10 ms·

Grid World

623 points by tobr 4y ago

tomcam 4y ago
So beautiful and creative and human and touching. So perfect a creation from the child of a “Myst” co-creator. Made me a little envious of that upbringing tbh.
- tyrust 4y ago
  HN needs spoiler tags, haha. I'm glad I went to the article first because I feel like the "Myst" reveal at the end was a little twist.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
I love those visuals.
uoaei 4y ago
I used to run cellular automata manually on graph paper. There's still a sheet on my dad's fridge, though the ink has faded from UV exposure.
- Tenal 4y ago
  [dead]
- kroltan 4y ago
  In high school I got half of my class to procedurally generate dungeon maps using simple rules and neighbouring cell populations. Example ruleset: - Rooms are rectangles 3 to 6 cells large in either direction. Place them randomly with a gap of 1 cell until there are no more valid room locations. - If a cell is between two rooms, and has a cell between the same two rooms on either side of the cross axis between the rooms, then it can be a door, but only if there is no door connecting this pair of rooms yet. - If an empty cell is in a corner, and there is a door 2 less than 2 cells away from it, then it is a torch. - If an empty cell has 2 cells distance to any walls, then it is a table(-like decoration). - If an empty cell is directly adjacent to a table-like decoration, it has a 50% chance of being a seat; This will generate a lot of dimly lit mess halls, but the actual rulesets would be larger and evolve through time, we would start anew once someone made too many mistakes.
shaunxcode 4y ago
This is awesome! The other works on the main page are also inspiring. Almost makes me believe in color again (I am a monochromist).
IIAOPSW 4y ago
On a related note, I've been obsessed recently with grid cities. Queens, New York in particular flummoxes me. Locally every point conforms to a grid, but globally they don't all conform to the same grid. Brooklyn is comparatively easy as it consists of 4-6 large grid areas stitched together (depending how much slight bending you forgive). Big swaths of Queens like Astoria and everywhere north of Queens Blvd are also simple enough. But that region from the border with Brooklyn I just can't ever seem to summarize succinctly. Any pattern that might form gets interrupted by either a cemetery, a park, train tracks, and in some cases (I've found out) former train tracks that were ripped out 100 years ago. I've considered theories like the streets being radially biased towards important junctions like Jamaica / Flushing. I've considered outlining major obstructions to see if those are the source of borders. I've looked around for the master plan on street numbering in Queens to no avail. This should be easy, like Manhattan Queens has numbered streets. It conforms to an approximate grid, yet no one ever plots out exactly what this grid is and where the defects in it occur. WTF IS QUEENS GRID?!?!
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  On a related note, lots of businesses on Manhattan still don't get it. They advertise their location as something like: 58th St 369 instead of saying: 58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located. I don't get it why they don't get it.
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    "True" New Yorkers seem to have memorized which numbers are between which numbered Avenues --- at least my son has done this since moving there first for college, then a job.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      This is one of those 90/10 rule things where just learning a post-it note worth of trivia covers you for over 90% of instances. I'm sure he's competent at navigating especially in the ordinary places reachable by ordinary subway ride. The corner that flummoxes me is that inexplicable void in the map. The big empty part of the subway system sandwiched between the EFMR and JMZ lines. That curious combination of Newton Creek, Highland park, an archipelago of like a dozen large cemeteries, more than a few heavy industrial zones, and freight rail tracks. I've seen parts of the map in this no mans land where numbered Ave's just straight up skip over a half dozen other numbers which I know exist elsewhere on the map. However the grid was zippered together, there is a seam in it and this is it.
seltzered_ 4y ago
"That place has a name, space, and it is measured, quantified, and standardized by the grid, tamed by its regular meter. No nook or cranny of nature is safe from this blanket of rationalization, stretching to cover the entire Earth in a global-scale grid of longitude and latitude. " Perhaps it may be worth mentioning there's another space of thought that critiques the rationalization, such as books like 'Descartes Error' and the whole systems-thinking space (e.g. folks like Fritjof Capra) and possibly the Complexity Science space.
- astroalex 4y ago
  Hi there, author here. By telling the personal story of how I inherited the rationality meme, I hoped to offer my own critique of rationality. I intended for the sentences you quoted to imply a subtle darkness to rationality, with phrases like "tamed" and "no nook or cranny of nature is safe." Maybe those aspects were too subtle. But just wanted to clarify!
