Mariah ☀️ Knowles, PhD

Cat coco above the camera on a window perch. Her yawn makes her look like she is screaming. You can see all her teefs

🐈

heres your yearly reminder if you don't celebrate valentines day you can celebrate me instead. HRT 2/14/2020

screenshot of Humanity, Blessed: TTRPG as a PDF with bookmarks sidebar open

screenshot of Humanity, Blessed: TTRPG website showing the print options bar

i feel like a mad scientist or something getting these print-to-pdf buttons and automatic pdf bookmarking to work the way i wanted.

weird thing i've noticed. i get much sharper renders on these PDFs using my chromebook than my desktop

cover pages, light and dark mode for ttrpg ive been working on. trying to evoke something goofy that might spark creative ideas without conveying any particular genre

snotskie.com/ttrpg/

i really need to get around to DMing my "everyone is a pair of shoes" campaign

Optimal Smoothed Analysis of the Simplex Method YouTube video by FOCS 2025

smoothed analysis is dead. i gave a eulogy

Mapping Your Emotional Floorplan: A Comic by Erika Moen Come Together is in paperback now!

right? this comic does a good job of explaining it with visuals too, buttondown.com/enagoski/arc...

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Interviews Santa Claus For several centuries, Santa Claus has been one of the most prolific mythical gift-givers in the world. Formerly known as Saint Nicholas of Myra, a...

magnificent

there's also the emotions that change over the course of a scene or session, and character growth (etc.) over the course of a campaign. so the floorplan of the character gets more rich as we spend more time with them

the multiamory podcast has a recurring metaphor of your "emotional floorplan," what's in an emotion's room (how do you know youre in it), what rooms're next to it (what do you feel before feeling it), and how do you leave the room (what brings you to other emotions)

maybe something in that?

[New Blog Post] Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

pketh.org/lifetime-pla...

Remember your favorite creator possibly might be struggling with imposter syndrome and doubt and this timeline sucks.. so if you find yourself thinking “wow I really relate to this persons work” or that persons work gives you joy, you should probably tell them. It’s a hard time to be a creative.

i did get to use my favorite data structure for this, a disjoint set

it does triangles now

courageous-pasca-c65b8f.netlify.app?w=1600&h=900...

Producing recorded research talks YouTube video by EATCS

Looking for inspiration for your #FOCS2025 pre-recorded talk? Check out this video youtu.be/Ygu5m-yPFhg

Remember the Human: A Systematic Review of Ethical Considerations in Reddit Research | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Reddit is one of the world's most prominent social media platforms, and also a valuable source of data for internet researchers. However, working with this kind of data also presents novel ethical com...

If you are a researcher who happens to know other researchers who study Reddit/use Reddit data, I beg of you to please send them this paper.

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

flip a coin for which of the two die results you listen to? assuming you remember what the results were

mon nouveau vinyle de KYO est arrivé -- très vite !

A wheel-like visualization of bird feathers colored from wikipedia descriptions

It took me about three months to get here but...

Here's a 🪶 for (nearly) every species of bird, with colors extracted from wikipedia descriptions.

10,151 species.

#dataviz #birds #data

genuinely liked Ice Cube's movie

thanks! one of my players is a legally blind twitch streamer so ive had a lot of conversations about how accessibility plays out beyond just what they teach you in web dev school

to your point of how authors write the content, how i did it it's all just markdown behind the scenes

so if you go in respecting users' custom setups on equal footing as default ones, your game now has countless format versions

eg. font size tweaks pushing content to different pages, machine translation of English to Spanish, etc.

that's what ive been experimenting with here snotskie.com/ttrpg/

I've been thinking about this a lot this past year too, from an accessibility perspective

once you get into browsers and out of pdfs, you start interfacing with users' browser plugins and settings that they've setup to make the web usable for themselves, like forcing dark mode and upping font size

Beyond Smoothed Analysis: Analyzing the Simplex Method by the Book Narrowing the gap between theory and practice is a longstanding goal of the algorithm analysis community. To further progress our understanding of how algorithms work in practice, we propose a new alg...

The simplex algorithm is super efficient. 80 years of experience says it runs in linear time. Nobody can explain _why_ it is so fast.

We invented a new algorithm analysis framework to find out.

Coding Trance Music (Full Narrated) YouTube video by Switch Angel

Some content is so relevant to my interests that it causes my brain to glitch.

youtu.be/GWXCCBsOMSg?...

cat coco in a chair with very "where have you been" energy

🐈

Where Philosophers Write - Daily Nous Where do you like to write? Via Jason Kottke, I learned of a recent article in Wallpaper with photos of the favored writing spaces of a dozen authors longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Some write o...

Where do you write? Show us.