That energy suits his work in a lot of ways, though not universally, and can be monotonous sometimes.
Also I just felt I should weigh in because of my username.
Perhaps there could be something similar in San Rafel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/1hbexo/text_philli...
I think he also suffers from being a funny writer, funny writers from PG Wodhouse to Terry Pratchett are often underrated and for me that’s where Dick’s later work really falls down.
Post his breakdown his novels take a much darker edge (i found Valis in particular unbearably bleak), the humour is largely gone and more fundamentally the layered realities now have a single source of truth which in my opinion weakens them considerably compared to the open ended questioning of the mid period.
not a linear improvement perhaps but there’s growth and change in his output over time
For example, in the same 4-year time period as masterpieces like Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we got forgettable (and in some cases quite terrible) books like The Ganymede Takeover, The Game-Players of Titan, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and of course the universally maligned The Crack in Space.
The sad truth is that Dick was fueling his writing habit with drugs (particularly amphetamines) during this time period. He wrote six novels in one 12-month period during 1963-1964. It's a marvel that even the clunkers are fairly readable things, though they're often throwbacks to his earlier pre-1960s work. Another sad truth is that Dick's output was also drive by the need for money (by 1964 he had three ex-wives).
The odd one out from this period is Galactic Pot-Healer, which Dick claimed to have no memory of having written (too many amphetamines), and which he practically disowned. But it's one of his best, a colourful Vonnegutian mix of tragedy and comedy.
I just read your comment on derasterize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997236
> Based on your project I inferred that adding more matches seems to add more resolution and yeah, outputs are looking even nicer now. I updated the repo!
This is the right approach, but there's a combinatory explosion when computing the matches: you want to select a subset of shapes that in practice are more often right, to save on the matching computation time.
Also, when you are operating with time constraints (ex: video to text), keeping the FPS rate is often more important that the accuracy, as the human eye does a lot of interpolation.
Having different subsets of different sizes and a command-line toggle between them seems like the simpler approach to support multiple uses.
> I also used shapes which are less sharp rather than "perfect match".
Selecting some "less sharp" glyphs is a very daring and unique idea: in retrospect, it should help the bad cases by adding some "blur".
I really like you idea!
Would you be interested in a collaboration to inspect fonts and select glyphs based on 1) their availability (ascii>ansi>unicode) 2) their usefulness (by defining some subsets)
I'm sorry my interest in this is not as large as yours!
I think the end result could be cool, but overall not very practical. I wrote my program to include "images" in my text-only articles (http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-inter...), but really I can't imagine a real useful application. We (the world) is much better off to adopt a real "images with text" format which works nicely with terminals (for now this appears to be sixel and the proposal by kiTTY).
My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :)
Thanks, I will get in touch!
I want to release a new version of tmux-sixel first.
> really I can't imagine a real useful application
Plots of datasets are extremely helpful! It is much faster to use gnuplot over ssh than to download a subset of data
I loved PKD's Beyond Lies the Wub, which was his first published story (published in 1952). I also really liked the story he wrote the year before (but which didn't get published until the year after) called Roog.
I enjoyed the story, though the ending was a little weak.
He was so incredibly prolific that there is always more to explore. It's … not always great, huh.
One quiet theme I've seen in sampling his work at different stages is the evolution of San Francisco the city -- Dick has a bunch of stories which paint a particular picture of the mid 20th century Bay Area that of course feels very different from what the place is like today. It reminds me of the place we see in "The Crying of Lot 49".
A few years back while visiting the city I tried to get something fixed at a repair shop in a small office suite in a very old building (I think probably https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco ) and it looked and felt exactly like the older time SF of Dick's stories.
https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories....
I have a first-edition set on my bookshelves back when I bought it back then.
I assume the Folio Society collection is the same material, redone into 4 books and fancy covers and illustrations.
The stories are in chronological order, which is surprisingly interesting because you get to trace Dick’s evolution as a writer. The first published stories are not very good by any standard, but he keeps gradually honing in on the concepts and atmospheres that eventually mark his work.
As someone who has dabbled in SF writing, it feels like a consolation to see PKD’s humble beginnings laid bare. He never gave up on evolving his craft.