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Nah, it came through just fine. Pretty sure just about no-one would write those things that way any time halfway recently without intending it to be a bit tongue-in-cheek or ironic.
  - seltzered_ 4y ago
    Thanks for the clarification! Yeah, definitely felt a hint of the subtle darkness trying to be expressed.
phforms 4y ago
What a beautiful(ly told/written) story/experience. Love how the visuals interact artistically with the writing. Can totally understand the fascination with grids, although it came to me much later in life (as I child, grids felt too constraining to me and school reinforced that impression unfortunately). > “I think we project grids outwards onto the world from within ourselves, shining their structure from our minds. We radiate grids.” I don’t know if the author is aware of this, but neuroscientists discovered what they call “grid cells”: “a type of neuron within the entorhinal cortex that fires at regular intervals as an animal navigates an open area, allowing it to understand its position in space by storing and integrating information about location, distance, and direction.” [1] I believe grid cells, together with place cells [2] may explain a lot about not only how we make use of diagrammatic tools but also how we form and navigate our more abstract conceptual spaces. For anyone interested, I recommend this great article on Quanta: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-memories-like-spaces-20190114/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell
- astroalex 4y ago
  Author here. Thanks for the kind words and the note about grid cells. That is fascinating.
the_af 4y ago
Very good article! I really like the animations, too. Monochrome pixel art will always resonate with me. The writing in the article felt poetic to me, well done: > "and I dreamed that the grid was the understructure to not just my own memories but to the world" As an aside, and not at all to detract from the story: I find it interesting that Myst wasn't universally loved. I remember in some "gamer" circles it wasn't considered a real game but an interactive slideshow.
- cstuder 4y ago
  > Monochrome pixel art Scroll all the way down for a lovely surprise.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Back when Myst came out casual gaming was almost non existent, and I wouldn't even consider Myst to be a casual game per se. I still remember being blown away by the graphics and the moodiness of exploring that barren island. The graphics were of course all prerendered, but you could enjoy the fact that some computer, somewhere, had generated them. Advanced 3D rendering was so novel (in early 90s). You couldn't get scenery like that on an SNES or a Genesis or any of the game consoles available at the time. None of the game consoles could even take advantage of 3D. And this game was novel enough and easy enough to navigate that it sold a crazy amount of copies to almost anyone with a home PC and a CD-ROM drive. The PC itself hadn't fully saturated the US yet. It was also interesting in that the game just sort of left you to explore the island, and paired with a good soundtrack of moody music, it was legitimately fun.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  > I remember in some "gamer" circles it wasn't considered a real game but an interactive slideshow. I always wondered how those people would categorize, for example, the Zork games. Myst is interactive fiction, which is its own genre. The disdain for Myst reminds me somewhat of the disdain for things like The Sims (which for some reason never extends to the types of simulation games that 'gamers' like such as SimCity, Cities:Skylines, RCT, etc.).
  - 4y ago
helloplanets 4y ago
That was a breath of fresh air! Also, the notes page warmed my heart. [0] Such a shame that digital gardening hasn't really taken off that much. Scrolling through some of the posts there feels in such a stark contrast with most of present day internet. Just putting stuff up on a webpage for yourself, not an audience you're trying to work. Bring back the nooks and crannies of the olden days! old man shakes fist [0] https://alex.miller.garden/notes/ https://alex.miller.garden/notes/
- Min0taur 4y ago
  I'm with you about small pages/personal sites! It makes the internet feel so much more lively and cozy to have these small, quiet spaces.
1attice 4y ago
What stack was used to make this? I cracked devtools but couldn't find any obvious fingerprints, and `bundle.js` is a only 12kb! 0_0; This is a masterpiece. Good writing, good graphics, good coding. Totalkunst in the wagnerian sense
- astroalex 4y ago
  Thank you! I used plain javascript without any libraries — firstly to keep the file size low, and secondly as a fun technical exercise.
  - d11z 4y ago
    It’s amazing knowing that one can produce things of this caliber without an internet connection at all. No dependencies required!
loraxclient 4y ago
Lovely story, well written and the artwork sparked joy. Beautiful observations about grids - never thought about them in that way, but so relatable. A great reminder of the fundamental pleasures of imagining and creating. Easy to forget after following those affinities far into a career. Thank you for sharing, really brightened up my day.
