Feb 27, 2021

Alarm Clocks, Potatoes, and Musical Space - See With Eyes Closed Issue #2

By Benjamin Hollon • Issue #2 • View online

The first week has passed and everything’s running smoothly! That’s good news. Here’s what’s up this week.

New Blog Post

Well, I finally got a new post out. It’s been a while. Enjoy:

Stop and Listen to the Alarm Clock | See With Eyes Closed

My watch’s alarm never wakes me up. My old one would beep for ten seconds before automatically snoozing for five minutes. Even if I heard it, my brain knew that if I could endure ten seconds of noise, I’d have an extra five minutes of sleep. I could never find the motivation to get up and out of bed when I heard it. My new one is even worse: it beeps for ten seconds without snoozing afterward. That’s when I started the search for a new alarm clock.

seewitheyesclosed.com • Share

More writing from this week:

PugJS Form Mixin - DEV Community

So now that I’ve started using PugJS as a templating engine and to speed up my development process, I naturally wondered if I could use it to streamline the form-creation process while keeping everything accessible.

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Current Projects

These are mostly works-in-progress, but I hope you enjoy a look at what I’m working on:

Image Sonification: I saw an article by Harvard about a program designed to turn pictures of space into music that I was fascinated by. In turn, I attempted to make my own. My version works but sounds really awful (if you _really_ want to hear, the code’s linked). I’ll probably try again. [Code]
Serial Microfiction: As I mentioned last week, I’m working on a story that will have a new chunk released daily. I’ve been getting some great planning done as well as creating the program that will allow me to release them like that. It’s been going well so far. [Code]
Far-Future Calendar: For story-planning purposes, I made myself a calendar that spans the next two hundred years. The story I’m using it for will probably start in the year 2178, so I needed to do some serious planning ahead to give it a backstory and make it believable. I also made it available for anyone who wants something like this (though I’m not ruling out the possibility that I’m insane and no normal person would want a two-century calendar). [Download]

You can view past projects that have been published on my site’s shiny new projects page.

Other Stuff

I’m super excited to have gotten access to some awesome NASA atmospheric modeling software this week that I’m having a blast with. It’s calculating data in a few seconds that I was spending hours solving equations to try to figure out how to solve so that’s awesome. I’m using it to help me design airships for other planets that I’m hoping to use in the story I’m writing. So yeah, pretty cool. The data’s a bit tricky to read at first, though:

The first set of data I calculated using Titan-GRAM.

Do you remember how I said last week that there were two placeholder panels left on the homepage? Well, the writing panel is placeholder no more! It now features an automated illustration of the writing process as portrayed by The Potato Paragraph:

The Potato Paragraph | See With Eyes Closed

An automated illustration of the writing process as portrayed by The Potato Paragraph.

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Thought of the Week

When I said that last week’s quote (from The Little Prince) inspired the name of my site, that wasn’t completely true. It was inspired by both that quote and this one:

[I]f something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed.

– Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Have a great week!

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By Benjamin Hollon

A weekly digest of my new blog posts, projects, and things I'm currently working on as well as just an eensy bit of plain old fun.

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