warpedvisions.org

Welcome to my weblog. I write to help give me perspective, to see my thinking serialized, and to give me a chance to look at my ideas from different angles. Sometimes I vent. Sometimes I’m processing. Sometimes I just want to be helpful.

The things we don’t say out loud

There is a point in your career where you start to weigh what you want to say with what you can and should say. If you’re not careful, it can paralyze and stunt your ability to hold opinions with conviction. I suspect that the difference between our inner voice and where it comes from, versus what we know we should sound like, is one of the primary causes of imposter syndrome, and possibly contributes to a cycle of burnout. I find the more disconnected my inner voice is from my external persona (and the longer there is dissonance), the less I feel like myself. ...

Imposter syndrome is real

I have a reminder on my TODO list that haunts me weekly: Problem: I’m not writing. Sometimes I snooze it, sometimes I check it off. Sometimes I start to draft something and then lose interest. I leave the task on the list as I really should be writing more. There are a bunch of things getting in my way, but honestly I haven’t felt like myself for a few years. Working from home during lockdown was draining, and work itself is challenging enough that I don’t have much left at the end of the day. Even my non-work life has thrown a few curveballs. The most frustrating thing, however, is that I have been struggling with imposter syndrome. I feel like I don’t deserve to write. ...

How we write headlines is changing

I find trends in style guidelines interesting, especially when shared style guides lag language usage in the wild. I have observed a shift in headline style from Title Case to Sentence case in the majority of commercial publications online. I’ve also found a general improvement in clarity from the most reliable publishers, mostly due to well understood in house style guidelines. Common headline formats There are for general formats used for headlines today, with some publications using multiple methods depending on the feed source. ...

Warped v40

This is the 40th evolution of warpedvisions.org. It’s now running on WriteFreely, hosted by Write.as. WriteFreely is a minimalist writing platform built on Go, LESS, and plain old vanilla Javascript. It’s a speedy platform that feels nice to write in. This is also the 40th Warped theme. Not all 40 versions made the light of day, mind you, but I’ve hacked together all of these themes as a sort of playground of tech and design approaches. The process of building out a theme for a platform tells you a lot about the platform. ...

Playing with the Pico-8 fantasy console

I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas. Pico-8 is a highly constrained virtual machine that behaves a lot like a personal computer from the 1980s. It has a fixed colour palette, limited memory, limited screen size, and a simplified programming model using Lua. The constraints make it a great place to scale down ideas and quickly finish demos and prototypes. This week I’m toying with generative art ideas, starting with a tool that stamps the screen in various patterns. I’m hoping to evolve these prototypes into a general plotter library, but for now I’m focused on making things that look cool, as a way to play in generative code again. ...

PICO-8 tile art tests

I’ve been playing around in PICO-8, working on some generative art ideas. Lua is a fun little language that feels a lot like something between BASIC and JavaScript. Lua isn’t my favourite language, but it’s fun at the small scale. PICO-8, however, is a fantastic little game engine (or “Fantasy Console”) that has all of the feels of the 80s. First tests I started with a Minecraft style terrain generator, but as 2D tyles: ...

Using fonts with ligatures to improve readability

I set up a new dev laptop for myself over the Christmas holidays. I took the opportunity to burn down my old environment and to survey the 2021 tool landscape, which included testing out various terminals and setups, editors, and fonts. This year I discovered Fira Code, a tidy little monospace font that supports ligatures. Ligatures are two or more letters (or graphemes) that can be combined to make a single glyph. The result of combining letters into these ligatures can make complex syntax a bit easier to read, especially if you are familiar with the notations the concepts are based on. ...

A media diet for the crazy years

In the last year I read a lot less than normal, while at the same time I watched more streaming shows than I’m used to. I’ve been busier with work, in addition to what’s shaping up to be a crazy year. Stress and burnout kill my ability to focus on long form reading, which is something I’m working hard to counteract. Sometimes just forcing myself to read a book is the best medicine imaginable. ...

A savoury media diet for a cold and dreary Winter

One of my favourite reads is Kottke.org, a blog by Jason Kottke. Calling it a blog is a bit of a slight: it’s more of a magazine, like a proto-New Yorker. It’s thoughtful and relevant, weaving current events, artsy things, various interesting edges of tech, and topics about general humanity. Kottke has been killing it since ‘98, about as long as WarpedVisions has been around (though Kottke is better in every way). One of his regular columns is his Media Diet, a post I look forward to reading whenever it appears. There is something great about seeing someone else’s obsessions and indulgences: there’s a bunch to learn and inspiration to be had. So I’m in, here is the best of my media diet from this dank Vancouver Winter. ...

A JavaScript link mashup for Winter 2017: Things I used and liked in the JS universe this year

2017 was a good year for JavaScript. The newer language features are now part of our daily routine. Tightly integrated CI and packaging scripts are the norm, and we have a huge sea of libraries and tools available to us. The core JavaScript frameworks have settled down and matured to the point that we can be confident in JS as the base for large-scale commercial projects. Here are a few of the main JavaScript things that impressed me this year: ...