How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste

Let us pause to recall how proud Sam Bankman-Fried was to say that he could prove, with mathematical certainty, that Shakespeare was overrated. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. […] Link

Studio-notes 3-11-23

Big leap forward today- passing through a door in grotto gives it a color marking of its connecting room, letting you know what path you’ve taken. The maze is still disorienting, there are no cardinal directions in the map view, but you leave a breadcrumb trail as you traverse it.

studio notes 2-27-23

Some small updates to Grotto- keys are no longer single-use, but rather have a chance to break on use, like shields and brushes. Shield bashing- you can attempt to shield bash locked doors now, but this has affected regular character shield bashing and will need to be revisited. Added incense animation.

Studio Notes 2-23-23

the node app I made to check the grotto api and send mqtt (mosquitto) messages to things like lights and the doorknob controller is working, which is huge.

studio notes 2-22-23

Genealogy breakthrough today- was able to fix a wrong name and add one generation prior to the earliest Fridel family member on record as well as a few additional people in other families. This means another version of the GEDCOM file, which is kind of a hassle at this point, because a new GEDCOM file totally rebuilds the game maze and I need to make sure that the cenotaph activation and relic csv’s all have all correct person names.

studio notes 2-16-23

Some changes to Grotto from Saturday that I’m just now documenting here- Added the body parts UI area and changed the item interaction pattern- body part items can be equipped, all items in either section have a ‘x’ button that will drop them in the current room.

studio notes 2-7-23

The cheapo usb 5.1 audio interface I got only does surround sound through a bunch of 3.5 mm analog plugs, and the surround speakers at the lab are digital only (the interface has optical out but it only carries stereo).

Multi-tasking with CircuitPython

For many of us, the first program we see or run on a new platform is some variation of “Blink” to turn an LED on and off at some rate. It has become like the “Hello World” of microcontroller programming. This will turn the LED on and then wait, or in other words, time. […] Link

How Police Actually Cracked the Idaho Killings Case

Around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, a masked man broke into a house about a mile from the University of Idaho campus and stabbed four students. Then he walked past a stunned, surviving roommate and left. […] Link

studio notes 2-3-23

My current challenge is to find ways to connect Grotto to a gallery space for my final show. I’d like to avoid falling into the same pattern of “Thing projected on a wall” that you see at a lot of these shows. So far I have been concentrating on esp32 microcontrollers or headless raspberry pi’s that can get information from Grotto’s API. I’d like to use lights and sounds and weird tactile interfaces as much as possible.