Book Report: Shift Happens, Vol. โ2
It's the second volume in a set of books about the history of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history. Sometimes ...
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Book Report: Shift Happens, Vol. โ1
It's the first volume in a set of books about the history of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with text on various then-newfangled devices. I learned a lot, which might kind of s...
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Book Report: S v Z
This book accompanies Tauba Auerbach's exhibit now showing at SFMoMA. It's an interesting piece of art in its own right. That's a good thing, I guess? I find myself comparing it to an earlier book d...
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Further Bewordled
I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds u...
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I made a little program to generate "ransom note" text using fancy international symbols like "ฤฐ ๐บฤโ
๐ผ ๐ธ ๐ฉ๐ลฆฦฌ๐๐ แญ๐ฅโฒ๐ถ๊
๐ฐ๐บ t๐ ๐พฦละแa๐ฃ๐ธ 'แ๐ข๐ฎ๐ฒโโฉ ลโฦฌ๐ฆ' ฦฌ๐ธ๐ฟt ๐ผเบฃi๐๐ถ ๐ก๐๐๐พฮณ ๐๐๐๐ดRnโฉ๐ฤฐโฌฏโฒaโ เด๐บแฮฒโโS." ...
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As a wordplay enthusiast, I was excited to hear about an old book called Ars Magna by Ramon Llull that tried to find new occult truths by re-arranging letters. The letters of "Ars Magna", after all, ...
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Free Donald Knuth lecture coming up… about Metafont. Clever guy, but not my topic. I probably won't go, but maybe you're interested. ...
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Fear and Loathing in Alternate Reality
Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for act two of the Games of Nonchalance a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful...
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Book Report: Alphabet Juice
This book is a sort of lexicon, except that instead of definitions there are riffs. These are some of the author's favorite words, or at least words that he wanted to write about. He likes to pron...
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Site: Tauba Auerbach / The Alphabet Variations
You may recall that I went to a gallery a couple of weeks ago. It was some art by Tauba Auerbach, including two that featured an alphabetload of overlapping letterforms. I'd wondered what they woul...
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Book Report: How to Spell the Alphabet
A while back, I pointed out some not-exactly-puzzle-ish-but-not-exactly-not-either images by Tauba Auerbach. I finally broke down and sent away for a book of her work, How to Spell the Alphabet. To...
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Park Challenge
Today Team Unwavering Resolve (a.k.a. Steven Pitsenbarger, Paul du Bois, and I) played in Park Challenge, a puzzle hunt game organized by the Desert Taxi folks. It was a fun stroll in Golden Gate Pa...
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