/documents/notetaking/Sönke Ahrens - How to take smart notes_ one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking (2017) - libgen.lc.epub
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/documents/obelisk/Scan Apr 6, 2021 at 5.34 PM.pdf
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/documents/teaching/Individual Instructor Report Fall 2023 Version A for AET 319 - DESIGN & INTERACTIVITY (21660) Wiley Wiggins_dc062406-98a5-4e37-b708-ccb44b5968aden-US.pdf
/documents/teaching/Individual Instructor Report Spring 2024 Version A for AET 319 - DESIGN & INTERACTIVITY (20775) Wiley Wiggins_d78971eb-b039-4543-b8d3-3611341dc83fen-US.pdf
/documents/teaching/Individual Instructor Report Spring 2024 Version A for AET 333 - PROTOTYPING (20830) Wiley Wiggins_4bbc1aca-d11e-4cb4-ab8f-647487801488en-US.pdf
Gathering some info about how to make HDRI images to light 3d models with the cheapie Rico Theta sc2 camera. If you use the mobile app to shoot with the camera there’s an option for bracketed shooting. This combined with a nice neural enhance like Topaz megapixel (the theta sc2 photos are pretty low-res) could produce usable HDRI lights in a pinch! I have a Theta Sc2 and I’m playing with it.
I never got to meet David lynch, but he was such an outsized presence in my young life. Dazed and Confused was shooting in the summer of 92, and still all I could think about was the last episode of the original Twin Peaks run and Fire Walk With Me. I saw FWWM several times in the theater, and I remember the first time people walking out, getting audibly angry. This was a part of my life when I was starting to form an oppositional viewpoint. An abusive stepfather, the US war in Iraq, and the growing realization that the only thing that arrested this inner feeling of sadness that was petrifying my heart was a glimpse of some kind of unfamiliar pattern, sight and sound and words, something that felt as if it was coming from an internally consistent place but which did something new and unexpected and maybe even a little frightening. I was becoming aware that these things that excited me, that I was looking for in an attempt to learn, were the same things that made other people angry. The violation of expectations made other people angry and shut them off.
Here’s a little something I’ve been working on: The Visible Zorker! Really, go give it a shot. It’s a toy. You can read the rest of this post later. […]
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Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! Production of cement — the world’s most used commodity after water — currently produces 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. […]
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Sometimes its hard to believe someone has already built your dreams: Ensamble Studio’s @anton_ensamble C’an Terra transforms an abandoned quarry in Menorca into a singular holiday home. […]
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This is a repository of p5.js programs for loading and displaying single-line vector fonts (also called single-stroke or monoline fonts) in a variety of formats — including TTF, SVG Font, Hershey Font, and others. Such fonts are ideally suited to creative coding, pen-plotting, and CNC machining. […]
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One solution to century scale storage is to scatter your holdings, to put copy after copy all over the world, so that no disaster, war, or sudden loss of funding could ever threaten a digital collection’s survival. Right now, the internet and computation are not decentralized. […]
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Creator: Larry Cuba
Year: 1982-1985
Medium: 16 mm film
Software: Custom written in Z-Grass Programming Language
Computer: Datamax UV-1
URL: <www.well.com/~cuba/> […]
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“Imagine if we could begin our little life all over again. Imagine if it was all nothing more than some electronic game. Imagine if I knew then what I know now.” —Deus Ex Machina, Automata, 1984 […]
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Rat Chaos is a 2012 stream of consciousness[1][2]art and browser game created by Winter Lake. While learning the software Twine, author Winter Lake[4][5] made the game “in a couple hours” on July 18, 2012.[2] Originally, the game was available via Winter Lake’s website monster killers. […]
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Claude-Achille Debussy - Clair de Lune (Mondglanz, Mondschein, Moonlight), Suite Bergamasque, Debussy, piano. The Suite bergamasque was first composed in 1890-1905.
“Claude Debussy Plays His Finest Works”
Claude Debussy, Piano Roll, 1913.
