The Other Stuff with internetVin Falcon: A Romance of Many Dimensions | The Other Stuff #32
Ahmed Saleh, Steven Yuen, and Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan of Falcon (https://falcon.so/). Falcon is a new design tool for curious designers. Their team is based in the West End of Toronto.
In this episode, we explored the games, tools, and software that shaped each of us growing up, from Doom and Zelda to Macromedia Flash and KidPix, and how those early experiences rewired our understanding of what computers could be. We discussed Falcon’s approach to building creative tools: the idea that anything can be anything if you expose the right primitives, the concept of mutation as a design principle, and why the beginning of the creative process deserves far more attention than the optimization at the end. Along the way, Gabe walked us through ray tracing from first principles, demonstrated geometry nodes in Blender, and showed how Falcon can turn math into fire, visuals into audio, and signals into whatever you want them to be.
We talked about why most design tools today are built around optimization rather than expression, the false thesis of simplicity, and how the dimensions of the tools we inherit quietly become the boundaries of what we think is possible.
This is a conversation about software, self-expression, and how the tools we use shape the world we live in.
The Other Stuff is hosted by internetVin, filmmaker and entrepreneur and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New.
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Timestamps
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:42 Doom and id Software
00:16:14 Open World Games
00:36:05 Ray Tracing
00:45:14 Blender Demo
00:50:07 Early Web
00:56:20 Macromedia Flash Era
01:00:34 2Advanced
01:10:52 KidPix and Expressive Tools
01:21:03 Mutations in Design Tooling
01:30:41 Node Editors and Falcon
01:44:45 AI and Creative Tools
01:49:59 Craftsmanship and Intent
02:00:50 Worldview Over Technology
02:09:03 Making Fire with Math
02:17:28 Information Density
02:28:40 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
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The Other Stuff Podcast: https://otherstuffpod.com
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