Andrew Glassner

The cover of the novel The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. It shows small silhouettes of man and woman on a horse on a brown field. Behind them the field rises in to a mountain, and the sun is visible to the side, all together forming an abstracted heart.

Just finished The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Beautiful. It feels the way I imagine it would feel to be in a dim Irish bar, rain falling outside, a fire in the corner, and someone next to you, with a glass of drink and a gorgeous gift of language, turned and told you a story.

My Psychology Today credit card offers Freud and Identity Monitoring.

Halloo, Halloo!
The monkey's done in!
The chipmunk cried
With a mighty grin.

Video games: Only you can stop this urgent, imminent global catastrophe! NOW! Also, run errands for NPCs and talk through their personal issues, collect some flowers and stuff, and explore the environment. But also urgently stop the world-ending cataclysm that's already happening!

I put off playing this game for a long time because I thought it was too twitchy & empty. Then one day I gave it a go & I’m so glad I did. What a wonderful game! So consistently inventive and funny. And though I missed some of the game references, I caught enough of them to be delighted.

I was thinking of playing this. It sounds like you’re enjoying the game. Would you recommend it?

Icarus YouTube video by Ralph Towner - Topic

He did a beautiful version with Gary Burton on vibraphone. I have loved this piece from the first time I heard it. I play this on special occasions to mark a joyful event.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Msn2...

You're a writer with a protagonist who is brilliant, confident, and faces challenges to their ambitions. If you're a selfish loon you write Atlas Shrugged. If you're a thoughtful soul you write The Dispossessed.

The crucial role of chaos in our brain’s most extraordinary functions That the human mind treads a delicate line between order and disorder is a radical idea that’s gaining traction - and is changing our understanding of intelligence, consciousness and creativity

Regardless of what your crazy uncle (or cabinet member) believes, scientists love well-informed, good-faith sceptics. "The sceptical groups are, in my opinion, the best thing that ever happened ... They forced the field to dig deeper." www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

Broadly speaking, math is about numbers as literature is about alphabets.

Now it is free to make good on its moldy schemes.

The Long And Winding Road (Naked Version / Remastered 2013) YouTube video by The Beatles - Topic

A beautiful song, in its original, intended simplicity. Haunting.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfVA...

I bought Metronome for my phone and it’s just clicks with no interaction, loot, or achievements. Lousy game.

A 3D image rendered in Houdini. A yellow ball sits inside a larger, red ball. The yellow ball has a texture like thick paste. The red ball seems to be made of many small and large worms on its surface.

New project! My test/debug image became my first image, and I'm super happy. Onward! (Fine print: Houdini w/ custom nodes running my own code. No reaction-diffusion sim, no textures, no transparency.)

A house near Davie and Bute streets in Vancouver BC.

Here’s a Vancouver house I passed today near Davie and Bute streets.

Hello (Lionel Richie Jazz Swing Cover) feat. Casey Abrams YouTube video by Scott Bradlee

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhF...

Wow! Beautiful and humbling. We are, as always, fish discovering our water. It's thrilling that our inner and outer worlds are always expanding, always deepening, always connecting everyone to everything in new ways.

A book on how to create your own art, but with a genAI cover. That's a "fire station burned down" level of irony.

A "MacGuffin" is a thing that characters want - a noun. It often doesn't matter what it actually is. Video game quests are often: "go to X & turn on/off Y" where the specifics of X and Y are secondary to the gameplay. They feel like MacGuffins but verbs. Is there an industry standard word for this?

Just finished Outer Worlds 2 on PS5 (~80 hrs). A masterclass in Art Nouveau styling. Sharp writing, funny & subversive. Well-crafted companions. Top-notch voice acting. Many oddities, eg topo maps that don't match the terrain, & undocumented HUD elements I *still* don't understand. But I had fun!

I love that he doesn't know who he helped (and ideally, though it's unlikely, they'll not know it was him). The many self-serving documentaries and videos showing someone doing good so they can bask in grateful praise are horrid. Doing good for strangers anonymously & without reward is golden.

When my body says, “Nap,” I say, “How high?”

About your last panel: I love your artwork and I wouldn’t expect you to ever make it when you don’t want to. Whenever you want to make and share more, I will be so happy to enjoy it.

I would love to have the experience you had. I started the game twice but I gave up in frustration both times because I found the 3D piloting impossible - I just couldn't steer reliably or land where I needed to be. Can you share any techniques for controlling spacecraft in this game?

It’s an Imagination Enlarger. Newborn ideas go in the small end. You swirl the device in improvisational gestures, urging the ideas to broaden and become more daring. They emerge from the big end, preposterous and mad and beautiful. For life-affirming use only.

Let's cross-synergize our marketing rollouts. I'm destablizing the worn-out paradigm of shared objective reality in favor of my own unfiltered insistences, which I will leverage into a late-night podcast / restaurant and verbal boxing emporium. My brand: always right, always loud.

TIL that not *every* character in the game The Outer Worlds 2 talks like this: "Pray elucidate the exact nature of your tiff of contention" or "Pardon my slowing your ingress" (actual quotes). A few speak in normal, colloquial language, and I hang my ornaments on their dialog trees.

This is lovely! If somewhere (here, YouTube, etc.) you could also include a rough measure of how much real time is captured by each time-lapse video, that would be great information to know!

The cover of Moonbound by Robin Sloan. It shows a low-contrast view of a cloudy sky, with a tear revealing the inky blackness of space, and a faraway planet.

I just finished Moonbound by Robin Sloan. A delight from start to finish, a combination of epic fable, science fiction, and fantasy. Every word honed, every sentence weight-bearing, nothing wasted. Characters that mattered. Sparse and lovely.

Is ChatGPT really conscious? Will it solve climate change and end all war?