Salamander Days in Banská Štiavnica remind the former fame of the most beautiful mining town in Slovakia, inscribed in the List of the Cultural and Natural Heritage of the UNESCO. The Days are concluded by a carnival procession. […]
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If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underlying infrastructure and then chronologically. […]
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Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern. Suddenly, I realized the pattern was strangely familiar, so I stopped and looked closely. […]
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Aside from the physical heft of data centers seen from highways and the fiber optic cables crawling into homes and offices, the digital world mostly exists in our imagination. That imagination is shaped by the people selling services that rely on that infrastructure. […]
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Doesn’t it feel like the web is getting worse every day? Do you miss the days when Google wasn’t a garbage factory, Twitter wasn’t a cesspool of Nazis, and you weren’t treated like a pair of eyeballs with a wallet? Don’t worry, the web of yore is still alive and kicking – in fact, it’s thriving. […]
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Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there’s a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn’t mean we can’t try. […]
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From the first time I heard “Nardis,” the Miles Davis song made famous by pianist Bill Evans I fixated on it and the odd sound of the Phyrgian musical mode. There’s something about Nardis that is sort of maudlin and unfolding and I listen to it a lot when I’m trying to figure something out. This is a great piece of writing about the history of the song and about Evans.
“Design education not only teaches its technical and historical canon, or how to design, but more importantly teaches students how to be designers in society and in relation to capital,” writes designer Jacob Lindgren. […]
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click for a new word The show I just wrapped was kind of conceptually overloaded, but it was useful as a kind of high-level survey of the stuff I’m wrangling right now, and the goal was to find new ways to connect the tile art I’ve been doing, which is of the Dungeon Mode, to dungeons-as-mines, which was an underdeveloped chunk of my thesis writing that just kept blowing up as I would find more and more readings and more weird kismets piled up in my life related to it.
Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain’s northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. […]
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Last Saturday of the show was very nice, I had a lovely long walkthrough talk with Kristen Lucas and Joe McKay. I had a nice chat with an old friend about the Geomancy Sketch that pops up in my main piece for the show, which was something I was fiddling with while I was in a SFPC class. I also think my typical fretting during the installation and opening overshadowed the really nice interactions I was having in the space on the first two nights. I had a great long talk with my super talented studio neighbor Scott Gelber and I got to meet and talk to Lauren Gardner from Babycastles/SFPC.
Did you know there were typewriters that used ball point pens to draw not just text but also graphics? I’ve collected several of these over the years. Read on to discover a world that you didn’t know existed. […]
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3/23/01 Due to the overwhelming number of requests I have received to tell about my discoveries and bizarre experiences in a cave not far from my home, I have created this web page. I will outline the events that happened to me during the past few months. […]
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Redundant Technology is a term stemming from artist collective the Redundant Technology Initiative (RTI), which was started in Sheffield, 1997. The RTI gathered computers destined for the dump and used them in exhibitions following a classic guerilla strategy—use weakness as strength. They had no money to engage with technology, so they made that the point of their engagement with it.[…]
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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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Severija Inčirauskaitė, 2017-2019. More of her work here. Embroidery by Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė, via thisiscolossal. […]
[Link](https://text-mode.org/?s=severija incirauskaite)
Simple 3D printable noise makers. Use for fighting colonialism, fascism and unfair labor practices. Developed during the UCLA Graduate strike of 2022. More info here. […]
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Robin Berjon is an expert in digital governance and has contributed to numerous web standards, including the Global Privacy Control (GPC). He works on novel web protocols such as IPFS and sits on the W3C’s Board of Directors and the ICO’s Technology Advisory Panel. […]
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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. […]
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Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have forced open a chasm of outrage between peoples and regimes around the world through sheer steadfastness in the face of untold violence. […]
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Spring break has given me more time to sit and play with projects. No big breakthroughs. I rewired the doorknob plinth from Doors and now the action on all the knobs and doorknob is much nicer than in the show. Unfortunately there’s still communication issues with the blinkm rgb light that lights up the keyhole. It’s possible that I rewired it wrong, but maybe more likely that it’s an OSC issue. It’ll take a little work to remember how it was meant to work and do some troubleshooting, since it was the last feature I added before the show and probably the least documented part of the project.
Do I even want to get this working again though? I can see it being part of a show with more grotto-related stuff, but part of me thinks it’s probably better to concentrate on other stuff.
CSS has an infinity constant. When I first learned about this, my brain lit up with all kinds of absurd possibilities. Let’s discuss! There might even be some practical use cases. No promises, though. […]
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Content Warning: War, Murder
This week's class prototyping theme is "I Spy". A number of the students either wanted to make prototypes of suspect lineups or of some manner of Sniper scope game. In my mind I was thinking about old games like Spy Vs. Spy or Elevator Action, but the student projects made me start thinking about first person telescopic views instead.
