David Foster Wallace Talks About Literature (and More) in an Internet Chatroom: Read the 1996 Transcript

in Books, Technology | January 28th, 2014

dfw internet chat

Reddit’s Ask Me Any­thing (AMA) series, where users get the chance to pose ques­tions to the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen King, and Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy, pro­vides a sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple way to inter­act with celebri­ties. Before Reddit’s arrival in 2005, how­ev­er, real-time exchanges between your gar­den-vari­ety Inter­net user and famous per­son­al­i­ties were occa­sion­al­ly con­duct­ed in Inter­net cha­t­rooms. One such ear­ly case appears to be a chat between the read­ers of WORD Mag­a­zine and David Fos­ter Wal­lace (read 30 of his essays free online), which seems to have tak­en place in May of 1996.

If AMAs are an order­ly, if vast, Q & A ses­sion, this chat is more like a boozy group meet­ing with your favorite Eng­lish lit pro­fes­sor in a smoky bar. (Read the tran­script here.) Wal­lace, using the han­dle “dfw,” is on a refresh­ing­ly lev­el field with the oth­er chat par­tic­i­pants, and the con­ver­sa­tion nat­u­ral­ly drifts from one top­ic to anoth­er. Things, as they often do, begin with a bit of ban­ter:

dfw: I’ve had some unpleas­ant nick­naames and monikers in my time, but nobody’s ever hung “fos­ty” on me before.

Keats: You know, I still think it should be spelled Fos­tie, or Fos­tey.
Keats: Fos­ty looks too much like “Frosty” and “sty” to me.

Keats: And makes me think of eye­balls packed in ice.

dfw: “Sty” as in an impact­ed eye­lash or a pig­pen, you mean?

Keats: Yeah. Is that what a sty as in “sty in your eye” is?

Marisa: I used to think the word “sty” was pro­nounced “stee”.

Keats: I had no idea exact­ly, just an unpleas­ant feel­ing about it.

dfw: Yes. Mas­sive­ly painful and embar­rass­ing, too. Like a car­bun­cle on the exact tip of your nose — that sort of thing.

Keats: I used to think the word “trough” was pro­nounced “troff.”

Keats: You know, I hap­pen to have a car­bun­cle on the tip of my nose right now.

Keats: Except it’s not a car­bun­cle, it’s more like a welt. It’s still embar­rass­ing.

dfw: In my very first sem­i­nar in col­lege, I pro­nounced facade “fakade.” The mem­o­ry’s still fresh and raw.

Soon, things take a turn for the seri­ous, and read­ers begin to ask Wal­lace about irony:

dfw: I don’t think irony’s meant to syn­er­gize with any­thing as heart­felt as sad­ness. I think the main func­tion of con­tem­po­rary irony is to pro­tect the speak­er from being inter­pret­ed as naive or sen­ti­men­tal.

Marisa: Why are peo­ple afraid to be seen as naive and sen­ti­men­tal?

dfw: Marisa: I think that’s a very deep, very hard ques­tion. One answer is that com­mer­cial com­e­dy’s often set up to fea­ture an iro­nist mak­ing dev­as­tat­ing sport of some­one who’s naive or sen­ti­men­tal or pre­ten­tious or pompous.

Keats: I’m start­ing to see a lot of irony in Hol­ly­wood and in adver­tis­ing, but its func­tion seems to be to let them talk out of both sides of their mouths.

dfw: Keats: adver­tis­ing that makes fun of itself is so pow­er­ful because it implic­it­ly con­grat­u­lates both itself and the view­er (for mak­ing the joke and get­ting the joke, respec­tive­ly).

Wal­lace also drops a few men­tions of some of his favorite authors:

DaleK: Mr. Wal­lace, I’m curious…who among cur­rent nov­el­ists do you find the most inter­est­ing?

dfw: Dalek — DeLil­lo, Ozick, R. Pow­ers, AM Homes, Denis John­son, David Mark­son, (old) JA Phillips and Louise Erdrich.

