I wrote a paper! I wrote a paper with my friend and mentor, Dave Ackley.
We submitted it quite a long time ago now, and I'm delighted to say... that after two rounds of reviews, plenty of edits, hours and hours of conversation, several battles with latex, thousands of dollars, one cover letter, one all-nighter, and one trip to Los Angeles...
We have now published!!!!!!
Want to see to the paper? Sure!
First read the blog post below and then
download the PDF by clicking here.
First of all, some thanks are in order.
Of course, I'd like to thank
Dave Ackley, my friend and
mentor, for his help and guidance and big fun every step of the
way.
And thank you to everyone who's ever contributed to the Living Computation Foundation. You helped to fund this paper!
Thank you to Jonathan Edwards for encouraging us to write a paper with his blog post, despite it being a blog post, and despite my facetious response.
And thank you to both Jonathan and Marcel Taeumel for running the Onward track, and being friendly and welcoming during the whole conference.
Thank you to our reviewers! Especially reviewer C, who was the most critical. They made our paper much better.
And thank you to our shepherd, Allen Wirfs-Brock, for all his help in getting our paper over the line. Thank you also to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, who sherpherded our shepherd.
It keeps going!
Thank you to everyone who read early drafts of our paper and gave feedback. This includes Murilo Polese, Geoffrey Litt and Ivan Reese.
And finally... Thank you to Flora Caulton, for all her help and support with my stupid stupid work.
Luckily, there was an animation conference going on in Los Angeles at the same time, so we were able to go together!
And now... some of the things that weren't so nice.
The first "no thank you" goes to the ACM for charging me stupidly large amounts of money to attend my own talks.
The second "no thank you" also goes to the ACM for charging us one thousand dollars to make our paper freely available.
We decided to not pay this.
The third "no thank you" goes to the awful PDF format, and the disgustingly bad latex tools we were forced to use by the ACM.
It was so bad (so so bad) that it inspired me to write not one, but two poems about how bad PDFs are.
And the final "no thank you" goes to the misogynistic question that was asked to the speaker before me.
If you missed that one, I strongly recommend you check out Felienne Hermans's paper and talk. It was inspirational.
Like I mentioned earlier, we didn't pay for "open access", so you can't freely access our paper from the ACM library.
However, they do allow us to share a pre-print on our personal websites. So here we are!
In the spirit of open practice, and as an act of minor rebellion against the ACM's gatekeeping, I've decided to share a very specific early version of our paper.
Click here to download the re-submitted version of our paper. It includes:
I hope you enjoy reading our paper. And I hope this becomes the 'canonical' version of it.
I also gave a talk about our paper at SPLASH 2024.
Here it is! I edited the audio a bit to make it more legible.
Our paper is a paper about communication and code, and how the two relate, or how they do not. So I hope you will consider communicating your thoughts with me: Do you like our paper? Do you hate it? And more importantly: Why?
If you do decide to communicate with me, please don't be like the ACM. Don't do it privately. Contact me in the open. Transmit your message for all to see!
So hit either of us up on mastodon, or on bluesky if you really insist.
@livcomp@hachyderm.io
@todepond@mas.to
@todepond.com