d11z 4y ago
Wow, the visuals in this are truly extraordinary and unique. I have never encountered anything quite like this before. I felt compelled to list the things that struck me the most: - Beautiful, poetic prose on a subject that resonates deeply with me - Just about as light on bandwidth as you can be, fully embracing the default system font stack while maintaining an attractive appearance - Seamless functionality on iOS Safari and Firefox on Windows - Highly engaging links (the Roman pictographs were particularly fascinating!) - Exquisitely handcrafted artisanal HTML/JS/CSS, reminiscent of Bartosz Ciechanowski's work I can't say I would change even a single thing. One might argue about the Google Tags import, but this minor "sin" is easily forgiven due to the exceptional mastery of web design and development displayed here, I can't blame you at all for wanting analytics on visitors. This website meets every criterion of my personal "gold standard" for websites, and I can be pretty fussy having done a fair share of frontend stuff myself. Recently I've been working on a page for a personal project, aiming to achieve a similar level of quality but it can sometimes be challenging to perfect the visual design aspects especially. This website serves as great inspiration! Thank you so much for sharing this! I’m eating like an absolute king the past two days what with Ciechanowski’s post yesterday and now your fine specimen. The web sometimes feels like wading through a sewer but on occasion you strike gold and it makes everything feel OK.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  The graphics make me want to play Return of the Obra Dinn again. Love that style.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    I’m more reminded of Proteus (2013).
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  I recently started a new blog / personal site, replacing an old Jekyll blog I hadn't touched since 2016. This time I decided to just write plain old HTML, with the minor concession of using Tailwind for styling because I wanted to learn it. It's been wildly fun, and using plain HTML has made the site really flexible and fun to develop in a way that static site generators never were. As an example, today I wanted to add a small footer to a code sample to link back to the originating commit on GitHub, and it was just a div, a, and span away. No bullshit, just put the elements there and all of a sudden it's on the screen! Another benefit has been just getting more familiar with HTML and CSS instead of letting a framework do the heavy lifting. Since restarting my site, I've felt a lot more confident when sitting down to write templated html or a react component or whatever during my day job. I totally share your enthusiasm for this link, and find the site incredibly inspirational - this is exactly the kind of digital garden I hope my site can become. Mine is a little more sterile at the moment, but the beauty of each page being static HTML instead of a rendering of some template is that the style can evolve over time, and I'll be able to go back to old posts and see them in their original state. The internet is still fun!
qup 4y ago
<3 I love GRID WORLD. The next-to-last visual reminds me of these "brain mazes" a childhood friend would make. If you read this, hello M. Coxson!
sublinear 4y ago
Oh I see... so scroll hijacking on a webpage is only ok when it's something nerds like /s
- the_af 4y ago
  In short, yes. When something is a work of art or an "exhibit", I accept things which I otherwise wouldn't. So a generalist blog hijacking scroll is jarring, but one about exploring art forms isn't (or not necessarily, at least). I'm willing to give this one a free pass because I enjoyed it. Sorry if it sounds like circular reasoning.
- sherry-sherry 4y ago
  I wouldn't even call this scroll-jacking. It doesn't overtake the position I've scrolled to/want to scroll to, nor send things in a different direction than expected.
adamredwoods 4y ago
Nice exhibit at MOMA: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5453 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5453
rf15 4y ago
Oh what an interesting post. The visuals are great, and through the paragraphs I was reminded of one of my first video games (At the first mention of Hyper Card I guess). And then in the second to last paragraph it just whacked me over the head with "my dad and his brother created a computer game called Myst" as I realised just which Alexander Miller this was.
junon 4y ago
This sort of thing is what the internet was made for. What a beautiful piece of art.
smokel 4y ago
Lovely page. It made me remember my endless efforts as a kid to digitize photos by tracing them on graph paper, and then grouping 3x2 pixels into blocks that could be represented by the Teletext character set, for display on the Philips P2000T. Each block had a character code that I soon learned by heart, not knowing at that time that they had a logical binary representation. I spent days on end typing those codes in many lines of BASIC, with the end result being a slideshow of 80x72 "pixels", green on black background. I didn't know about pixels or scanners, I was just being obsessed with finishing the picture to move on to the next one. Fond memories, and a great waste of time.
