Thursday, October 30, 2008
Emily Short is trying something very exciting in interactive fiction design: she’s written a conversation system that lets you write in new dialogue. It’s supposed to ask you how that dialogue should fit into what’s already there, then generate some Inform 7 code. You send her the code and she incorporates it in a new [...]
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Good news: Waterstones (Amsterdam branch) has a pretty fair selection of “graphic novels” (read: comics).
Bad news: Waterstones (Amsterdam branch) is fairly pricey.
Good news: Said “graphic novels” are on a 3-for-2 sale.
Bad news: In fact only about half of said “graphic novels” are on a 3-for-2 sale.
Good news: One that I want is covered. (Alison Bechdel, [...]
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
I’ve posted the slides (3.1M download!) to my LeGO talk, on my publications page. A bit about how and why, and some technical questions maybe the laziweb will answer for me, after the gap.
I’m having a debate with my southern hemisphere evil twin at the moment, about the merits of spelling reform. No conclusions to be expected, of course, but it’s leading to all sorts of delightful Wikipedia discoveries.
Spontson glaber1 discovered in the OED the spelling “thrwch” for “through”, which put me in mind of Welsh. (By the [...]
They reckon that dreaming in a second language is a big milestone. This morning my alarm clock rang at 7:45. I reset it for 8 and went back to sleep, to dream a voice saying with great surprise “Στις οχτώ;” (At eight?), and myself replying “Στις οχτώ.”
Could have just been Olga objecting I suppose.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
I learnt my conversational Dutch mostly in the pub. It’s a method I recommend, for loosening up and just spontaneously sayin’ stuff, as well as for getting used to coping with background noise and non sequiturs and topic changes and all the things that make live conversation different from the examples you learn from in [...]
Thursday, October 9, 2008
I haven’t posted much lately, because I’m having a spurt of dissertatory activity (less painful than it sounds). Tomorrow I’ll present the main ideas of my thesis at the LeGO (our internal colloquium, feel free to stop by if you wanna), and next week I should have a short version of my first chapter drafted. [...]
Thursday, October 9, 2008
I don’t usually bother linking to xkcd, since everyone should be reading it anyway. But this is even more beautiful than usual. Youtube have implemented the “out-loud preview” feature… but it doesn’t seem to be working.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Greek spelling is both wonderful and awful.
It’s wonderful because, completely unlike English, if you see a word written down you know exactly how to pronounce it. It’s awful because knowing how to pronounce a word still leaves you lots of options for how to spell it.
Today’s discovery is the verb “to use”: χρησιμοποιώ. Third person [...]