December 9, 2014

Homage for the Holidays: Pebble.Ink

I’ll admit, the next Homage for the Holidays post is kissing the line between “homage” and “abject copy”.

Here’s the backstory. A couple weeks after XOXO 2014, Internet’s Paul Ford started a project called tilde.club. You should go read the original post about the project, but here’s a quick tl;dr: Tilde.club is a delicious piece of nostalgia from the beginning of the world wide web. Every member gets shell access, email to other members, and small piece of web real estate.

I feel like “nostalgia” may not be the right word to describe tilde.club, because that word has become a little overloaded. The explosion of pixel-art games and the social conservative rhetoric of a return to simpler times has added a context to “nostalgia” that can leave a bad taste in the mouth. This is a little unfortunate, because things that are older are not necessarily bad. (see above re: pixel-art. Some fabulous examples there.)

A better word might be “ownership”. Being a member of tilde.club means you have a little slice of the web that is yours, you can put whatever you want there, make it look however you like. While owning a chunk of the web may sound like no big deal, and in fact I would wager that most tilde.club members have their own dedicated web presence elsewhere, there’s a fundamental difference.

Having your own space on the web, on a server you own or rent with your own domain name, is like having a massive plot of land a few hours outside of town. It’s yours, you can do whatever you want with it, but you have to push people to come over and visit. Having a space in tilde.club is like leasing an apartment in the trendy new complex on the town square. You can still do almost anything you want with it, but your neighbors are all in shouting distance, they’re probably really friendly, and you can see what their places look like as well. And, because the place is run by Internet’s Paul Ford, a lot of people are always dropping by to visit.

That’s the setup, here’s the homage. I applied, and did not get into, tilde.club. This mildly bummed me out a bit, until I realized that I possessed the materials to build my own. So I did. I spun up the cheapest Digital Ocean box that they make, installed apache with user directories turned on, and opened it up to friends. It’s called Pebble.Ink

Now, I want to open it up to. As of today, if you’re a member of Pebble.Ink, you get shell access, email forwarding, and you’re own little slice of the web to do whatever you want with. More features will be coming soon, including (possibly) the ability to run rich python and php apps.

If you’ve been paying attention to the tilde.club story, you probably noticed that other people had the same idea I had, and started their own versions. This put a damper on my plans somewhat, but I’m charging forward. I have not added Pebble.Ink to that list, although I plan to try and do so soon. I’m not using the official tilde.club puppet script, either.

I would be thrilled to have you along for the ride. Check out Pebble.Ink for more info, and watch this space for updates.

homage-for-the-holidays

December 2, 2014

Homage for the Holidays: from Portland get XOXO

This is the first Homage for the Holidays project. It may help to read the previous blog post for context.

Let’s follow the logic train on this one. XOXO was awesome, and inspired me to want to do projects not for fame or money, but just because they were interesting to me and hopefully pushed the envelope in some way. I started by looking at what the organizers, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, had done previous to and alongside XOXO for inspiration. Digging through Andy Baio’s profile, I found his work with Inform 7, and Playfic.

Briefly: Inform 7, often shortened just to Inform, is a language and tool for creating and running interactive fiction. If you think you don’t know what interactive fiction is, think back to really old text based games - “go north you are eaten by a grue” type stuff. Playfic is a site where you can run and play interactive fiction works in a web browser. Playfic was created by Andy Baio, because he wanted to — well, I’ll let him tell it:

Andy loves interactive fiction and wanted to make a game, but found it to hard to share his work-in-progress online. In an epic tale of yak shaving, he built Playfic before writing his first game.

From the PlayFic Website I deeply empathized with this level of yak shaving, and Playfic/Inform seemed like a great way give homage to one of the people who had inspired me. Additionally, in my head Inform and I had unfinished business. If my education had gone according to plan, I would have taken a course on interactive fiction (a subject that really excites me) and spent three months doing a deep dive into Inform. My school career didn’t exactly follow a linear path, so I never got a chance to play with Inform.

Until now.

Here is what I have done, although started may be a better word. I have rebuilt, as much as possible, the XOXO 2014 experience in Inform 7, hosted on Playfic.

The project is called “from Portland get XOXO”.

Is it finished? Nope, although I’ll be working on it more this week, and posting updates when I can. What is there is the bones, including pretty much every major location and most of the events from the four days of fun.