fancyfredbot 4y ago
What a pleasure to read a well written article with great visuals and no adverts, no cookie banners, no invitations to sign in or subscribe. It was this as much as the beautiful visuals which made the article really stand out. The thought that the rest of the web could be like this makes me sad.
totetsu 4y ago
As a kid my friend and I would walk to the corner shop just to buy individual sheets of A3 grid paper to take home and draw maps on just as something to do.
reusable_batt 4y ago
Did anyone notice the comment in the HTML of the page inside the <html> tag?
nvalis 4y ago
Beautiful article, both in text and in visuals. > Then my grid-vision exploded outwards from this center, enveloping everything, and I dreamed that the grid was the understructure to not just my own memories but to the world. I think we project grids outwards onto the world from within ourselves, shining their structure from our minds. This paragraph instantly let me think of the theory of Lattice QCD [0] where both space and time get discretised in a lattice to be able to simulate and make predictions on processes happening on the subatomic level. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
LeonB 4y ago
What a delight. Nice work. At one point in time I had a fascination with hexagonal grids. I made little library for drawing them on the html canvas, and then made clones of a few hex based games, worked on various “game of life” variants in hex land. I also wrote about a hex based spreadsheet concept and a few other people got quite into the idea. I tinkered with other grid systems and tiling systems, too — there are some fascinating irregular five sided systems etc. At the start of that exploration I think some part of my head held that the square co-ordinate systems were “basic” … beneath me … too simple. But what I kept coming back to was a realisation that the square grid wasn’t just easier to program in, it was better, it was just the most “correct” way to pack the plane, in some indescribblable way, when working in 2 dimensions. If you’re tired of square grids, you’re tired of 2D life.
- gumby 4y ago
  > If you’re tired of square grids, you’re tired of 2D life. Lovely use of this famous aphorism.
bowsamic 4y ago
But the grid isn’t some kind of natural thing. It is just a convenient idea we come up with. The author makes it sound like all of nature abides by the grid, pointing to longitude and latitude. To me this seems like someone getting so over excited by their tools that they can’t resist constructing some kind of religious ideology around it. It’s really not that big of a deal, it’s just a basic tool. Stop freaking out over basic things. Let the mundane be mundane, and if your life is so devoid of the supramundane that you need to make a coordinate grid your supramundane, then you should really reconsider how you’re viewing things Reading posts like this makes me quite sad
lynguist 4y ago
Interesting read. It makes me think when I was at school all the other children were seemingly obsessed with grid paper, using it for every class, writing all notes only on grid paper. Grid paper was also the most available and most normal paper at our schools. In contrast to the other children and in contrast to the author of this text, grid paper wasn’t inviting for me, instead it was feeling like oppressively giving me direction that I don’t want. I would ignore the grid and see the grid as something like dirt on the paper. Only a bit later I discovered that I could buy smooth and dense note paper that was completely blank. Ever since then I mostly use 100 g/m2 white A4 paper; rarely also A5. I love the liberating feel of white paper. After a few years I even learned how to write justified text on blank white paper, it feels very satisfying.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I like both, but they lead to very different thinking patterns. Hand me blank paper for a grid paper problem or vice versa and it doesn't work. Likewise, the size has to be right - big for brainstorming or free-thinking creative thought and small for bringing order to a chaotic mess.
  - wedemmoez 4y ago
    I found a happy medium with dot-grid notebooks. The dots are faint enough that you can ignore them and treat parts of the page like a blank sheet while using other parts for organized lines or sections.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      I love dot grid too! I also like the ability to change papers in Goodnote when I'm working digitally. Using dot or grid for layout and then switching to plain so it looks clean = YES.
- creata 4y ago
  > After a few years I even learned how to write justified text on blank white paper, it feels very satisfying. Neat! How do you justify text by hand as you go?
shever73 4y ago
This is a very good read, and I love the interstitial animations. My introduction to grids wasn't as overt as the author's, but I remember my bedroom being full of graph paper when I was designing sprites for my ZX Spectrum games back in the 80s.
kitd 4y ago
The graph paper says: you can make your own icons, too. OS/2 had a simple raster icon designer that you could use to create your own icon bitmaps and use them at various points in your workspace.

