and ridiculous scams. That's why they call it "Silly Con Valley".

Because it involves repeatedly stabbing an object many thousands of times, cross-stitch is arguably the most Klingon craft. (The text is a Klingon phrase meaning, "It is a good day to die.")

Concept: The Game of Theseus, a tabletop game about sailing through the Aegean sea, but you collect a metacurrency that allows you to choose and replace rules one at a time until you are finally playing a completely different game. ...or are you?

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/)