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13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project. all told i ended up cataloging a dozen books from the early-to-mid 80s, looking for patterns in their construction and in the paths made by different readers through them.

these short, simple books had a surprisingly complicated structure with their interlocking pages & choices. as a kid the idea of writing one and keeping all those pages straight boggled my mind. what was lost on me at the time was that even a list of hundreds of page numbers can be comprehensible if it’s redrawn as a diagram. these days i feel like i approach everything that way.

so here is my look back at an obsession from my past, using graphical obsessions of the present to guide the way.

samizdat.cc/cyoa

bloom filter sketch

a finite state machine that reminds me of pac man…

when in doubt

a simple reminder

The Mystery of Ura Senke

i’ve been spending my vacation traversing trees. here’s my trusty old graph layout algorithm helping me find where i dropped the leafnodes.