What would I like to happen? Well, mostly I want people to play it. And have a reaction to it that hopefully isn’t boredom. I also want people to change it, make it better, make it crazier, basically take what I’ve done as a base and push the limits of it.

So I’ve put the whole thing in a github repo, and I am actively soliciting issues and pull requests. Anyone who contributes will get my eternal thanks, and a call-out on twitter plus this blog.

Play it, have fun with, and make it your own.

Thanks, and look for more updates about the project this week, plus more Homage for Holiday posts in the coming weeks

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xoxo homage-for-the-holidays projects

November 30, 2014

There’s No Place Like Homage for the Holidays

Update 2014-12-08: Pebble.Ink, the second Homage for the Holidays post, is up.

Update 2014-12-01: The first Homage for the Holidays project is up.

Over the summer, on my first trip to Portland, I read the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. If you do something that could remotely be considered creative, I highly recommend you check out the book, and his more recent Show Your Work.

Reading Steal Like an Artist, then returning to Portland for XOXO in September, helped drive home a lesson that my Game Design professors tried to teach me in college, but that I rejected: The best way to expand your creative horizons is to copy work you like, preferably with your own take on it.

When I was in school, I didn’t see the value in trying to copy what someone else had done. That didn’t sound ‘creative enough’ to me, partly from ignorance and partly from arrogance. Maybe more than partly from arrogance. It’s also 100% possible that I just didn’t care enough about games to try and emulate the ones that interested me.

So I graduated, started an engineering job, and was quickly exposed to the fact that those who are best at what they do often succeed because they’ve learned from the mistakes and successes of those who have come before them. And the best way to learn from someone is try and do what they’ve done.

I got a double helping of this when I tried to build my own Content Management System - basically a glorified blogging system - for The Adventures of Captain Quail, a webcomic run by myself and my incredibly talented artistic partner. I went into the project thinking that I’d have the whole thing together in a month, tops. A year later, there’s still more I want to fix about it. Did I need to build a CMS? Is mine any better that what else is out there? Probably not. But the lessons I learned in building it I’m not sure I could have learned any other way.

This is where I’ve learned the value of building things that are directly or indirectly influenced by others: You get a tiny insight into what they’ve gone through, and can use that to make your own work better. I think this was, in many ways, a subtheme of this year’s XOXO: That nobody produces great work in a vacuum, and the projects that seem most original or creative can be traced to specific influences from the creator’s life.

So, reading Auston Kleon’s book and going to XOXO and thinking about what I’ve discovered in the past year that really excites me, I’m embarking on a project I’m calling Homage for the Holidays. Every week, starting December 1st, I’ll release a new project directly inspired by something I’ve seen this year that I thought was awesome. I’ll be posting about them here, and right now the projects I’m planning to release will be available on the web. I’ll try to document everything that happens with them, and the source materials for all of them will be freely distributed online.

Most of the projects I’m planning will be collaborative by nature, and I would be thrilled and grateful if people wanted to work on them with me, but I’d also love to see other people run their own homages. Tell me about them, and I’ll link them here.

Thank you to everyone who’s provided me with inspiration this year. I hope I can spread that to other people this month.

See you on the 1st!

xoxo homage-for-the-holidays

September 22, 2014

XOXO 2014

I’ve gone to a lot of conferences. When I was 17 I lied on the registration for LinuxWorld and said I was 18, which was the minimum age requirement. I was pretty into Linux in those days, and having LinuxWorld in San Francisco was too good a chance to miss. As it turns out, I probably interacted with people at that conference who would end up being friends and co-workers more than 5 years in the future.

My early conference-going years, and I should point out this was before I was actually full-time employed in tech, were all about LinuxWorld and MacWorld. Those were the things I liked, because I was really weird in high school, apparently. In 2010 I discovered comic conventions with WonderCon. I was blown away with the realization that this whole world of comic-and-movie lovers existed, and I had only dipped my toes in it in comparison.

2012-2014 was filled with technical conferences and fan conventions. HTML5DevConf, PyCon, KrakenCon, AOD, APE, BigWow ComicFest. There was something that drove me to each of them, and PyCon sticks out as being full of friendly pythonistas. PyCon still ranks as my favorite technical conference.

Sometime through all this I realized that I enjoy going to conferences and conventions because I like hanging out with groups of people who are guaranteed to share at least one interest with me. The strength of that shared interest normally dictates how much I like the con.

