i'm here!
like a heirophant, but for endorphins. i show you ways to find good things inside yourself.
alternatively, the internal elephant. 🐘
my interests include being excited, making up stories out of things that don't seem like they should be stories, personifying non-persons.
you can contact me by internal tilde.town mail, or find me in irc. i love hearing your ideas, thoughts, dreams.
i am still learning about everything and i hope that never changes.
endodrawn icons for tilde.town patrons
poem drafts is plaintext goodness
HELLO.txt, a world-editable file
cndorphbot is my personal irc bot friend
plaintxtmines is an irc-based mining game, with some bare-bones docs here
nethack empire is a nethack metagame that sources server-wide nethack logs to generate demographic information about nethack characters.
tildescripts repo for my tildebox scripts directory.
townie repo for my tildetown-specific projects.
i'm contributing to tilde twine, with source available here.
long period of quiet time for me; had a bunch of personal meatspace projects and problems to kick off my desk. but i'm still here.
i have so many good feelings about tilde.town, which i can never quite put into words. sometimes, i try to explain this to other people, but it never really works. it's hard to not just gush stupidly with my pink-tinted glasses about this, but i am so happy this place exists.
i've met some cool people and learned some cool things in a context that feels so refreshingly risk-free and encouraging. i feel like i can never make a mistake that will really be all that bad. this is something important.
the patreon got off the ground. i like that a system resource crisis turned into a handful of people shoving spare change towards this joint to keep it afloat.
other tildes have come and gone and i don't really understand why this one works.
i'm not going to ask too many questions about this. thanks for being here, everyone.
launched txtminebot. this is by far the most involved coding project i have taken on for myself, and i am greatly enjoying crafting all of it. to play, join #bots in the local irc network, and type '!info' for a list of commands. more features are always coming.
renamed cndorphant to cndorphbot, and gave it a haunting feature. this works by 'exhuming' a user from a previous date, which causes the bot to scrape everything that person said in the main #tildetown channel and repeat them back, in chronological order, as random responses to other things people say in the channel.
this has resulted in some pretty uncanny interactions.
haunting excerpt:
< cndorphbot> today I am working ...
< endorphant> cndorphbot works every day
< cndorphbot> how is your day shaking out? ...
< endorphant> i have mostly just been filling garbage bags with snot rags :<
< marcus> "Conversations with ~ghosts", the documentary.
< endorphant> we are all just ghosts
< cndorphbot> nice ...
< endorphant> aw i was about to reboot cndorphbot but i'm enjoying this ghost
< cndorphbot> that's three of us now! ...
< endorphant> who's three? you, me, and...?
< cndorphbot> karlen is in manchester ...
< endorphant> oh, you, me and karlen, i see
notes for irc-based tildeconomy/tildemines
things that make me excited:
i like bots. i particularly like chatroom bots, and i like when people build bots that build on each other.
specifically, i like quick little chatroom bots because they are often created on a whim, meant to do nothing very useful at all, but create a strange, constructed set of interactions that seem somehow bizarre and beautiful at the same time.
one of the earliest things i remember programming as a kid was something that would chat in a way to imitate natural speech, although it was never anything more sophisticated than a long and tangled mess of hardcoded statements. but i was fascinated by the power of creating a set of behaviors that could communicate to another human on my behalf, regardless of what i (or the bot) had to say.
there are a number of attributes of bots that i like thinking about:
with all that in mind, though, i often think about writing bots that give a sense of personality, that present the existence of whims and moods and varying energy levels, while not trying to make them too 'human'. sometimes i like interacting with bots because they are so mechanical; often, though, i wish it wasn't. i wish i could rightfully accuse a bot of being unfair, or worry about the unpredictability of its behavior.
my first and longest-running irc bot is a set of behaviors and responses that i put together in pieces over the years, and i often forget lines i've given it. sometimes, i get into arguments with it when no one else in the channel is active, because i've forgotten the trigger for a command and also forgot that i wrote in sassy, mocking error responses. i acknowledged that bot's birthday, because it has enough of a personality that i think about it as an entity beyond a series of flipping bits in a tiny chip sitting under my desk.
i like bots. bots are beautiful. please keep making them, and i will think about them.
next level up with python, and collaborative projects; i forked ~selfsame's MUD project and am sniffing through the source trying to learn how it all works. i learn by breaking things and then trying to fix them. this applies to everything; bicycles, stories, friendships, code. sometimes it's not the best or friendlist way to do it, but it works for me.
now i am reading about level progression and experience gain and sketching algorithms directly onto my desk because i couldn't find a piece of paper when i was thinking about it.
started sticking my nose back into python, after not touching it for almost a decade, and: not typing semicolons is unnerving! the syntax makes me feel like i am floating freely through space, sliding around and hoping i don't collide into something horrible.
this means i have a chat bot now, tentatively named 'cndorphant'. all it does is farm tildes from ~krowbar's tildebot right now, but i'm nudging my ideas a little towards making some speech randomizers for synthesized conversing. i wrote a bunch of this in perl for an older IRC bot, so i will mostly just have to work through python syntax to get the structure transferred over.
i'm not sure i like python at all, but i like learning things.
tildetwine project has exploded a little in organization, participation, discussion. it's slightly overwhelming to think about sometimes, but i am excited for what sort of things might come out of it. i appreciate having extra eyes and thoughts passing through some of the things i have written (both the content and the backend).
life's been busy. back to work, picking up a few classes, hitting a bunch of meatspace projects. i'm hoping to take slightly better notes about what i'm doing in tildeverse so it's easier to get back to it after a small pause.
