Mark Gritter
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markgritter.bsky.social
Mark Gritter
@markgritter.bsky.social
200 followers 140 following 100 posts
Math and startup geek. Software Engineer at Thirdlaw. Ex-Postman, Ex-HashiCorp, ex-Tintri. he/him
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markgritter.bsky.social
Dressed for Halloween as all twenty-six #Rogue monsters.
A bearded man in glasses smiles at the camera in a blue room with art visible on the walls. He is wearing a Roguelike Celebration 2024 T-shirt which displays pixel art versions of all the monsters, and our hero the @ symbol.
October 31, 2025 at 7:36 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
Post a witch.
Granny Weatherwax, as drawn by Paul Kidby. She is wearing a pointed witch's hat with several needles sticking through it, holding four cards in one hand, and scratching her ear with the other.
October 26, 2025 at 2:52 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
NY-area folks, I highly recommended visiting the Ruth Asawa retrospective that just opened at MOMA. I saw it in San Francisco and it's an amazing experience. www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/10/ruth... #ModernArt #RuthAsawa
A room showing several sculptures with a seating area and a large photo of Asawa's work area in her home. Your humble poster standing in front of an Asawa woven wire sculpture. More woven wire sculptures. A twisted wire sculpture formed from subdivided branches of wire bundles, forming a structure like a zero-gravity tree.
October 21, 2025 at 2:56 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
I won! I got the special hexagonal chocolate chip! Does this mean a tour of the magical Guittard factory?
Two chocolate chips sitting on a white napkin. The left one is a normal circular chip with its point folded over. The right one is much larger and has a hexagonal base, and its point is smoother and does not fold over.
September 15, 2025 at 5:52 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
Sadly I only got the suburban version.
A photo of a sunset. A blue sky above gives way to a backlit cloud. Rays of light seem to connect two of the clouds.
August 20, 2025 at 3:37 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
Over on Mathstodon, I'm experimenting with huge visualizations of #Rogue level generation.

If we go through all 2^32 seeds, and fix the first two room shapes, what possibilities remain? Left: remaining possible shapes. Right: excluded

mathstodon.xyz/@markgritter...
mathstodon.xyz/@markgritter...
A 3x3 grid. Inside each grid is a smaller 50x51 grid illustrating possible room shapes, each with a count of how many seeds produce that shape. The distribution is conditioned on particular shapes for the first two rooms -- only 209 seeds out of 2^32 generate those shapes. The previous diagram's negative space, all the room shapes that are impossible given the first two rooms are fixed.
July 13, 2025 at 11:33 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
Learning #shashiko at a hands-on session on textiles and technology at #minnebar19
Three people working on their embroidery Two additional people My piece-- I started doing it wrong with a solid embroidery line Another example showing the intended pattern
May 3, 2025 at 8:03 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
My ambitions for a replacement front door have been too small. #sfmoma #RuthAsawa
Two gigantic doors made of redwood, carved in a whorl meander pattern. Doors (S. 528, Carved Redwood Doors for Ruth Asawa's Home) 1961, Redwood, private collection The first project Asawa envisioned for her family's new home was this oversize pair of front doors, which she made at their country property in Guerneville, Sonoma County, While Lanier worked on house renovations in San Francisco. On conjoined nine-foot-long planks, Asawa drew an allover pattern of interlocking waves -- the "meander" that she had begun exploring while she was a Black Mountain College studnet -- that crossed over the doors when closed. Asawa engaged her older children in carving her design. With mallets and chisels they helped coax the swirls and indentations, then burnished the surface with wire brushes and a blowtorch softened any imperfections.
April 12, 2025 at 12:37 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
Hey @marissalingen.bsky.social, look look look!
Asawa and Buckminster Fuller teaching a workshop at Marshall Elementary School, San Francisco, 1974
April 11, 2025 at 11:19 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
One that hit me particularly hard was Lee Krasner's piece "Polar Stampede". The picture doesn't do it justice: it is huge and intense, and somehow conveys the insomniac grief during which it was created.
A large painting with coarse strokes of black and tan on a a white background. Lee Krasner, "Polar Stampede", 1960, oil on canvas. "Polar Stampede roars with intensity... These canvasses were painted at night during a long period of insomnia following the death of her partner and husband, the artist Jackson Pollock."
December 30, 2024 at 2:51 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
Here's a drawing-on-the-wall example from Sol LeWitt. #sfmoma #SolLeWitt
Lines heading in four directions in four quadrants,.drawn directly on the gallery wall. A zoomed out view. There are four squares of four squares, each of which have parallel lines either ina single direction or overlapping directions. Sol LeWitt, born 1928, "Wall Drawing 1", 1968.
September 29, 2024 at 5:58 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
I will never get tired of modern artists (a) drawing on the walls or (b) dumping stuff on the floor. On exhibit at #sfmoma
Sharp fragments of stone lie in a filled-in circle on a gallery floor. They have one flat side down to resemble a set of mountain peaks, and none of them touch. Richard Long, b. 1945 in Bristol. "Cornish Standing Stone Circle", 1987, stone.
September 29, 2024 at 5:53 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
#sfmoma had an exhibit on artists associated with Creative Growth, an Oakland-based nonprofit that supports artists with disabilities.

