Brent - lesser daemon (Page 8)

02

Feb

Sunday Loop

Day 19 of this hundred days project and the weekend malaise is setting in. When I'm not following my set weekday schedule, I find it a lot harder to make time to write - weekends are full of tasks, social engagements, and things that pull me away from my desk (good) and make me forget to write (bad). It is, overall, probably a good thing that I do things like chores, exercise, and all the other stuff I have to do to keep my mind right, but man, do I really have to keep doing this every day for the

1 min read

01

Feb

Letter of Recommendation: Monster Trucks

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Gravedigger getting towed.

I went to Barclay's center to watch Monster Jam today, an experience I can never recommend highly enough. The trucks are huge, they do jumps and wheelies and, in the case of my all-time favorite, Gravedigger, an actual backflip! A girl power truck I hadn't seen before, Sparkle Smash, provided maybe the most consistent entertainment of the day by absolutely wrecking the hell out of her pink unicorn truck suit (I don't know the technical term for the mostly decorative chassis on top of the otherwise identical giant machines). Her unicorn horn

1 min read

31

Jan

In Praise Of Self-Hosting

One little trend that gives me hope in these times is that a lot of people are starting their own websites. People are trying to return to a time when the internet was more personal, and everything wasn't centralized and aggregated on the same 3-4 platforms. People are starting webrings (please invite me to your webring). People are even trying to bring RSS back!

I tend to have mixed feelings about looking back at early eras of the web with too much nostalgia. Among a certain set it's become popular to yearn for the return of web 1.0, but

3 min read

30

Jan

Some Things I Believe

I spent a while today working on adding animations to a Jupyter notebook in anticipation of writing a follow-up to yesterday's post, but in a self-own I will never stop repeating I forgot to push them to git and I don't want to spend another two hours rewriting the same code. I'll write that up eventually, but for today, I have been thinking a lot about what people believe and why they believe it. Obviously, the various ghouls and goblins currently in control of America are a big factor in that, as are their feckless opposition who appear to believe

4 min read

29

Jan

Programmatically Creating Styled Cells In Jupyter Notebooks

I've been playing around with the idea of using Jupyter notebooks as a narrative game interface for a while, and finally got around to doing some prototyping this week. One thing I really wanted to do was require users to run code cells in Jupyter to unlock story beats: Jupyter notebooks are usually presented as a step-by-step tutorial, which is perfectly fine if you're trying to teach someone how to run a linear regression in sklearn but less so if you're trying to build suspense over the course of a story.

It's pretty easy to get output from just running

3 min read