623 points by tobr 4y ago

So beautiful and creative and human and touching. So perfect a creation from the child of a “Myst” co-creator. Made me a little envious of that upbringing tbh.

tyrust 4y ago
HN needs spoiler tags, haha. I'm glad I went to the article first because I feel like the "Myst" reveal at the end was a little twist.

hombre_fatal 4y ago

I love those visuals.

uoaei 4y ago

I used to run cellular automata manually on graph paper. There's still a sheet on my dad's fridge, though the ink has faded from UV exposure.

Tenal 4y ago
[dead]
kroltan 4y ago
In high school I got half of my class to procedurally generate dungeon maps using simple rules and neighbouring cell populations. Example ruleset: - Rooms are rectangles 3 to 6 cells large in either direction. Place them randomly with a gap of 1 cell until there are no more valid room locations. - If a cell is between two rooms, and has a cell between the same two rooms on either side of the cross axis between the rooms, then it can be a door, but only if there is no door connecting this pair of rooms yet. - If an empty cell is in a corner, and there is a door 2 less than 2 cells away from it, then it is a torch. - If an empty cell has 2 cells distance to any walls, then it is a table(-like decoration). - If an empty cell is directly adjacent to a table-like decoration, it has a 50% chance of being a seat; This will generate a lot of dimly lit mess halls, but the actual rulesets would be larger and evolve through time, we would start anew once someone made too many mistakes.

shaunxcode 4y ago

This is awesome! The other works on the main page are also inspiring. Almost makes me believe in color again (I am a monochromist).

IIAOPSW 4y ago

On a related note, I've been obsessed recently with grid cities. Queens, New York in particular flummoxes me. Locally every point conforms to a grid, but globally they don't all conform to the same grid. Brooklyn is comparatively easy as it consists of 4-6 large grid areas stitched together (depending how much slight bending you forgive). Big swaths of Queens like Astoria and everywhere north of Queens Blvd are also simple enough. But that region from the border with Brooklyn I just can't ever seem to summarize succinctly. Any pattern that might form gets interrupted by either a cemetery, a park, train tracks, and in some cases (I've found out) former train tracks that were ripped out 100 years ago. I've considered theories like the streets being radially biased towards important junctions like Jamaica / Flushing. I've considered outlining major obstructions to see if those are the source of borders. I've looked around for the master plan on street numbering in Queens to no avail. This should be easy, like Manhattan Queens has numbered streets. It conforms to an approximate grid, yet no one ever plots out exactly what this grid is and where the defects in it occur. WTF IS QUEENS GRID?!?!

galaxyLogic 4y ago
On a related note, lots of businesses on Manhattan still don't get it. They advertise their location as something like: 58th St 369 instead of saying: 58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located. I don't get it why they don't get it.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  "True" New Yorkers seem to have memorized which numbers are between which numbered Avenues --- at least my son has done this since moving there first for college, then a job.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    This is one of those 90/10 rule things where just learning a post-it note worth of trivia covers you for over 90% of instances. I'm sure he's competent at navigating especially in the ordinary places reachable by ordinary subway ride. The corner that flummoxes me is that inexplicable void in the map. The big empty part of the subway system sandwiched between the EFMR and JMZ lines. That curious combination of Newton Creek, Highland park, an archipelago of like a dozen large cemeteries, more than a few heavy industrial zones, and freight rail tracks. I've seen parts of the map in this no mans land where numbered Ave's just straight up skip over a half dozen other numbers which I know exist elsewhere on the map. However the grid was zippered together, there is a seam in it and this is it.

seltzered_ 4y ago

"That place has a name, space, and it is measured, quantified, and standardized by the grid, tamed by its regular meter. No nook or cranny of nature is safe from this blanket of rationalization, stretching to cover the entire Earth in a global-scale grid of longitude and latitude. " Perhaps it may be worth mentioning there's another space of thought that critiques the rationalization, such as books like 'Descartes Error' and the whole systems-thinking space (e.g. folks like Fritjof Capra) and possibly the Complexity Science space.

