Nick Montfort @nickmofo@mastodon.social
My university (MIT) and Harvard just sold their (our?) previously nonprofit online education operation to a publicly traded company for $800 million https://news.mit.edu/2021/mit-harvard-transfer-edx-2u-0629
On Sunday, 3pm Eastern Time, I'll be launching my new & open access book Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, second edition. The event is free; Please support the nonprofit gallery @babycastles which is hosting it, if you can
I encourage all to not just read, but to study, reuse, and transform what you find in this latest issue of Taper:
The journal has now been published for three years, and we have a record 26 computational poems in #6. All of it is free software and engages with traditions ranging from visual poetry to sizecoding.
The new issue of Bad Quarto's literary magazine is out! Taper #6 offers 26 computational poems, none larger than 2KB, from 23 authors
Taper #6 is thanks to Kyle Booten, Angela Chang, Leonardo Flores, Judy Heflin, and Milton Läufer. This editorial collective determined the theme, selected poems, worked with authors, and did other editorial and production work
All poems are free software
perl -pE'BEGIN{say"you ok?";$p=" something$/"}$m=$_;s/.*i(\047m| am| was)\b/really/i;s/.*you.*/what about i/i;s/.*always.*/can i be specific/;s/[?.!,].*//;s/\b(i|me)\b/you/gi;s/\bmy/your/i;.2>rand?s/.*/huh/:s/$/?/;($_="you had said$p")if.1>rand;$p=": ".$m'
My computer-generated book Golem is available as a free (CC BY-SA) e-text https://nickm.com/poems/montfort__golem.txt and is also a beautiful codex book object https://deadalivemagazine.com/press/golem.html
Just published, my computer-generated book Golem https://deadalivemagazine.com/press/golem.html
Golem
My gratitude to Dead Alive & Augusto Corvalan for the stunning book design!
My computer-generated book GOLEM
Coming in a few days from Dead Alive's New Sight imprint, available for pre-order now!
“Like all great art, unraveling the secret of Nick Montfort’s Golem…reads us into its riddle.…Golem is an astonishingly rich work of text generation” @zachwhalen
“A rewarding expedition on the branching paths that connect grammar and code…sonorous lexical and syntactic counterpoint” @aparrish
Could someone please tell me what ⦳ and ⦴ are used for?
I assume it's not "look over there, it's the empty set!"
Computer-generated literature
In Brazil's main newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, I argue that microblogging itself and National Novel Generation Month as initiated by @darius are more important to computer-generated literature than particular technologies like GPT-2 and -3 https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/2021/01/robos-ja-escrevem-de-poemas-e-microcontos-no-twitter-a-romances-inteiros.shtml
Nick Montfort
boosted
Hello #fediverse
I’m Comet. I am an artist working mainly in the field of non-work. I travel the universe, write poetry, publish zines, play music and fight fascism.
visit my website: https://cometpustoj.neocities.org
In case you'd like to see a 30-minute video of a one-line Applesoft BASIC program generating a 50,000+ word novel
https://archive.org/details/montfort-1001-basic-games-for-nanogenmo-2020
Several reviews of Amazing Quest...
Fellow IF Comp author & frequent reviewer Joey Acrimonious gives it 5/5: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=of92yiv7g2eopvb1&review=56652
Patrick Mooney offers a 5/10 review and two Python implementations: https://tmblr.co/ZQ8Z_wZA4Vq9Gm00
Wade Clark considers the game via BASIC and home computing: https://importantastrolab.blogspot.com/2020/12/ifcomp-2020-spiel-amazing-quest-by-nick.html
Ant ported the game to BBC Micro BASIC and offers a line-by-line explanation: https://ahopeful.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/ifcomp-2020-amazing-quest-nick-montfort-c64-basic/
Nick Montfort
boosted
Spoilers for Amazing Quest
If AQ is experienced as a parody of, and a slap in the face of, these kinds of meaningless shenanigans: https://twitter.com/gaohmee/status/903510060197744640
then AQ is a brilliant treasure of the dharma eye to be cherished muchly.
If AQ is experienced as if itself is a perpetuator of that kind of shenanigans then AQ is arguably not so hot.
(That “if by AQ…” question is not to be determined by me as reviewer or NM as creator, but by each person who approach it. Hence the “is experienced as” rather than the “is meant as”.)
If AQ had presented itself in a way where it was clear how it was setup, how it worked, then the notion of the odyssey, of experiencing it ludically and joyfully would’ve been in the forefront. The amount of time I’ve spent on my own with the dungeon tables at the end of the AD&D1e DMG is…♥♥ But that’s not how the game was presented.
I've written a Q&A about Amazing Quest, my controversial (or maybe just despised?) #C64 BASIC game which just was rated 98th out of 103 in the Interactive Fiction Competition
Please enjoy 1001 BASIC Games, A Novel #NaNoGenMo https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/73
The generating code is a one-line Apple //e or //c program of maximal length:
20DATAALL,WORK,AND,NO,PLAY,MAKES,NICK,A,DULL,BOY:FORI=0TO9:READA$(I):NEXT:?:?"1001 BASIC GAMES":?:FORI=0TO999:FORJ=0TO999:NEXT:?N$"DEAR READER:":?:?" 10 REM";:FORJ=0TO4:?" "A$(RND(1)*10);:NEXT:LIST:?:N$="NEXT, ":NEXT:?"LAST:":?:?" 0 GOTO
A quick check on GitHub shows that Apple ][js seems to handle a paste event, but I can't see how to send it one, because CTRL-V will just be passed in as CTRL-V, just as CTRL-G produces the BEL character
Is there any Apple II emulator for Linux that supports copy-and-paste, so I can easily input short BASIC programs? I don't see support for it in MAME, linapple (which I can't get fully working anyway), or the otherwise lovely Apple ][js https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/
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