While we can’t con­clu­sive­ly con­firm that this was indeed the real DFW con­duct­ing the chat, it’s hard to deny that “dfw” sounds very much like the author. Cer­tain­ly, the com­plete exchange is as much fun to read for its mid-90s inter­net cha­t­room nos­tal­gia as it is for Wallace’s thoughts on irony, Infi­nite Jest, and the sound of one hand clap­ping. The whole tran­script is avail­able here.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Love of Lan­guage Revealed by the Books in His Per­son­al Library

The David Fos­ter Wal­lace Audio Archive: A Lit­tle Gift For the Novelist’s 50th Birth­day

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Discover Cy Endfield’s “Microwriter,” The World’s First Portable Word Processor (Circa 1980)

in History, Technology | January 14th, 2014

The hall­mark of an endur­ing inven­tion is the dif­fi­cul­ty oth­ers encounter when attempt­ing to improve on its orig­i­nal design. The QWERTY key­board is a prime exam­ple: since the emer­gence of the Rem­ing­ton No. 1 type­writer in 1874, the key­board has con­fi­dent­ly with­stood any sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges. That’s not to say that curi­ous alter­na­tives haven’t occa­sion­al­ly come along. Indeed, sev­er­al weeks ago we wrote about the Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball, the late 19th cen­tu­ry type­writer Friedrich Niet­zsche used while trav­el­ling. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the writ­ing ball proved too frag­ile and expen­sive to man­u­fac­ture, and today sur­vives sole­ly as a rel­ic.

The most unusu­al recent attempt to rein­vent the key­board was devised by Cy End­field in the ear­ly 1980s. End­field was a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor of some suc­cess pri­or to being declared a Com­mu­nist by Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mis­sion and black­list­ed in 1951. An alto­geth­er enter­pris­ing fel­low, End­field kept his chin up and his upper lip stiff, opt­ing to head to Eng­land where he worked on films (e.g., Zulu, 1964), wrote a book, and per­formed card tricks with remark­able skill. He also cre­at­ed a six-but­ton word proces­sor he called the Microwriter.

Microwriter

In a 1984 inter­view with NPR, End­field recount­ed want­i­ng to reduce the num­ber of keys used when typ­ing. Instead of push­ing a key and obtain­ing the cor­re­spond­ing let­ter (a 1‑to‑1 ratio), he want­ed to use a hand­ful of keys to yield the whole of the alpha­bet. He decid­ed that chords were the answer:

“It occurred to me that… it would be pos­si­ble to com­bine a set of sig­nals from sep­a­rate keys, and there­fore you could reduce the total num­ber of keys. But, of course, this involved the learn­ing of chords… dif­fi­cult to mem­o­rize… But how do you make these chords mem­o­rable? And, one day, star­ing at a sheet of paper on which I was draw­ing a set of five keys in sort of the arch formed by the fin­ger ends, it occurred to me, ah! if I press the thumb key, and the index fin­ger key, any­body can do this just lis­ten­ing now, press your thumb key and your index fin­ger down and you’ll see that a ver­ti­cal line joins those two fin­ger ends, a short ver­ti­cal line. There is an equiv­a­lence between that short ver­ti­cal line and one let­ter of the alpha­bet. It’s the let­ter “I.”

The above video pro­vides a much sim­pler and more con­cise expla­na­tion.

Equipped with 16 kb of RAM and a sin­gle line LED dis­play, the Microwriter allowed users to quick­ly type notes on the go and trans­fer the results to their com­put­ers through the ser­i­al port. Five of the but­tons cor­re­spond­ed to the var­i­ous chord-keys, and the low­er thumb but­ton allowed users to cycle through var­i­ous input modes.

While it was pos­si­ble to achieve a quick pace with the device when typ­ing tex­tu­al rather than numer­ic input, users of the device remem­ber need­ing sev­er­al days of train­ing to remem­ber the var­i­ous key com­bi­na­tions and to begin using the device with some pro­fi­cien­cy. Need­less to say, in spite of End­field­’s claims of being the world’s first portable word proces­sor, the Microwriter sim­ply was­n’t user friend­ly enough to sur­vive. It entered pro­duc­tion in the ear­ly 1980s, and ceased in 1985.

