Making It Be What You Want It To Be

My final college project was a Medieval-style mystical tome containing an allegory using modern artificial life and intelligence as its alchemical ingredients. I bound the book using traditional European bookbinding techniques.

You’ll notice, if you order one of my publications, they’re gp0002 or gp0005 or some such number. Homunculand was the first glyphpress publication in a print run of two, so it’s gp0001. It’s not for sale, but if you come over to my place, you can read it. I hope to someday rewrite it for broader publication. Maybe that edition will be gp00015 or something.

As ashcan season comes upon us, I’d just like to remind everyone that there are a lot of ways to make a book. Many of the indie games of years past have been bound at home, using a variety of loving techniques. Paul Czege’s Acts of Evil is hand-splatterpainted. I believe the first edition of Dust Devils was bound in Matt Snyder’s basement. Paul Tevis’ A Penny For My Thoughts is bound like a patient dossier. Books are not a magical thing that someone else makes. They don’t need to be a particular size or shape. What they need is to look and feel the way your game looks and feels so that it attracts and holds the people you want to attract and hold. Find your way to make that happen.

0 thoughts on “Making It Be What You Want It To Be”

  1. Hi, Jonathan.

    Well, it was a not-very-good story about a guy who designs a computer simulation running on a supercomputer. The world in the software was based in an actual project, which has since become breve. Breve was originally created to make an environment in which the evolution of intelligent behavior would be beneficial. In the story, they encourage the development of social behaviors, which eventually develop into recognizably intelligent ones. Since the simulation is running much faster than realtime, evolution happens at a pace that can be perceived and understood.

    Critters in the simulation discover a way of inducing segmentation faults, which causes one of them to realize that there’s a structure to the world imposed from without. Eventually, humans and the homunculi wind up talking a lot about God and the simulation is open-sourced because the creator is concerned that the critters think that he’s God.

    The book is written as an annotated journal. Annotations are by me, the experimenter (“Ezekiel Tomorrow”) and one of the critters (“Hajj Walking Writing”).

    It’s illustrated by one of the critters, too in critter heiroglyphs.

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