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damien's zone

Posts with #technology

Cool Selection of Stuff: end of October 2024

Programming note: remember link roundups? Well, I'm deciding to call them by a different name now. Why? So I can make a silly pun. I wanted to go with "Cool Stuff Sunday" at first, but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I'll stick to posting these on Sundays.

Let's get to it, there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Social Media meta

For better or worse, I still think probably far too much about social media, so I can't help but be into articles about it.

Tom (Date 'em Ups): I want you to dream

You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.

Another cohost-related post, it will happen again, I'm not sorry.

Luna: Online following and Starter Packs

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

It is not a secret that I am not exactly fond of Bluesky. I use it, but I tolerate it. Bluesky's "starter packs", much like Twitter's "Follow all"[1] feature, are... misguided? I see where they're coming from, it's hard to "build a feed" when you start on a Twitter-like website but, like Luna here, I can't help but feel this will produce Some Weird Results.

I think following a starter pack is doing yourself a disservice because you're just injecting people into your feed without getting a feel of what their posts are like, and people who are added to them have little way of doing much about it. You can "just block the creator of a pack" but this isn't a great solution. Some people might prefer to never be put in the spotlight at all, sometime it might be awkward for people to block a starter pack's creator. The fact there isn't an "opt me out" button is bonkers to me, but ultimately doesn't surprise me coming from Bluesky. But I'm just a hater, so what do I know.

Build your feed slowly but…Read more

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The intersection of liberal arts and technology

Inspired by "Lack of Vision" by Louie Mantia.

It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

I have been thinking about this quote recently.

I've never really considered myself an artist. Sure, I've spent hours upon hours messing around in Photoshop as a teenager on the family computer, learning graphic design by following tutorials written by other amateurs. Does that make me an artist? I don't know.

I've always been more into what we'd call web design and UI design. I've learned the ropes of all of this by just fiddling with existing things. It might feel "pointless" to an outsider, but I remember taking great joy in essentially doing "vector tracing" with Photoshop's Pen tool over various pictures of my favorite fictional characters, pieces of tech and such.

All in service of figuring how to reproduce that one gradient, that one visual effect, etc. I distinctly remember doing that over a (I didn't know it was at the time) render of Apple's iconic Cinema Display.

For fun, I was messing around.

Around 2009 or so, I got my first iMac (the first aluminum one). I had been lusting for this computer for a long time before my parents got it as a birthday present. I browsed Apple's website, enamored by the design of the hardware and the software.

I was so enamored by the visual, dare I say artistic, quality of the software (I couldn't judge anything else by that point) that I had gotten into the hobby of disguising my Windows XP installation into Mac OS X "Tiger" and later on, Mac OS X "Leopard".

Even after getting my Mac, I didn't stop obsessing over that aspect of my computing life. I took any excuse I could to change my system or Dock icons by downloading a pack from The Iconfactory, MacThemes.net…Read more

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