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A Plot Summary of Disney’s 1963 film Sword in the Stone
Merlin: I need to find the boy who will one day be King Arthur, and educate him so he is an effective King. Arthur: I conveniently fell in through your roof. Merlin: I am going to teach you kingly stuff like geometry and Latin. Arthur: Okay. I’m currently a squire, and I want to be…
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Talk @ Roguelike Celebration 2022
This upcoming Sunday, Oct 23, I’m doing a talk at Roguelike Celebration, a conference about the creation, appreciation and analysis of roguelikes; that odd genre of game incorporating procedural generation, permanent consequences (often called permadeath) and maximalist systems. In 2020, I did a short talk on Procedurally Generated Technology Trees. This year, I’m talking about…
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A Dream-Locked Vision
A had a strange experience last night. Background: I had had some back pain and insomnia for a couple days. It seemed better yesterday morning, but got worse over the day. I met up with friends midday near Prospect Park to grab drinks on a patio. The back pain was getting worse, and I gleefully…
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1px VR
I have always had slightly dry eyes. This has made wearing contacts difficult. During the pandemic, I gradually became inexcusably annoyed at having to choose foggy glasses or blurry vision when wearing a mask in public. Independently, it occurred to me in The Year of Isolation that this would be an ideal time for some…
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Books Read 2020
This year was a year of very long books, often on walks, or drives. In a first, the best piece of literature I “read” was the narrative game Disco Elysium. In extreme contrast, I loved the long, ancient tomes Herodotus’ Histories, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron; both great reminders of the universality of humans barely…
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Species-Wide Imposter Syndrome
Have you ever had that moment where you’re walking from one meeting to another and something clumsy happens – like you trip over a chair corner, you realize your shirt is undone, or you sneeze inelegantly. And then the entire facade of civilization comes crashing down. We’re barely different from the apes messing around hanging…
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Books Read 2019
My favorite book this year is either Voyager in Night by C.J. Cherryh, or Teckla by Steven Brust. The former is about an interaction with a computer consciousness as it’s falling apart, the latter is about a socialist uprising in a fantasy world, in the context of negotiating differences in romantic relationships. Both are wonderful.…
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GPT-2 and Culture Ship Names
Brief Personal Update: I accepted a new job and moved to Manhattan – more on that later. Critically, I signed a lease on an apartment after 3 years of cybernomadism. I intend to live here for a while, but I want it to feel like a spaceship on the move. Thus, it needs a proper…
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Upcoming Topics in Computing (that I’m interested in)
I have spent a lot of time in academia, and the last four years at commercial startups, including running a few myself. This gives me a special vantage point on upcoming computing areas – I want to jump over what’s interesting now to what will be interesting in 5 years. My current job hunt has…
