Updates, "Sleets", Number Friends

Hello good humans!

1. Number Friends

First, here's the latest Number Friends build: https://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=a1965fa5976196ce4ac0ed090d81ceec

If you tried it right after my original post, I added a bunch of levels and stuff the next day in a series of updates. It currently stands at 27 levels.

There's a lot more things I could try with it, like actual level design, more block types, etc, and it's easy for me to envision how it could be a polished game with the help of a small team, but for now my only aspiration is probably to spend a few more hours and just release it publicly mostly as-is. So if you have any notes or feedback, here's a good place to leave them!

2. PAAAARTY WOOOO

Actually my current aspiration is to not to be The Most Burnt Out Human Ever, and I'm getting increasingly inefficient at it. So guess what: I'm planning an actual vacation! Where I go somewhere that isn't my own home and everything!

I'm looking forward to telling you all about it after I'm back. But it's not until September so for now I'm continuing to inefficiently poke my brain and pretend it's human. 

I do hate to interrupt working on projects, no matter how slow and inefficient I'm being at it. So, seeing as travel vacations take time to plan and book anyway, I'm hoping to get out another video or two before I run off. I was working on Spidermath 2 and got distracted by conic sections so I started writing a spinoff video about conic sections and then I got distracted from that to cardioids, so, we'll see how many of those videos end up reaching a good draft and getting produced. 

I really want to do the cardioid one though, because (as mentioned in videos past) there's a bunch of interesting ways to make them, and a few can involve a mug, and now that I'm doing merch I should probably sell a cardioid mug to fund my vacation. I've got a design sketch that's pretty awesome, actually. I'm generally skeptical of merch mugs but this one takes advantage of a couple intrinsic mathematical properties of the mug itself and it's going to be awesome. 

No more spoilers though!

3. This Week's Sleets

M and I are doing this thing where, instead of tweeting tweets as we think of them, we save our random thoughts and then publish them all together. It's like tweets but slower, so, "slow tweets" -> "sleets" is the brilliant name we're working with.

Here's my could-have-been-tweets sleets:

Using AI/Machine learning/algorithms to make “impartial" decisions is basically like writing your opinions in a book and then pointing at that book as an objective external authority

Scutoid is a pretty good pet name

You know how there’s a certain level of skill you need to have before you know how bad you are at something? I think the cliche example is the 3-chord guitarist who thinks they’re all that, until they get good enough to realize they have no musicianship whatsoever. Well, I think I’ve reached that point with my cooking problems. I used to be able to think I did ok, and not realize I left the milk in the cup cabinet until a mystery number of days later. But today I managed to realize I put the meat away in the bread drawer just after I shut it! And I messed up the order of operations on the mayo, taking it out of the fridge, getting a knife, and then putting it back in the fridge before using it. And I noticed just after shutting the fridge door, not halfway through eating my sandwich. I’m like a proper amateur now!

Green tea, blue cheese,

An inverted map of breakfast town.

The earth’s crust supports her creatures,

Toasted. With tomato on top,

And a hint of salt.

Nothing annoys me more than that romanticized exploitative myth of the starving artist, that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, that pain and trauma are good for art-making. I do my best work when I have the most stability, like most artists. You can't do deep work when the rug is getting pulled out from under you every 6 months.

I had a dream involving some detailed and interesting research on Parkinson’s disease that resulted from the discovery that frogs have similar rates of it to humans, and I have to write it down so that if years later I remember "having heard this somewhere” I can google it and see it was just a dream

The only memories left are ashes caught in a spider’s web

Vi