astroalex 4y ago
Hi there, author here. By telling the personal story of how I inherited the rationality meme, I hoped to offer my own critique of rationality. I intended for the sentences you quoted to imply a subtle darkness to rationality, with phrases like "tamed" and "no nook or cranny of nature is safe." Maybe those aspects were too subtle. But just wanted to clarify!
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Nah, it came through just fine. Pretty sure just about no-one would write those things that way any time halfway recently without intending it to be a bit tongue-in-cheek or ironic.
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  Thanks for the clarification! Yeah, definitely felt a hint of the subtle darkness trying to be expressed.

phforms 4y ago

What a beautiful(ly told/written) story/experience. Love how the visuals interact artistically with the writing. Can totally understand the fascination with grids, although it came to me much later in life (as I child, grids felt too constraining to me and school reinforced that impression unfortunately). > “I think we project grids outwards onto the world from within ourselves, shining their structure from our minds. We radiate grids.” I don’t know if the author is aware of this, but neuroscientists discovered what they call “grid cells”: “a type of neuron within the entorhinal cortex that fires at regular intervals as an animal navigates an open area, allowing it to understand its position in space by storing and integrating information about location, distance, and direction.” [1] I believe grid cells, together with place cells [2] may explain a lot about not only how we make use of diagrammatic tools but also how we form and navigate our more abstract conceptual spaces. For anyone interested, I recommend this great article on Quanta: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-memories-like-spaces-20190114/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell

astroalex 4y ago
Author here. Thanks for the kind words and the note about grid cells. That is fascinating.

the_af 4y ago

Very good article! I really like the animations, too. Monochrome pixel art will always resonate with me. The writing in the article felt poetic to me, well done: > "and I dreamed that the grid was the understructure to not just my own memories but to the world" As an aside, and not at all to detract from the story: I find it interesting that Myst wasn't universally loved. I remember in some "gamer" circles it wasn't considered a real game but an interactive slideshow.

cstuder 4y ago
> Monochrome pixel art Scroll all the way down for a lovely surprise.
chrisco255 4y ago
Back when Myst came out casual gaming was almost non existent, and I wouldn't even consider Myst to be a casual game per se. I still remember being blown away by the graphics and the moodiness of exploring that barren island. The graphics were of course all prerendered, but you could enjoy the fact that some computer, somewhere, had generated them. Advanced 3D rendering was so novel (in early 90s). You couldn't get scenery like that on an SNES or a Genesis or any of the game consoles available at the time. None of the game consoles could even take advantage of 3D. And this game was novel enough and easy enough to navigate that it sold a crazy amount of copies to almost anyone with a home PC and a CD-ROM drive. The PC itself hadn't fully saturated the US yet. It was also interesting in that the game just sort of left you to explore the island, and paired with a good soundtrack of moody music, it was legitimately fun.
Mezzie 4y ago
> I remember in some "gamer" circles it wasn't considered a real game but an interactive slideshow. I always wondered how those people would categorize, for example, the Zork games. Myst is interactive fiction, which is its own genre. The disdain for Myst reminds me somewhat of the disdain for things like The Sims (which for some reason never extends to the types of simulation games that 'gamers' like such as SimCity, Cities:Skylines, RCT, etc.).
- 4y ago

helloplanets 4y ago

That was a breath of fresh air! Also, the notes page warmed my heart. [0] Such a shame that digital gardening hasn't really taken off that much. Scrolling through some of the posts there feels in such a stark contrast with most of present day internet. Just putting stuff up on a webpage for yourself, not an audience you're trying to work. Bring back the nooks and crannies of the olden days! old man shakes fist [0] https://alex.miller.garden/notes/ https://alex.miller.garden/notes/

Min0taur 4y ago
I'm with you about small pages/personal sites! It makes the internet feel so much more lively and cozy to have these small, quiet spaces.

1attice 4y ago

What stack was used to make this? I cracked devtools but couldn't find any obvious fingerprints, and `bundle.js` is a only 12kb! 0_0; This is a masterpiece. Good writing, good graphics, good coding. Totalkunst in the wagnerian sense

astroalex 4y ago
Thank you! I used plain javascript without any libraries — firstly to keep the file size low, and secondly as a fun technical exercise.
- d11z 4y ago
  It’s amazing knowing that one can produce things of this caliber without an internet connection at all. No dependencies required!

loraxclient 4y ago

Lovely story, well written and the artwork sparked joy. Beautiful observations about grids - never thought about them in that way, but so relatable. A great reminder of the fundamental pleasures of imagining and creating. Easy to forget after following those affinities far into a career. Thank you for sharing, really brightened up my day.

