Zorking Around

 You are in an open field west of a big white house with a 
 boarded front door.
 There is a small mailbox here.
 >open mailbox
 Opening the mailbox reveals:
   A leaflet.
 >get leaflet
 Taken.
 >read it
   Welcome to Zork!
Zork is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning.  
In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory
ever seen by mortal man. Hardened adventurers have run 
screaming from the terrors contained within.
In Zork, the intrepid explorer delves into the forgotten 
secrets of a lost labyrinth deep in the bowels of the earth,
searching for vast treasures long hidden from prying eyes, 
treasures guarded by fearsome monsters and diabolical
traps!
Zork was created at the Programming Technology Division 
of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Anderson, 
Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling.
It was inspired by the Adventure game of Crowther and Woods, 
and the Dungeons and Dragons game of Gygax and Arneson. 

Chat Interfaces are the new Command Line

A lot of noise has been made of late re: chat interfaces and chat bots. People seem to think that they are new, revolutionary, and about to disrupt everything. No seriously, a lot of noise. Just look:

Star Trek (TNG) Your Life

So here we are, someone finally made a decent LCARS interface for the Raspberry Pi. Check the code out on Github, and then decide what you’re going to build it in to. Check out a video of the system in action below.

Silent Cinema: The Astronomer's Dream

117 years after it was originally released, my buddy Wesley wrote and recorded a new score for the Georges Méliès sci-fi short film The Astronomer’s Dream. It’s part of an ongoing project, in which I’m working with local musicians and videographers to revitalize and rescore vintage films. I’m really pleased with this score, and the ultimate film is fantastic.

Digital Publishing: Making RSS Suck Less

Magazines are rad, especially the weird counter-culture zines that gave rise to websites like BoingBoing. A lot of early blogs and online publications were born directly out of Zine culture, and most digital publications still operate under at least some of the same paradigms as traditional publishing. One of the earliest victories for the young web was RSS, a way to subscribe to blogs and websites that mirrored the idea of (but was fundamentally removed from) traditional magazine subscriptions.