trenchant.org

Doug Wheeler’s SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, exhibited at the David Zwirner Gallery [NYT]

This is an exploration of what’s moving and enchanting and fascinating in software applications, videogames and procedural arts, beyond the amusement offered by obeying rules and receiving rewards.

— about notgames

Nice release list as well to help explore this emerging genre.

Just played through Gemini Rue. I really enjoyed it and the aesthetic.

[via top 2011 games from the TIGSource forums]

Can we please revive adventure gaming as a genre with the iPad? I would help fund it.

“Anyway, really what I wanted to tell you is, after all these years, and moves across countries and oceans, I was cleaning yesterday and found your Moby CD.”

“What’s amazing is not only did you outlast my interest in Moby by a decade, but you also outlasted my interest in owning physical media.”

My latest little app — textagon for ios — is now available.

Please download it and make neat word art and share it!

Consider if the actions are destructive or constructive, adding or removing friction.

There are no enemies in FEZ. No bosses, no combat. In fact, no conflict of any kind. You can die, but there is no penalty for doing so. FEZ aims to create a non-threatening world rich with ambiance, a pleasant place to spend time in.

— What is Fez

Gaming at its best creates new places we want to spend time in. That ability is core to what excites me most about the medium.

I still want to see an independent tech weblog that covers the many startups and subjects I never see listed on the current tech blogs. I hate seeing a glowing post about some new startup and know the writer and CEO regularly joke with each other on Twitter. I hate when a popular startup is given a pass because most of the writers attended the founder’s bachelor party or got an exclusive on a new feature.

— Andre Torrez, Backdoor Deals

It’s like the difference between writing about politics and writing about policy.

What we need is more smart writing focused on technology and software rather than the spectacle of it all interspersed with the casual celebratory repetition of press releases, and written by those with domain expertise in software, technology, and product design.

This rings true in all sorts of disciplines, in all kinds of journalistic coverage.

The implicit, underlying assumption of much of journalism is that reality isn’t interesting enough, or comprehensible enough on its own. It needs to be reinterpreted through storytelling with a bias towards conflict, personality, stereotype, conventional wisdom and other tropes that make what is boring and unfamiliar to the writer more palatable to a large audience.

The difference is with the internet, we don’t have to tolerate it anymore.

Although gamification is apparently about “the infusion of game design techniques, game mechanics, and/or game style into anything,” an implicit goal is to transform the attitudes and behavior of users (students, workers, consumers, etc.) to be more like the attitudes and behavior of happy, engaged “gamers.” The problem is, gamification assumes a rattomorphic view of gamers in the appropriation of techniques and principles from games: we’re just like Skinner’s rats, all that is needed is some good old fashioned operant conditioning!

— Terry Schenold, The “Rattomorphism” of Gamification [via]

My new favorite piece of software is GlimmerBlocker.

I set it up to get Safari to search Duck Duck Go by default but then, inspired by Mittens Romney did this.

And it made me think I’d like to subscribe to proxy rules that surprised me or made me laugh every day.

We have a technical apparatus set up to subscribe to rules to remove advertising from our web browsing but very little designed to transform things in unexpected or delightful ways.

Luckily I love to laugh at my own jokes.

Seeing people change avatars on centralized, corporate-sponsored social networks as a political protest reminds me that the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will be live, interspersed with sponsored Tweets™.

Your Congressman is not following you.

“Why do you watch this trash? You don’t even care about politics.”

“I try not to care. But this is like my sports. Sometimes you watch sports even when your team isn’t playing.”

Fox Woods tweeted:

I would like you to expand on this http://trenchant.org/daily/2011/12/23/

I can, but it doesn’t really make any sense.

“A coherent picture of where your future is heading.” Okay, fine. Let’s imagine you’re three years old again. You want to give your Dad, back in 1974, a coherent picture of what 2010 looks like. You know, something very actionable, lucid and practical, where he can just slap the cash on the counter and everything works out great for the family. Okay: given what you know now about the present, tell me what you oughta tell him about 2010, back in 1974. Use words of one syllable, so he doesn’t have a stroke.

— Bruce Sterling, State of the World 2010

· · ·

(Adapted from an IM conversation, 12/23/2011)

“What is beyond the internet. I read your SOPA thing.”

“Real physical things. Manufactured instantly on demand down the street or in your home. Or growing organs in your basement for when your heart fails. I don’t know! We can barely even imagine. We have instantaneous worldwide communication now. CHECK. Where’s the rest of the future? That part seems almost trivial.

Fast communications in the end is a sort of escapism that temporarily removes us from our geographical limitations, but we live in geographical limitations.

