getty @aysamanra@sometimes.when.computer

I wanted to do some writing this afternoon, so the yak I shaved instead was writing a tool to wire up a TeX-inspired markup language for producing HTML and a Lua interpreter to create a little easily-extensible markup language.

I realized today that "Gothic architecture" couldn't have been built by Goths, since all major Gothic tribes were long gone by the 12th century when Gothic architecture started being built. Turns out: the name "Gothic architecture" started as a pejorative term in the 16th century, slamming it as "barbarian" architecture and contrasting it with classical Roman architecture. Earlier Medieval sources generally called it either "Frankish" or "modern" architecture.

This thought comes because my brother's been running D&D for one of the first times and when he asks for advice I keep having to tell him, "Oh, yes, this isn't a problem for other tabletop games, but unfortunately, you're playing D&D."

My interests as a tabletop designer are mostly narrow, idiosyncratic games that are pretty far afield from D&D: for example, two of my current efforts include "comedic one-shot MegaMan party game" and "contemporary paranormal wilderness survival game". …but I do occasionally wonder how I'd try to tackle designing a standard fantasy fighting-monsters game.

Relatedly: I try to keep track of the movies I watch and review each one! My list is in fact public, although be warned that the ratings here are "did I enjoy it", not "is it good" or even "would I recommend it to someone": https://infinitenegativeutility.notion.site/Movie-List-aa3250d5738647288b7e398d12a50ba5

A few years ago, I watched every Coen Brothers film in production order (over the course of months, not, like, in a single sitting) and this year I'm planning to do the same thing but for every Tarkovsky film. Started tonight by watching Ivan's Childhood.

Over on Cohost I wrote a post about some holiday decorations and light pranking I did in my hometown: https://cohost.org/aysamanra/post/745518-so-my-family-has-th

Anton Duvet

Currently thinking about the time that I filmed a time-lapse video of a drive from San Francisco to Portland (although the sun went down before I hit Portland, so the last bit just looks like the end of A Space Odyssey instead.) Some day I should make another attempt at this that isn't marred by a windshield bug for the first third. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb61wE4U2PY

The thing is: for years Mastodon was the site where there were I felt like only a half-dozen people were paying attention, so I could just post all my flop puns here. Suddenly it feels more like a Real Site, and it's weird to get used to that. (…probably gonna keep posting bad puns, though, just to be honest.)

In the interest of full disclosure: I block people who post AI-generated art without content warnings. Nothing personal! While I love most generative art, I really dislike the current crop of AI image generation systems and don't want to see their output, so I'm curating my experience accordingly.

I don't think I ever posted it, but I watched the entirety of Lost earlier this year and this was my takeaway.

Knowing the French word for "country" really pays.

(This doesn't mean that those social networks don't have problems! …it just means that people on other social networks don't usually know what they are.)

When you see a post like, "Here's the problem with [X] social network," but posted on a social network other than [X], you can safely disregard it almost every time. …well, unless the post is about how Twitter sucks, in which case, it's correct.

(…also my Twitter archive does go back to before 2013: I didn't include those in my archive because it turns out the way I was tweeting at the time was, to put it bluntly, pure unadulterated cringe.)

The script that I'm using I've also put online in case people want to use it, but I confess I've made no real effort to make it usable by people who aren't me: https://github.com/aisamanra/twote

I've downloaded my Twitter archive and turned it into a single-page archive of all my tweets since the beginning of 2013: https://tweets.infinitenegativeutility.com/ I'm still iterating on it, but it's more or less browseable as-is.

Also, the username—aysámanra—is "dreamer" in an old conlang of mine. (I don't do conlang stuff much any more, but it's an old hobby that's still dear to me.)