2013

The NRA’s new Stand and Fight ad is completely truthful and accurate… if you turn it off at the right time. I took the liberty of fixing it for them.

Last Thursday, on my last night after working a few days in NYC, I pulled together a little meetup of a few friends at Spitzer’s, a great little restaurant in the Lower East Side. On a frigid Manhattan night, we all cozied up against the bar in the warm, crowded backroom for conversation and rounds of Spaceteam over craft beer.

Fred noticed him first, sitting in the middle of a long table nearby, five people deep on either side. The place was packed and it was hard to reach him, but I waved from across the room, trying to catch his eye. No luck. He was deep in conversation, smiling and chatting. I thought he looked happy. I was wrong.

It was the first time I’d seen him in years, but I decided not to bug him, figuring I could catch up with him some other time. I made a mental note to drop him a line next time I was in NYC.

The next day, he was gone.

Watching him grow up online, he felt like the Internet’s little brother. His young age betrayed a deep drive and talent, leading him to accomplish so much in so little time. It was intimidating to people twice his age.

By the time I met him at Foo Camp in 2005, I knew way too much about him. I knew about his work with RSS and Creative Commons, I’d followed his crushes and frustrations on his personal blog through his awkward college years, and I was an avid reader of his Google blog.

He was one of the first people to sign up for Upcoming.org, on the second day it was live, and occasionally sent me valuable feedback. After Upcoming was acquired, he was the first person to visit us, on our second day in the office, on November 2, 2005. The photos he took of us and the gaudy Yahoo campus were the first he ever posted to Flickr.

We sat down for dinner at the end of a long day in URL’s, the Yahoo cafeteria, and talked about supertasters and the web. He struck me as someone who was curious, brave, idealistic, and occasionally immature — the kind of person who gets shit done.

We’d talked online occasionally, but it’d been years since I’d seen him last as he went on to change the world — merging Infogami with Reddit, liberating the PACER and Library of Congress datasets, starting Open Library and Demand Progress, and helping to crush SOPA. And, yes, busting into an MIT closet to download millions of academic papers.

Yep, he got shit done.

I never got a chance to say goodbye, but my last glimpse is how I’ll remember him. The center of a modern-day Last Supper, holding court over grilled cheese sandwiches in a Lower East Side bar, surrounded by people who loved him.

Goodnight, Aaron.

Today, a video’s making the rounds of a Southern California car chase that jumped from the TV to real life, giving one young man a front-row seat to the action.

I was curious to see if the video was matched up to the local TV news broadcast, so I synchronized the two videos side-by-side to see. The results are below (view full screen):

There are two versions in the video. First, synchronized to the TV broadcast on screen, and second, to real-life events.

Note that the TV broadcast is exactly ten seconds behind real-life, with the news station operating on a ten-second delay. Live news commonly uses a five- to ten-second delays for unpredictable live coverage, like the recent car chase that ended in suicide accidentally broadcast by FOX News.

As much as I was hoping to debunk this, it appears to be real (or a particularly convincing fake).

Nearly a year ago, my nephew Cooper and I launched Playfic, a community for writing and sharing interactive fiction games from your browser.

I haven’t talked about the site much, and have barely touched it since we launched, but I’ve been delighted to see people slowly discover it and use it in interesting ways. Unfortunately, I’m the only one privy to these delights, since I never got around to building a good way to browse or search them.

So far, there have been over 600 games created on Playfic. While many of them have been simple sketches or tests, over 20% have more than 1,000 words in the source code. What kind of things have people made on Playfic? Some of my favorites so far:

• An absurd dream world full of Jungian symbolism
• A jetpack simulator.
• Doctor Who fanfic and The TARDIS.
• A port of Homestar Runner’s Thy Dungeonman
• Sherlock fanfic
• A geography game winding through the continental U.S. states
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic meets dark, existential dread

But two of my favorite examples happened in the last two weeks.

First, Wired’s Chris Kohler published an interview with Infocom’s Dave Lebling and Steve Meretzky as an interactive fiction game. The game was written on Playfic and embedded in the article.

As if that wasn’t awesome enough, today came the first release of Text Glitch, a very early attempt to port the wonderfully creative Glitch multiplayer game to a text adventure.

In short, the brilliant Rev. Dan Catt took the locations and items from the last snapshot of the Glitch Encyclopedia, parsed it, and spit out Inform 7 source suitable for Playfic.

It’s very alpha, only covering the Alakol region, and doesn’t have any interactive elements beyond simple exploration yet, but for fans of Glitch, it’s a trip.

I was a big admirer of Glitch, and very sad when it closed its doors last month. I love the idea of preserving its collective memory in a text world you can explore.

This is exactly the kind of surprising thing I was hoping to see on Playfic. Give people a new outlet for creative expression, and they’ll find it and use it. Simply by making it easier for anyone to screw around with Inform 7 and share interactive fiction from their browser, crazy awesome things emerge. I hope to do some work on it this weekend to help shine a light on some more of the wonderful things the community’s created.