Marble, dungeons and quantum darwinism

First off, some updates:

• I’ve removed the Google Fonts dependency. Uses a couple of self-hosted fonts with system fallback now.
• Small visual updates as well.

Now on to business as usual.

Programming

• The Mutable Web, via hackernews

• SVG PORN

  NB: not actually porn, just a collection of hand-crafted SVG icons

  (via hackernews)

• Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1

  TL;DR: some were heavily inspired by Rogue and the likes. To the point of generating the layout in ASCII as one step.

  When in doubt, glue more rectangles onto the side of things.

Articles

• Stone Age “consistent doodles”

  I.e. writing-but-not-really. I too have some “consistent doodles” of my own.

• Why Communism is Useless

  That is, in the context of Sid Meier’s Civilization 2, not in general.

• Multi-layer Dictionaries

  ALSO via hackernews

• The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking

  (TW: paywall)

  Fun quote:

  In 2011, a biologist named Michael Eisen found out, from one of his students, that the least-expensive copy of an otherwise unremarkable used book—“The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design”—was available on Amazon for $1.7 million, plus $3.99 shipping. The second-cheapest copy cost $2.1 million. […] Seller A’s price was consistently 99.83 per cent that of Seller B; Seller B’s price was reset, every day, to 127.059 per cent of Seller A’s. […] Each seller’s presumed strategy was rational. It was the interaction of their algorithms that produced irrational results.

• Quantum Darwinism

  Take that, Shcrödinger’s Cat!

Art

• An interview with Junji Ito

• Il Disinganno

  From the “holy fuck this is all marble” series. Probably via francesco, but I’m not sure.

• Ancient Greek marble sculpture half-eaten by the sea

  Also, speaking of marble and the Antikythera book, here’s another photo by the author of the latter (along with some article). It’s a marble sculpture (from the same shipwreck) of a boy wrestler that was half buried in the sand and therefore half-decomposed.

  The decomposed half is quite creepy in my opinion, but even creepier is the combination of two.

Books

• Game Engine Black Book: DOOM

  Buy it, read it.

Music

• The Devil and the Almighty Blues - Tre

  Their first album had no title, their second album was called simply “II”, and this is their third.

  Nice slow heavy psychedelic rock and blues tunes, quite enjoyed it.

• And for something completely different, here’s an archive of 102 K-Mart background music tapes

  This is also music, I guess.