deathmtn

Some really good weird noise by Minóy, who was this isolated guy making this stuff in the '80s. And yeah, he had a tough life.

Oh, also if you're into GIFs or file formats, What's In A GIF - Bit by Byte is a good read.

OK! I got the Spinners animated gifs working for mobile now! (Also Ubuntu Image Viewer.)

After a bit of poking around with omggif which seemed like it was going to take way too long, so I gave gif.js a look. I saw gif.js before, but I didn't read it that carefully and assumed it was only for the browser and wouldn't work for Node. I poked inside (always worth doing), and hey, although it does use web workers, a level down is a cleanly separated layer of modules that just do the work of 1) converting images to indexed images + a palette 2) encoding in LZW and 3) building the animated gif. Before I started uprooting animated gifs, I checked out the nice browser demo and downloaded the animated gif it produced, mailed it to myself, then viewed it on my phone. Yup, shows up on phone!

omggif doesn't do indexing/palette building for you, so I cobbled together my own rough function for that, but gif.js does it for you with a tiny neural network (?!). It is slower, but it does look better. (Though there is something to be said for net art-style colors.) As a result of it doing all that, the commit to webimage looks beautiful.

So, Spinner gifs will be coming to the bot newsletter for real! Probably!

The guy told us that his friend told him about a big Lego set called "the Millemmium Falcon."

Our kindergarten teacher actually called me just to check in?! I'm so used to calls from schools and daycares being about injuries or something. It was super nice, and it was great to confirm that he indeed has friends, is good at taking care of himself, and isn't tired (he has trouble getting up and doing the long walk sometimes). Apparently, also a good table conversationalist, which I did not expect. I always imagined he could only talk about current shared activities, which is a limitation I have.

10-4-4-2-3-2. I gotta get back in the game!

Renowned MIT Scientist Defends Epstein: Victims Were ‘Entirely Willing’
I defended Stallman a few weeks ago re: his views on free software. Unsurprisingly, he has no idea what kids are or what makes them kids. I would bet that he has not interacted with a child for decades or possibly even at all. And yet I'm still surprised that goes as far to say there "consensual pedophilia" is OK.

In 2006, he said it wouldn’t so bad for an adult man who worked for the Department of Homeland Security to have sex with a 14-year-old, as one government employee had allegedly propositioned: “Supposing she had voluntarily had sex with him, presuming that they used a condom and suitable contraception, it would have done no harm to either of them.”

He reiterated his point in 2013: “There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.”

As opposed to big tech as he is, he really is just another tech guy that lazily assumes that however he imagines a domain he has no experience with just works the way he imagines and that problems in that domain exist simply people are just being stupid, people's actual expertise and experience be damned. Goodbye, RMS. C-x C-c

Dag, just realized those gifs are unreadable on iOS. Should've waited for morning to check!

Hey, Spinners is now a bot! That is to say, it generates art on a regular schedule. And of course, it's got an RSS feed for people that like to see animation in their feeds, and it will make it into these emails, for people that like to get emailed animated stuff.

It's all thanks to these changes to webimage, which allow webimage to take a series of screenshots (instead of just one) of a webpage, then string them together into an animated gif. I didn't implement optimal palette selection for the animated gifs, so colors are off, but I kinda like the low-fi-ness. (I know, it is a convenient taste.)

Also, I am super glad I wrote this checklist. Was able to get it bot-ized in under two hours!

I've been watching the Chasing the Moon series. The part about Ed Dwight, a Black astronaut candidate, getting sabotaged by Chuck Yeager and NASA was really depressing.

That article talks about that as well as this interesting insight:

The idea that early astronauts must first be test pilots, like the hotshots at Edwards, was not a foregone conclusion. Voas imagined a nationwide competition that could include deep-sea divers, arctic explorers or racecar drivers. The most important characteristics for the first classes of astronauts headed into the unknown would be the ability to respond coolly if something went wrong and levelheadedness in the face of hostile environments.

Riding a rocket had little in common with flying a plane, aside from being airborne. “The basic thing you have to understand,” Dwight explained recently, “is everything that happens on that spaceship, from the time you crawl into that seat to the time it touches down, is controlled from the ground. There’s no one thing that makes a good astronaut. I don’t know any person with determination and will that can’t go to space.”

It would have been really interesting if the Mercury astronauts weren't all these wahoo Top Guns.

A dad's resume

Someone posted his dad's resume from 1980. He had, at that point, a 35-year career, much of it spent programming.

The main event in our D&D game last week was a mysterious plague that was causing a town to become paranoid. It was actually caused by a valuable mineral. I got the idea from on 1) this really good lecture series on the Black Death and 2) the episode of Star Trek where a medieval-ish civilization gets its hands on a radioactive substance.

Katie, who plays in the game, pointed out that that episode is based on the Goiânia accident, in which cesium was pried loose from a medical device found in an abandoned private hospital.

On September 18, Alves sold the items to a nearby scrapyard. That night, Devair Alves Ferreira (the owner of the scrapyard) noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the capsule's contents were valuable or even supernatural, he immediately brought it into his house. Over the next three days, he invited friends and family to view the strange glowing substance.

Every link in this chain of events is stunning. This one in particular:

Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the objects that were left behind.

The objects included the device containing the cesium.