To read or lis­ten to Cy Endfield’s full inter­view, head over to the NPR Archives tum­blr.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

The His­to­ry of the Seem­ing­ly Impos­si­ble Chi­nese Type­writer

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

Dis­cov­er Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball”

Com­put­er Sci­ence: Free Online Cours­es

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Highlights from the First Ever Stanford Code Poetry Slam

in Poetry, Stanford, Technology | January 11th, 2014

I was lucky enough to be liv­ing in Chica­go when Marc Smith’s Poet­ry Slam move­ment became a thing. What fun it was to hit the Green Mill on Sun­day nights to hear such inno­va­tors as Lisa Bus­cani or Patri­cia Smith tear­ing into their lat­est entries in front of packed-to-capac­i­ty crowds. Those ear­ly slam poets inspired a lot of oth­er word­smiths to brave the mic, a glo­ri­ous rev­o­lu­tion whose gleam was inevitably tar­nished for me once it caught on for real.

I remem­ber think­ing some­thing like, “If I nev­er hear anoth­er poem about some­one’s rela­tion­ship trou­bles, it’ll be too soon.”

To fur­ther illus­trate my wan­ing enthu­si­asm, here’s the above thought, ren­dered in Stan­dard Spo­ken Word Venac­u­lar:

If

I nev­er heeeear  

Anoth­er Po

Em About Some­one’s 

Re-la-tion-ship…

Trou­bles, it’ll be

Too

Soon.

Some two-and-a-half decades fur­ther along, Leslie Wu, a doc­tor­al stu­dent in Com­put­er Sci­ence at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, has been crowned the win­ner of the inau­gur­al Code Poet­ry Slam, and I’m mourn­ing the loss of those long-ago rela­tion­ship trou­bles.

To cre­ate her win­ning entry, “Say 23,” Wu donned a Google Glass head­set, as she recit­ed and typed 16 lines of com­put­er code, which were pro­ject­ed onto a screen. When Wu ran the script, three dif­fer­ent com­put­er­ized voic­es took over per­for­mance duties, sam­pling the 23rd Psalm along with an uncred­it­ed snip­pet of In the Hall of the Moun­tain King.

I may be too hot-blood­ed to appre­ci­ate the artistry here.

Melis­sa Kagen, who orga­nized the com­pe­ti­tion with fel­low grad­u­ate stu­dent Kurt James Wern­er, stat­ed on the uni­ver­si­ty’s web­site that in order “to real­ly get into the intri­ca­cies you real­ly need to know that lan­guage.”

I guess that goes dou­ble for the com­peti­tors. Accord­ing to Wern­er, Wu’s poem wove togeth­er a num­ber of dif­fer­ent con­cepts, tools, and lan­guages, includ­ing Japan­ese, Eng­lish, and Ruby. Philis­tine that I am, I had always thought of the lat­ter as an uncap­i­tal­ized gem­stone and noth­ing more.

Not that I’m align­ing myself with those cur­mud­geons whose typ­i­cal reac­tion to a Rothko or a Jack­son Pol­lack is, “My two-year-old could do bet­ter.” For one thing, I’ve got teenagers, and giv­en their druthers, they’d eat their way through the con­tents of Wern­er Her­zog’s shoe clos­et before agree­ing to learn so much as a sin­gle line of code.

What a won­der­ful world in which so many of us are free to pur­sue our indi­vid­ual pas­sions to the point of poet­ry!

If you’re the type to whom code poet­ry speaks—nay, sings—you should con­sid­er putting some­thing togeth­er for the fast approach­ing sec­ond slam. Have a look at the work of the eight final­ists, if you’re in need of inspi­ra­tion. Entries are being accept­ed through Feb. 12.

