Ramsey Nasser @nasser@merveilles.town

my bio translates to "come, let's sit in the shade / this shade does not belong to anyone" from the inimitable ziad rahbani

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4q418uU4lA

ramadan kareem ❤️

compiler development, expectation: i will venture to the far corners of the lambda cube so that i may confront the fabric of thought itself
compiler development, reality:

coming to the grim realization that I'm going to have to read the source code of luajit at some point

on that site i still call it a "modular game engine" but really its a set of design patterns for playful systems. the actual software components i made can be pretty easily reproduced and they're are not as important as the ideas behind them, i've come to think.

this is following a museum installation that was the biggest deployment of my coroutine system and larger interactive software patterns ive started documenting at http://ajeeb.games/. i'd like to spend the rest of the year writing about this system and my experiences using it.

bit of downtime between work, noodling on coroutine examples/tutorials. the idea is to make something complete but simple to work towards. i have a memory game in ~150 lines of code which i think is a good start! simple mechanics plus enough space for visual flourishes.

free as in الحرية

been silent for a while installing a project I can't really post about. hope to get back in a month or so!

the kinds of programming languages i want to make are totally different depending on whether i am deep in compiler work or deep on an interactive software job

workshopping a very hot take: the browser is an acceptable smalltalk

working on better ways to talk about the coroutine system i've been developing and using. at first i thought talking about time was the best entry point, because you can write functions that run across multiple frames, but increasingly i am thinking state machines are the right mental model. the state machine on the left can be transcribed pretty literally into the javascript on the right. you end up writing *a lot* of state machines in games and this is the tersest approach i've found yet.

its the story of palmyrene queen zenobia briefly reconquering the middle east away from rome only to lose everything at the end. it plays with notions of resistance against the west and obsessive self-destructive ambition.

a few times a year i rewatch this the 2007 Zenobia musical. i saw it in person at the time, and they've never released a video of it, but someone on youtube used the official cast recording and whatever images and footage she could find to cobble together the closest thing we have. its v cheesy and over the top, but it gets me every time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua-m2nu2CP0

it does one thing beyond the minimal set up, forgive me: it adjusts the coordinate system such that 0,0 is the center of the window, not the top left, which is generally what i want when i am sketching.