Now we come to XOXO 2014. I will be forever grateful to Tom Cenzani, one of the many excellent people I work with at Eventbrite, for showing the videos from last year’s XOXO Conf. As I watched Cabel Sasser, and Jonathan Coulton, and Maciej Cegłowski and all the other speakers talk openly and honestly about their successes, and failures, and fears in trying to build things, in trying to add something to the world while following their own path, I knew I had to be a part of that. The idea that there was a con, this thing that I already knew I loved, dedicated at least in part to being a creator, a thing I struggled with daily - how could I not want to be there?

Of course, I promptly forgot about this desire. The videos came out last fall, registration didn’t open until the spring, and we lead busy lives. But when registration opened, I remembered watching those videos, and immediately went to sign up. And right from the beginning of registration I had a feeling I was in for something special.

We’ve established that I go to a lot of conferences, but most of them are technical, and therefore not deeply accessible to my wife. She’s incredibly intelligent, but has chosen math and music over technology. I have, in the past, felt sad about not being able to share my joy at certain cons with her, because the common thread or theme was something that she didn’t have experience with. So when I saw the blog post from XOXO about families, I paused for thought, and then realized I had finally found a conference that (maybe, hopefully) my wife and I could enjoy together. That in and of itself is an incredible notion, one that still brings me joy.

So I got her to sign up, and we went. Myself, my wife, and my cofounder. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, they were definitely not sure what to expect, but all of us saw enough interesting bits in the program that we were excited. And well we should have been excited. From the opening party Thursday night to the closing party Sunday night, XOXO 2014 was an experience that none of us were truly prepared for, and none of us will forget.

This is where writing this post gets tricky, for me. I could go into excruciating detail about every game, and musician, and speaker that we loved, but I think that would miss some of the true character of XOXO, for me. PyCon was the first convention where I heard about the concept of the ‘hallway track’ as a measure of how good a con is. The ‘hallway track’ is all the conversations and random meetings and excellent discussions you have between sessions, over meals, or generally outside the scripted part of the con. For cons like PyCon, the quality of the ‘hallway track’ is one of many factors used to determine how good a particular year’s con was.

For XOXO, the ‘hallway track’ is the con. The spirit of XOXO may be distilled in speakers, and the musicians, and the games, and the films, but it lives and breathes and shouts with joy at the conversations and chance meetings that take up every spare moment. I thought I had found friendly groups of people at other cons - they don’t hold a candle to the friendliness and warmth of the attendees at XOXO. I made what I hope are lifelong friends during that weekend in Portland. Out of hundreds of conversations, I can only remember one where I didn’t come away feeling excited and so happy to have talked with that person.

For me, XOXO wasn’t a huge ‘BANG’ of insight or revelation. It was a slow burn shared with a thousand perfect strangers and true friends who were there because they make things, and who wanted to share the reassurance that makers are not alone. If you look up a bit from the candle that you are desperately trying to keep burning, you’ll see hundreds of others, all with their own candles, ready to lend a hand. It was the best four days of my life that I can remember, and the fact that I got to share that with my wife makes it all that much sweeter.

Now, the hardest part: I am privileged. I am a white, straight, twenty-something male who works as a software engineer for a startup in the San Francisco Bay Area. It would be really, really hard to be playing life on an easier mode than what I’m currently playing. I try, every hour of every day, to recognize my privilege and not let it drive my actions. I am surrounded by those less privileged than I, and I struggle with what I can do to help. I am not perfect, and never will be.

And because I recognize my privilege, and want to be a human being despite it, I applaud and support everything that the enthusiasm of Andys do to make XOXO a more diverse place. I don’t think that the conference is for everyone (how could it be? how can anything with any focus be for everyone?), but I do think it benefits from having as diverse an audience as possible. Which means that, if there is another XOXO, it’s unlikely I’ll be selected to attend. There is most likely someone far more deserving for the spot, and I am incredibly lucky to have been able to attend once. This is probably how the universe should work.

But I also desperately, desperately, desperately want another chance to spend four days in Portland with all the friends I have, and all the friends I haven’t met yet. To be inspired together, laugh together, play together, sweat together, and remind one another that we are not alone.

Thank you, Andy, and thank you, Andy, for an incredible XOXO.

xoxo