Linked List: December 2024
Monday, 30 December 2024
- Apollo-11 HSK TV monitor polaroid pictures ✶
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A click on each broken thumbnail reveals the images.
- Browser image slideshow for OBS ✶
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With captions generated from the filenames of the images that you put in a folder. Supports many image types including animated gifs, avif, svg, and bmp, and webp. I’ve added this to the streaming guide.
- Show time in other time zones in macOS menubar ✶
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With the free Hovrly utility.
Sunday, 29 December 2024
- Goodbye, Jimmy Carter ✶
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I came along at a time when Americans still remembered painfully the lies told and the debacle of Watergate. I was outside of Washington, I was not stigmatized by the mistakes that had been made in those previous years. And I brought a fresh face of a peanut farmer, a working man who swore never to tell a lie or make a misleading statement.
An unlucky president, and a lucky man.
Wednesday, 25 December 2024
- Noticing nature ✶
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Our surroundings can impact our well-being for better or worse, but we’re not always aware of these effects. This practice asks you to pay attention in particular to the feelings evoked by nature. Research suggests that people often feel positive emotions like awe, connectedness, and hope in natural settings, and taking time to acknowledge these feelings can strengthen them.
Monday, 23 December 2024
- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century ✶
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Also available in a visual graphic edition.
Saturday, 21 December 2024
- On Exactitude in Science ✶
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A one paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges:
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
(Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658)
—Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. Via Edwin Evans-Thirlwell’s RPS article about Microsoft Flight Simulator’s earth mapping quest.
Tuesday, 17 December 2024
- Moon ✶
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Always exciting to see articles by Bartosz Ciechanowski, masterful interactive physics demonstrations, joining my news feed orbit.
The Moon may be just an unassuming neighbor in the sky, but its presence affects our lives in many subtle ways. When it reflects sunlight off its scarred surface to guide the way in the darkness of night, or as it breathes life into oceans by rhythmically raising tides, or when it cloaks the Sun in a rare and awe-inspiring total solar eclipse, the Moon reminds us of the celestial world right outside of the safe confines of our planet.
Monday, 16 December 2024
- ESAK ✶
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These types of labels can only be rough approximations at best due to the 2-dimensional nature of x-axis and y-axis graphs, but they’re still useful, so here’s my Bartle taxonomy questionnaire result:
You are 87% Explorer
What Bartle says:
♠ Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (ie. bugs) and figuring out how things work. Scoring points may be necessary to enter some next phase of exploration, but it’s tedious, and anyone with half a brain can do it. Killing is quicker, and might be a constructive exercise in its own right, but it causes too much hassle in the long run if the deceased return to seek retribution. Socialising can be informative as a source of new ideas to try out, but most of what people say is irrelevant or old hat. The real fun comes only from discovery, and making the most complete set of maps in existence.
You are also:
♥ 60% Socialiser
♦ 47% Achiever
♣ 7% Killer
This result may be abbreviated as ESAK.
Richard Bartle on text:
If there was some kind of technology which could enable you to talk straight to the imagination…Well, there is. It’s called text, and it’s been around several thousand years.
One example of the value of a sprinkle of text added on top of an existing video game: A text message about seeing footsteps headed in a rough direction with estimated number of people in the group popping up in the user-made Arma 3 mission Pilgrimage added so much drama and interesting decisions to the game.
Saturday, 14 December 2024
- Waveform visualizer ✶
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Nice OBS plugin to show waveforms of the audio source of your choice on your livestream. Added this to the streaming guide.
And by the way, closed captions now work again twitch.tv/hypertexthero. I had, uh, treated this plugin with unattention or disregard since building Interwebs Communotron 2023, but I now have rectified the situation by making sure it is installed.
Tuesday, 10 December 2024
- Satellite Tracker 3D ✶
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There’s a lot of satellites in orbit around Earth.
Sunday, 8 December 2024
- New emotes ✶
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Plus links on most emote images to the inspiration for each one.
Wednesday, 4 December 2024
- Genie 2 ✶
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Artificial intelligence model for making playable game worlds with controllable characters to train AI further.
Today we introduce Genie 2, a foundation world model capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments for training and evaluating embodied agents. Based on a single prompt image, it can be played by a human or AI agent using keyboard and mouse inputs.
Games play a key role in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Their engaging nature, unique blend of challenges, and measurable progress make them ideal environments to safely test and advance AI capabilities.
Sounds good for prototyping, but like most things, editing, or choosing, is key.
Who knows where we’ll be in 5–10 years. There’ll be good video games, but hopefully not in a world like Ready Player One’s.
Tuesday, 3 December 2024
- Ko-fi tips ✶
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Things have been getting more expensive as I now need to pay for caretakers for my mom, so I’ve set up a digital mug for tips, after researching several options.
Ko-fi is a nice company, I receive 95% of the amount given, and appreciate anything received very much.
Monday, 2 December 2024
- Dying is a form of education ✶
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Gabriel Winslow-Yost, writing about Elden Ring at Harper’s Magazine:
One of the insights underpinning FromSoftware’s games is a recognition of the opportunity that the medium presents—an opportunity not for narrative simplicity, as it has been seen in the past, but for a new kind of complexity, a centerless, centrifugal form of storytelling, defined by discontinuity and uncertainty and yet, at the same time, propulsion and accessibility.
Sunday, 1 December 2024
- Brain rot ✶
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The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”