Many businesses, industries, and regulatory bodies have been putting sustainability front and center in recent years. However, the games industry has fallen short on all three sustainability dimensions (economic, social, environmental). Our talk will explore paths towards compelling it to do better, […]
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[The Xerox Alto] was first introduced in 1973, at a time when that same Xerox meant only “photocopy”, and IBM was an extremely important PC manufacturer; among all the features it had, what is probably its most influential achievement is that it was purposely built to run a GUI operating system, the Alto Operating System, at a time when something like that was unheard of. […]
The first Alto game we’ll quickly mention is called MazeWar; it wasn’t originally released for this computer, but it was instead ported from another computer called Imlac, which featured intriguing vector-based graphics. What was special about this game is that, just like Alto Trek, it was a multiplayer game, and could be played against people on the same network; luckily for the busy researchers of PARC, it was easy to jump in and out of the game without disturbing anyone, as each instance of it ran on every Alto independently, and it would connect to the network only when it needed to exchange data with other players (so, for instance, the person who started the game, the host, could leave at any time, and the MazeWar match would simply continue).[…]
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The Grannies is a documentary short. A group of players venture beyond the boundaries of the videogame Red Dead Online (Rockstar Games, 2018). […]
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Hello and welcome to the eighth installment of Tennessee Adoxographic, my occasional newsletter about the 1982 World’s Fair and one of it’s key pieces of themed architecture, the [[Sunsphere]]. […]
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The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. […]
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Jarret Drake delivers the keynote address at the 44th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, “The Politics and Ethics of the Archive.” Drawing connections between his work as an archivist to his work in prisions, Drake’s keynote, “Graveyards of Exclusion: Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belong […]
Great sounding class that aligns with some of my research interests, but I can’t take it due to teaching obligations. I would really like to be in a reading group that discussed Manfredo Tafuri, since I found him both one of the most interesting and the most chalenging of the writers I investigated.
It’s funny looking back at this blog for the last year or so and finding only really terse notes about school projects and the aftermath of school projects when there is obviously so much going on in the world. The violence and darkness that surrounds us can make us feel small and disempowered, but everyone is part of history, and we all move it together. A better world is, as they say, possible. There’s so much in my research that connects history to this present moment, but it’s also a path that seems to be taking me further and further from the actual act of making games. That’s fine, but the path i’ve been going feels like it would have benefitted from a different degree than a practice degree (I will admit that the Information Science class I took was really compelling). Right now I want to make things that connect me to people rather than isolate me further, and to do that I need to keep refining and experimenting in a game making practice.
In middle school, a local grocery store helped donate Apple IIe computers to our school. As a result I got to attend a computer class in a lab full of Apple IIs. The teacher would treat the class by showing these little animations every week.
Happy New Year.
Not sure what to tag today’s log, I’m still working with the tileset from Grotto, but it’s moving into other areas, like the cellular automata I started working with a few months ago. I’m starting to take all of the small javascript projects that use the tiles and bring them together into a single repository with a separate node.js app that would hypothetically get input from switches or other devices and then switch between/effect the small projects.
Every game is a fragment world– bordered by the rules of its logic. These boundaries may be spoken out loud (don’t step on the cracks! the floor is lava!) or may be programmed (the end of traversable ground, the rim of the map, an invisible wall that plays a bonk sound effect when you walk into […]
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I haven’t been posting work notes while the world crumbles, but I’ve been keeping them locally. There’s been a few updates to the unnamed roguelike that are worth mentioning, the first is I’ve been experimenting with a creeping plant class, working off the idea that once the player dies the game keeps going, and plant growth would be nice. Other than that, lots of little tweaks, like refactored item and entity classes, arrows that can spread fire, fire destroying things, and I experimented with multiple player instances, which just worked on the first try.
Kai Krause [today: kai.sub.blue]was born 1957 in Dortmund. He came to California in 1976 with two friends. He worked as a musician for Disney Sound Effects; the sound track for “Star Trek: The Movie” was created on his synthesizers*. […]
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While it’s not as attractive or ‘in-world’ as a mazelike tilemap representation would be, I’ve made an auto minimap for grotto using D3. D3 is a library to procedurally draw SVG in a browser, and it’s commonly used for interactive data visualizations. I used it here because it has the ability to create force directed node maps. This means nodes are repelled from one another in a game-physics like simulation, so rather than needing to figure out how to place them on the screen, they simply spread out to positions where they no longer overlap. Here’s what it looks like in a room with a lot of sibling nodes:
New Studio space! I just moved some things into a workspace at The Museum of Human Achievement.