We don’t need more virtual real estate to sell ads on, we need real real estate to live on.

Imagine construction to be 100x cheaper with prefab technologies we don’t even have yet and imagine building your dream house in virtual legos and then like, buying it, and it’s there in a week.

Don’t like it? Knock it down and build a new one next year.”

Why are we re-urbanizing and bidding up the costs of tiny houses cramped into expensive areas when telecommunications should make that seem quaint? Are we going to have to wait until self-driving cars until we spread out and property values tank and cause another crisis because we refuse to interact over Skype for business?

“A free internet just hasn’t made much of a difference in most people’s lives. First, because they don’t even have it, and even if you believe it’s leading to a more democratic world or something revolutions happened long before the internet and long before communications were easily monitored on chokepoints like Facebook.

It feels like the PC coming along in the 1980’s mattered more. Spreadsheets, accounting systems, CAD… things that would take weeks of human time or giant rooms of expensive computers could be done in hours for a fraction of the cost.

Tweeting? Who cares.”

Tweeting is just reality television which is just gameshows which is just finding a way to make money on other people’s supposed real reactions to real life that is fake but it doesn’t matter because even if it’s fake it’s real but that doesn’t mean it’s important.

“Are internet companies technology companies creating the future and improving productivity or media companies trying to create flashy diversions so they can sell ads?”

I don’t think they even know anymore.

· · ·

To expand, what I mean is: if we just concede the Internet to the RIAA and Chinese fascists it’s not the end of the world because we should probably be working on something more important anyway.

(It would be pretty bad though.)

In the past trenchant.org has been produced with long forgotten software like Userland Frontier, shell scripts accessing BeOS filesystem attributes, and organizine.

Previously

For most of trenchant.org daily’s run it was produced with a home-grown CMS called mathecms. Matechms was a perl script that transformed text files into the site, and offered a simple web frontend for editing.

I ran the CGI perl script locally to both edit the site and generate. Afterwards I ran an rsync script to transfer the flat files to the web server. A cron job ran nightly to regenerate the site.

This worked OK, but I can do better.

One of the first projects I did in 2010 after leaving my job was replacing mathecms with a more “modern” version written in python called endless inkwell, but it was the same idea: flat files representing the site, a script that creates html files, and an rsync script that transferred it to server.

I never released that, but it was the starting point for endless i/o, a retro-file-blogging platform whose main advancement was monitoring a directory for changes, then creating the static web site, then syncing it to a server, enabling drag and drop publishing.

For 2012 I’ve changed the setup on trenchant.org a bit based on that concept, and some new ideas and requirements.

In the old days it was:

1. Draft text in some text editor, usually notational velocity but sometimes Aquamacs, and sometimes in a web browser
2. Launch local endless inkwell web site, paste/edit text
3. hit save
4. Manually rsync files to server from the command line
5. Server rebuilds site every night. (Usually, when Dreamhost wasn’t randomly deleting my cronjobs.)

Now it is:

1. Create and edit text files in notational velocity
2. There is no step 2.

I’m still using the same (creaky) python scripts to generate the site but my workflow is much better.

I had this working for decommodify a while back and decided I like it.

Also, if I want to create something on my iPad the workflow is:

1. Create a text file in IA Writer that saves to Dropbox
2. There is no step 2

Why?

No save buttons in 2012.

We should be past that.

And I want well written, responsive, native interfaces to my writing process. I want creating and editing and searching to be frictionless. Currently I find Notational Velocity the best in that regard, so that’s the frontend.

(Yes, I know, I was trying to get all that working on the web but I haven’t. Yet.)

Behind the scenes, I want everything to just work and not require actions on my part.

How

No source or full recipe yet, but here are some of the moving parts:

• Notational Velocity saving text files to a directory synced by Dropbox
• An unix server you can install whatever software you want on
• Dropbox linux
• a cron job to rebuild the site periodically on the linux server
• Fork Notational Velocity to create multiple contexts for different sites. I didn’t do the hard work to do this, and, instead I just renamed the bundle-id and recompiled, so I have different notational velocity binaries for trenchant.org and decommodify.com.

Smarter solutions would be to have a script that doesn’t regenerate the whole site every time, and that monitored the directory for updates rather than just rebuilding it once a night, but this seems to work OK despite the obvious inefficiencies because it’s just me on my Linode and it’s 2012 computing is cheap.

And also I could modify my workflow to support multiple sites from a single directory of text files, but I kind of like keeping them separate.

The only annoyance is editing after publishing requires a manual kick-off rebuild, but, luckily, my words never need fixing!