Reacting to the new dynamicland website

dynamicland is a place I’ve never visited

i don’t really know what it’s like, so it’s been really nice to gradually explore through the new dynamicland website to get a slightly better understanding of it.

it’s really massive! which is really cool. cos it means there’s so much to explore and discover and stuff.

it also means it’s quite hard to digest it all in one go, so I’m trying to take my time with it.

another challenge is that dynamicland, as a project, seems to attract a lot of strong opinion. like… it seems like marmite. from afar, people either love it or they hate it.

for me, that’s a sign of a truly great piece of work, because it really Says Something, you know?

but it does mean that i have lots of people shouting things in my ear about it. in many DMs and group chats and communities and places and events… i have people telling me what to think about it… that it’s either terrible or perfect.

and to be honest i find it quite— it find it hard to figure out what i actually think

What i actually think

i’m making an active effort to build up my understanding very slowly

this includes noting my gut reactions, and examining whether they’re just that: gut reactions. or if they’re something more.

gut reactions tell us something, i think.

it’s not bad to have a gut reaction.

i’d like to explore why i get certain gut reactions and stuff— what it illuminates

and what exactly is causing my feelings and reactions? hmm

Day reactions

anyway so i had this silly idea of limiting myself to one tiny reaction/comment per day about the new dynamicland website.

for a week and a half, I’ve been sharing them on mastodon and twitter.

i’ve been very pleasantly surprised that many people have chipped in and helped me to understand things better along the way.

it seems like there’s a tiny crowd of people following along now! ha…

as you might expect, some of these people are doing the usual boo/hurrah thing, either saying “yeah it’s perfect” or “yeah it sucks” but many more are helping by sharing specific links or informations or whatevers.

here are my day reactions so far.

my day one dynamicland website reaction:

this is an amazing piece of normalising sharing scrappy fiddles

my day two dynamicland website reaction:

this is giving me a way richer understanding of dynamicland than before

my day three dynamicland website reaction:

this reminds me of early years education (in a good way)

my day four dynamicland website reaction:

this is a “launch”. intentionally or otherwise, it’s a feat of marketing

my day five dynamicland website reaction:

this is really hard to read on my phone

my day six dynamicland website reaction:

“bless” gives me the ick

my day seven dynamicland website reaction:

i find the decentralised and spatial nature of realtalk compelling

my day eight dynamicland website reaction:

the bad thing about paper is that it’s hard to edit after it’s printed. is there anything said about this on the website?

when something’s not physical, it’s easier to edit. my mistakes are less costly

my day nine dynamicland website reaction:

dynamicland is for “real people in the real world”

as opposed to what? fake people in the fake world?

what do you think of those, so far?

Day reaction reactions

i recommend looking through both threads for other people’s responses. (there are more on mastodon than on twitter).

for now, let me just pick out a couple of interesting ones.

here’s murilo polese kicking off a conversation about the role of “trust”:

From another perspective, how annoying is that someone can come and easily change a word in the middle of your program? As you said all these media bring their different benefits. Text editors really changed the way we write, not necessarily for good.

(murilo is a creative technologist who has previously taught at the school for poetic computation.)

(andrew walpole joined in that conversation, a developer who has become heavily involved in the robust-first community)

here’s alex mclean sharing how to edit paper:

You can point a keyboard at a bit of paper to edit its code. Once you are happy with it you print out a fresh copy. You do end up with a lot of recycling..

(notably, alex has access to a realtalk/dynamicland-like setup, and his work features on the website)

and here’s joshua horowitz challenging me on my reaction to bret victor’s use of the term “real”.

presumably when Bret says that he’s talking about the richness of physical copresence and physical media, vs the narrowness of the digital

(curious: was this actually not clear to you? or is the intended meaning clear but there’s something about the rhetoric you don’t like?)

(of course, josh has been heavily involved in dynamicland and features heavily on the new dynamicland website)

Josh’s follow-on challenges here were really great and helpful, so I feel like I owe it to him to write up a more considered response. I’ll do that at some point!

A soppy conclusion

I love the new dynamicland website because it opens up so much great work and research and exploration to all of us out here in the real world.

and it’s allowing me to learn a lot, and im now able to speak about it in detail with lots of people i respect.

for me, it shows the value and importance of normalising sharing scrappy fiddles! the website does it, and it’s what I’m trying to do now.

back to the new dynamicland website.