Grid World
alex.miller.garden
alex.miller.garden
- Beautiful, poetic prose on a subject that resonates deeply with me
- Just about as light on bandwidth as you can be, fully embracing the default system font stack while maintaining an attractive appearance
- Seamless functionality on iOS Safari and Firefox on Windows
- Highly engaging links (the Roman pictographs were particularly fascinating!)
- Exquisitely handcrafted artisanal HTML/JS/CSS, reminiscent of Bartosz Ciechanowski's work
I can't say I would change even a single thing. One might argue about the Google Tags import, but this minor "sin" is easily forgiven due to the exceptional mastery of web design and development displayed here, I can't blame you at all for wanting analytics on visitors. This website meets every criterion of my personal "gold standard" for websites, and I can be pretty fussy having done a fair share of frontend stuff myself.
Recently I've been working on a page for a personal project, aiming to achieve a similar level of quality but it can sometimes be challenging to perfect the visual design aspects especially. This website serves as great inspiration! Thank you so much for sharing this!
I’m eating like an absolute king the past two days what with Ciechanowski’s post yesterday and now your fine specimen. The web sometimes feels like wading through a sewer but on occasion you strike gold and it makes everything feel OK.
It's been wildly fun, and using plain HTML has made the site really flexible and fun to develop in a way that static site generators never were. As an example, today I wanted to add a small footer to a code sample to link back to the originating commit on GitHub, and it was just a div, a, and span away. No bullshit, just put the elements there and all of a sudden it's on the screen!
Another benefit has been just getting more familiar with HTML and CSS instead of letting a framework do the heavy lifting. Since restarting my site, I've felt a lot more confident when sitting down to write templated html or a react component or whatever during my day job.
I totally share your enthusiasm for this link, and find the site incredibly inspirational - this is exactly the kind of digital garden I hope my site can become. Mine is a little more sterile at the moment, but the beauty of each page being static HTML instead of a rendering of some template is that the style can evolve over time, and I'll be able to go back to old posts and see them in their original state.
The internet is still fun!
Overall it's a really nice workflow, and doesn't feel overly invasive, or overly divergent from the point of writing the site in plain HTML. I really like Tailwind - it feels similar enough to writing vanilla CSS but has some guardrails and affordances for responsiveness that I think make it well worth the small extra setup.
I've just been adding Tailwind classes inline on elements thus far, although I'm starting to repeat myself enough that I'll probably make some custom classes with the @apply directive soon.
Overall really enjoying it!
Any pattern that might form gets interrupted by either a cemetery, a park, train tracks, and in some cases (I've found out) former train tracks that were ripped out 100 years ago. I've considered theories like the streets being radially biased towards important junctions like Jamaica / Flushing. I've considered outlining major obstructions to see if those are the source of borders. I've looked around for the master plan on street numbering in Queens to no avail. This should be easy, like Manhattan Queens has numbered streets. It conforms to an approximate grid, yet no one ever plots out exactly what this grid is and where the defects in it occur.
WTF IS QUEENS GRID?!?!
instead of saying: 58th St 369 btw. 6th and 7th Av
It would be so much easier for their customers to reach them if they stated between which streets, or which avenues their particular street-number is located.
I don't get it why they don't get it.
Yes I know there are formulas you can memorize to figure out cross streets but you're a business, you're supposed to be trying to make this easy for me.
If you're located on a grid and you advertise an address without giving cross streets, I guess you don't actually want my business.
Large fractions of Brooklyn and Queens are consistent-enough to approximate most of the landmass as perhaps a dozen jig saw pieces. Nothing you said is news to me. But this border area, primarily Ridgewood and Maspeth, it refuses to be consistent enough to draw a jigsaw piece over it.
Once NYC expanded and engulfed all of those separate settlements the grids ended up merging and some of the connecting roads and railroads between the settlements were incorporated into the city.
Quite a few small towns found themselves suddenly as components of Amsterdam after being engulfed. New York in a way is relatively orderly because all of that happened in a short time.
It's fascinating stuff. Good luck with your search, I'm curious if you ever will find out what caused it.
This helpful tool [2] highlights what I mean. Zoom out and look around, its mostly consistent large jigsaw pieces. There's just this one turbulent maelstrom in the middle that ruins the idea of several grids glued.
1. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.la002117/?r=0.197,0.358,... 2. http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/maps/enhanced-stre...
Coincidentally that describes an area a bit north of where I'm focusing called "Rego park". Where does the name Rego come from? Was it what the Native Americans called it before the settlers arrived? Was it the name of some important person in history? Nope. None of those. The company that developed the area was called "Real Good Realty". Rego is a contraction of REal GOod. Yep, its that stupid. But Rego Park is still grid conforming.
There's a bunch of strangely curving streets a bit East of Rego Park in a crescent shape starting at 63rd St. Those are bending around the (now abandon and overgrown) tracks of the LIRR Far Rockaway branch. That line continues straight South exactly tangent to the curve. There's a few other places on the map where long gone rail lines influenced streets, but those mostly form minor exceptions to grid rules rather than full on dissolution.
