small electronics repair
I bought two gameboy colors (gameboys color?) from j4u to fix up and mod. the one on the left was sold as "needs repair" but worked fine, especially after I cleaned the button contacts. the one on the right was sold as "doesn't work" and has... let's say *extensive* corrosion damage. the pics show what it looked like after my attempt to deal with the corrosion and removing the negative battery terminal (which didn't even have continuity from front to back)
self promo (book release), asemic text
I have a new book out on Aleator Press! https://www.aleator.press/releases/wendit-tnce-inf it's a collection of asemic prose poems in a small handmade letterpress edition. the book was generated with code from a nanogenmo project of mine from a few years ago (source available here: https://github.com/aparrish/word-gan-book-generator)
james did such lovely work with the book design and printing. it was rewarding to work with him and I'm so glad this is finally out in the world!
i finally finished my hand-woven kitchen towels! the last step was hemming the edges, which required learning literally the bare basics of hand sewing (which somehow i had avoided learning until this point in my life). i wove them on my 15" schacht cricket rigid heddle loom using a pattern and yarn from Gist (the brooks bouquet/waffle weave detail at the edges was my own addition). it was incredibly fun and satisfying to make these! hell yes to fiber crafts imo
I wrote up a progress report and lab notes on my project to make a computational poetry generator that uses only solar power: https://posts.decontextualize.com/solar-powered-dawn-poems-progress-report/
the prototype device uses an Adafruit M0 Feather, Jasper Sikken's AEMSUCA board, and a tiny solar panel to generate small snippets of dawn poems from a corpus I am putting together
(work supported by CultureHub as part of my residency there)
... from the preface of Peter Hausted's Rival Friends (1632). I invite you to "tag urself" among this play's vivid Dramatis Personae
the original cartridge shell is in pretty rough shape. been like this since i bought used it from gamestop like... fifteen years ago probably?
put my Link's Awakening cartridge in a new shell with a fun custom label from Next Stop Please https://nextstopplease.square.site/
fiiiinally made a complete plot from this idea that I actually like! this is: distilbert hidden states from the first ~1k sentences of Frankenstein, stacked vertically to form a bitmap, normalized, blurred, skeletonized into a rhizome of polylines, then plotted on an axidraw. (the idea was to invent a form of "asemic" "writing" to visualize machine learning model hidden states)
skeleton/vector tracing thing
continuing work on this and I think I'm finally getting good results! on the left is the original bitmap, on the right is the vectorized skeleton. the algorithm: start by "thinning" the bitmap (w/Zha 1984), then make a graph in which every set pixel is a node, then split the graph into polylines at shared nodes (i.e., with more than two edges), then simplify those polylines with Visvalingam-Wyatt. here I've also interpolated the polylines as Catmull-Rom splines
the playable portion of Jesper Juul's "The Game of Video Game Objects" is cute and insightful https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/
picture of picture of me
this is... actually a really good picture of me haha damn (from the livestream of a conference I just spoke at over zoom, you can rewind the livestream here if you want to watch: https://iterations.online/)
a thing that has been bugging me is that the Utah Jazz appear to be using a font in their marketing materials that is at least notionally based on the proportions and diagonal blocks of MegaZeux, the DOS EGA text mode shareware game (my recreation in MegaZeux on the left, original on the right). and I don't know what to make of this
Poet, programmer, game designer. Assistant Arts Professor at NYU ITP. she/her