Find 74 free cours­es from Stan­ford in our col­lec­tion: 825 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn to Code with Harvard’s Intro to Com­put­er Sci­ence Course And Oth­er Free Tech Class­es

Codecademy’s Free Cours­es Democ­ra­tize Com­put­er Pro­gram­ming

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky, an award-win­ning, hand­writ­ten zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Watch Laurence Olivier, Liv Ullmann and Christopher Plummer’s Classic Polaroid Ads

in Film, Photography, Technology, Television, Theatre | January 5th, 2014

Before Urban Out­fit­ters and Project Impos­si­ble, before the adorable bick­er­ing ubiq­ui­ty of spokes­peo­ple James Gar­ner and Mari­ette Hart­ley, Polaroid kept things classy by entrust­ing its rep­u­ta­tion to the most seri­ous of seri­ous actors.

Take Lau­rence Olivi­er. Who else could have made the phrase “Polaroid SX-70 Land Cam­era” sound like Shake­speare? Seri­ous­ly. He could’ve tacked the string of superla­tives he unleash­es against a black back­ground above onto the end of Hen­ry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech and I would have been none the wis­er.

(And gen­tle­men in Eng­land now a‑bed

Shall think them­selves accursed they were not here,

And hold their man­hoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day -

Pock­et sized, fold­ing, elec­tron­i­cal­ly con­trolled, motor dri­ven…)

Accord­ing to the late Peter Wens­berg, a for­mer Polaroid exec and author of Land’s Polaroid, A Com­pa­ny and the Man Who Invent­ed It, Sir Lau­rence agreed to the 1972 spot on the con­di­tion that it would­n’t be shown in Eng­land. (YouTube would­n’t be found­ed for anoth­er thir­ty years.)

Sir Lar­ry was fol­lowed in 1979 by actress Liv Ull­mann, solemn­ly prais­ing the  SX70 Sonar OneStep’s moment-cap­tur­ing abil­i­ties. Is there a Polaroid some­where in the Ing­mar Bergman Archive of his and Ull­man­n’s 12-year-old daugh­ter Linn, stand­ing at the sink, wash­ing dish­es? Or has YouTube become the sole reli­quary for these pre­cious moments?

Christo­pher Plum­mer’s 1980 spot seems down­right loose by con­trast, as he kicks back on a beach, aim­ing his SX70 Sonar OneStep at a Gold­en Retriev­er and a canoe’s worth of kids. (Sir Lar­ry’s sub­ject was a rather fussy porce­lain clock.)

Giv­en their his­to­ry, it’s easy to think of Polaroid’s instant cam­eras as a gim­mick or a fad, but such not­ed pho­tog­ra­phers as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Hel­mut New­ton, and Walk­er Evans were fans of the SX-70.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Amer­i­can Film­mak­ers in Japan­ese Ads: Quentin Taran­ti­no Sells Cell Phones, Orson Welles Hawks Whisky

Ing­mar Bergman’s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

Ayun Hal­l­i­day has the sort of vision that screams out for an unlim­it­ed sup­ply of free dig­i­tal shots. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson Explains How Apple’s iPhone Was A Remixed Creation

in Creativity, Technology | December 17th, 2013

In Every­thing is a Remix, dig­i­tal film­mak­er Kir­by Fer­gu­son has cre­at­ed a four-part seri­al­ized ode to remix­ing as inno­va­tion. Fer­gu­son sees all artis­tic pur­suits as deriv­a­tive of their pre­de­ces­sors to some degree, and in parts 1 and 2, he method­i­cal­ly demon­strates how cre­ative endeav­ors con­sid­ered rev­o­lu­tion­ary in their fields are often high­ly reliant on the ground­work laid by their fore­run­ners. It’s all about “stand­ing on the shoul­ders of giants.” Heavy met­al pio­neers Led Zep­pelin were thor­ough­ly indebt­ed to the blues, bor­row­ing lib­er­al­ly from Howl­in’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” on “Lemon Song,” while Star Wars’ shots can be matched, with a sur­pris­ing­ly high degree of cor­re­spon­dence, to scenes from Flash Gor­don and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa films.