Now I am deciding what to work on next. I think there was potential in the installation I did for my graduate thesis show, but it was missing some important pieces to be effective. The first think it’s missing is a legible mini-map. Navigating a maze that is a tree structure is incredibly frustrating. It’s maybe the worst possible level design. people get trapped in branches too easily looking for the one door back up. I’m experimenting with maps in the web game using the api, but it’s very difficult, as I’ve said before, to automatically lay these maps out. You really need a force-directed nodemap, which clashes stylistically with the patterned-tiles-on-a-grid style. I’m playing now with some nodemaps using D3, and I’m going to functionally solve the problem first and then deal with the aesthetics.
What is the Census Tree? The Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. […]
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Learn the rules like a pro, so that you can break them like an artist, this is what Picasso told us to do. As a medium mediated by rules , but expressed through play, games exist on the border of this division. This essay explores how we conceptualize and define both rules and play, and the paradox […]
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Progenitor of the early-2000s indie filmmaking wave that would come to be known as mumblecore, Andrew Bujalski has retained the handcrafted, DIY spirit that defined the movement even as his productions have grown (modestly) in budget and scale. His films are humorously offbeat, precisely observed snapshots of hyperspecific social microcosms—from a 1980s AI nerdfest in COMPUTER CHESS to the world behind the counter of a Hooters-like sports bar in SUPPORT THE GIRLS—lent vivid authenticity through their unfailingly naturalistic dialogue and keen understanding of human relationships. […]
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Twin Peaks: Into The Night is an incredible fan made Twin Peaks game that recreates David Lynch and Mark Frost’s classic series as a PS1 styled adventure! […]
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In 1962, experimental designer Ken Isaacs imagined and constructed a ‘knowledge box’, a compressed environment for experiencing ‘culture’: a cube of wood, masonite and steel equipped with twenty-four slide projectors and audio-suppliers. […]
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The month that I wrote this, it was potentially the hottest month in human history. By the time you read this, you will have seen hotter. The month that I wrote this, there were fires and floods, there was mass suicides by whales. […]
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It’s a little confusing to keep calling these posts studio notes, since I no longer have a studio space. I’m sitting in a room at our place back in Austin that’s still filled with unpacked boxes. Settling back in is a slow process, and the last month has been really busy with moving a relative out of this space as we move back in. We also got a new kitten, who we are slowly acclimating to our other cat through a pet gate, carefully negotiating their two territories and resources (is there a strategy game idea somewhere in cats claiming or sharing litter boxes, food dishes, toys and sunbeams?)
Still don’t have a project tag for this roguelike experiment yet, but it seems like it might turn into an actual game. Now I’ve added doors, (some of which are locked and have paired, color coded keys,) inventory, enemies, and slightly janky click to pathfind to suppliment arrow key movement. I’m about to add sound with howler.js and audiosprite next.
A big thing that is missing is fog of war. I made kind of a mess getting my Grotto tiles working and it’s not as straightforward as it would be in a normal ascii rot.js game. I’ll give it some consideration once I get sound added.
At the intersection of language, art and technology lies computational poetry. A realm in which poet and programmer meet, it is an art form born for the digital age. […]
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Military Intervention Project (MIP) The United States (US) ‘‘spends roughly as much on defense as the rest of the world put together…and remains the only country able to project military power globally. […]
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I added fire and death to the little rot.js roguelike game I am tinkering with. This is separate from Grotto but uses the same visual language. It’s a difficult proposition to try to integrate this with Grotto, as this is turn based and Grotto is a multiplayer database driven thing with no understanding of items or characters positions in a room. This feels like a new game so far and not an extension of grotto, although there could be some interactions between the two using Grotto’s API. What should it be? It could either be a totally new dungeon game or I could try doing some sort of zero player ant-hill arcology thing to go with Archon as I had originally imagined. Hmm.
Two work notes-
I was able to use the Grotto API to make a bot player, hosted on Glitch, that has simple logic that has the player check the cleanliness level of the room it’s in once and hour, if it’s dirty it uses a scrub brush item, if it’s clean, it moves through an adjacent unlocked door.
