getty @aysamanra@sometimes.when.computer

It is with a heavy heart and a guilty conscience that I must humbly and regrettably announce that I am Back On My Bullshit.

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

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.)

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.")

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

One Christmas gift for my partner this year was a custom earring rack, which I made with birch plywood on my laser-cutter and then stained much darker. (I confess I don't love the pale-front-black-sides look of untreated laser-cut wood.)

I've got error reporting mostly working, so I think the final thing to do is round out the stdlib and this little random-text language will be ready for a release.

I've been sort of idly reimplementing my first attempt at a random generation language and putting a modest bit of polish into its REPL. I'm really happy with how it's coming along.

Here's what happens in my brain when I play Animal Crossing and watch Deep Space 9 on the same day.