Fer­gu­son believes that all cre­ation is the result of copy­ing, trans­for­ma­tion, and com­bi­na­tion, and the series’ third and fourth install­ments show Apple to be the ide­al exam­ple of this process. Xerox had ini­tial­ly devel­oped the scroll bar, pop-up menus, and the desk­top-inspired inter­face. Apple, how­ev­er, copied Xerox’s work, trans­formed the inter­face by sim­pli­fy­ing the user expe­ri­ence, and com­bined the com­put­er with the idea of a home appli­ance, yield­ing its icon­ic Mac­in­tosh mod­el. It was Apple’s low­er price point and focus on every­day usabil­i­ty that made the Mac­in­tosh vast­ly more pop­u­lar.

In the most recent addi­tion to the Every­thing is a Remix series, above, Fer­gu­son returns to Apple, and uses its iPhone as a stand­alone case study in inno­va­tion. Apart from the size­able engi­neer­ing prob­lem of cre­at­ing a viable mul­ti-touch screen, Apple was forced into unchart­ed waters in phone design by remov­ing the iPhone’s key­pad and replac­ing it with screen area. To make the nov­el device seem acces­si­ble to con­sumers, Apple incor­po­rat­ed ele­ments of old tech­nolo­gies: users saw a reel to reel tape deck in the pod­cast app, heard type­writer clicks when they entered text, and flipped vir­tu­al pages in iBooks. Fer­gu­son demon­strates that it is pre­cise­ly the cou­pling of the iPhone’s pecu­liar new touch screen with famil­iar visu­als and inter­faces that allowed Apple to woo a lead­ing share of cus­tomers to its phone.

The most inter­est­ing devel­op­ment arrived by 2010, when mul­ti-touch screens had become a smart­phone stan­dard, and Apple was forced to inno­vate in dif­fer­ent ways. No longer need­ing to famil­iar­ize users with the tech­nol­o­gy, the com­pa­ny was free to work sole­ly with­in the medi­um, which allowed the lat­est iter­a­tion of its mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem, iOS 7, to have dra­mat­i­cal­ly few­er fea­tures ground­ed in real-world design. Instead of look­ing for mate­r­i­al inspi­ra­tion in tapes and type­writ­ers, Apple assessed its com­peti­tors and inte­grat­ed their phones’ best attrib­ut­es into iOS 7. This new iOS bor­rowed its con­trol cen­ter and pull-down noti­fi­ca­tions fea­tures from the Android oper­at­ing sys­tem, while its mul­ti­task­ing paid homage to Win­dows, Android, and per­haps even Palm Pre phones. The visu­als, too, were dra­mat­i­cal­ly sim­pler, flat­ter, and less real­is­tic, in line with a style that’s become large­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the Win­dows phone. All in all, just anoth­er exam­ple of remix­ing as inno­va­tion.

To watch Ferguson’s com­plete series on remix­ing as a form of cre­ativ­i­ty and inno­va­tion, as well as more of his work, head to our pre­vi­ous post Every­thing is a Remix.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

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Turn Your Bike into an Electric Hybrid with MIT’s “Copenhagen Wheel”

in MIT, Sports, Technology | December 6th, 2013

Bonaverde’s “Roast-Grind-Brew Cof­fee Machine” seemed like one of the cool­er inven­tions I’ve recent­ly stum­bled upon. But then I came across this: The Copen­hagen Wheel. Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed by researchers at MIT, the Copen­hagen Wheel “trans­forms ordi­nary bicy­cles quick­ly into hybrid e‑bikes.” It allows bike rid­ers to “cap­ture the ener­gy dis­si­pat­ed while cycling and brak­ing and save it for when you need a bit of a boost” — like climb­ing a hill in San Fran­cis­co. The wheel also feeds data to your iPhone, allow­ing you to mon­i­tor pol­lu­tion lev­els, traf­fic con­ges­tion, and road con­di­tions in real-time. After spend­ing sev­er­al years in devel­op­ment, the wheel can now be pre-ordered online and it will ship next spring. It retails for $699.

