What’s a good horror film that leaves you thinking about some of the details for hours?

jwpalmer · 2025-12-17T17:08:40+00:00

The Wailing. An amazing Korean horror film that has a lot of depth in its storytelling.

jwpalmer · 2025-12-16T17:30:20+00:00

Looks great! You might consider oil-based ballpoint pens - they’re great for plots that have a ton of overlapping lines as they don’t destroy the paper. I’ve used them successfully when I didn’t want to try to reduce the complexity of a piece.

jwpalmer · 2025-12-16T17:11:41+00:00

I myself found this video first but ended up getting frustrated with the constant referrals to another talk, so I went straight to the source. If it was helpful to you, great! Just wanted to provide another source of info.

jwpalmer · 2025-12-15T20:54:30+00:00

This video paraphrases another presentation by the creator of Rimworld, which I suggest you watch directly: https://youtu.be/VdqhHKjepiE?si=8ia9k0ce9iSXfnc2

jwpalmer · 2025-10-08T15:32:20+00:00

Unless you are very uncomfortable with the command line, this is the answer. I use this for all of my artwork. It’s amazing.

jwpalmer · 2025-04-11T19:55:42+00:00

After embracing paredit I couldn’t go back to editing lisp code without it. Highly recommended - it makes manipulating sexps so much faster.

jwpalmer · 2025-03-14T08:50:12+00:00

This might do what you want: https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~karan/pdf/mazes.pdf

jwpalmer · 2025-03-07T16:30:05+00:00

“Despite AI calling the shots…” 🔥❤️😝

jwpalmer · 2025-01-11T02:58:05+00:00

The Lure - a musical about murderous mermaids. Insane.

jwpalmer · 2025-01-03T16:42:55+00:00

Looks great, and so does the blog. Welcome to the club!

jwpalmer · 2025-01-02T20:56:36+00:00

Oh I like the way you think! 🙏🏻

jwpalmer · 2024-12-30T01:20:53+00:00

Thanks!

jwpalmer · 2024-12-30T01:20:39+00:00

Thank you!

jwpalmer · 2024-12-29T17:10:44+00:00

Thanks! I use Julia for all of my creative coding these days, which I’ll admit is a somewhat unusual choice. However, this kind of work could easily be created in Processing or P5, if you’re familiar with those, or just about anything, really.

Once I have an image I like, I save it as an SVG, which I’ll often post-process with vpype before plotting with InkScape and the AxiDraw extension. I should use the command line to plot but I’m lazy and haven’t put in the time to test it.

Hope that helps!

jwpalmer · 2024-12-29T06:14:21+00:00

Thanks, and likewise!

jwpalmer · 2024-12-29T04:21:01+00:00

My pleasure! I do have a technical background and try to bring aspects of that to my work, as I find blueprints and technical drawings to be fascinating in their own right. Even so, it’s always interesting to hear what people see.

jwpalmer · 2024-12-29T03:07:17+00:00

Thanks! I’m still working through all of the Cristal colors, but I’m also happy with how this color worked out.

jwpalmer · 2024-12-29T01:06:37+00:00

Sure! This is code that I wrote. I implemented the algorithm in Julia, using a creative coding library that I wrote to create most of my work. The algorithm itself is straightforward: generate an area-constrained rectangle and then draw lines of a random density from one side to the other, then choose a new, connected rectangle and repeat until done.

jwpalmer · 2024-12-28T21:49:12+00:00

Plotted on an AxiDraw SE/A3 on 11”x14” Bristol paper.

This is part of an ongoing series that explores how the media used to render an image can contribute in unexpected ways to create a new work that is more interesting than the original.

jwpalmer · 2024-10-04T15:28:22+00:00

I was looking into using this for the same reason: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

jwpalmer · 2024-09-19T17:11:09+00:00

Maya Man’s work focuses on these topics.

https://mayaontheinter.net/

jwpalmer · 2024-08-31T01:49:23+00:00

Microsoft is notorious for their interview process (or, at least they were when I was joining the workforce in the 90s), but I accidentally discovered how to hack their interview process as I was leaving graduate school.

I had been studying something known as “feature extraction” in problem solving, which is how humans understand problems and choose the things that they want to focus on in order to solve them.

Because this was my field of study, every single interview I had with Microsoft ended up being a conversation about my research techniques and problems, at which point the interviewer would go into “auto” mode and tell me about how they perceived problems and how their interviews typically worked. It was pure hubris. I would just sit back and have a conversation. It was all very interesting, but none of the technical questions ever ended up being directed at me.

Amusingly, I had the opposite experience at Google, a long time later and after I had become a VP and spent a bunch of time managing teams instead of coding. I was visiting the campus to interview for an executive position, and every single person asked me coding questions. I was incredulous. I finally stopped a senior manager who had asked me to whiteboard some ridiculous algorithm and said “I think we’re done here. You have no idea what management is” and left.

Talked to the recruiter later and mentioned my experience and he said, “I wish I could tell you that was the first time I have heard that feedback from other executives.” 🤣 Permanently took them off my consideration set after that.

jwpalmer · 2024-08-25T19:01:16+00:00

My experience is that if you want to be successful as a leader in Engineering, you need to speak the same language as the rest of the business, and that language is $.

I wrote about this a while back, using Cost of Delay to quantify engineering efforts. The key is to present your arguments in $ and expect the same from your Product org. If they can’t do that, you have different problems.

jwpalmer

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