search

unusualstudio / unusualstudio-projects

All the projects I'm interested in pursuing on Unusual Studio.
0 stars 0 forks source link

Reflections on project naming versus descriptions #5

Closed stuartpb closed 6 years ago

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Weird little note that the eclectic nature of these project names, where some (mostly pre-naming) are descriptive and some (most post-incubation) are opaque, kind of reminds me of the program listing described in SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums:

Another window on the interests of AI and of the hackers is a posted printout of the file of AI’s system programs, some 250 elaborate routines available. Scanning: Hand Eye Monitor . . . Go Game . . . DPY Hack Broom Balancing . . . Comparison Portion of Soup . . . Retrieves Selected AP News Stories . . . Display Hack . . . Mad Doctor . . . New TV Editor . . . Fortune Cookie Program . . . Another Display Hack . . . Kalah Game . . . Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Job Gone . . . Paranoid Model . . . Pruning Program . . . The Wonderful News Program . . . Old Spacewar . . . New Spacewar . . . Send Everyone a Message . . . Old Version of Daemon . . . Tell Everyone the System Is Going Down . . . Music Compiler Sort Of . . . New Music Compiler . . .

This is, essentially, what I want the "description" field to look like: none of these listings are adequate enough to give an intuitive understanding of what the program does, but they're evocative enough to pique one's interest in a way that indicates if they might like to learn the details.

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Maybe there should be a "Subtitle" field, for descriptions like this, that would work like the little ruby descriptions for bosses in Ocarina of Time (for projects past the seed phase that don't have these as their main name)?

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Nah... I think I'd rather just refactor descriptions to work like this, and bat away the current clumsy encapsulations to "info" documents/links that describe the idea in more detail (which more projects should have).

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Man, I was thinking there'd probably be a name for these kinds of subtitles in the kaiju genre (which I would use to replace description as a field name), but all I could find was https://wikizilla.org/wiki/User:Gerdzerl_Kinerfdamahnsters/Sandbox/List_of_Godzilla_kaiju_subtitles_and_nicknames, so apparently there isn't one? (I'd propose "monsteruby", a portmanteau of "monster" and "ruby", but that doesn't flow very well.)

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Actually, after looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#History, I'm thinking the term that gives this the right level of jargon-y slanginess would be "agate".

I was originally considering "logline", but that would suggest going in the opposite level of detail from what I'm thinking.

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Okay, looking at it now, considering the vaguely "Reptilicus" nature of descriptions like this, and in tribute to the AI Lab lineage of descriptions like this for programs, I think I'm going to call this field which I intend to phase in going forward labname.

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

It's also kind of like a genus, or Pokémon category.

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Also, to be clear, per what I described here, labname effectively supersedes and deprecates description in favor of fuller descriptions and background somewhere linked as urls.info.

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

Actually, as much as I like labname, I think the word I'm really looking for is "concept", a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept. (I still think "labname" should be what these are called for kaiju, though... though "concept" kind of covers it for them, too.)

stuartpb commented 6 years ago

After going back over the projects, concept works for many of them, but not all: some of them (the more low-concept ones) still call for description, so I'm not outright deprecating it.