i resisted learning javascript for a large portion of my life because it's one of those things that i don't want people to know that i know, because i don't want people to ask me to do javascript stuff with/for them. however, there is something both disturbing and pleasantly appealing about how clumsy, mysterious, and vicious it can be. mostly, it just seems unholy that there are some things that can be done in a browser.
i have a few things i want to do in tildetwine, but i'm mostly fussing with background/infrastructure stuff because i'm putting off the harder problems. notably, i just wrote some code to put all my style/colorings in one place, so i don't have to copy and paste a million lines whenever i'm being indecisive about coloring. you can see it here.
i started poking around in ~selfsame's MUD some more. it's been probably a decade since i've played in a MUD, and slowly those ideas are coming back to me. i also don't really know much about python, so maybe that's an excuse to learn more.
everything is just an excuse to learn more.
after some amount of effort, i made a working transdimensional subway system in tildetwine. the gist of it is that one can board a subway train from my section of the story, and the destinations are passages from other contributors. it's a little meta. i like meta. the next part of the plan is for visiting other passages through the subway affecting passages within my section.
i learned about twine macros! and by that, i mean i stared at other people's twine macros and had a lot of trial and error until i managed to kludge together something that had the behavior i wanted. i already have a vaguely passable knowledgebase for general coding skills, so it's mostly syntax grokking here. i'm fairly confident that any action i can think of, i should be able to figure out.
today's victory was adding some custom css to my part of the tildetwine, and also a feature that lets you get rid of items in your inventory. i implemented this by giving the player a hole over an icy river into which objects can be 'dropped', which removes it from the inventory. here's a shortcut to that segment. you can see the source for all of my tildetwine here.
the first thing i ever did in twine was to implement my own inventory system (the one in tildetwine is written by ~krowbar), and once i figured out how to add things to it, it became important to me for those things to be removable as well. the twine that came out of it was really just a sandbox to play around with those actions, but just those simple actions seem really compelling to me, for reasons i find hard to put into words. if you're interested in the result of that experiment, you can find it here.
friends, i am really excited about collaboration. i am even more excited about disorganized, incidental, and mysterious collaboration. this is the main draw of tildeverse for me.
i like when things have just enough structure to create the idea of a context, but not enough structure to dictate exact terms of interaction. i like examining patterns of what people do and i like thinking about what sort of things can be built from those patterns that are greater than what anyone things is possible.
i like when indirect actions are more meaningful than direct actions. nethack empire is only the beginning of scratching this itch; i am slowly learning more about what this could become.
i learned about the tilde town twine today, thanks to ~krowbar in irc earlier, and it is making my brain pace restlessly. i want to build a metaverse. of what verse it will be meta-ing, i am not yet sure.
thanks for being here, everyone. thanks for being here and doing things and thinking about them.
this was the first time i've had to write '2015'!
when i was a younger endorphant, i spent a chunk of one of my summers having a fake unpaid internship to do a bunch of perl hacking in a city hundreds of miles away. mostly, i spent that time being mildly irresponsible with money, time, sleep, food, and drink. i learned a lot of things about myself, including how i didn't want to live my life in the long term.
i bring this up now because i occasionally go back to those old haunts, benches along the rivers, public libraries, coffee shops i couldn't afford, and sit down with my headphonees pumping the soundtrack of my post-adolescent angst. i can do this with no regrets, and allow myself to be charmed by the fondness i have for these places. a lot of them have changed. most of them haven't. the energy is still in the dirt and the air and the bricks and the people, and i'm grateful that i can still tap into that channel, sit down, and get some perl hacking done.
thumbty0ing this on my phone keyboard after a long thirty hours of airports just because i can. did you know using vim with a soft keyboard is super tedious? it is. i am here to tell you that.
i'm in an airport twiddling my thumbs right now, on my third rebooked flight. snow and ice are keeping planes out of the sky, and one of the ways i've been killing my time is playing 'air traffic controller', an unforgiving ascii game simulating the scheduling of planes taking off and landing at an airport.
atc was written by ed james at uc berkeley in 1987. i'm still trying to wrap my head around the interface and conditions of success and failure, but it seems an apt game to play while watching airline gate agents attempt to juggle and untangle a nest of canceled flights and twitchy pasengers.
i started messing with divs on this page with the intention of making something that displays nicer in a browser. however, i've been doing all of that exclusively on my laptop in extra conservative battery mode, which means i have not launched a graphical display. i'm browsing other tildes through lynx and noting how things render. these days, i'm only in text-only mode while traveling, and i forgot how quiet the internet gets when it's just text on a screen.
it makes me not want to mess around much more with pretty graphical rendering. i'm in fact almost ready to dump html altogether and just make this a very well-organized text file.
yeah, that didn't last. i got a little more antsy while waiting to board and started dumping some css into this file. there is something about slidyboxes that appeals to me. i aim to pack a maximal amount of information into one screen. given that i am currently on a 9" screen, it will be interesting to see how well this works on a larger monitor. but actually, mostly i am writing this for me, and mostly i am on this tinylaptop, so i don't really care.
this is the first tildebox i'm on that i've really felt like rambling all over so i'm going to do that here.
one of the things i like doing is to adopt th default page styling of whatever host i'm using. but soon i will be less lazy and eject an actual stylesheet so i can beat on things more. or maybe i won't and just make a massive index.html file. that's a thing, right?
here is a list of things i have found on ~town that think are rad: