works of wanderlust

  • gamified runs

    I was going to mash this update together with my previous post about gamification of my creative journey, but I think this one is different enough to stand on its own.

    See I’ve been vibe coding: using AI to write code.

    AI sucks in many ways, but speeding up the development of personalized coding projects, securing hand-written code, and building software that breaks the free-mium or subscription-based app model a little bit because you can write your own stuff that much easier… I’m sorry, but those are some of the positive uses.

    As I said in my last post, I’m not looking to launder the reputation of AI, but to declare a technology all bad is to miss the point: the point is to understand where it is useful, where it is harmful and where we should be drawing the line.

    I wrote some code that makes my life better, so I would think it remains on the near side of that line.

    I wrote a running dashboard.

    See, when I run with my watch (which is always) the watch records my route in a little file called a GPX file. It’s just a list of time-stamped GPS coordinates. Any simple bit of software can reassemble that back into a map. (In fact, I once built a little add on to my photo app where if I upload a GPX file it will superimpose a little abstract map over the image. Fun and almost useless. But interesting.)

    I started trying to figure out if I could build something to make better use of all these files …besides uploading them to Strava (the fitness social media platform) and begging for kudos.

    So I gamified it.

    My feets dashboard does so much it would take me too long to explain it all, and I’m not sure I actually could: I’ve made about fifty different iterative versions of this, each one adding a new feature or two and it’s become a beautiful mess of tangled complexity.

    In essence, tho, it takes all that running data I collect over thousands of runs and mashes it up with some open source maps and street data and creates a system that gamifies everything: it tracks neighbourhood coverage in a game I call “road fill.” It awards trophies and cards for completing challenges and quests. It builds interesting routes to run. It makes heatmaps, fog maps, and time maps and comparison animations and lets you visualize pretty much anything that might come out of a GPS file.

    I vibe coded the darn thing and I still spend long stretches of time exploring and getting lost in all the things that it does, almost unbelieving that I was able to put this thing into existence by simply nudging an AI to push the boundaries of good sense and practicality.

    It is, bluntly, the most amazing toy that I’ve ever made…. or I’ve overseen made. Depending on your take on vibe coding, I suppose.

    And it’s already getting me out the door to run and explore more.

    The software was made by AI but doesn’t rely on it to keep working, so now many people could use and enjoy and get more from their running data, too: I’ve released the whole darn thing on Github, so ping me if you want that link.

  • gamified me

    Productivity is a sonofabitch.

    I’ve been through all sorts of methods to try and get myself to get things done, and many of them have been modestly successful. Whether or not gamification works is still up in the air, but the concept of it has been something of an idle fascination for me for years.

    Gamification? That’s a method of turning a chore or a job or anything you need a bit of motivation to get done and turning it into a game. Like Mary Poppins said, “snap, the job’s a game!” In the technology era, that usually means almost literally turning it into a game: making an app, creating a character, collecting XP and trophies, unlocking achievements… which is almost where that “Achievement Unlocked” meme comes from.

    Which brings me to AI. For most everything AI has been a creativity suck. I’ve been wary about using it for most things, and completely adamant that I won’t use it to write or do anything artistic.

    I’ve done some security passes on some code and AI has been very helpful in identifying vulnerabilities, and helping me tweak some of my handwritten code to make sure I don’t get hacked because another AI found a hole.

    But creativity? Well… I think I finally found a way to use AI to make me more productive creatively: See, I vibe coded an app.

    I call it the codex, and it gamifies creative efforts.

    It’s baked through with a cyberpunk aesthetic and builds a grid-like city map that grows and expands as you unlock skills. You acquire XP by doing tasks, completing missions, working towards progress on tracked projects, and general by just doing the creative work that you’re tracking in the system.

    For example, I have in mine: writing, music, photography and art.

    I have added a few projects to work on: short stories, collecting black and white photos for my blog, learning my repertoire for orchestra, and drawing pictures while on vacation, just to start. I can add more, expand and extend and connect things together, too.

    The system also gives me daily challenges from my listed disciplines, and creates randomized narratives around a group of characters (fixers) who live in the city and push you to do “jobs” for them… all of which are just more motivation to spend time doing the forms of creative practice I want to grow for myself. The value of work shifts based on an internal stock market, too, so if I neglect something it pulls me that way.

    I’ve been using it for a couple days, testing a tweaking the algorithm, and it is so much fun.

    The system was mostly built by AI, but it does not use AI to operate. In other words, it’s now just a complex piece of stand-alone software that I own that I can use perpetually to motivate myself to do more creative work.

    And that’s the kick: motivation.

    I’ve gamified my creative journey. And if you find it easier to break that demotivation cycle than I do, congrats, but sometimes having that extra nudge to get off the couch and go take some pictures or work on a story, hey, it’s a make or break thing. This kind of tool motivates me.

    Yes, AI does a lot of shitty things; it crushes creativity in many ways and produces garbage that people try to pass off as their own work. I’m not looking to launder the reputation of the algorithm here, but when the world hands you lemons sometimes you need to make some lemonade.

    Welcome to my codex.

  • sunrise

    I haven’t written any weekend reports lately. That’s okay. But this last one, even though it’s already Wednesday, was a blur and a crazy consequential shift.

    Friday evening I trekked out to the expo centre to see the Forever Canadian rally.

    Seventy five hundred of us crammed into the venue to hear the Prime Minister speak and cap off a mass event in support of Canadian unity.

    I often forget it myself, but in the late nineties I went to a youth conference in Quebec, chosen to be among the 100 young representatives from across the country to meet and talk and share ideas falling out of the then-recent Quebec separation referendum. In the nearly thirty years since I have held a special candle in my heart for the lessons and ideas I learned there.

    Monday was our turn, and seventy-six percent of the province affirmed that we’d had enough of this separatism bullshit and voted against any further political pushing on the matter.

    I volunteered at one of the major counting centres, and met a ton of great people doing their part in democracy. I got home well after midnight that night and napped most of the next-day celebration on the couch in recovery.

    It’s dawn in Alberta. Night isn’t quite over, but we can see the sunrise here for the first time in a long time.

  • autumn algorithms

    I’ve been doing a lot of coding lately. 

    I’ve built a small suite of plugins for WordPress. This site and a small list of other writing projects that I’ve been working on, from small essays to my running  journal to short fiction, are all living on a small collection of little interconnected WordPress websites.

    The problem with modern WordPress tho is that the plugin culture has enshittified it.  WordPress itself is a free product, the result of a huge effort to develop an open platform for anyone to use. They have a hosted product you can pay for, but anyone can download a copy of the software for free and just start making a website.

    For years there was a huge collection of free plugins. Plugins are little bits of community code that do niche things, add new features. Like, for example, I made a plugin last year that enables WordPress to store and organize PDF copies of our sheet music because that’s how we are licensed to distribute it to members of our orchesta. It’s all password protected and organized by instrument and has links to Youtube to show how the song sounds. Almost literally no one else in the world needs that exact functionality so obviously it is not built into the base system. Anyone can write some code and make new features: plugins.

    In the last five years or so almost every plugin on WordPress’s official directory has become “freemium” though. You know, just like every app on the app store now gives you a limited trial or ten percent functionality until you pay some annual subscription. WordPress has gone the same way. Here’s the list of twenty things this plugin does, but it only does three of them unless you pay and if you don’t pay our branding is going to be on your homepage and we’re going to pop up messages nagging you to pay eighty dollars a year for it.

    Some of these plugins might genuinely be worth it. They are honed and tuned over years of work. Most are cash grabs.

    And legit, this pisses me off. You took a free system built by a generous community and you’ve put a paywall on your contribution. Late stage capitalism. Gross. And it’s never a small amount. It’s never I’ll sell you the full version for five bucks to support my hobby and hosting. It’s always sliding annual subscription costs. 

    If I paid for every plugin I would like to have I’d be paying literally thousands of bucks a year to use a “free” community-built product.

    Thing is, paying developers who want outrageous prices is only necessary if you don’t know how to make these things yourself… and I know how to make my own toys. I’ve been doing a lot of this over the past few months, and building into my sites some pretty interesting functionality: glossaries, social media auto-posters, versioning systems, and secruity tweaks.

    It’s inspired me to write more stuff, having these robust and interesting tools to do it with. And that’s kind of the point of a platform like WordPress… to inspire creativity, not become a cash cow for greed and shit.

  • old blogger, new tricks

    I’ve been writing a lot lately, and as I work to tweak and promote and refine everything that I’ve written I’ve been locked in this reality of the internet in its current state: that blogs are all but dead media.

    I was going through my bookmarks the other day and it was almost depressing how many 404s or just deeply stale blogs are out there.

    I, on the other hand, have been merrily writing away and posting huge amounts of content over on three very active niche sites.

    Why keep at it? you may ask. And indeed, I asked the same question to myself, have asked it a thousand times in the past few years. And the conclusion I came to is that while it looks like I have a bunch of blogs, I really only have one. This one.

    Ok, hear me out.

    The other three sites are using blogging software, but none of them are really “blogs”… at least not in the common sense of the word. In fact, recent work I’ve done to add some new plugins and refine how people are able to read what I write there and overall why I write in them at all, places them in a broader category of something more along the lines of what I would call “living books” growing and changing and interconnecting and built around a bigger idea of exploring a topic.

    That’s a far cry from the weblog online journal precursor to social media that ninety-nine percent of people have abandoned for short form video or rage tweeting or doomscrolling tiktoks.

    In fact, with the addition of a couple new vibe-coded plugins I’ve turned my other not-blogs into more of a kind of robust publishing platform. I write. I build off what I wrote. I share. I tweak. I fine tune. I compile into anthologies. I keep going.

    Blogging is probably pretty dead, and I’ll keep posting here as often as I feel I need to update the handful of people who still read this… if you even exist. But I’m going to steer hard into the idea of those other sites as living documents from now on.

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

There are currently 473,862 words in 614 posts.

other sites

Dispatches From Nowhere
8r4d Consulting Ltd.
Plecks Mart Game Blog

collections

archives

topics

tags

ai backcountry stories backpacking backstory backyard adventures baking blogging book reviews borrowed words bread breakfast is the most important meal campfire camping cast iron love cast iron seasoning coffee comics cooking cooking with fire cooking with gas december-ish disney dizzy doing it daily drawing & art exploring local fatherhood fifty walks gamers garden goals head over feets health and medicine insects inspiration struck japan japanese kayaking lists of things local flours sours local wilderness meta monday mountains nature photography new years new york style overthinking it pandemic fallout parenting personal backstory philosophy photographer pi day pie poem politics professional questions and answers race report reading recipe reseasoning river valley running running autumn running solo running spring running together running trail running training running winter science fiction snow social media sourdough bread guy spring spring thaw suburban firecraft suburban life summer summer weather sunday runday the holidays the socials travel travel photo travel plans travel tuesday trees tuck & tech urban sketching video weekend weekend warrior what a picture is worth why i write winter weather wordy wednesday working from home work life balance youtube