miscellany

You know how you’ll be straightening up your abode and at first it’s pretty easy?  I know where this goes!  I know where this goes too!  And then you get down to the stuff that you can’t find a good place for, so you just shove it in the closet?  Welcome to the closet.  If you’re looking for any rhyme or reason to what follows, I’m so sorry.

Names

Pick a name, enter it into the form, and see how popular that name has been in the United States over the course of seven generations.  The results page will explain how generationally specific a given name is and offer advice to authors about how appropriate it would be to use that name for a character born in America between 1892 and 2017.

The Lyttle Lytton Contest

Quite possibly the most popular thing on this site, the Lyttle Lytton Contest has run annually since 2001.  The basic idea is this: the annual Bulwer‑Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to pen the world’s most atrocious first line to a novel.  The problem is that most entries are so long that they’re not amusingly bad—​they’re just flat‑out unreadable.  So the Lyttle Lytton Contest forces entrants to keep their masterpieces down to 200 characters or less.  It runs year‑round, so check it out!

Stochastic Planet

A few years ago I coded up a little PHP toy that would pull up a random spot on Earth.  Now imagine running that script every day and archiving the nearest photo on a Tumblr blog.  Except you don’t have to imagine it, because Stochastic Planet did it for six years.  Check it out—​once you’ve seen a few dozen of these you might have a different sense of what the land mass of the Earth is actually like.

Paintings
Joust

I once commissioned video game art from clearfour.com, but thought I ought to do this one myself since it was for my then‑gf’s birthday.
Fake Jo Baer Polyptych in CGA

Jo Baer created a number of “black band” paintings that I like a lot.  Here’s an homage using the palettes offered by IBM’s Color Graphics Adapter of 1981, on which I deeply imprinted as a child.
’70s Mondrian

When I was a toddler, these were the only colors that things were allowed to be.
Fake Roy Lichtenstein Diptych in CGA

Back to the ’80s, only with Benday dots instead of a 320×200 grid of pixels.

And then, for the stuff that doesn’t even belong on any of the closet shelves, there’s that box on the floor way in the back.  In real life, mine has, among other stuff, a raccoon hand puppet, a bunch of old license plates, an empty box that once held some crêpes dentelles, and my psychological evaluation from when I was five.  Online, it has this stuff.

Here’s an annotated list of my favorite songs.  Listen to the music, learn about the bands, look at some album covers reduced to the size of postage stamps.

I made a Youtube movie about date formats.  (When I told my then‑gf about this, her reply was a resigned sigh of “You and your date formats.”)

The end of Daylight Saving Time on 2009.1101 got me thinking… you know how most of the world cheats a little where time zones are concerned, so that even during standard time the sun rises and sets later than it technically should?  What would a map of time zone deviance look like?  Answer: like this.  (Or this, if you’re colorblind.)

Gull is a guide to Glulx Inform, which is used to create interactive fiction.  It’s also mentioned on my IF page, but I figure it couldn’t hurt to mention it here as well.

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