Get more back­ground infor­ma­tion on The Copen­hagen Wheel via this MIT web site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Design­ers of the Invis­i­ble Bike Hel­met Describe Their Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Prod­uct in Short Doc­u­men­tary

Sci­ence Behind the Bike: Four Videos from the Open Uni­ver­si­ty on the Eve of the Tour de France

Brus­sels Express: The Per­ils of Cycling in Europe’s Most Con­gest­ed City

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

The Physics of the Bike

 

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The World’s First “Roast-Grind-Brew” Coffee Machine Could Bring About a Coffee Revolution

in Food & Drink, Technology | December 6th, 2013

Bonaverde is “a small, ded­i­cat­ed team of young, sleep­less Berlin­er entre­pre­neurs that [have] made it their goal to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the cof­fee world.” How? By build­ing the world’s first “Roast-Grind-Brew Cof­fee Machine.” Oth­er machines might grind and brew the cof­fee. This one will roast the beans too, which is no triv­ial inno­va­tion. It promis­es to sig­nif­i­cant­ly decrease the num­ber of steps, and the amount of time, it takes to turn a har­vest­ed cof­fee bean into your morn­ing cup of joe, which means a much fresh­er cup of cof­fee. And per­haps a cheap­er one too.

Bonaverde has already devel­oped a pro­to­type. (See how it works below.) Now the ven­ture needs to bring the machine into pro­duc­tion. Through a Kick­starter cam­paign end­ing on Decem­ber 8th, the ven­ture ini­tial­ly hoped to raise $135,000. But it has already blown past that fig­ure, rais­ing $582,693 thus far. Any­one who con­tributes $250 (or more) to the cam­paign will get one of the very first Roast-Grind-Brew Cof­fee Machines, plus 6.6 lbs. (3kg) of green cof­fee. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly all you need to brew one very fresh cup of cof­fee. Find more infor­ma­tion on the next-gen­er­a­tion cof­fee machine over on Bonaverde’s Kick­starter page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Cre­ates Ad for Cof­fee in the 1650s

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

How Cli­mate Change Is Threat­en­ing Your Dai­ly Cup of Cof­fee

A Short, Ani­mat­ed Look at What’s Inside Your Aver­age Cup of Cof­fee

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

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Long Live Glitch! The Art & Code from the Game Now Released into the Public Domain

in Technology, Video Games | November 19th, 2013

Back in 2009, a start­up called Tiny Speck (whose co-founder Stew­art But­ter­field also co-found­ed Flickr) launched a mul­ti­play­er online video game called Glitch, which won praise for its cre­ative visu­al style. Although more than 150,000 peo­ple played the game, Glitch nev­er quite found its foot­ing in the mar­ket. And, in 2012, it was shut down. But, now Glitch ris­es from the ash­es and lives again.

Yes­ter­day Tiny Speck made this announce­ment:

The entire library of art assets from the game, has been made freely avail­able, ded­i­cat­ed to the pub­lic domain.… All of it can be down­loaded and used by any­one, for any pur­pose. (But: use it for good.)

Tiny Speck … has relin­quished its own­er­ship of copy­right over these 10,000+ assets in the hopes that they help oth­ers in their cre­ative endeav­ours and build on Glitch’s lega­cy of sim­ple fun, cre­ativ­i­ty and an appre­ci­a­tion for the pre­pos­ter­ous. Go and make beau­ti­ful things.

Accord­ing to Tiny Speck, this release “is intend­ed pri­mar­i­ly for devel­op­ers and those with the tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty to take advan­tage of the struc­tured assets.”

Glitch-Game-Logo

Now, assum­ing you have some tech chops, here are some help­ful links that will get you start­ed:

Long live Glitch!

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

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