Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe as it was leaving the Solar System. In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected […]
Film critic hulk, one of my favorite writers on pop culture and feelings, recently published a long article doing a deep dive on the themes and symbolism in Evangelion. https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/7/21043182/neon-genesis-evangelion-netflix-anime-meaning-bible-depression-sexuality Evangelion was one of the first animes I’ve seen, long before I even though I could ever come to live in Japan. I’ve seen it […]
A little bit late, but here are my reflections on the new year. 2019 was a weird year. Last year I promised myself I would cut down on side projects, and ooh boy that didn’t work out — I did cut some of my projects off, but it felt like fighting a hydra: One down, […]
This weekend I’ve finished Celeste, a game I have been wanting to play for a while — and it was very very wonderful. Celeste’s story is heart-warming, and I felt connected with the protagonist struggles with anxiety, depression and haywire defense mechanisms. The characters are also extremely cute, with great conversations between stages. The game […]
A very important habit that I think students should captivate is “thinking on paper”. Specially when studying, but also when planning or problem solving, we have to spend quite some effort thinking. However, our brains are dirty tricksters, and will easily lead us away from whatever we are thinking down to daydreams, digressions, and other […]
Reddit is probably one of the worst sites on the internet out there, but it’s sub-community “Ask Historians” is probably one of the best sites on the internet out there. Today I ran across the discussion below, which begins with a user asking about the differences between the Serfdom and Slavery systems, but gets a […]
This January I have begun GM’ing the “Powered by the Apocalypse” cyberpunk RPG game, The Sprawl. One cool thing about this game (and most other PbtA games) is that on the very first session (session 0), the entire group builds the setting together, based on a conversation about what each player is interested in, and […]
Today I started seriously working on the AI Wolf project, which got funded by the University for January and February. The basic client code is much simpler than I thought at first, although the documentation (specially in English) is seriously lacking. I should put in the effort to prepare some sample code and a tutorial […]
Today was my first day of work in the year, and to “celebrate”, I spend 12 hours at the university (_ _);… I used my new digital paper device to keep track of my activities during the day: about 6 hours reading and following up on e-mails, writing forms, and preparing documents. About 2 hours […]
Today I continued my adventures in Neural Networks. I’m working towards a system that uses “Artificial Intelligence” to detect features from pictures of plants in a greenhouse (such as leaves, branches, fruits, flowers). The final idea is to use this system to control a robot that would automate part of the work in a greenhouse. […]