C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I made a new personal website, matt-arnold.com. I have now completely migrated 21 years of blog posts from here to the blog section of that site, with improved full-text search and filtering. Let me know if you find formatting issues from the migration process!

I've set up a commenting system, although comments here won't transfer over to comments there and vice-versa. I'd appreciate if you'd test it! I know I can count on Sarah Elkins to do so. :)

For several years, every site I've built has used a static site generator, and this one is no exception. It's all focused on Javascript, Markdown files, and YAML flat files, which means I don't set up my own server or database. Instead I use Netlify for the back end (contact page, blog comments, forms, automatically-triggered events, and so on). For this site, I used Github Copilot AI to radically accelerate the development process.

The site also has some galleries of my projects and illustrations, as well as a page of my podcasts, and one collecting my talks and other videos, and links to external websites about board games I've made and events I run.

Expect much more content as time goes on. The Updates page will automatically build a changelog of all content updates, so that you don't have to wonder if you missed some.

The process of testing the blog migration has re-exposed me to an enormous amount of my own past, so I've been quite contemplative about it lately. I might blog about that soon.

When we had Chris DiBona from Google as Penguicon's Guest of Honor, I hoped to have a panel about Google in science fiction. For instance, there is a piece of Flash animation science fiction about Google's next ten years. "Turing's Cathedral" is a non-fiction essay by George Dyson about his visit to the Googleplex, and it gets very science fictional at the end. One of the pieces I remembered but could no longer find was this one-page super-short story: The Nine Billion Names of God by Kathy Kachelries. It shares the same name as a classic tale by Arthur C. Clarke.

PC Turnoff Organization wants us to turn off our computers August 1 through 7. Their website features articles like "Give Your Kids The Gift Of Boredom." I am not making this up. For a moment I thought it was a parody, but it's not.

I can hardly wait five years to carry a computer with voice recognition in a hip pack, wirelessly connected to a heads-up display and headphones embedded in a pair of glasses. Through augmented reality, networking with each other would no longer involve staring through a window into another "cyberspace" reality. Computer-mediation is coming out of the screen, and layering over our entire environment.

I'm all in favor of getting up from a desk to interact with the world around us. I'll do that more often after wearable computers with augmented reality have made the two worlds become one and the same. Lose the ball and chain to the location, not the computer.