The site has been lots of fun so far; I've had one mild SlashDotting (more of the 15 minutes of fame used up!), and a few nice comments from passersby. The most active part of the site is the Log, which is updated vaguely daily; other stuff changes more rarely.

The David Chess that this site is about, and that is me, is David M. Chess, currently of Mohegan Lake, New York. There's a page about the family over on chessfamily.org, and a work-related page here. I can be contacted by email, at altogether too many different addresses.

This site was created with a flat-ASCII text editor, because I think Website IDE systems are largely an Instrument of the Devil^TM. Various Perl hacks, some of which can be found on the TOYS page, were stolen and/or created to automate the boring parts, and to help in the search for novel and/or pleasing design elements.

Different sites are for different things. This one is a place for me to express myself more-or-less straightforwardly, and I've tried to keep the design simple and direct. I like black and white, I like text, I like images to be tiny if there have to be images at all. On the other hand, I'm willing to sacrifice a little bandwidth for Quality of User Experience. The active buttons on the menubar require three times as many images, but since each one is less than five hundred bytes, I'm willing to live with it.

I don't like frames. But then nobody likes frames, so I can't take much credit for that. I like the understated feel of lowercase letters, although that's so trendy that I worry it may be a cliché.

Other sites are for other things. On Theogeny.com, I'm probably doing something that I'm mostly not doing here. Probably.

Comments on any and all Webstuff are welcome, in the forum here if it's working, or via email in any case.

So, with reference to the entry page (which, by the way, you can get back to by clicking on my smirking face on any other page, or by clicking here), just what am I interested in?

Well, partly I'm very interested in whether or not anyone but me ever actually reads down this far on this page. Seems unlikely. But that's OK; I will read down this far, and communicating with oneself is an important form of communication, both diachronically in the obvious way and synchronically.

I'm interested in new stuff, in stuff that might be an improvement over what I already know about. I'm interested in vast logical spaces, and ways of exploring them. The ways I'm currently using to explore some vast logical spaces (1D cellular automata, music, levels for FPS computer games) can be loosely classified as "serendipitous", by which I may not mean anything, but I may mean something like finding areas that are likely to be unusually dense in interesting points, and poking more or less at random into those (soft juicy) parts of the spaces. Not exactly profound, but sometimes productive.

I'm interested in what people do and why they do it. In how people communicate, and how they fail to. I'm interested in how phenomena that look like life can arise in substrates that we wouldn't normally consider living. In how art helps us make sense of life, and in what "make sense of life" could possibly mean. You interested in any of that stuff?