Partial Applications: Over 0x100 oblique ideas

February 18, 2013 6:44 AM

Partial Applications: Over 0x100 oblique ideas
I was introduced to Oblique Strategies here on MeFi, and the cryptic collection of aphorisms by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno has been one of my favorite creative tools ever since. Lately, I've done most of my creating with a text editor and terminal, so I made a similar tool skewed towards programmers (but hopefully useful to problem solvers of all sorts). It includes a tiny JSON API and a command line interface.

Tech stuff: I wrote this in Clojure and Clojurescript, which was an absolute joy (until I had to drop into Java to deal with a ConnectionFactoryBuilder). Thanks to the Compojure web framework and Hiccup templates, everything from the server up (except CSS) is just s-expressions—not a lick of HTML, SQL, YAML, JSON, or Javascript. I think this is my first moment of true lisp enlightenment.

Role: author, programmer

posted by ecmendenhall (5 comments total)

I have a huge brain boner for creativity tools but I think your hip & segsi tech stack is equally interesting.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:44 AM on February 18

Oh, man, the CLI part is killer! It's as fun as 'fortune', just incrementally more useful.
posted by ignignokt at 7:59 PM on February 18

Yeah, the CLI version is much appreciated. I've been relying on ZIPPY for inspiration so long my data-base is JULIENNED and stir-fried!
posted by Lorin at 8:04 PM on February 20

As a big fan of Oblique Strategies, I like this a lot. I'm going to try actually using it when I'm working today.
posted by snofoam at 3:08 AM on March 5

Thanks! I'm glad you found it useful. I'm a Vim user and young whippersnapper who'd never heard of fortune or the Emacs Zippy quotes. They're pretty great, too!
posted by ecmendenhall at 2:58 PM on March 15