FUN
Some fun things I’ve made, or things I’ve made for fun.
Games
14. Musi Supa - The Fun of Desk (board game)
- Party game: describe things using only the 80 words on the board.
- Flexible difficulty: casual family game, hard language riddle, or classroom activity.
- Different languages: it can become a playful language-learning exercise. There is even a sign-language version!
13. Musi Tu (board game)
12. Phonemic Wordle
- Wordle but with American English phonemes.
- Challenging, but instructive and innovative.
- Best: Collaborate with a friend to solve it in a Telegram chat.
- Cool: Original features like hard mode, check pronunciation even outside of a game, deduced info from hints so far, play with 4-6 phonemes.
11. Lycanthrobot - Playing your own Werewolf quickly on Telegram
- Telegram bot to manage a Werewolf/Mafia game
- Makes nights quick: people play in parallel. Or allows async games (one day one irl-day).
- Flexible: It’s not full automation, its a tool to play in your own way.
- Cool variant where players have several “lives” and do not die immediately.
- Nice data from games I played at the bottom.
10. Codenames in Telegram
- Codenames, in a telegram bot.
- Personalization: Simultaneous games, any number of teams or words.
- Coolest: Crafting and playing with random decks, like TV Tropes.
Cool or Useful Applications
9. ankigenbot - Language anki card generator in Telegram
- A Telegram bot that turns words in 6 languages into Anki flashcards.
- Can upload selected cards directly to AnkiWeb.
- It fetches definitions, part-of-speech labels, and example sentences.
Recreational Math
8. Folding paper guesses your fruit
7. Explorable Explanation about fair resource allocation
- An interactive app about assigning Internet speeds fairly.
- Made for the Berlin Long Night of Sciences in 2022 and 2023.
- The math question: What does “fair” mean when users share limited network links?
6. Math-inspired escape room puzzle ideas
When I was in Oxford doing my PhD in 2019, the Mathematical Institute organized a math-based escape room and asked for ideas for it. I submitted this PDF, wh...
Creative Writing
5. [Spanish] Tres terrestres (narra una ranarra)
An Oulipo tale, in Spanish, where the story alternates between prose and using sentences consisting of triplets of sounds that are the same or almost.
4. Reemergence - Concept for a webcomic
AI has really improved at generating text in images and also on keeping character style. I played around with it the other day in combination with the concep...
3. Puns, and other plays on words [Spanish, English, Toki Pona]
To question or not to question, that is the being.
- Do not take this post it seriously.
- A couple of cool puns plus a massive amount of silly things.
Toki Pona
I speak Toki Pona fluently. It is a cute constructed language designed to be simple, second only to Esperanto in number of speakers. It has ~130 words, a simple grammar, and a simple phonology. It can be learned in a month if you really get into it. You describe what you mean as you speak, by combining words. Context is powerful, so you often don’t need details. And once something has been described, you refer to it instead of describing it again. This constraint makes conversation playful and surprisingly expressive: meaning emerges from context, perspective, and creative combinations. You can say essentially anything in Toki Pona. I have attended several week-long Toki Pona conferences since I learned it in 2019, and we had lots of fun while communicating only in Toki Pona.
Here are some things I’ve made in Toki Pona, for Toki Pona, or inspired by Toki Pona.
2. My Toki Pona number system
It’s kind of a joke that when you learn Toki Pona, you are not happy with its overly simple number system and you create another one. Usually for fun. One nu...
1. Write sitelen pona on Telegram with this bot
- A Telegram inline bot for writing Toki Pona glyphs (sitelen pona).
- Supports line breaks, compound glyphs, cartouches for names, and configurable fonts/colors.
14. Musi Tu (board game)
13. Musi Supa - The Fun of Desk (board game)
- Party game: describe things using only the 80 words on the board.
- Flexible difficulty: casual family game, hard language riddle, or classroom activity.
- Different languages: it can become a playful language-learning exercise. There is even a sign-language version!
12. ankigenbot - Language anki card generator in Telegram
- A Telegram bot that turns words in 6 languages into Anki flashcards.
- Can upload selected cards directly to AnkiWeb.
- It fetches definitions, part-of-speech labels, and example sentences.
11. Math-inspired escape room puzzle ideas
When I was in Oxford doing my PhD in 2019, the Mathematical Institute organized a math-based escape room and asked for ideas for it. I submitted this PDF, wh...
10. Explorable Explanation about fair resource allocation
- An interactive app about assigning Internet speeds fairly.
- Made for the Berlin Long Night of Sciences in 2022 and 2023.
- The math question: What does “fair” mean when users share limited network links?
9. Folding paper guesses your fruit
8. My Toki Pona number system
It’s kind of a joke that when you learn Toki Pona, you are not happy with its overly simple number system and you create another one. Usually for fun. One nu...
7. Write sitelen pona on Telegram with this bot
- A Telegram inline bot for writing Toki Pona glyphs (sitelen pona).
- Supports line breaks, compound glyphs, cartouches for names, and configurable fonts/colors.
6. Puns, and other plays on words [Spanish, English, Toki Pona]
To question or not to question, that is the being.
- Do not take this post it seriously.
- A couple of cool puns plus a massive amount of silly things.
5. [Spanish] Tres terrestres (narra una ranarra)
An Oulipo tale, in Spanish, where the story alternates between prose and using sentences consisting of triplets of sounds that are the same or almost.
4. Reemergence - Concept for a webcomic
AI has really improved at generating text in images and also on keeping character style. I played around with it the other day in combination with the concep...
3. Phonemic Wordle
- Wordle but with American English phonemes.
- Challenging, but instructive and innovative.
- Best: Collaborate with a friend to solve it in a Telegram chat.
- Cool: Original features like hard mode, check pronunciation even outside of a game, deduced info from hints so far, play with 4-6 phonemes.
2. Lycanthrobot - Playing your own Werewolf quickly on Telegram
- Telegram bot to manage a Werewolf/Mafia game
- Makes nights quick: people play in parallel. Or allows async games (one day one irl-day).
- Flexible: It’s not full automation, its a tool to play in your own way.
- Cool variant where players have several “lives” and do not die immediately.
- Nice data from games I played at the bottom.
1. Codenames in Telegram
- Codenames, in a telegram bot.
- Personalization: Simultaneous games, any number of teams or words.
- Coolest: Crafting and playing with random decks, like TV Tropes.