§ Had a big meeting to kick off a two year collaboration with the Alliance of Immersives in Museums. Got to meet a bunch of techy creative people from interactive science museums around the country.

A big topic was how to balance the flexibility and speed of pure immersive expirerencs with the unique possibilities that can only arise from traditional tactile exhibits.

§ How can desire paths be used in interior design? Do you keep the space reasonably empty and then add affordances—benches, walls, signage, trash cans—only after a period of careful observation? Do you make a reasonable initial guess and then remove and rearrange later? Is there some kind of carpeting that can reveal the paths tread later, perhaps under some special light?

§ I bought the new 2D platformer Super Mario Bros. Wonder, hoping to capture some of the magic from the surprisingly excellent Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.

  • The local co-op play is great. Had I not been spoiled by Tropical Freeze’s ingenious backpack mechanic I would be completely happy.
  • Doing away with time limits was the right call. Now it is time to rethink the coin / life model. Celeste has had the right idea here all along: unlimited time, unlimited lives, the challenge comes from clever level design.
  • In general it has been a really satisfying bite-sized game. Each level takes maybe five minutes or less so it’s easy to pick it up for a quick round during a moment of downtime.

§ I’m trying out Arc, a new-ish web browser that feels more like an operating system for the internet. It is weird and slightly fascinating.

A giant downside: their mobile app is awful. You can only open one tab at a time in the most unintuitive way imaginable. It is the opposite of the old Apple design adage of “it just works”. Although apparently a new, fully-featured mobile app is under development. Until that arrives I’ll probably stick with Safari for most of my browsing but I am grateful Arc is here an unafraid to throw away all assumptions on what a web browser can be.

§ I was hopeful OpenAI would decrease the price of their ChatGPT Plus subscription in the near future. $20 per month is a truly wild price. It is my most expensive subscription save for my cellular data plan. It says a lot that it is even remotely worth it at that price. Well this week OpenAI decided to pause new signups due to a “surge in usage” so the possibility for a price decrease any time soon feels pretty remote.

§ But also! The OpenAI board unexpectedly fired their CEO and co-founder Sam Altman on Friday. In response, their other co-founder Greg Brockman and at least three other senior researchers quit. So who knows! Anything can happen at this point!

§ I got a new Creality CR-M4 for work. I can’t attest to the quality yet—I’ve only had time for a couple of small test prints—what I can say is it is giant. Effectively an 18x18x18" build volume.

§ Links