Author: dustinfreeman

  • Books Read 2023

    Looking through this list, I read an incredibly good set of books this year. In each of my annual “books read” posts I try to pick the best or most impactful one, and this year is very hard. It’s the first full year of my sabbatical, so I delved deeper into non-fiction topics, many of…

  • The Nose: A New Immersive Theatre Show

    This fall, I’ve been working intensively on directing and producing a new immersive theatre show out of The Lower Case, called The Nose. The full title, in true style is, The Nose: A Full and Complete Explanation For The Events of Nov 14-16, 1983. The show opens tonight, and runs for all of January. Grab…

  • Music for a Desert Drive

    Music for a Desert Drive

    I’m visiting Joshua Tree in late December. I delayed buying the flight more than I should, and by that time a flight directly into Palm Springs was expensive. The backup plan was to fly into Los Angeles, but this would lead to an slogging drive across legendary urban sprawl in the middle of holiday season…

  • Support Hot Potato

    Text I wrote from an email nearly two years ago, after a corporate re-organization: Here is a common scenario at a megacorp, a glimpse into “real programming”. Group A (imagine they’re the point-of-view character in this story) makes a software component, and it is widely well-received. Group B hears about it and wants to use…

  • Let Me X That For You

    It happened. I asked a technical question in a forum. A day later, someone I don’t know responded “would this work?”, with a short link to them copying my query directly to a text-based AI. The AI’s response was completely irrelevant and unusable, despite giving the standard “verbose confident technical” aesthetic. 10-15 years ago, it…

  • San Francisco, 2016

    San Francisco, 2016

    It was 9 am-ish in mid-December. I sat in a cafe along Folsom Street in the SOMA neighbourhood of San Francisco. This was the nearest place to me that had caffeine. Scratch that – the actual nearest place was a tiny 24/7 corner store (you’d call it a “bodega” in NYC), and had prepared coffee…

  • Millennial Superconductor

    Millennial Superconductor

    A superconductive material that operates at room temperature (LK-99) has been reported in the last couple weeks. This is not just exciting because of the potential applications, but also the bizarre drama around the release of the news, and the race to independently verify it. This is especially exciting for me personally, since my first-ever…

  • Hyperlexia

    Hyperlexia

    Pictured above: A photo of glass door of a cafe in Queens, NY, looking from outside, into the cafe. The door has handles on the outside and inside that are identical, and could be used for pushing, or pulling. On the outside of the door is a decal with cut-out letters that say “PULL”. On…

  • “Billiards, but they’re People”

    “Billiards, but they’re People”

    I just finished nearly a whole month of travel, the last bit of which was in Latvia where I participated in a week-long game jam in a castle. Fellow game dev Charlie Behan made a great mini-documentary of the event. I’ve done a lot of game jams, and with this one, I needed to get…

  • Books Read 2022

    The Walrus and The Warwolf by Hugh Cook, i.e. the picaresque story of Drake, shithead pirate teen in a world of decaying magic, was above and beyond the most impactful book to me. Don’t just take my word for it – read China Miéville’s commentary. In non-fiction, The 1619 Project is a must-read to exist…