May 26

Succession Quotes > Midjourney Prompts
In honor of the final Succession Sunday, thought I'd share a project I've been working on throughout the season. I take my favorite quotes from each episode and turn them into prompts in Midjourney. It gives me great delight and I'm happy to take requests if there's a pre-season 4 quote that's near and dear to your heart.


May 25

DayBrix daily minigame
I had the thought “What if a certain falling-blocks game asked you to clear today's date?” and decided to build it… in an original, legally-safe, non-infringing way. Each day of the week has its own theme (and music), and there’s an Arcade Mode.


May 24

[iOS] US Passport agency rapid(ish) redialer
People in the US waiting for passports often have to call the passport info line as their travel date approaches to move things along, but that number is swamped and on many tries plays a long recorded apology before hanging up. This iPhone/iOS shortcut lets you redial the moment that apology starts, so you can immediately try again, with a minimum of effort. [more inside]


Have You Played?
Learn about the videogames you should play and how to think about them! Have You Played is a free weekly newsletter for novices and experts alike, written by an award-winning game design and journalist. Every post starts with a simple description of exactly how the game works and what you do in it, then explores what makes it uniquely good or flawed. I've covered games including Pentiment, Season, Terra Nil, Cyberpunk 2077, Honkai: Star Rail, and many more!


May 22

Preserving Worlds - Season 2
Visit virtual worlds of the past! Meet the netizens keeping them going. Let's re-wild the information superhighway! Can cyberspace be a better place? A streaming documentary series on the cultures and communities of antique virtual worlds. Every episode is standalone, so you don't need to have seen season 1. [more inside]


Who are you, Mel Kaye?  
For 40 years, since "The Story of Mel" was published (May 21st 1983), the existence of the hacking legend Mel Kaye was in doubt. Until today. We found his final resting place, which unfolds the life and work of the Mel (Melvin) Kaye (Kornitzky), who hacked a blackjack game for the LGP-30 and RPC-4000 some 70 years ago, in Glendale, Los Angeles. The article "Mel Kaye – CV" is published on the Mel's Loop project website, which is dedicated to hacker folklore research, and to the research of The Story of Mel in specific.


May 16

Known Leaders
Here's a tool to fill you in on who the leaders (you know, the important ones it the front of the band photos) of various bands are. It will also tell you about games and novels. [more inside]


Deco Deck: a new logic puzzle
My new game, Deco Deck, is now available for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, and Mac. In Deco Deck, there's a grid of cards. Each card has one of five suits, and a number from 1-9. The goal is to link up the cards in connected groups of five, such that each group forms a valid "hand". The hands are: straight, flush, full house, five-of-a-kind, and rainbow. A rainbow is one card of each suit. Each puzzle has only one solution. There are new puzzles every day. [more inside]


Season of Skulls — my latest novel — is published today
Season of Skulls is the third book in the New Management trilogy, following on from 2020's Dead Lies Dreaming and 2022's Quantum of Nightmares. (Link points to a reading extract.) [more inside]


May 15

Sight Snap - a new game to speed up identifying notes on the staff
I built this simple browser-based matching game as a less boring way of building note recognition speed compared to the simple question and answer format found in most music theory apps. It should work on every device but will be more enjoyable on a touchscreen. [more inside]


May 11

Becoming a dad, ready or not
I'm a storyteller and standup comic in NYC, and I just posted this standup act/story about what it was like to have to prepare for my first baby while grieving my own father - and getting some surprise inspiration from my stoner mother-in-law. I'd greatly appreciate your checking it out and sharing it everywhere if you're so moved.


May 4

Back to My Dreams
For a birthday present for my wife, I commissioned two musicians to each create a pop song using lyrics generated by ChatGPT AI, album cover art generated by AI, and an AI generated music video. I made this website to present the songs to her as a surprise and explain the process of getting this project made. [more inside]


May 3

Our Backyard
This is a super low-key chill project, sharing some of the better videos I get (mostly from trail cameras) of critters in my backyard. It's mostly deer and bunnies lately.


May 1

Terminal Evening podcast/mix series
Monthly thematic mixes of music, sound and text, intended for active, immersive listening. [more inside]


April 28

FLW inspired Bird Feeder
I used Maker_Mobile's "Laser Cut Frank Lloyd Wright Window Lamp" as the starting point for this. Added a bottom tray, soda bottle to hold seeds, and a top. I can't figure out if I should put a hook in the top to hang it, or mount it on a fence pool.


April 26

Growing In My Gray (Part II)
Here's the second part of my graphic memoir: https://www.echonyc.com/~neander/GrowingInMyGrayPartII.pdf In case you want to read the first part, it's here: https://www.echonyc.com/~neander/GrowingInMyGray.pdf. Any comments welcome. Hope you enjoy it.


Tales of Nocturne - A Night Fiction Sleep Podcast
Tales of Nocturne is a Night-Fiction podcast. What is that you say? Night-fiction are stories that are engaging but where the entire show is design to help one sleep. Tales of Nocturne is based on Nocturne, Planet of Eternal night surrounded by magical waltzing moons. Our tales follow the lives of those that live in that darkness and explore its mysteries. [more inside]


April 23

Banned Book Book Club  
Displays information about a book that has been banned in American schools 2021-2022, alongside a readable preview of most books (on desktop only) and a link to buy it. Reload to see another one.


