getty @aysamanra@sometimes.when.computer

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/)

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