Whenever I imagine the world of the medium-term future looking back on the current time, say 75-100 years from now, which I do reasonably often, I imagine an intense future regret for now. It’s a hard emotion to put into words. Maybe a kind of warm nostalgia combined with disgust, the way many Americans now view the 1950s, but mixed in with the sense that this time, the early 20XXs, was a time when wrong choices were made willfully in the face of evidence pointing toward right choices.…

I tried to continue on my theme of making a colossal cave adventure clone for voice, thinking that this time using the webhook fulfillment it would be much clearer what to do. I did get it functioning, somewhat. Unfortunately going south here should get you into the forest. I encountered numerous other bugs, such as items not appearing in the rooms they should be in, and getting stuck in a room permanently.…

For a daily life diorama I wanted to share one of my favorite daily activities: flossing! Construction wasn’t too hard but took some ingenuity. I used a shoebox, construction paper, tissue paper, and a clear plastic egg carton for the teeth. Quite a bit of tape, and of course a piece of floss. I really do love flossing and look forward to it every evening. When I was much younger I would never floss but I’ve had a lot of problems with my teeth and jaw over the years and have since become a total convert, maybe it gives me the feeling of being in control a bit more over a part of me that has been so unruly.…

Sandra I love the premise of Sandra but I can’t help but wonder what kind of system could instantaneously categorize and direct all of these requests but couldn’t formulate automated responses for most of them. Does it go more into detail about what ends up happening? There is something in the show about the current economy’s preference for high-abstraction capital (algorithms, systems, connections) over labor, like the company Alia Shawkat is working for is the service economy equivalent of an old steel factory.…

The peculiarly named Grant Gore, a small triangular park at the intersection of Dean and Bedford in Crown Heights (‘gore’ being an obscure term for any small triangular park), is home to a truly massive bronze statue of Ulysses S Grant, Union hero of the Civil War and two term Reconstruction era president. On a crisp morning this week I went to take a look at the statue. I was intrigued by the short bit of history I had read about it and the Gilded Age high society club that had commissioned it, but I also went because I wanted to unpack the inexplicable warmth I feel towards Grant.…

I made a draft of my field guide using the time honored “paper prototype” method. Corporate aesthetics, coming apart at the wheels. I used a hacky scan tool with Google photos to get these pictures of the draft since I didn’t want to run in the rain to the library for a real scan, hence the weird banners, but I actually think they fit the overall aesthetic well, though it washed out the color a bit.…

Recently I’ve been reading a ton of books with names like “Cyber Dictionary: Your Guide To The Wired World” or “Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World”, hip and breezy internet guide books written between 1996-2000. This has led to me making a few strange archive tools around the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine The one I made for Hello Computer this week, a voice controlled archive navigation system, can be found here but unfortunately because I don’t have HTTPS certification on my prototypes site Chrome will not allow you to access the microphone, so all you can see is the initial button.…

List of Taxonomies All ideas for coherent taxonomies Energy Types (Country by Country Energy Mix) - high renewable mostly coal mostly nuclear mostly gas import/export ratio Policy Goals Seeking investment Building infrastructure Making revenue Reducing carbon admissions National security Political kick-backs Prop up the failing coal industry to own the libs (Just the US) Reducing city pollution Don’t rock the boat Market Structures and Regulatory Regimes Deregulated generation to transmission markets Regulated vertically integrated private utilities State-run vertically integrated utilities State/private grey area uh oh zone Ownership (who owns what where and what power do they have) Power of generation owners' lobbying (not sure how to measure) Acumulated wealth of energy investors and company owners as % of GDP Due to the vastness and scope of nations' global energy policies I have been imagining so far pursuing a scattershot approach, with a few entries from different categories, say, for example, an entry on Japan’s nuclear energy policies, an entry on FERC chairman Kevin J.…

This week the phrase “digital avatars” has kept making me think of Digimon. I don’t think Digimon ever really established what exactly happened to these kids when they entered the DigiWorld. Was their meatbody converted to bits and code? They pass back and forth between the barrier several times, which to me seems like a painful transition. I worked with Nico and Kim doing 3D body scans with itSeez3D. We did a lot of scans.…

The websites I visit most frequently are a little boring. According to what Chrome, my browser, suggests, my number one visited website is Twitter, followed by the (in?)famous data journalism blog FiveThirtyEight, then ScaryGoRound.com which is a webcomic I’ve been reading for almost 15 years, then Gmail (the Inbox flavor), then Github, and then my own blog which you are reading now. I think that last one is only because of how often I need to double check that my posts have actually made it online, not because of the love I have for my own posts.…