Okay I’m posting here again now
So I sorta didn’t update this website for, uh, eight years. I attempted three separate projects to replace this site with something more convenient and none of them really worked out. So alright, here again, at least for as long as it takes for me to publish a WebGPU tutorial.
Meanwhile, here’s some things I’ve been doing since 2016, since I wasn’t good about linking them here:
I’ve been doing longform blogging on cohost.org, which shuts down next week. You can click here for a list of my best posts there, but here’s the highlights:
- The “baseline” scene in Blade Runner 2049 was literally written by Ryan Gosling
- A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat¹
- 120 Bandcamp album recommendations
- An introduction to WebGPU
That last post, the WebGPU one, is why I’m reviving this blog; there’s a part two, a WebGPU tutorial, I’m mostly done with and will be finishing this year². And I guess it goes here. (By the way, all those links above may die in a couple of months; this page will stay up, and I will correct the links when Cohost releases their archiving tools.)
I was running a VR company for a while. It was called Mermaid Heavy Industries. The use of past tense may… give you a hint how that turned out, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to show you the (frankly, very cool) game in the video at that site. However, I will have a very interesting VR-related announcement around the end of this year.
I made a standalone site for web art named dryad.technology, but it hasn’t been updated in years and because the WebAudio standard changed around 2019 I’m not sure if any of the apps on that site have working audio. There’s supposed to be audio.
I made some original software for the Analogue Pocket and this little site for hosting my Pocket cores. None of these cores are on the standard Pocket “inventory” site yet, this is the only place to get them. Right now they’re all art experiments but I do have a few small Pocket games in development.
I contributed some shaders to “Get in the Car, Loser”, a game by my wife Christine which is on Steam, Itch and Nintendo Switch. This game rules and you should play it. It is a pixel art RPG roadtrip and it puts its own unique spin on every single aspect of the RPG genre.
I’m also posting regularly on Mastodon³ and Bluesky. I’ve never linked my social media from this blog, and I kind of don’t want to start now, because I put this site on my resume I give to potential employers and it makes me kind of uncomfortable when the wall between work life and personal life breaks down. But if you can solve my maze of riddles and misdirection and find my Mastodon/Bluesky accounts, I do post a music recommendation on each of those sites daily.
¹ This is a tribute to a now-defunct website with an unusual degree of user freedom, posted on a second now-defunct website with an unusual degree of user freedom. The irony makes me unhappy.
² Other unfinished Cohost drafts that may or may not show up here: A chronicle of my adventures trying to learn FPGA programming after writing only software for decades; a post I’m not entirely sure makes sense about how Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” and Saul Williams’ “Neptune Frost” are basically the same movie; a proposal to encode video games in the Dumas-Dutil alphabet and beam them into space.
³ I’ve been contributing to a Mastodon client named “Tusky“, and I’m very excited about the possibilities of ActivityPub/”The Fediverse”. If you’ve been following this blog since 2006 (and if you have: hi, Brian) you might remember I made some attempts to make RSS tools that merged together blogs on different sites so they acted like parts of a single integrated community. That didn’t work, but ActivityPub seems to be doing the same thing and it is working, so far. I am going to set up this blog so you can “follow” it on ActivityPub/Mastodon.