Weird

Interesting observation is that “solo-dev” seems to be the new indie.

...In this case, I think it’s great when things get brought back to the basics… Work by just one person counts as something. It brings value to the table in ways that work by large teams never will because it’s the unique voice, perspective, and intention of just one person that you are experiencing when you are playing their game. Experimentation can thrive here.

...It is particularly interesting when you look at the tool space. Tools outside of the mainstream, made by just one person, a group of friends, or a small team… all asking “what if”, and then exploring how their tool can empower creation in an idealistically creative way.

If We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.

As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.

In my practice I turn code (such as HTML) into material form. By superimposing structural, system-based and interface components from the Internet over processes in the material world (and vice versa), new perspectives on the "nature" of either world are encountered. In recent years I have been focusing especially on interfaces of data collection, foremost HTML <input> fields... The project I have started at ChaNorth during the very inspiring "ProcessPark" Residency(*) in April 2018 is called INPUT FIELD FORM #2 and materializes an HTML based Web-form into an agricultural layout for growing plants and serving food, creating edible HTML.

...The INPUT FIELD FORM "garden" is structured by the Web form's functionality, and each agricultural "sub-field" therefore is dedicated to a specific functionality in the online Input Field. Instead of taking data from the "users", it is given back to them in the form of food that has grown inside the installation.

I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.

A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life.

This sort of thing [parody software] functions as turning your actual desktop into a playground or space for a game.

I think that’s a fascinating tangent to explore with software. It can be a conduit to a fantasy reality, blurring the line between where the fiction starts and the software stops...I think it goes to show that people love looking at computers in a different light, one that breaks free from the mainstream ideals.

...There’s a novelty to re-discovering that software can be something else. It does not have to serve a purpose like photoshop, or how a video game serves a purpose, it can just exist to make your digital space weird. They are digital toys.

There is a power to that: when developers reject the idea that everything made needs to be part of a monetary feedback loop, and can just make things that break that established pattern of use, monetization, productivity, corporate branding that exists in every part of the desktop…

Being part of a long history like this, software is meant to be weird. Computers are silly. Hobbyists are at the heart of this.

According to patent drawings, it's a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.

Teranoptia is a typeface without letters, a peculiar contraption that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures just by typing letters with your keyboard. Its design has been inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and by medieval illustrations, as well as by children's books. You can use it to create border ornaments, to daydream about monsters or just to spice your layouts with marginalia.

David Horvitz made the score ‘When the ocean sounds’ for human voices intended to mimic the sound of the sea.

...Imagine the first life forms, with porous skin or cell walls, through which the sea could freely flow into and out of their small bodies. At a certain moment, however, these life forms evolve. They come out of the sea and develop a different type of skin, one that allows them to keep liquids within their bodies. These liquids are ultimately seawater, and so the creatures – as do we – carry the sea with them, no matter where they go.

Chernoff faces, invented by applied mathematician, statistician and physicist Herman Chernoff in 1973, display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty. Chernoff faces handle each variable differently. Because the features of the faces vary in perceived importance, the way in which variables are mapped to the features should be carefully chosen (e.g. eye size and eyebrow-slant have been found to carry significant weight).

cursor watching plays with the contrasting extremes of institutional surveillance and human witnessing inherent to browsing the internet to question how we watch and are watched in the process. Mimicking a surveillance feed at first glance, the website reveals itself upon closer attention to be a collection of live windows looking onto various corners of the internet. Presenting our everyday internet activity as a collective performance, this internet environment invites visitors to consider how they show up in the act and how their actions are perceived.

There is a large-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate culture and discourse online and in wider culture by utilising a system of bots and paid employees whose job it is to produce content and respond to content online in order to further the agenda of those they are employed by.

Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

thinking about poetic forms; about the translation of poetry into this visual tangible thing; about poetry for the eyes, for looking at; about iconicity; about the use of words and space and punctuation and line break in composing a poem; about the poetic arrangements

A Congress on the Visuality of the Internet

Special Fish is a community site for publishing poems, journals, logs, and lists.

