Mastodawn

I guess this is as good a time as any to remind people that

if you only know how to contact friends through a single platform, you're liable to lose touch with them sooner or later.

Give them alternatives. ANY alternatives.

Any single place can just blow up overnight. And if something is starting to smell like a brewing dumpsterfire, that SHOULD be a clear sign.

#Discord

Whistle Feb 9

Nitro cancelled.

Discord, I will mourn you as you slip further into enshittification.

But I am not letting you put me at risk like this, thanks.

I love it. This makes me want to dig up low-size pattern bitmaps for my wallpaper.

Whistle Feb 5

Tilton Raccoon Feb 5

Reject modernity, embrace tradition. A KDE theme I can get behind!

Whistle Feb 5

Using LLMs to vibe code is rolling coal for computer science. It is the heaviest negative impact on the environment, just makes the systems involved work worse, and the smug "fuck you I do what I want" of its users as it sows pollution that will take years to root out of the ecosystem (both informational and ecological, in LLM's case).

This bubble can't pop fast enough.

Whistle Jan 28

Gwen Fisher Jan 27

Twelve years. I started this project twelve years ago, and today I hold the result in my hand. It’s a book that combines bead weaving with math called, “Beading with Algorithms: Cellular Automata in Peyote Stitch.” With help from mathematician and artist Roger Antonsen, graphic designer Zelda Lin, a handful of talented proof readers, and the good people from World Scientific Publishing Company, my dream of combining my loves of math, art, and teaching into a book is finally a reality.

This book is the first of its kind, a recipe book of algorithms that can be used and combined to generate colorful patterns in peyote stitch beadwork in any size and shape you desire. These algorithms could also be applied to other pixelated art forms like tile laying, embroidery, crochet, and quilts. We included projects like bracelets, pill pouches, pendants, beaded beads, and key chains. We also included a bunch of different grids that you can photocopy and color with markers.

Of course I’m biased, but I think it’s a really beautiful book. We included multiple colorful images on almost every page, 172 pages in all. It was a huge layout challenge, but Zelda nailed it. My original goal was to write 128 pages on how to use algorithms to make beaded jewelry, but the more we explored the space, the more we found. Not just millions of algorithms, the space of possibilities is infinite. So of course, we couldn’t include them all. But we used math and Roger’s custom software that he wrote for this project to help us find dozens of the easiest algorithms and more than a hundred more in increasing levels of complexity. We included all of our favorites. 1/2

#MathArt #beading #Genuary #math #beadweaving