I also had some moderate success using my tileset to build a small dungeon map using the roguelike javascript library rot.js. using a rat’s nest of conditional logic, it does sort-of-cellular-automata-style matching rules to draw walls and shadows around a floor map, in the style of Grotto rooms.
New York, December 4, 2020 – Blackstone (NYSE:BX) today announced that private equity funds managed by Blackstone (“Blackstone”) have completed their previously announced acquisition of Ancestry® from Silver Lake, GIC, Spectrum Equity, Permira, and other equity holders for a total enterprise value of $4.7 billion. Current Ancestry investor GIC will continue to retain a significant minority stake in the company.
We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. […]
Implementación de autómata celular sencillo en Javascript. La renderización es llevada a través de PixiJS. Se ha propuesto su utilización en generación procedural de cuevas en 2 dimensiones. […]
In the above example, a cell that has 2 living cells surrounding it will survive. If 3 living cells surround surround the cell, it can come back from the dead. This function is called every step of the simulation and is passed an array of neighbors to this cell. […]
Grotto is now at v1.01. The last push included a text-entry interaction that can be used for writing notes with a letter item and for updating a character greeting. Letter item and Potion item both are now functional, although Potions aren’t particularly useful yet.
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. […]
Kinbank is a database of kinship terminologies ranging from grandparents to grandchildren, parent’s siblings and their children. You will find terminologies for 1229 languages, ranging from Aché to Zulu. […]
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The scripts that generate book content from Grotto are done, the output requires a little bit of tweaking after they run, the pdf output looks good and I’ll try printing soon. This is going to be an expensive print job, as the book is over 1000 pages, 500ish 2-sided. I intend to print signatures and stitch it coptic, including whatever thesis writing is done.
Having all sorts of long-term ideas go out the window. Up until now I’ve been using a solenoid lock to stop a ratchet wheel in one direction and another ratchet wheel and arm to keep the assembly only turning in one direction. I had a limit switch that would flip on a turn.
Flailing. A few issues made me abandon my idea for a doorknob controller plinth in which the doorknob portion revolves to select a “door”, reorienting the player- first the reintroduction of a projection screen into the space, which would make variable player orientation weird, and 3 or four mistakes in laying out an mdf laser cut that made the complicated revolving encoder/slipring assembly off center or needing hand drilled holes over and over, resulting in a lot of wasted time. The alternative (keeping the doorknob controller) is an additional spinner knob control on the top of the plinth. I don’t love it. The idea here is there’s a projection of a circular array of the doors in the room, with the color of the room and doors, a spinner revolves them, the doorknob tests them to go through.
In the early days of computer gaming, developers and publishers used various creative physical copy protection systems to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of their games. These methods usually required the user to possess a specific physical item (“Feelie”) that came with the game in order to play it. Some notable examples include:
Let us pause to recall how proud Sam Bankman-Fried was to say that he could prove, with mathematical certainty, that Shakespeare was overrated. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. […]
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Big leap forward today- passing through a door in grotto gives it a color marking of its connecting room, letting you know what path you’ve taken. The maze is still disorienting, there are no cardinal directions in the map view, but you leave a breadcrumb trail as you traverse it.
Some small updates to Grotto- keys are no longer single-use, but rather have a chance to break on use, like shields and brushes. Shield bashing- you can attempt to shield bash locked doors now, but this has affected regular character shield bashing and will need to be revisited. Added incense animation.
the node app I made to check the grotto api and send mqtt (mosquitto) messages to things like lights and the doorknob controller is working, which is huge.
Genealogy breakthrough today- was able to fix a wrong name and add one generation prior to the earliest Fridel family member on record as well as a few additional people in other families. This means another version of the GEDCOM file, which is kind of a hassle at this point, because a new GEDCOM file totally rebuilds the game maze and I need to make sure that the cenotaph activation and relic csv’s all have all correct person names.
Some changes to Grotto from Saturday that I’m just now documenting here- Added the body parts UI area and changed the item interaction pattern- body part items can be equipped, all items in either section have a ‘x’ button that will drop them in the current room.
The cheapo usb 5.1 audio interface I got only does surround sound through a bunch of 3.5 mm analog plugs, and the surround speakers at the lab are digital only (the interface has optical out but it only carries stereo).
