labels like ‘games’ or ‘art’ aren’t actual discrete categories of work, they’re lenses for talking about something that carry with them a set of expectations. With expectations you can talk about a thing critically in a context of other things.
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uh oh, I was able to parse branching text in the .ink format inside one of my p5 sketches. It’s going to be hard to resist adding a czech textovka-style text adventure to the sketches before the show…
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oh my god, fuck the stupid TRIAC dimmer I have been trying to use for this lamp. It’s haunted, I’m done with it. I’m going to try with a relay instead which should presumably be much simpler. If it works as soon as I get it there’s still a chance I’ll be able to make a fully integrated lamp with a geiger counter that flashes the lamp at its own rad counts. The backup plan is just to have the counter next to the lamp. I like the idea that this visible assurance of safety implies just the opposite. How does a casual viewer know how many ticks are normal and how many are dangerous? The lamp, lit up with an additional stage blacklight nearby looks great on the blue velvet of the table.
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This week worked a lot on trying to get a thyristor dimmer working with an arduino and geiger counter.
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I feel pretty good today because while i pulled the roguelike game from the build (1.0b) that I will project, it is actually working great and looking good on the launcher now, which means it will be fine inside the space. I also made an electron version of the Tumblr bot I made a while back that posted pages from the Archon book with generated names, and that was really simple and I think will work well in the launcher. I am also getting permission to include some modern games by other artists that fit, since I am already including games from the past on vintage equipment.
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Pulling the roguelike game from the electron app. It seemed fine yesterday but today I had issues:
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I cobbled together some writing to go with the installation that suggests games by other artists that could fit in a collection inside the space. I’ve got a Spectrum next… which is pretty novel… and a Mac classic, both with some games that could fit, and i could scare up a pc with a launcher and a few games. I’ve also got a three channel video piece with synced subtitles that Batsly helped with that will fit nicely.
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There’s a date for a show at MoHA- the 29th of next month. I am anxious because the thing that is eating up the most time is this Roguelike game that I have packaged up in an electron app with a bunch of processing sketches. It’s the thing I’m always posting about, and it would be nice to show off in some form but I think I have to make a hard decision to cut it right now. As always! The thing I worked the hardest on needs to go… Because it’s a new game it’s the most brittle and buggy part. I’m sinking more and more time into working on it, but I feel like it’s shit-or-get-off-the-pot-time and I should take it out of what I’m showing, or at the very least, remove it from the stack of processing sketches that I plan on projecting, since it’s a point of failure. It has a zero player mode that was turned on for this projection version and it isn’t very clever, gets stuck a lot, etc. Was it really conceptually that important to this show? Or was it just a thing I worked on a lot and have sunk cost in? If it isn’t that conceptually important, is it fun enough that it would be a draw to the space? Or does it just look cool in screenshots? Can I do something else with it? What if I took a fuckton of screenshots of it generating levels and played them really fast with some narration? That would still be putting it to use and communicating what was hard to do in the experiment without leaving it as this raw point of failure due to lack of testing and debugging.
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Great talk about overlap between procedural narratives in games and in reality television (Something I’m sure Doug Wilson would dig as much as I did.)
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