🎶 "The farmer takes a wife,
The farmer takes a wife,
Hey-ho, the derry-o,
The farmer takes a wife."

Dating was a lot easier before the internet.

The End of Evidence History on Demand

Soon audio and video will join text as untrustworthy records of actual events. Our culture isn't ready. andrewglassner.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

box magnitude?

I wish that my body would tell me - say at 3AM, suddenly and intensely - that I ate cheese during dinner but forgot to take lactose tablets.

Minion's Comp Recorded May 13

A new Open Season post! A perfectly normal day.
open.substack.com/pub/andrewgl...

The subhead states that the companies are only guilty of undefined "theft" in quotes. Rather than, you know, theft.

I went to Staples and bought rubber bands. I feel like I got away with something.

A little-known fact: the musical notes are named for their inventors:
A for Tiberius Alouette
B for Sarah Barnacle-on-Stafford
C for Frederico Henrow Scrunnulus Coperville
etc.

A cartoon image of a tree in a forest. A wooden board is nailed to the tree at a slight angle. On the board are the words "Open Season". Below that is the URL andrewglassner.substack.com. The image is a collage of modified public domain art from the web. The typeface is Mirisch, regular weight.

Since the dawn of time, people have thought about interesting ideas and wondered, "What does Andrew think about this?" We can finally answer that question! Check out Open Season, my new Substack, at andrewglassner.substack.com Tech, games, ideas, art, humor, and no politics.

The cover of the novel The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. It shows small silhouettes of man and woman on a horse on a brown field. Behind them the field rises in to a mountain, and the sun is visible to the side, all together forming an abstracted heart.

Just finished The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Beautiful. It feels the way I imagine it would feel to be in a dim Irish bar, rain falling outside, a fire in the corner, and someone next to you, with a glass of drink and a gorgeous gift of language, turned and told you a story.

My Psychology Today credit card offers Freud and Identity Monitoring.

Halloo, Halloo!
The monkey's done in!
The chipmunk cried
With a mighty grin.

Video games: Only you can stop this urgent, imminent global catastrophe! NOW! Also, run errands for NPCs and talk through their personal issues, collect some flowers and stuff, and explore the environment. But also urgently stop the world-ending cataclysm that's already happening!

I put off playing this game for a long time because I thought it was too twitchy & empty. Then one day I gave it a go & I’m so glad I did. What a wonderful game! So consistently inventive and funny. And though I missed some of the game references, I caught enough of them to be delighted.

I was thinking of playing this. It sounds like you’re enjoying the game. Would you recommend it?

Icarus YouTube video by Ralph Towner - Topic

He did a beautiful version with Gary Burton on vibraphone. I have loved this piece from the first time I heard it. I play this on special occasions to mark a joyful event.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Msn2...

You're a writer with a protagonist who is brilliant, confident, and faces challenges to their ambitions. If you're a selfish loon you write Atlas Shrugged. If you're a thoughtful soul you write The Dispossessed.

The crucial role of chaos in our brain’s most extraordinary functions That the human mind treads a delicate line between order and disorder is a radical idea that’s gaining traction - and is changing our understanding of intelligence, consciousness and creativity

Regardless of what your crazy uncle (or cabinet member) believes, scientists love well-informed, good-faith sceptics. "The sceptical groups are, in my opinion, the best thing that ever happened ... They forced the field to dig deeper." www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

Broadly speaking, math is about numbers as literature is about alphabets.

Now it is free to make good on its moldy schemes.

The Long And Winding Road (Naked Version / Remastered 2013) YouTube video by The Beatles - Topic

A beautiful song, in its original, intended simplicity. Haunting.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfVA...

I bought Metronome for my phone and it’s just clicks with no interaction, loot, or achievements. Lousy game.

A 3D image rendered in Houdini. A yellow ball sits inside a larger, red ball. The yellow ball has a texture like thick paste. The red ball seems to be made of many small and large worms on its surface.

New project! My test/debug image became my first image, and I'm super happy. Onward! (Fine print: Houdini w/ custom nodes running my own code. No reaction-diffusion sim, no textures, no transparency.)

A house near Davie and Bute streets in Vancouver BC.

Here’s a Vancouver house I passed today near Davie and Bute streets.

Hello (Lionel Richie Jazz Swing Cover) feat. Casey Abrams YouTube video by Scott Bradlee

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhF...

Wow! Beautiful and humbling. We are, as always, fish discovering our water. It's thrilling that our inner and outer worlds are always expanding, always deepening, always connecting everyone to everything in new ways.

A book on how to create your own art, but with a genAI cover. That's a "fire station burned down" level of irony.

A "MacGuffin" is a thing that characters want - a noun. It often doesn't matter what it actually is. Video game quests are often: "go to X & turn on/off Y" where the specifics of X and Y are secondary to the gameplay. They feel like MacGuffins but verbs. Is there an industry standard word for this?

Just finished Outer Worlds 2 on PS5 (~80 hrs). A masterclass in Art Nouveau styling. Sharp writing, funny & subversive. Well-crafted companions. Top-notch voice acting. Many oddities, eg topo maps that don't match the terrain, & undocumented HUD elements I *still* don't understand. But I had fun!

I love that he doesn't know who he helped (and ideally, though it's unlikely, they'll not know it was him). The many self-serving documentaries and videos showing someone doing good so they can bask in grateful praise are horrid. Doing good for strangers anonymously & without reward is golden.