rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

Moving this to Merveilles.town:

#introduction

I'm a NY-born Oakland resident who programs for game companies to survive. I teach Scratch to kids at our town's video game museum.

In my free time I used #Flash a lot, then #Haxe, and now a lot of modern #JavaScript. I port things as a way to preserve ideas. I have a loving wife and 2 cats.

uh.

#webgl #threejs #pasta #halloween #science #wordplay #gpl #matrix #macintosh #darkwave , uuuuh, #antifa #kielbasa #netneutrality #humanity #flan #pasta

@rek @neauoire I mean I can't stress this enough, please make the time you need to recover, because, holy shit, buddies 😨

@rek @neauoire christ on toast, you two (and Pino) have been through so much. Until your future updates, I won't know your naval plans, but I hope calm and peaceful waters are in store for you.

Also I'm very glad you're encountering some hospitable people in Victoria. I'm also glad you had people you could reach via radio from time to time on your journey.

@rek @neauoire I'm 30% through your ship log, it's very well written, also I haven't exhaled in minutes

For context, this is the ident for a public tv/radio station out of Boston that's also an educational foundation, who've contributed a lot of content to school programs over the years and are longtime producers of NOVA

Forgive me if I've mentioned this before, but do any other Merveillians in the US hear this when they see @cblgh's handle on Mastodon? 😁

https://youtu.be/Ys7pub-ld-U

@rek @neauoire Welcome to, uh, the quarantimes! Is there anything this Oakland resident can do to help with those groceries in BC? You may be a thousand miles away, but compared to where you've been, it feels like you're just a couple towns away. 😁

There's something about autocorrect errors on my Android device that I really despise. It's like having an interpreter who injects their own stuff into what you're saying.

I dunno who deciphers things in 2020 for a living anymore, but they probably have a workflow I'd like to borrow.

Hopefully it doesn't lead me back to the Creative Suite, though! 😅 Forgive my transgression, Merveilles! At least I got data out of a "proprietary" format. 😉

The only reason the transcript was possible is because I could envision a workflow where I could take some concrete (and, when possible, automated) steps towards deriving and collating information without data loss.

Now I think we need a workflow for *decipherment*, which I've never done before. A way to annotate the text with hypotheses, like "I think these two letters are a suffix" or "maybe these four letters have this meaning".

My point is, despite leaning on the executables distributed by techno-feudalists, I've got what I believe to be a complete and accurate transcript of Traditions of the Scattered Path, which *is* shareable with other people, since it's a work derived from the copyrighted art. I'm hesitant to publicly share it for the short term, but a group of enthusiasts reached out and we're turning this text file over and over again in a Discord.

Another NodeJS script took the sorted glyph directory structure and reassembled the text. There were plenty of flaws, so as a verification step I made a close-enough font and re-typeset the whole booklet.

Adobe was like, "Save your work to the cloud?"

And I was like, "HISSSSSSSSS!"

Though ironically I did end up saving my work to Google Drive, and anyway my dependency on Creative Suite is still unfortunate, I really want to distance myself from these tools in the long run.

By aligning the scanned pages and slicing them all into line images, I was able to build a directory of PNG lines of text whose names were indexable. A little NodeJS script broke those into ~17.5k glyph images, which I sorted by hand. I used some tricks to sort most of them quickly, but wound up manually sorting about 5,000 of them.