News You Can Bruise

You know that email you get when a website you like is acquired by a big company and you know it's going to get shut down? This is like that, only the website shut down first and then got merged into a bigger project.

In May 2003 I created The Eater of Meaning, a web proxy that changes the words on a web page and renders the results. It was popular for a while in the "blogosphere" and then I kind of forgot about it for 20 years, until it broke in 2024.

Throughout 2024 I got occasional emails from poets about the Eater of Meaning and could I fix it. Upon reflection I decided that while running a public web proxy on my personal website in 2003 was kind of fun, doing so in 2024 is a bad idea. So the CGI script breaking was a blessing in disguise. But I didn't want the Eater of Meaning to disappear entirely because, as I've found out, it's important to some poets' artistic practice.

So I've rewritten the Eater of Meaning code in modern Python, and added it to olipy, my pack of art supplies. With basic Python skills (or even Python package-installing skills) you can have access to just about all of the Eater of Meaning's old functionality, as well as some new eaters based on the other olipy tools. I realize that this isn't as convenient as having it as a proxy on a website, but this is the best I can do for now.

A lot of stuff has been happening around the Minecraft Archive Project, and NYCB is no longer the best place to put all this information, so I've created a separate website for it: The Minecraft Archive Project. It incorporates most of the stuff I've told you over the past year-and-a-half, about why I'm doing this, what's in the captures and who has copies of the data, but there's also plenty of new stuff, which I'll summarize.

The big thing is that I've started a whole other collection, the Ephemeral Software Collection, which is now bigger than the MAP. My goal with the ESC is to archive software that's likely to be overlooked, forgotten, or destroyed by a takedown notice. Also stuff that I just think would be interesting to have around. The ESC contains the non-Minecraft stuff I got from CurseForge in the December capture, but it also contains a ton of Git repos that I cloned from GitHub.

I asked around about games that had active level creation/modding communities, searched the GitHub API for the names of those games, and cloned all the repos that showed up in the search results. Then I started branching out, running searches for classic games like checkers and Snake, as well as more general terms like 'surreal' and 'gender' and 'senior project'. This is how I got the data for That's Life!. IMO the most significant part of the ESC capture is 750 gigabytes of games created for game jams.

I stopped when I ran out of old hard drives to fill up. You can see the full list of ESC collections; there are about 100 of them.

Before creating this web page, when I heard about another source of Minecraft maps or other ephemeral software, I had two choices: 1) do a lot of work to incorporate it into the MAP, 2) do nothing, feel guilty, eventually forget about it, and suffer a nagging feeling that I'd forgotten something important. Now when I find out this sort of thing, I stick it in the "What I Didn't Capture" section and then forget about it guilt-free. It's a nice system.

I guess the only other piece of news is, I did another MAP capture in early February to see if it was too much hassle to do a capture every month. Total haul: about 75 GB of images and binaries. It was a pretty big hassle, but that number implies that I save about twice as much stuff if I act within one month than if I wait a year, so I'm torn.

The link to the initial release of Sycorax was broken, and although several people tried to download it, nobody was distressed enough by its unavailability to complain. However, this will change once the CG Twitter feeds start up and you see how useful Sycorax is for making fictional characters bitch at each other on Twitter. Then, you'll download my software!

Oh, uh, the point of this post is that a new version of Sycorax is out. This one has sanity checks like "is a tweet longer than 140 characters?" and "do a chapter's tweets overflow their alloted time?". This version also has a script that makes it easy to get OAuth access tokens for your characters. Plus, I checked that the link works.

Constellation Games begins serialization later this month (preorders open soon!), and I've working on the auxiliary material that will ensure a fun experience for subscribers. Things like bonus stories, and the Twitter feeds that will play out as the serialization progresses.

In general, a chapter of Constellation Games covers 5-7 days of story time. So... I can script those characters' Twitter lives ahead of time, and then enact them during the week, so that they talk to each other in a way that looks natural. If one day a character stays up late, they'll post to Twitter late at night and then go silent until early afternoon. What could be simpler?

Except, when you search for software to automatically post to Twitter on a schedule, you find software that is designed to make your personal Twitter account look like a robot is behind it, timing your tweets for optimum "penetration" into your "social network" in the hopes of "going viral", all at the cost of your "personal agency". Talk about the ELIZA effect!