(non-)user events is a collaged interface that navigates personal internet experiences by quoting and close-knitting HTML elements from Polina’s browsing history. These elements, gathered from sites she visited in June 2024, are entangled in a grid-like structure, searching for areas of friction and excess, inviting viewers to move beyond seamless user experiences into poetic space where new meanings are possible.

The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?

While physical intimacy between humans is almost extinct, we understand you maintain a biological and psychological need to give erotic pleasure.

We have created It is as if you were making love to provide a usable and efficient experience of pleasuring a partner without the distress and dissatisfactions of a physical body to navigate.

(we)bsite is a living collection of internet dreams from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet.

• …
• Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend's back. (letters in the Brahmi script)
• Guessing a friend's thoughts.
• …

I’m trying off and on to develop a juiciness theory of software aesthetics where programs are judged by how well they create or strengthen a sense of juiciness.

Juiciness relates to fruits and berries, these miraculous objects that emerge from the soil with firm boundaries, beautiful contours, cohesive juicy alluring wholenesses that are intrinsically desirable.

...It also relates to Christopher Alexander’s theory of centers being self-coherent nexuses that strengthen the surrounding overall field generated by other nested centers.

...Juice itself is less juicy when it’s extracted to a smooth clear liquid. Maximal juiciness is like a grapefruit or blackberry, because the essence of juiciness involves liquid being contained in a crisp cellular packet.

Sunday postcards with links to the quiet, odd, and poetic web.

This is a programming language based on three paradigms:

• Tacit programming
• Stack-oriented programming
• Array programming

The main feature of the language is its avoidance of any naming of any sort. True to this maxim, the language itself doesn't have a name. "The namingless programming language" is a definition.

Since there is only one such language in existence, it doesn't need a name.

i_^_b_H_i_cpp^_)_V_b_v_J_^_E_H_leafL_==^_)_V_H_Z_Z_^_)_V_H_I_^_E_1^_2^_#_G_Z_Z_^_E_1^_2^_#_H_$_L_-^_G_m_G_&_&_

a website with a thermostat
a website that floats in through the window
a website that is often partially shaded
a website that isn't sorry
a website with a courtyard

If you have three words, the order usually goes 'I-A-O.'
tic-tac-toe

If there are only two words, ‘I’ is the first and the second is either ‘A’ or ‘O.’
click-clack
King-Kong

A programming language whose virtual machine is Olympus. Instead of registers, we have a set of gods, each of which will do specific things for us if we ask them in the right way...Each line of code is written as an invocation: a request to a god.

Despite the fact that there are not many documented cases of sudden mysterious darkness, scientists are seriously concerned about this phenomenon. The phenomenon was first mentioned in the Bible. It spoke of darkness as a punishment of the gods sent to the Egyptians.

The most famous, which has already become a textbook, can be considered a case in the American city of Louisville. On March 7, 1911, at about 4 pm, darkness fell on the city, which lasted for about an hour.

Although, as eyewitnesses later told, it seemed to them that they had been in thick, viscous darkness for only a few minutes. The darkness was so dense that a lit match brought to their faces could not be seen. Fear paralyzed people, they stood still, afraid to get lost.

“How Lord Northcliffe Heard Two Oceans At the Same Time,” the headline from the October 1917 issue of Electrical Experimenter magazine blared.

A conventional dictionary is a collection of words, together with explanations of their meanings, hints for their pronunciation, pictures illustrating particular words, examples showing how the words have been used in books and newspapers, and so on.

The OEIS is a collection of sequences of numbers (such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, …).

The real value of AI comes not from having it emulate old ways of solving problems, but, instead, by helping us unlock new capabilities. Employees at companies don’t need another tool to search their corporate intranets for data, they need a way of skipping the most boring parts of their job while make their remaining work more productive and engaging. Students don’t need an improved version of Grammarly, they need tutors and advisors that will boost their learning. To do this, we need to experiment with weirder uses of AI tools, and we need to do that while paying close attention to the ethical concerns and technical limitations of AI. Careful experimentation is the key to success.

Scroll up, or scroll down. It doesn't really matter. Follow your heart!

This type of website is a often referred to as a "memex", a kind of archive and mirror of everything that one has done, that one has learnt. It's a living document that outlines where one has been, and a tool that advises where one could go.