April 22

Greatest newspaper correction EVER - but where's it from?
So there's this newspaper correction I first came across about 40 years ago and have had memorised ever since. It reads like this: "Instead of being arrested yesterday as we stated for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, Revd. James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago." I've seen it quoted dozens of times since - most recently in July last year - but never with any attribution telling us which paper it appeared in or when. Earlier this month, I decided to find out. (Twitter thread.) (Threadreader) [more inside]


April 17

Infinite LP records from the Boston Public Library via archive.org
This LP player streams an endless loop of songs from the Boston Public Library collection on archive.org. Choose from dozens of stations or create your own stations. Discover and enjoy classic music! [more inside]


"Rhymes With 'Biscuit'" rolling-ball sculpture
Link goes to 3:30 YouTube video. Rolling-ball sculptures typically involve lifting balls via some mechanism and then letting them roll down various interesting routes. Rhymes With "Biscuit" takes a different approach; it has the balls rolling round and round without going up and down (very much).


April 10

The Dalai Dalí Dolly Folly (Super Deluxe Edition)
Do you have 5 minutes? Do you want to hear 13 songs with rhyming titles? Have I got the album for you! [more inside]


April 3

AODY Music, text-to-speech
A new music project, under the artist name AODY. Including text-to-speech vocals feature, from VoxBox. Three new albums created using this feature so far. AiODY 1, AiODY 10, and Wind Rhapsody. [more inside]


March 31

Kicked Out: gay erotic romance set at a boarding school in the '70s
The winters are long at Napier Academy, an elite boys' boarding school. And as Spaulding Stockwell turns eighteen, he couldn't be lonelier. His best friend Lawrence is pushing him away, and forget finding a girlfriend in Nowheresville, New Hampshire. But when he catches the eye of the school's charismatic star athlete, George "Ender" Endicott, his life takes an unexpected turn. As Ender's tutor, Spaulding becomes embroiled in a steamy affair that jeopardizes all he holds dear. He knows he’s playing with fire…but Ender is impossible to resist. [more inside]


March 30

Infinite Adversaries: a fighting game generated and narrated by ChatGPT
Inspired by the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series, Infinite Adversaries asks ChatGPT to generate perpetual, randomized encounters, pitting you against a never-ending army of imaginary enemies. You're given an option of weapons, and from there ChatGPT imagines an adversary, location, and a set of possible actions (along with their outcomes). As you decide what to do, ChatGPT narrates the results. If you survive, your prize is another adversary. [more inside]


March 24

Tales From The Town: Volumes 1 & 2
Tales From The Town (previously on projects: 1, 2) is my ongoing weekly story series about a small, strange town (latest episodes appear here every Saturday; earliest episodes can be found here). About half the stories follow the adventures of four siblings growing up in a weird, rambling, semi-haunted house, and the rest feature various vignettes about the other inhabitants of the town. It recently reached its 101st episode and to celebrate I've released two free anthologies of the stories from the first two years of the series. Volume 1 (Summer, then Winter) collects the first 52 (standalone) episodes, while Volume 2 (The Lodger Suite), which was an attempt at an ongoing episodic story, collects the next 40 or so. [more inside]


March 19

Let's Have Fun Why Not
Five buoyant tunes! [more inside]


March 10

Sunny Disposition
Sunny Disposition is the latest EP from Corwin Bolt & the Wingnuts. We also recorded a Tiny Desk Contest video for one of the songs, "Pile of Diamonds". [more inside]


March 7

A conference about empiricism and software engineering
If someone explained to you that they find bugs in their code by wiggling a dowsing rod at the screen you might have questions. But a lot of modern software development is no more evidence based than that; if you're part of a programming team "doing agile", you might have more in common with that bug-dowser guy than you realize. I'm organizing a small conference focused on presenting new evidence-based practices and novel empirical results in software engineering. It's called Never Work In Theory. [more inside]


March 5

A ChatGPT Primer for Writing Teachers (and other academic humanists)
Academics, like the rest of the world, have been talking a lot about ChatGPT. College writing instructors—people in the field of writing studies or composition and rhetoric—are particularly worried about (1) the possibilities of plagiarism and (2) the questions automated prose generators raise for the notion that writing is form of thinking. This informal 5000-word longread primer, with an extended bibliography for further reading, summarizes some of the technical operations of LLMs for a humanist audience and links those technical questions to larger pedagogical and philosophical concerns. Feedback welcomed!