You're right Bushwick was absolutely Forrest from what I've read. But Bushwick itself is actually pretty grid conforming. Its approximately rectangular and slightly rotated relative to Bedstuy on its left side. The difficult parts start just above Bushwick. Namely around Ridgewood, Glendale, Maspeth and Middle village.
Queens is unusual in the sense of having developed incredibly recently. Like literally farm land as recently as the 50s in some parts. Logically it should be the most conforming to the overall street plans, yet it isn't. Yeah there's natural borders like those cemeteries, but if it had streets running along the edges of the cemeteries the result would be a square layout leading exactly to a grid! Its almost like someone went out of their way to avoid making sense!
BTW since you're interested there's quite a few place names you missed in NYC where the influence of the Dutch settlers can be seen. New Utrecht Ave, Dyker Heights, Stupyen Duvil, Yonkers, Van Ness, Van Wyck...probably more but those are the ones I can think of off hand. There's also the flag of the city [1] which still has the blue-white-orange banner of the Dutch crown (albeit vertical rather than horizontal). I've been told in recent times that particular tri-color pattern has an unfortunate association with far right political movements. Is it true?
I'm aware of them, just figured the point had been made. There are indeed quite a lot more of them if you know how to look for them. The degree to which they have been bastardized sometimes makes it harder to spot them.
> There's also the flag of the city [1] which still has the blue-white-orange banner of the Dutch crown (albeit vertical rather than horizontal). I've been told in recent times that particular tri-color pattern has an unfortunate association with far right political movements.
The 'Prinsenvlag' (the non rotated version) is indeed associated with the NSB, the Dutch Nationalist Socialist Movement which during World War II made nice with the Nazis and whose name is pretty much synonymous with 'traitor'. In more recent times it has been associated with the PVV another right wing party with nationalist tendencies.
Unlike Brooklyn, which was its own independent city for a while before merging into New York City, Queens was a county consisting of several distinct towns. So for example Flushing and Long Island city were two separate municipalities. It's not too surprising that they were developed differently.
What I think is more fascinating is just how enormous Queens actually is. I've always wanted to learn more about why it seemed like a good idea to unify such a large area into one physical city. Same goes for Staten Island. Would be really interesting to read some primary sources from the time.
Once upon a time Flushing was hyper religious Quakers. When the NY & Flushing RR was built (today the Port Washington branch of LIRR), one of the anecdotes in its history was the moral outcry when they tried to run a single train per day on Sunday. They appointed actual fun police to make sure no rowdy drunkards would dare come to their town hoping to have a good time. What do they think this is, Brooklyn? LIC was literally built by and for the railroads. Before the tunnels into Manhattan (1906 IIRC), you would get off the LIRR (or other competing services which were later bought out) and switch to a ferry to cross the East river at Hunters Point. LIC was always de facto colonization by Manhattanites.
That's not surprising given that the town of Vlissingen that it is named after in NL is also in part of what is called the Dutch Bible Belt. Zeeland has a very strong religious tradition, even today. Likely those that came to America and named their town Flushing (likely phonetically much closer to Vlissingen in those days) were from there.
One other aspect I find fascinating about Seattle's system is that there's some redundancy built into the address specification: whether the street is oriented north-south or east-west is not only indicated by whether it's an Ave (N-S) or a Street (E-W), but whether the grid qualifier is specified as a prefix or a suffix. So when you find a partial address on some album art [2], for example, you can deduce that "4718 38NE" is talking about 4718 38th Ave NE and not 4718 NE 38th St.
[1] theoretically nine grids, anyway. As an example, I'm not sure if there's actually an "E" grid. The central grid goes all the way to the water on the east, and when continued on the other side of the lake in Bellevue, the NE and SE grids touch each other.
[2] https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f...
FWIW there are neighborhoods that are E. The CD, Madison Valley, basically everything south of 520 until Yesler.
You also didn't mention that part of the city grid is on a 45 degree slant due to the city founders not being able to agree which grid system to use. :)
In contrast to the other children and in contrast to the author of this text, grid paper wasn’t inviting for me, instead it was feeling like oppressively giving me direction that I don’t want. I would ignore the grid and see the grid as something like dirt on the paper. Only a bit later I discovered that I could buy smooth and dense note paper that was completely blank. Ever since then I mostly use 100 g/m2 white A4 paper; rarely also A5.
I love the liberating feel of white paper. After a few years I even learned how to write justified text on blank white paper, it feels very satisfying.
I also like the ability to change papers in Goodnote when I'm working digitally. Using dot or grid for layout and then switching to plain so it looks clean = YES.
Neat! How do you justify text by hand as you go?
If it’s a word border it’s already justified, if it’s a syllable border I hyphenate. My hyphens and punctuation marks I leave purposely outside of my justification margin, I like that presentation.
I can do it with text widths as wide or narrow I want.
Sometimes I just know what the layout is going to look like and adjust my margins and spaces accordingly, kind of like in a LaTeX document.
> “I think we project grids outwards onto the world from within ourselves, shining their structure from our minds. We radiate grids.”
