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Happy pride! Not a super busy month, as I’ve been buried under a bunch of research. Let’s take a look!

Research

CT Scanning. CAD-ing. 3D Printing. Never work with sardine otoliths, people. Complete and utter pain in the ass.

Forgive the brevity, but it’s definitely a work in progress, and I’m still working through what’s actually feasible for what I can get done. I’ll definitely be saying more on this later though!

The Outer Wilds

Play this game now. Avoid reading anything about it. It is about epistemology. If you learn about the game a priori, there will be little game left over for you to play. Trust me and just play it. It is worth it.

5th try in, and I finally finished it; It finally clicked. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense or seems to have no direction. That’s by design. Have a look around. Use the little mind map on your ship. And above all else, be curious. The world really tries to suck the curiosity out of us, but fight back. Just long enough to get your head around this masterpiece. It’s just beautiful.

Burning Chrome

I finished Gibson’s Burning Chrome, the collection of his short stories. Beautiful work.

He writes his prose in this often opaque, but incredibly evocative style that takes a second to find a rhythm, but yields incredible results. The range that he showcases in these stories is also quite impressive; Burning chrome was great, but I actually quite recommend “Dogflight” as a piece with punch. The outcome and general theme are certainly rote, but he gets there in such a fascinating way, that I just didn’t care.

I am now quite inspired to make some cyberpunk myself. Onward to Neuromancer.

On Writing

I am a good way through Stephen King’s “On Writing.” I am not a fan of horror, and know little of king himself, but this book is incredible. King’s prose is just orchestrated so expertly that I can’t help but be a little jealous! His thoughts on writing as a medium are profound as well, and I think many people inside and outside of the medium alike would stand to gain quite a bit by reading it.

Writing

I’ve been writing. A lot.

The ‘Festo

The manifesto has been coming along nicely, though I’m going back over it and there’s a lot of polish and sourcing to do.

Perhaps I can release it early and keep it alive. I know other people have their own pet peeves and expertise in places that I just don’t, so I would love to open it up to guest writers to expand it as necessary. I just want to make the best damn resource for tech ethics that I can.

Slop

I’m tired. I’m so tired. I don’t want to think about it anymore.

This short essay by Steven Langbroek really encapsulates how it feels. To be in it. To have a single brain cell still kicking around in there. Getting poked about AI this AI that, by well meaning, but ultimately naive people who see machine generated code that compiles and think they’ve met god.

I’ve been at that party. I’ve gotten that question. And every time I answer, the conversation that follows seems to take a little bit of me with it. What do you say this time? Do we derail the entire conversation into my personal little layer of hell for the next thirty minutes, where we ultimately address close to nothing and go nowhere? Do I delude myself into thinking that some gentle pushback from someone who knows any singular thing about the technology in question will do something, anything? Or do I just drop it and try to salvage a little bit of levity from the night?

So no. AI is not god. God is dead. God remains dead. And it is not AI, but rather its creators, who have killed him.

Make a website

I have made progress here. I still need to craft the site proper, but the boilerplate is done, and now all that remains is the tutorial.

The Beginners Guide

I am doing a close reading of the beginners guide. After this year’s inaugural playthrough, I’ve just been struck by the beauty of this game once again, and I felt the need to just completely butcher it, out of love.

Creative writing

I’ve been looking at an old manuscript called “the party.” If you’ve trawled my site’s git history, you might have seen it collecting dust. It sucks. Really bad. But it surprisingly has some really incredible moments. It needs a full rewrite though. It doesn’t know what it’s about and it’s less subtle than a sledgehammer in saying very little at all. But there’s juice in there, I can just feel it. I think I will fix it.

I’ve also been poking around at some more cyberpunk as well. It’s still early days, but I thought it would be fun to interpret the title “Burning Chrome” in the opposite direction as Gibson, and see where I can go from there. We’ll see what else crops up.

Game Jam site

I’ve done a good amount of prep, but I really need to just set up that damn php webserver for local development. It’s surprisingly annoying to get a php/postgres dev environment set up!

Manifesto Jam

I joined the manifesto jam for this year. I made two entries.

• I Hate Fun Games
• Fix This Game

The Smallest Church In Saint-Saëns

I took a turn at karaoke in the local bar’s karaoke night, and checked one off the bucket list. One person recognized it, which is all I could’ve hoped for.

I’m told it was lore accurate too, which I’m quite proud of. I have a recording, which I’m also told has a lot of laughing in it, but haven’t watched it back yet. I’m not sure why. I wanted it on film, that I know for sure. But just to have, I think. To prove it was real. The memory is already fading, but there’s something beautiful about it just the way it is. From my perspective and nobody else’s. Up there screaming my heart out to a bunch of strangers, in a bizzare, beautiful tribute to a game one of them has ever played.

This is one of my favorite memories, I think.

Retrospective

This month was good. Not everything got done, but research has been busy, and I’ve been enjoying life, so all’s well I think.

Plans

More research.

More creative writing

More ‘festo work.

Game jam will happen, but probably not while I’m doing research.

Conclusion

Voy a escribir mi conclusion en espanol. No se porque, pero es mi blog, y puedo crear las reglas. LLore por eso :3

Junio fue buenisimo. Necesito gastar menos tiempo en la computadora; los arboles me llaman.

Hablando de eso, ahora me voy! Adios y vaya con queso!