Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 18

wonderful interview with my Marina Zurkow, a colleague of mine on the faculty here at ITP, about her Climoji project (made with ITP alum Viniyata Pany) https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/15/16893288/climate-change-emoji-climojis-marina-zurkow "All emoji are metaphors: lips are a metaphor for love, for kissing someone. So, can these things as visual metaphors amplify and naturalize the conversation around climate change?"

drawing text around a circle with perspective. (the ultimate goal is to make a persona 5 battle menu generator, this is the first step.) this is all CSS & more fiddly than it seems (fiddliest part was flipping the text so it appears the right way up on the right side of the circle)
#typographyexperiments

(going to just hashtag these from now on instead of putting them all in the same thread; thread with previous experiments here: https://mastodon.social/@aparrish/99278645613120406) https://mastodon.social/media/6VlQpQkkVqGp93iu-B0

also from the fontforge manual, an unordered list of "ah yes, the n genders" jokes (tag urself I'm "semi-flourished") https://mastodon.social/media/re2EL0espluG78TbW5A

helpful life advice from the fontforge manual https://mastodon.social/media/GYza-OZptCz-Ya-1gNE

thanks proquest ebooks central for letting me download extremely fine-grained one-page sections of this book's front matter but not, you know, the actual content https://mastodon.social/media/N6jr3_xaOJJkwonB3Es

@enkiv2 yes, the words themselves are just n-dimensional vectors. the way that I drew them in that experiment was to find n equally spaced angles and then draw a line whose length corresponds to each dimension—a hack to make it easier to see the values for each dimension. how to make that play nicely with a 2d projection of the word vectors themselves as points is up to you (or whoever!)

@enkiv2 yep! for reducing the dimensionality to 2d. unless we're conceptualizing this task completely differently!

@enkiv2 i mean, tsne is the traditional choice for something like this

@enkiv2 that is an interesting idea, hmm

one of these days I'm finally going to have to make the party- and turn-based RPG of my dreams with randomly-generated enemies/equipment/skill trees and an endless randomly-generated dungeon of twisty featureless corridors and on that day you'll never see or hear from me again

one of the things I like about NetHack is that sometimes there are just Boring Levels With Nothing In Them. (I know that there is literal sokoban in NetHack but they had the good sense at least to partition it off in its own optional area)

the essentially mechanic of the turn-based RPG is, imo, the question of whether you should turn back: managing your resources to maximize each "dive." the excitement comes from the brinkmanship, like: I don't really have enough SP to enter this battle but I'm going to do it anyway. anything that gets in the way of that mechanic feels superfluous to me

unpopular opinion but my favorite rpg dungeon of all time is Persona 3's Tartarus: just level after level of procedurally-generated but essentially featureless corridors. I think part of the reason I've had trouble connecting with EOV is that *all* of the levels have puzzles related to movement (rotating things to unlock doors, timing against FOE steps, etc). what I want from a dungeon is just topography to traverse. keep your sokoban-esque bs in the puzzle genre thx

this one is difficult to explain but I think it actually has a lot of promise: visualizing a word's GloVe embedding by extending each point from the word center according to the value of each dimension of the embedding by dividing a circle into arcs according to the number of dimensions in the embedding https://mastodon.social/media/cZvGlIY_gC0nTg5NNOQ https://mastodon.social/media/I4dFbkuhiuqzrfEylcw (basically an adaptation of this http://static.decontextualize.com/vecviz/ but with the points of the font path instead of just a blob)