d11z 4y ago

Wow, the visuals in this are truly extraordinary and unique. I have never encountered anything quite like this before. I felt compelled to list the things that struck me the most: - Beautiful, poetic prose on a subject that resonates deeply with me - Just about as light on bandwidth as you can be, fully embracing the default system font stack while maintaining an attractive appearance - Seamless functionality on iOS Safari and Firefox on Windows - Highly engaging links (the Roman pictographs were particularly fascinating!) - Exquisitely handcrafted artisanal HTML/JS/CSS, reminiscent of Bartosz Ciechanowski's work I can't say I would change even a single thing. One might argue about the Google Tags import, but this minor "sin" is easily forgiven due to the exceptional mastery of web design and development displayed here, I can't blame you at all for wanting analytics on visitors. This website meets every criterion of my personal "gold standard" for websites, and I can be pretty fussy having done a fair share of frontend stuff myself. Recently I've been working on a page for a personal project, aiming to achieve a similar level of quality but it can sometimes be challenging to perfect the visual design aspects especially. This website serves as great inspiration! Thank you so much for sharing this! I’m eating like an absolute king the past two days what with Ciechanowski’s post yesterday and now your fine specimen. The web sometimes feels like wading through a sewer but on occasion you strike gold and it makes everything feel OK.

Waterluvian 4y ago
The graphics make me want to play Return of the Obra Dinn again. Love that style.
- teddyh 4y ago
  I’m more reminded of Proteus (2013).
agentwiggles 4y ago
I recently started a new blog / personal site, replacing an old Jekyll blog I hadn't touched since 2016. This time I decided to just write plain old HTML, with the minor concession of using Tailwind for styling because I wanted to learn it. It's been wildly fun, and using plain HTML has made the site really flexible and fun to develop in a way that static site generators never were. As an example, today I wanted to add a small footer to a code sample to link back to the originating commit on GitHub, and it was just a div, a, and span away. No bullshit, just put the elements there and all of a sudden it's on the screen! Another benefit has been just getting more familiar with HTML and CSS instead of letting a framework do the heavy lifting. Since restarting my site, I've felt a lot more confident when sitting down to write templated html or a react component or whatever during my day job. I totally share your enthusiasm for this link, and find the site incredibly inspirational - this is exactly the kind of digital garden I hope my site can become. Mine is a little more sterile at the moment, but the beauty of each page being static HTML instead of a rendering of some template is that the style can evolve over time, and I'll be able to go back to old posts and see them in their original state. The internet is still fun!

qup 4y ago

<3 I love GRID WORLD. The next-to-last visual reminds me of these "brain mazes" a childhood friend would make. If you read this, hello M. Coxson!

sublinear 4y ago

Oh I see... so scroll hijacking on a webpage is only ok when it's something nerds like /s

the_af 4y ago
In short, yes. When something is a work of art or an "exhibit", I accept things which I otherwise wouldn't. So a generalist blog hijacking scroll is jarring, but one about exploring art forms isn't (or not necessarily, at least). I'm willing to give this one a free pass because I enjoyed it. Sorry if it sounds like circular reasoning.
sherry-sherry 4y ago
I wouldn't even call this scroll-jacking. It doesn't overtake the position I've scrolled to/want to scroll to, nor send things in a different direction than expected.

adamredwoods 4y ago

Nice exhibit at MOMA: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5453 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5453

rf15 4y ago

Oh what an interesting post. The visuals are great, and through the paragraphs I was reminded of one of my first video games (At the first mention of Hyper Card I guess). And then in the second to last paragraph it just whacked me over the head with "my dad and his brother created a computer game called Myst" as I realised just which Alexander Miller this was.

junon 4y ago

This sort of thing is what the internet was made for. What a beautiful piece of art.

smokel 4y ago

Lovely page. It made me remember my endless efforts as a kid to digitize photos by tracing them on graph paper, and then grouping 3x2 pixels into blocks that could be represented by the Teletext character set, for display on the Philips P2000T. Each block had a character code that I soon learned by heart, not knowing at that time that they had a logical binary representation. I spent days on end typing those codes in many lines of BASIC, with the end result being a slideshow of 80x72 "pixels", green on black background. I didn't know about pixels or scanners, I was just being obsessed with finishing the picture to move on to the next one. Fond memories, and a great waste of time.