March 2

60 Years In Space
In 2015 I started making an extremely crunchy hard sci-fi TTRPG based on a board game, High Frontier. I’ve just released all 1800 pages of it on itch.io. The first 100 pages of the core rules are free to download and people seem to like it. [more inside]


February 28

Small Wonders Magazine  
A new online magazine for speculative poetry and flash fiction. [more inside]


February 27

Corky Lee and the Work of Seeing
For N+1 magazine, I wrote an essay in which I look at radical photographer Corky Lee's archive as a way to talk about the last 50 years of Asian American movements, political economy, class and gender. [more inside]


February 22

Lirdle - Like Wordle, but with one lie per answer  
Yet another Wordle clone, but this one is designed to be maddening in the way a debugging session can be. For each answer you give, it picks one square at random and assigns it the wrong answer. [more inside]


February 21

Word Searches for Dad
My dad Perry is really into word searches. I decided to build a website for him called perryspuzzles.com. We are both happy with the result. 32 different categories with puzzles like The Empire Strikes Back, Better Call Saul, and one dedicated to my friends at metafilter. If the puzzles aren't hard enough, you can always enter into ludicrous mode. If 5000+ puzzles isn't enough, you can make your own and share it with your puzzle loving friends. Your feedback is greatly appreciated and I hope you enjoy.


February 19

My portrait of COVID Toronto in maps  
I needed to exercise to be productive and take care of myself, but curiosity and the availability of technological tools turned that into a project of exploration, map-making, and collaboration with friends. [more inside]


February 13

An alphabet of vintage Romance Comics for Valentines' Day
This is a Twitter thread of genuine old comics covers I threw together taking us all the way From All-True Romance via Negro Romance and Teen-age Temptations to Weird Love and beyond. Artists whose work you'll see include Frank Frazetta and Jack Kirby. [The Teen-age Temptations cover is quite violent, so be aware of that before you open it.] [more inside]


February 10

Rock Scissor Paper Machine
This is a re-creation of the rock scissor paper gambling machines that used to be all around the streets of Seoul back in the 1990s. [more inside]


February 9

AD 79: Year of Vesuvius
In AD 79, Italy's mount Vesuvius erupted, covering Pompeii and Herculaneum in hot ash and lava. This was not, however, the only important event of that year. One emperor died, another succeeded, farmers farmed, politicians plotted, lawyers advocated, businessmen cut deals, life went on. In this podcast, we will follow the seasons of a typical year at the height of Rome's power from the perspectives of people high and low.


February 5

The Dreams Of The Waiting Prince
The Dreams Of The Waiting Prince, Before The Occasion Of His Ascension, During The Period Of His Seclusion, In The High Palace Of Eternal Solitude, Above The Clouds Of The Empire’s Reality, Beneath The Many Moons Of The Empire’s Imagination is the story of a lifetime and the history of an empire told entirely in 150 dreams (which can be read either as stand alone fables or in order as a single narrative), with illustrations and artwork by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900-1930) and Frances MacDonald (1873-1921). [more inside]


February 3

Weekend Collection: A weekly curated collection of essays and reviews
This substack provides a weekly collection of links to essays and reviews from the archives of my favorite cultural magazines. Each collection is chosen around a specific topic to hopefully provide something interesting and thought-provoking for readers to explore and be entertained.


January 30

Mondrian's Toothpicks
Spent the last week executing an idea I had earlier this month: a stained glass piece based on the Toothpick Sequence, a simple mathematical ruleset about line-drawing that generates complicated results. I ended up going with four color scheme for the collection of rectangles and squares, and so: Mondrian's Toothpicks.


January 29

Isle of Beasts
A narrative strategy game inspired by King of Dragon Pass and A Dark Room. Your people are exiled to an island full of strange creatures, and you must figure out how to survive, building a new society in the process.


January 26

The Real Problem With the New Dungeons and Dragons License is Capitalism
I made this YouTube video because I think the controversy around the new OGL is a great moment to really look at how capitalism attacks the commons and how collective resistance is a path to create economic democracy. Plus it seemed like a great chance to spread some communist propaganda to nerds!


January 24

Stage Magician Plays (PNGTubing)
I've turned my stage magician self into a PNGTuber (like a VTuber but more lo-fi) to stream games and talk stage magic! I'm currently exploring the stage magic in the Ace Attorney series (& other games), regularly playing Genshin Impact, and trying out random games from time to time! I stream Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday evenings AEDT (UTC+11) or you can catch up to VODS on YouTube.


January 19

Dither All the Things - Atkinson Dithering for the Web
I think we can all agree that web pages today are too colorful, which is why I have created a web component that crushes your images down to crisp, pixel-perfect dithered black and white. This blog post features an interactive demo - dither your own images and party like it is 1985!


January 17

Hampster Invaders
I've always thought Hampster Dance looked a bit like a Space Invaders game andI finally built that idea. Cuban Boys spotted my dev thread and suggested including their novelty hit single Cognoscenti vs Intelligentsia, so you get a blast of that after the first wave.


January 11

Bandcamp Tempo Adjust
Bandcamp Tempo Adjust is a web extension that allows you to detect and adjust the tempo of tracks on Bandcamp. Available for Chrome and Firefox


January 10

News and Weather
This application starts your day with news and weather from weather.gov based on your zip code. [more inside]


January 6

Arrppier Suphder, ik Voby Tok
Arrppier Suphder (Wonderful About Spiders) ik Voby Tok is an AI assisted translation and visual regeneration of the children's picture book classic Spiders Are Wonderful (Toby Vok, 2011) into a language far beyond our own, for audiences in realms not yet known. [more inside]


« Older projects