So, I wrote my own client, Sycorax. You write a script with approximate timings in a text file, and Sycorax a) time-codes everything in a way that looks natural, and b) enacts the script on Twitter. I wrote more documentation and made the usage more friendly than was necessary for my personal use, in hopes that you'll find a use for it.

(My preferred name for this program was "Prospero", for reasons that will become clear, but Twitter said that Prospero was taken, so I went with the other magician from The Tempest.)

Sycorax is written in Python and published under a BSD-style license.

Sumana mentioned that the other night we went through Craiglist for entertainment. Eventually the well started running dry and we did searches in the personals for unlikely strings like "Linux". Well, "Linux" did uncover a thread in the "rants and raves section", in which a troll exhorted everyone 'DON'T USE "LINUX" SOFTWARE or BUY A LAPTOP WITH "LINUX" ON IT' because Linus Torvalds is an atheist and--stay with me here--therefore a worshipper of Satan.

There were a number of responses to this, covering almost the whole spectrum of possible responses: "Atheists don't believe that Satan exists." and "You are dumb." and my personal favorite:

First, what do you mean exactly by "Linux"? The entire OS, or just the kernel?

Torvalds created the kernel but not the operating system. The OS was written by Richard Matthew Stallman and his crew of volunteers, collectively known as the GNU project...

However, I was a bit disappointed not to see it pointed out that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs[0] also lack a God-belief, so really what choice do you have? You're screwed.

I really hope someone is archiving Craigslist for the future. It'll be a useful training corpus for turning emotionless, super-rational AIs into crazy, human-like AIs.

[0] Under the reasonable-to-me assumption that Jobs doesn't practice a theistic kind of Buddhism. Gates is clearly a "that's not an interesting question" agnostic. Fleeing to your Apple II? Not so fast--Steve Wozniak is a flat-out atheist.

My biggest current project is a large work of fiction that you should be able to see in a couple of months. I've been writing down notes for months, scribbled in notebooks and put in disorganized files on my hard drive. I've also been collecting ideas from friends in email. Now that I need to exploit those notes, the limitations of this system become apparent.

I'm here to tell you that TiddlyWiki is the solution. I spent most of today organizing my notes, and the story is correspondingly clearer in my head. Tiny ideas have a place to live, and I've got a workshop for developing them into fleshed-out ideas.

Tiddlywiki lowers the barriers to capturing a fleeting idea better than any other software I've used. Since it's a Javascript app that runs in the web browser, rather than a client-server thing, Tiddlywiki is fast. Since it displays your entire edit trail on one page, the snippets don't feel isolated from each other. I can split out a section that's getting too long without losing it.

I've known about Tiddlywiki for a long time, and it's not that I resisted trying it until now; rather, I never really needed it until now. It delivers.

Tiny Pocket Wisherman update. Don't bother upgrading unless your list was having problems before.

Some minor bugfixes to wadl.rb. Still no official release, still not much in the way of syntactic sugar.

Some old computer-stuff links:

• Sales brochures from the Computer History Museum. Includes The Raytheon Computer Armchair Shopper, which sounds better than it is.
• Atari books
• An unplayable demo of Planetfall 2. Another "sounds better than it is", actually.
• Games on the C64, Amiga, BBC Micro. Remakes of same.
• The first DDR game machine.

why has devised hpricot, a permissive HTML parser with tree-crawling functions. It's written in C, so it's fast. Just another great piece of software named after apricots.

My second developerWorks article, on the Cheetah templating language, is now published. What's more, I'm actually getting paid for these articles! (Once I set up direct deposit with my agent.) This is an intriguing development because I still haven't seen one cent of my advance for the book, or even the paltry sum I've earned so far in Amazon referral commissions.

I was planning to write a series of articles on Subway, but a cursory run-through shows that such a series of articles would probably spend most of its time guiding people through small problems in Subway, and my time would be better spent organizing fixes for those problems instead of enshrining them in print. In other words it's not mature enough yet to be the subject of technical articles. So I may go back to my original idea of just writing individual articles on Cheetah and SQLObject, as I'd planned before I realized "hey, these things are all used in Subway". What do you think? Am I selling Subway short?

I love it when a plan comes together. The perfect use for tiny images embedded in the body of a webpage is sparklines, Edward Tufte's trendy post-literate ideographs. Joe Gregorio has the Python implementation.

What's good for doing programmatic graphs with Python? I'm using PILGraph for a little project of mine. It's nice and simple but I'm having problems getting the labels to actually show up. I'll probably end up fixing it because I like the simplicity, but I'm wondering what else there is.