Misdirection
Karl Germain once said that “Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.” This is sort of a review of a game, I guess. It’s called Superliminal. “Every magic...
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Dexterity In Depth
I’m exactly one microphone and one ridiculous haircut away from turning into Management Shingy when I get rolling on stuff like this, because it’s just so clear to me how much this stuff matters and...
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Synchronous Messaging: We’re Live.
After a nine month leadup, chat.mozilla.org, our Matrix-based replacement for IRC, has been up running for about a month now. While we’ve made a number of internal and community-facing announcements...
View ArticleBrace For Impact
I don’t spend a lot of time in here patting myself on the back, but today you can indulge me. In the last few weeks it was a ghost town, and that felt like a victory. From a few days after we’d...
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Notice
As far as I can tell, 100% of the google results for “burnout” or “recognizing burnout” boil down to victim-blaming; they’re all about you, and your symptoms, and how to recognize when you’re burning...
View ArticleSide Scroller
I’ve never met Ian Albert, but years ago he painstakingly scraped and pasted together a set of maps and backgrounds from a various oldschool games, an effort that’s helped me in a bunch of odd little...
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The Shape Of The Machine
The AMP people are rebranding themselves as “web stories“, raising that bland flag to the strained smiles of their publisher client-states, so it’s about time for me to click “post” on this. I was...
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Connections
“A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself...
View ArticleConsequences Of Code
[Content warning: There’s descriptions of psychological and animal abuse in here, because I’m talking about Facebook. This gets ugly fast.] The idea behind DevOps – a consolidation of the developers...
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Control Keys Redux
A long overdue followup. One of my favourite anecdotes in Kernighan’s “Unix, A History And A Memoir” is the observation that the reason early Unix commands are so often truncated – rm, mv, ls, and so...
View ArticleNavigational Instruments
A decade ago I got to sit in on a talk by one of the designers of Microsoft Office who’d worked on the transition to the new Ribbon user interface. There was a lot to learn there, but the most...
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Punching Holes
As always, I am inexplicably carrying a deep seated personal grudge against anyone incurious enough to start with “because in C” when you ask them why computers do anything, but bear with me here. I...
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Text And Context
This image is a reference to the four-square Drake template – originally Drake holding up a hand and turning away from something disapprovingly in the top half, while pointing favorably to something...
View ArticleTenuous
I’ve often thought “this video game should not have been made into a bad movie”, but Tenet is first time I’ve ever thought “this bad movie should have been a video game.” An hour into it and I can’t...
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Synthetic Intelligence
Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked...
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Humblebrag Selfie
I had to ride out for an urgent cross-town delivery yesterday, and after blowing through 15km of fogged-out greyscale city like a fast ghost I found myself in a dimly lit elevator thinking to myself,...
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