fancyfredbot 4y ago

What a pleasure to read a well written article with great visuals and no adverts, no cookie banners, no invitations to sign in or subscribe. It was this as much as the beautiful visuals which made the article really stand out. The thought that the rest of the web could be like this makes me sad.

totetsu 4y ago

As a kid my friend and I would walk to the corner shop just to buy individual sheets of A3 grid paper to take home and draw maps on just as something to do.

reusable_batt 4y ago

Did anyone notice the comment in the HTML of the page inside the <html> tag?

nvalis 4y ago

Beautiful article, both in text and in visuals. > Then my grid-vision exploded outwards from this center, enveloping everything, and I dreamed that the grid was the understructure to not just my own memories but to the world. I think we project grids outwards onto the world from within ourselves, shining their structure from our minds. This paragraph instantly let me think of the theory of Lattice QCD [0] where both space and time get discretised in a lattice to be able to simulate and make predictions on processes happening on the subatomic level. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD

LeonB 4y ago

What a delight. Nice work. At one point in time I had a fascination with hexagonal grids. I made little library for drawing them on the html canvas, and then made clones of a few hex based games, worked on various “game of life” variants in hex land. I also wrote about a hex based spreadsheet concept and a few other people got quite into the idea. I tinkered with other grid systems and tiling systems, too — there are some fascinating irregular five sided systems etc. At the start of that exploration I think some part of my head held that the square co-ordinate systems were “basic” … beneath me … too simple. But what I kept coming back to was a realisation that the square grid wasn’t just easier to program in, it was better, it was just the most “correct” way to pack the plane, in some indescribblable way, when working in 2 dimensions. If you’re tired of square grids, you’re tired of 2D life.

gumby 4y ago
> If you’re tired of square grids, you’re tired of 2D life. Lovely use of this famous aphorism.

bowsamic 4y ago

But the grid isn’t some kind of natural thing. It is just a convenient idea we come up with. The author makes it sound like all of nature abides by the grid, pointing to longitude and latitude. To me this seems like someone getting so over excited by their tools that they can’t resist constructing some kind of religious ideology around it. It’s really not that big of a deal, it’s just a basic tool. Stop freaking out over basic things. Let the mundane be mundane, and if your life is so devoid of the supramundane that you need to make a coordinate grid your supramundane, then you should really reconsider how you’re viewing things Reading posts like this makes me quite sad

lynguist 4y ago

Interesting read. It makes me think when I was at school all the other children were seemingly obsessed with grid paper, using it for every class, writing all notes only on grid paper. Grid paper was also the most available and most normal paper at our schools. In contrast to the other children and in contrast to the author of this text, grid paper wasn’t inviting for me, instead it was feeling like oppressively giving me direction that I don’t want. I would ignore the grid and see the grid as something like dirt on the paper. Only a bit later I discovered that I could buy smooth and dense note paper that was completely blank. Ever since then I mostly use 100 g/m2 white A4 paper; rarely also A5. I love the liberating feel of white paper. After a few years I even learned how to write justified text on blank white paper, it feels very satisfying.

Mezzie 4y ago
I like both, but they lead to very different thinking patterns. Hand me blank paper for a grid paper problem or vice versa and it doesn't work. Likewise, the size has to be right - big for brainstorming or free-thinking creative thought and small for bringing order to a chaotic mess.
- wedemmoez 4y ago
  I found a happy medium with dot-grid notebooks. The dots are faint enough that you can ignore them and treat parts of the page like a blank sheet while using other parts for organized lines or sections.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I love dot grid too! I also like the ability to change papers in Goodnote when I'm working digitally. Using dot or grid for layout and then switching to plain so it looks clean = YES.
creata 4y ago
> After a few years I even learned how to write justified text on blank white paper, it feels very satisfying. Neat! How do you justify text by hand as you go?

shever73 4y ago

This is a very good read, and I love the interstitial animations. My introduction to grids wasn't as overt as the author's, but I remember my bedroom being full of graph paper when I was designing sprites for my ZX Spectrum games back in the 80s.

kitd 4y ago

The graph paper says: you can make your own icons, too. OS/2 had a simple raster icon designer that you could use to create your own icon bitmaps and use them at various points in your workspace.