This piece by Joseph Alef has a quote from the artist: "It is easier to get all of the emotions out without the people."

I feel the same way many days, buddy.
A long, brightly colored painting on a wall. It is about three times wider than tall, and consists of a jumble of abstract shapes. There is a strong top-to-bottom flow with lines of colors or stripes running from the top to the bottom, but not directly or in straight lines. Some of the shapes suggest but do not directly resemble letters. Joseph Alef creates abstract paintings that burst with energy. Their rhythmic compositions are filled with an expressive vocabulary of layered marks. "I used to put faces in my art, and now it is all color and shapes", the artist notes. "It is easier to get all of the emotions out without the people." This is the largest painting Alef has made to date in his twenty-two years as a Creative Growth artist. Untitled, 2021, Acrylic paint on paper
September 28, 2024 at 11:20 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
At #sfmoma hanging out with my favorite Ruth Asawa piece. #ModernArt #SanFranciscoMuseumOfModernArt
A hanging sculpture made of metal wire, with many curved lobes, some of which are inside each other. Detail of the sculpture, showing how it is "crocheted" together. Ruth Asawa, American, 1926-2013. Untitled (S.114, Hanging, Six-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form with One Suspended and Two Tied Spheres) ca. 1958. Iron, copper, and brass wire. Selfie with the sculpture.
September 28, 2024 at 9:29 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
Hansel is tired and disappointed that my last trip to the kitchen did not return with any pistachios.
A fuzzy white dog lying on a black-and-white striped rug. His eyes are nearly obscured by his overgrown hair. A small green lies behind him.
September 15, 2024 at 8:13 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
Post a meme made by you
Dolores Abernathy from Westworld aims a gun. She is wearing a gray button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The text states "Hey, sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?"
September 1, 2024 at 9:09 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
It's my 25th anniversary with @marissalingen.bsky.social today!

Shown here: a gift from 25 years ago from my sister; a gift from today from Marissa; a joint picture from February because that seems to be the newest one I have with both of us in it.
A blue and white tile, hand painted, reading "Mark + Marissa Aug 1999" An art-deco-ish circular clock hanging on a wall. Marissa and Mark wearing winter hats.
August 14, 2024 at 4:56 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
Milestone achieved
The Gmail sidebar, showing exactly 100,000 unread items in the Inbox.
August 9, 2024 at 8:58 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
I was reasonably pleased by being able to come up with a proof of this identity without a lot of algebra:

www.quora.com/How-do-I-pro...

#combinatorics
for a in N, sum of k=0 to n of (an +k) choose k equals (n+1) times (an +n +1) choose (n+1), divided by (an+1) Five examples of the bijection providing the identity. On the right-hand side we take an+n+1 objects, pick n+1 of them to color red, then paint one of the n+1 red dots green. On the left-hand side we decide on a prefix size n-k of red objects, place the remaining k red objects in a suffix (leaving a gap of one), and then pick one of the remaining an+1 objects to be green.
July 28, 2024 at 2:38 AM
markgritter.bsky.social
Sharks! Here is my shark what occasionally shows up in Zoom.

(One social activity my team did was having a shark scientist talk about his research.)
A painted wooden shark head. It has shiny gold teeth.
July 10, 2024 at 6:23 PM
markgritter.bsky.social
A small project from yesterday, plotting Gamma(x) = Gamma(y). Wolfram Alpha is awful. Desmos is OK but not great. My custom code fills in the gaps, but is that really what a graph should show, or should it highlight all the discontinuities?

#GammaFunction#MathVisualization
Wolfram Alpha's plot looks like a bunch of disconnected gibberish. Desmos's plot is more usable but has difficulty plotting points near the undefined values Gamma[-n]. My final attempt, where each pixel is checked for an intersection between [Gamma(x0), Gamma(x1)] and [Gamma(y0), Gamma(y1)] with some special handling of the case where one is undefined.
March 27, 2024 at 5:25 AM