Robin Sloan

Week 1563

It’s been rain­ing hard in San Fran­cisco, and it lent the week a strange char­ac­ter; to me it seemed to pass sort of out­side the nor­mal stream of time. Like a pocket uni­verse. A wet pocket uni­verse. (Also, these things were on the loose.)

It was a good week for mak­ing memes. Stock and flow got wacky-​​incredible trac­tion over at Snark­mar­ket and my post on instru­mented read­ing made the rounds in the data viz world.

And if I’m right about stock and flow (who knows?) then some small frac­tion of those swarms got curi­ous and made their way over to meet my stock—maybe Penum­bra, maybe Scheme, maybe some­thing else. Maybe one of those peo­ple is out there flip­ping through Scheme this very moment. It’s a delight to think so.

Another delight: it felt so good to put together that post on instru­mented read­ing. I have been think­ing about that idea, and imag­in­ing that very graph, for a year entire. Whew. Done. Exorcised.

I announced the Remix Fund win­ners this week and made the ini­tial pay­outs. I like the feel of money flow­ing, even in small amounts. It feels healthy. Almost… meta­bolic. It’s a sign of life.

Read on…

Week 1562

Releas­ing some­thing new redeems even the lamest week; it’s a bit of a cheat, actu­ally. I mean, how lame can it be if you released some­thing? Not as lame as that other week where all you did was play Dragon Age, that’s for sure!

Though I didn’t give Gogo­main the time it needed ear­lier this week, I made up for it on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, and it’s on track for a full rough draft by tomor­row. My rough drafts are truly rough—not like those fake rough drafts that have been pol­ished up for inspec­tion. Over the years I’ve become pretty com­fort­able shar­ing stuff that still sucks, and at this point I think it’s a true strength. (See: Ed Cat­mull on shar­ing stuff that sucks at Pixar.)

Pil­grim abides. Did I men­tion I released some­thing this week?

Read on…