I don’t know if the author is aware of this, but neuroscientists discovered what they call “grid cells”: “a type of neuron within the entorhinal cortex that fires at regular intervals as an animal navigates an open area, allowing it to understand its position in space by storing and integrating information about location, distance, and direction.” [1]
I believe grid cells, together with place cells [2] may explain a lot about not only how we make use of diagrammatic tools but also how we form and navigate our more abstract conceptual spaces. For anyone interested, I recommend this great article on Quanta: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell
Bring back the nooks and crannies of the olden days! old man shakes fist
Perhaps it may be worth mentioning there's another space of thought that critiques the rationalization, such as books like 'Descartes Error' and the whole systems-thinking space (e.g. folks like Fritjof Capra) and possibly the Complexity Science space.
The writing in the article felt poetic to me, well done:
> "and I dreamed that the grid was the understructure to not just my own memories but to the world"
As an aside, and not at all to detract from the story: I find it interesting that Myst wasn't universally loved. I remember in some "gamer" circles it wasn't considered a real game but an interactive slideshow.
It was also interesting in that the game just sort of left you to explore the island, and paired with a good soundtrack of moody music, it was legitimately fun.
Scroll all the way down for a lovely surprise.
I always wondered how those people would categorize, for example, the Zork games. Myst is interactive fiction, which is its own genre. The disdain for Myst reminds me somewhat of the disdain for things like The Sims (which for some reason never extends to the types of simulation games that 'gamers' like such as SimCity, Cities:Skylines, RCT, etc.).
But consider this: in the Halcyon Days book of interviews with veteran game designers (like Dani Bunten, Chris Crawford and other trailblazers) at least one mentions disliking Myst: Eugene Jarvis (of Robotron fame). He considers Myst one of those style over substance and no action games (the other game he dislikes is Wing Commander!).
I remember a similar debate in my circle, that Myst was (unlike Zork) all style over substance. Remember that the graphics back then were really impressive.
In my opinion, there's no doubt Myst is a real game.
Also now I want to know Eugene Jarvis's opinion of The Stanley Parable. :)
A great reminder of the fundamental pleasures of imagining and creating. Easy to forget after following those affinities far into a career.
Thank you for sharing, really brightened up my day.
Example ruleset:
- Rooms are rectangles 3 to 6 cells large in either direction. Place them randomly with a gap of 1 cell until there are no more valid room locations.
- If a cell is between two rooms, and has a cell between the same two rooms on either side of the cross axis between the rooms, then it can be a door, but only if there is no door connecting this pair of rooms yet.
- If an empty cell is in a corner, and there is a door 2 less than 2 cells away from it, then it is a torch.
- If an empty cell has 2 cells distance to any walls, then it is a table(-like decoration).
- If an empty cell is directly adjacent to a table-like decoration, it has a 50% chance of being a seat;
At one point in time I had a fascination with hexagonal grids. I made little library for drawing them on the html canvas, and then made clones of a few hex based games, worked on various “game of life” variants in hex land. I also wrote about a hex based spreadsheet concept and a few other people got quite into the idea.
I tinkered with other grid systems and tiling systems, too — there are some fascinating irregular five sided systems etc.
At the start of that exploration I think some part of my head held that the square co-ordinate systems were “basic” … beneath me … too simple. But what I kept coming back to was a realisation that the square grid wasn’t just easier to program in, it was better, it was just the most “correct” way to pack the plane, in some indescribblable way, when working in 2 dimensions.
If you’re tired of square grids, you’re tired of 2D life.
Lovely use of this famous aphorism.
It made me remember my endless efforts as a kid to digitize photos by tracing them on graph paper, and then grouping 3x2 pixels into blocks that could be represented by the Teletext character set, for display on the Philips P2000T. Each block had a character code that I soon learned by heart, not knowing at that time that they had a logical binary representation.
I spent days on end typing those codes in many lines of BASIC, with the end result being a slideshow of 80x72 "pixels", green on black background. I didn't know about pixels or scanners, I was just being obsessed with finishing the picture to move on to the next one. Fond memories, and a great waste of time.
> Then my grid-vision exploded outwards from this center, enveloping everything, and I dreamed that the grid was the understructure to not just my own memories but to the world. I think we project grids outwards onto the world from within ourselves, shining their structure from our minds.
This paragraph instantly let me think of the theory of Lattice QCD [0] where both space and time get discretised in a lattice to be able to simulate and make predictions on processes happening on the subatomic level.
This is a masterpiece. Good writing, good graphics, good coding. Totalkunst in the wagnerian sense
I love GRID WORLD.
The next-to-last visual reminds me of these "brain mazes" a childhood friend would make. If you read this, hello M. Coxson!
My introduction to grids wasn't as overt as the author's, but I remember my bedroom being full of graph paper when I was designing sprites for my ZX Spectrum games back in the 80s.
OS/2 had a simple raster icon designer that you could use to create your own icon bitmaps and use them at various points in your workspace.
Reading posts like this makes me quite sad
When something is a work of art or an "exhibit", I accept things which I otherwise wouldn't. So a generalist blog hijacking scroll is jarring, but one about exploring art forms isn't (or not necessarily, at least).
I'm willing to give this one a free pass because I enjoyed it. Sorry if it sounds like circular reasoning.