For many of us, the first program we see or run on a new platform is some variation of “Blink” to turn an LED on and off at some rate. It has become like the “Hello World” of microcontroller programming. This will turn the LED on and then wait, or in other words, time. […]
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Around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, a masked man broke into a house about a mile from the University of Idaho campus and stabbed four students. Then he walked past a stunned, surviving roommate and left. […]
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My current challenge is to find ways to connect Grotto to a gallery space for my final show. I’d like to avoid falling into the same pattern of “Thing projected on a wall” that you see at a lot of these shows. So far I have been concentrating on esp32 microcontrollers or headless raspberry pi’s that can get information from Grotto’s API. I’d like to use lights and sounds and weird tactile interfaces as much as possible.
First big push to the staging server in 2023- 0.10.0 includes the first iteration of a graphics window for room maps and animations, using a combo of pixi.js, svelte-pixi, Tiled.app, and a new tiled-compatible version of what was previously called scratchbeam, that I am now calling grotto-paint.
The only way out of the vast, brutalist city of BABBDI is by train – if you can get hold of a ticket. Exploring Babbdi is a delight. It pulls off this amazing feat of feeling like a tightly designed videogame, but at the same time, like a real place that doesn’t care that you’re there. […]
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This is the complete leaf sequence used in the accompanying short film LeafPresser. While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape every single plant type I could find would fit somewhere into a continuous animated sequence of leaves if that sequence were expansive enough. If I didn’t have the perfect shape, it meant I just had to collect more leaves.
Get ready for vintage computing aplenty in [David Given]’s project to port EmuTOS to the AlphaSmart Dana. He’s got it all on video, too. All 38 hours of it over 13 episodes! […]
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Vid of the Lilys show I was (probably prudently) too chicken to go to back in January, floored that they played ‘Eccsame…’ and ‘In the Presence…’ tracks. Really wish I had been there.
Youtube archive of Twitch stream from 20 June 2017. In this video, I describe the simple game we are going to build in this series, talk about what HyperCard is and why it was important to me as a kid, and begin by drawing a few templates to get us started. Most of the meat will be in subsequent videos; this was most a glorified mic test. […]
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Thinking some half-baked thoughts today about the grid that I’m painting on in Archon, Descartes, dualistic thought as a root of thinking of humans and nature as separate, mapping and counter-mapping, the peculiarities of the perspective of Dwarf Fortress (top down orthographic, moving down in altitude through slices of the earth but still bounded by fog of war based on what the dwarves have discovered.) How Archon let me fudge the perspective and grid in a way I couldn’t have if it was a functioning game (sometimes I show the tops of structures instead of a single layer slice, in one frame I completely explode the grid into a mess). Thinking about single player games that sit in wait for the player to be a catalyst to move npc’s into motion, something that dungeons seem to do– wait for the adventurer. How that feeds into the idea of that separation, with humans on top as primary actors. With a brain on top acting on a body. How I placed myself in the dungeon not as the adventurer, but as one of the monsters sitting in wait, playing a different game of care for a shrine. How much is Dwarf Fortress actively simulating in the deep areas still shrouded by fog of war? Thinking about the wide time simulation that happens at world gen and between fortresses, and the step by step time that happens during play.
Going to try to get back to logging Grotto work. Right now I am working on stuff every Saturday up until the DMA thesis show next spring.
Recently we gave npc’s a flag to ‘illuminate’ if they’re carrying a candle drop, I added some icon bullets for doors to show state, and on saturday we added locked doors to stairwells and added keys. Over the last few weeks we’ve done a lot of tweaking to the auto poetry for room descriptions and I cleaned and cultivated a few new text corpuses to generate room descriptions at different depths of the dungeon. These still need to be tweaked, and I’d like to get a better handle on how the markovify functions have moved around since my original ones in order to keep making little adjustments.
It’s been a busy summer. Over the last couple of months I’ve written two articles, animated a music video, printed a little art book, built a big wooden projector enclosure and done a lot of work on grotto with my friend Paul (oh, and I made a barely playable twine game based on a dream I had about a horror text adventure version of Dig Dug). Right now I’m taking some of the visual work that’s going towards a future graphical version of grotto and working it into something for a fall group show at UCLA. Hopefully the two articles I wrote get published as one of them supports this work for the fall show.
In addition to communication within a player class, I’ve also been thinking about playing with the current darkness mechanic to allow for different perception for different classes.
