eggwhite.bsky.social

One of the greatest inventions of the last 48 hours

I'm having to step away pretty often to stop my brain leaking out through my eyeballs! 3/2 (so sue me)

I'm doing a mountain of semiotic analysis, and identifying purpose & meaning of shapes _in_ those PNGs & what they mean/represent.

Aiming to get it down to about 80 SVG shapes + a config file... But first I must grok each of those 1000s of old icons.

I'm winning, but my brain is icon soup. 2/2

Working on a *massive* iconography project at the moment. Which everyone _thinks_ involves drawing lots of icons... Which it could, eventually.

Right now it involves being lost in a swamp of 1000s of ye-olde PNG files, asking "why?", "what?" & "wtf?" and crashing all of my tools regularly. 1/2

Hmmm... Am I waiting because Figma's crashed, or am I waiting because Figma's running as normal and just talking ages? I honestly don't know how I can tell.

Father got lost in a maze
Mother left & took the kids
Zampano writing crazy things
Johnny-T is editing
Adding to a narrative
That's spiraling around

OUR #HOUSE
IS SO VERY HARD TO LEAVE
OUR #HOUSE
ATE MY BROTHER, NOW I GRIEVE
OUR #HOUSE
NON-EUCLIDEAN & DEEP
OUR #HOUSE
GIVES THE NAVIDSONS THE CREEPS

Trying again with only a few hundred source images, rather than a few thousand.

I know I'm probably abusing Photoshop here, but... Honestly, _it deserves it_.

As is semi-traditional, it ended with Photoshop crashing, process incomplete...

So... Today, my work has mostly involved watching a "working" spinner in Photoshop. I can't do much else, as all laptop resources are driving the stuff behind that spinner.

Fun, I guess.

Yay, Photoshop?

The front cover of a scientific journal titled Ornithologist, dated 1 April 2025. The main headline reads: “BIRDS: DECODED - Groundbreaking New Science.” Below that, a subheading says: “What are the UK’s birds really saying? Pioneering new research provides the answers.”

WORLD-FIRST: Ground-breaking research published today in the Ornithologist Journal has, for the first time, translated common UK bird vocalisations into equivalent phrases in the human language.

The results tell us a lot!

Extracts below... 🧵

Life as an Enterprise UXer goes in cycles. One moment it's "do this specific thing that you have no data for" and "we can't see the benefit in getting the data u need". The next it all falls into place and a burst of progress happens.

I'd like step two to happen at some point, please.

The Modern Moloch - 99% Invisible On the streets of early 20th-century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside and play in the streets,” all day. And then the au...

Another possible podcast... 99percentinvisible.org/episode/epis...

Gah. You clearly do know about them - brainfart!

(Still, they are cool, as are your tentacle pots!)

If you don't know about them, I think you _need_ to look up Theo Jansen's Strandbeests.

They might also be worthy of your (amazing) pots.

When asked, “What is artificial intelligence?” Ted Chiang replied, “A poor choice of words in 1954.”

To this day I think that is the only good answer to that question that I have seen.

A small cat with yellow eyes and a tawny coat with dark splotches. It is crouched in tall grass and is glaring fiercely but, alas, is more adorable than intimidating.

One of my favorite animals is the black-footed cat. These adorable murder machines are smaller than house cats, make hunting attempts every 30 minutes after dark, and are successful 60% of the time, making them one of the world's most efficient predators. 🌿

Behold, the world’s deadliest cat:

Not *quite* the same, but when I was learning to oxyacetylene weld, I was taught to wear wool... Because it burns slower & stinks when it does so. So we'd smell the *wool* burning before we did.

Maybe the geologists are applying the same logic.

That's my theory and I hope they run with it :)

Pretty much everything else (bar some core elements of background & stuff-to-be-discovered) came from the players. What they did before the band, Why they split up, what they did on hiatus, why they're reuniting now - everything except the band, the tour & some of the setting came from players.

For example, I ran a game where I provided a setting, and said the PCs all used to be in a band together in that setting. The band broke up. The game is their reunion tour. The setting was post-ecopocalypse on a planet where the terraform failed (for *reasons*) (tbc).

... But more than that, if done well, it can shortcut giving the party a shared history they can flesh out in play (No autocorrect, not a shared _bistro_... Although now I have *another* game idea...)

I'm not a huge fan of the "you're trying to stop all of it" approach, but the "you're in this group" approach gives a strong reason for the party to be a _party_. It can still leave a huge amount of freedom - it just sets a start point and an initial reason to be a group.

Photo of two Bengal cats sitting on top of a speaker.

Friday evening here, but Cinnamon & Pepper don't care :)

This is *glorious*.

It's like a visual cautionary tale for #EnterpriseUX... and I may have to use it as such :)

Adrian Monk, from the TV series "Monk".

Similar vein...

A discussion about investing in design systems. "Design systems become a “hair on fire” problem and get buy-in when people in the organization encounter a catastrophic or near-catastrophic event." daverupert.com/2024/01/are-...

An English Heritage Blue Plaque reading: Erwin Schrödinger, creator of Wave Mechanics lived and didn’t live here 1940 - 1956 Don’t tell anyone, but it’s a fake. I would know, I made it.

Well played, blue plaque. Well played.

So... I'm here now. Not 100% sure about this place. It's more _slick_ than the fediverse, less _trashfire_ than the birdsite but still a little bit whiffy on the ethics front.

For a nominal fee, I will attend your enemy's design pitch and ask them, "OK, but really what were your GOALS here?"