Blogs

I have a reminder on my TODO list that haunts me weekly: Problem: I’m not writing. Sometimes I snooze it, sometimes I check it off. Sometimes I start to draft something and then lose interest. I leave the task on the list as I really should be writing more. There are a bunch of things getting in my way, but honestly I haven’t felt like myself for a few years. Working from home during lockdown was draining, and work itself is challenging enough that I don’t have much left at the end of the day. Even my non-work life has thrown a few curveballs. The most frustrating thing, however, is that I have been struggling with imposter syndrome. I feel like I don’t deserve to write. ...

I find trends in style guidelines interesting, especially when shared style guides lag language usage in the wild. I have observed a shift in headline style from Title Case to Sentence case in the majority of commercial publications online. I’ve also found a general improvement in clarity from the most reliable publishers, mostly due to well understood in house style guidelines. Common headline formats There are for general formats used for headlines today, with some publications using multiple methods depending on the feed source. ...

This is the 40th evolution of warpedvisions.org. It’s now running on WriteFreely, hosted by Write.as. WriteFreely is a minimalist writing platform built on Go, LESS, and plain old vanilla Javascript. It’s a speedy platform that feels nice to write in. This is also the 40th Warped theme. Not all 40 versions made the light of day, mind you, but I’ve hacked together all of these themes as a sort of playground of tech and design approaches. The process of building out a theme for a platform tells you a lot about the platform. ...

I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas. Pico-8 is a highly constrained virtual machine that behaves a lot like a personal computer from the 1980s. It has a fixed colour palette, limited memory, limited screen size, and a simplified programming model using Lua. The constraints make it a great place to scale down ideas and quickly finish demos and prototypes. This week I’m toying with generative art ideas, starting with a tool that stamps the screen in various patterns. I’m hoping to evolve these prototypes into a general plotter library, but for now I’m focused on making things that look cool, as a way to play in generative code again. ...

I’ve been playing around in PICO-8, working on some generative art ideas. Lua is a fun little language that feels a lot like something between BASIC and JavaScript. Lua isn’t my favourite language, but it’s fun at the small scale. PICO-8, however, is a fantastic little game engine (or “Fantasy Console”) that has all of the feels of the 80s. First tests I started with a Minecraft style terrain generator, but as 2D tyles: ...