clarity's wiki

This garden is largely dormant & low maintenance, but there are small shoots here and there that quietly demand small acts of care.

Home

Language

I'm learning to read japanese.

ASL is a language that uses gestures of the hands, face, and body to communicate.

Toki Pona is a constructed laguage with a tiny vocabulary and a surprising amount of character.

Viossa is a "con-pidgin", an intentionally constructed pidgin produced by a friend group of linguists who decided to try to learn to speak with each starting only with languages that they didn't share in common. This video touched me in a way that really surprised me. Something beautiful, strange, and precious.

Reading Notes

As I read more books, I'll be making pages for them and filling them with quotes I want to hang onto interspersed with my own musings.

Stories

Some stories I've read that I liked.

Game Designs

I make games. Below are mostly notes for my works-in-progress

Tools

This is a list of small, free, or experimental tools that might be useful in building your game / website / interactive project. Although I’ve included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools and toys that are as fun to use as they are functional

Cabinet

This is where I place things that haven’t yet found their own page.

I began this lecture by telling a story. Let me end it with another story, this time Chinese: Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years"" said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
~ "Six Memos for the Next Millennium" by Italo Calvino

Fundamentally, my work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves.

In order to enable good teachers, I needed a system with a lot of freedom for judgment calls. On the other hand, if I left the system too vague and wide open, the inexperienced tutors wouldn’t know what to do. They would default to what they had been trained on: paperwork. Without concrete guidance, they were liable to continue handing out packets and telling kids to focus and sit still.

I discussed the problem with my husband in the car on the way to tutoring my students one day. More specifically, I was bemoaning the lack of growth-tech systems for me to use as a pattern. “Huh,” my husband commented, “sounds like an RPG.” He was right, and that basically amounts to the plot twist of this story. Apocalypse World was right there and I’d been missing it that whole time.

The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context.

What you put up with is what will continue.

As I see it, technology has built the house in which we all live. The house is continually being extended and remodelled. More and more of human life takes place within its walls, so that today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house. All are affected by the design of the house, by the division of its space, by the location of its doors and walls. Compared to people in earlier times, we rarely have a chance to live outside this house. And the house is still changing; it is still being built as well as being demolished. In these lectures, I would like to take you through the house, starting with the foundation and then examining with you the walls that have been put up or taken down, the storeys and turrets that have been added, the flow of people through the house — who can come in, who can go into particular spaces.