Supposedly, some people believe the desert is empty and others who know better reply that the desert is full of wonder. Claims of barrenness are politically useful in exploitative, extractive economies, and it’s worthwhile to examine and preempt them. […]
LinkArticle by Elisabeth Nicula for Momus
There are three interesting things to do with a computing museum. Museum directors and curators should be aware of all three and design galleries, present information, and make archives available to address them all. The first, and perhaps most limited, is nostalgia. […]
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Writing for TANK magazine in 2019, Josh Citarella mused on how WoW Classic tied into Mark Fischer’s idea of “the slow cancellation of the future” (aka “where are my hoverboards”) — its release acting as further evidence of the collapsing gap of space between cultural time (cultural cycle […]
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I’ve been looking for a while for mechanical ways to represent “imagined communities” (Anderson), and especially linguistic communities. Grotto is starting from very abstract and sometimes arbitrary formal bits- random character classes (robot, animal etc) with meaninglessly arbitrary skills that don’t have an immediately obvious mechanical use.
I really enjoy the way stuff looks when I draw it with the tile painting program we made, but to actually include it seems like it would be so complicated. Using something pre-made like d3 seems much easier, but visually boring.
Grotto has some somewhat unique challenges to its success as an actual game because it uses an atomic maze structure where exits are blind guesses about what is inside adjoining rooms. This mode is inherited from interactive fiction, Hunt the Wumpus, MUDS, etc– games that either had puzzles within the rooms themselves, or relied on constructing a mental model of the maze based on guesses (each one potentially fatal, in the case of Wumpus). I’ve had critiques about whether the game is intelligible and whether there is any player enticement to play. I’ve kind of sidestepped these critiques by saying that the real game mechanics haven’t been implemented yet, and that they would be the sugar that activates the content I am spreading through the maze in room and item descriptions. This suggests that I have some kind of plan for game mechanics though, and all my game design ideas gravitate towards roguelike mechanics, which may not be a good fit here. A roguelike structure where a visual map is slowly completed by exploring would probably require a substantial amount of retooling.
Abandoned thousands of years ago in the quarries of northern Aswan, ancient Egypt, the Unfinished Obelisk are a mass of granite 40 meters long (138 feet) and more than 1,090 tons (1,200 short tons) that makes up one of the most important mysteries of the archaeological world. […]
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Today was a first planning meeting to resume development on Grotto, and start the big project– the one I’m now calling Phantom Homeland (I got a good laugh out of calling it Dusičky for a little while, but come on).
Last night I was thinking about how to evolve the gui for grotto. Specifically- taking the older text view and fusing some elements from the joystick-gui view into it. I’d like to add a div with a top down map view of the room you are in with glyphs signifying items and doors. I added some new tiles to my drawing tool and started playing with the most minimal way to represent objects. when I stopped trying hard to represent things and abstracted all the way down to two-tile glyphs, I immediately unlocked a memory- another atari game (eyeroll emoji). The creatures from imagic’s Cosmic Arc
Last night was the first public viewing of Mud Room. As of this morning I’ve fixed a number of bugs I identified in the first show. There’s a remaining problem where the kneeling pad errors out when the pad is set to keyboard press/release but works with keyboard write, which is a little problematic since people kneeling for over 10 seconds trigger multiple kneels. I’ll likely need to fix this after the show is over.
Hey everybody! After a productive pause to gather community feedback, thoughtfully restructure, and revise our mission and vision, we are SO EXCITED to launch Games Y’all! […]
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Bedhead began with two brothers—the Kadanes. Bubba two years older than Matt, they were from Wichita Falls, a small city in Texas about 120 miles northwest of Dallas. […]
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I’ve been in a developing-too-fast-to-document place for the past month or so, so most of the action has been recorded in trello boards and git commits. Yesterday was a quarterly review though so I will take a moment to record my thoughts.
I’ve had two 3d modeling/animation classes in the last year with a fun, super knowledgable professor, and could have made anything for my final projects and both classes I have chosen to make dour mausoleums, literally. Funerary spaces. What the fuck is wrong with me and will I get better again?
For some reason I had a difficult time thinking of a piece of art to refer to for this exercise, so I picked the last film I watched for research purposes. The film is Jiří Trnka’s stop motion film Staré pověsti české loutkový [Old Czech Legends]. This might be an interesting selection because the film doesn’t have subtitles available and I watched it without knowing Czech. I did have some access to what what happening in the film because I have an English translation of Alois Jirásek’s Ancient Bohemian Legends, the book that serves as its primary source (which Trnka also illustrated).
A lot of my winter break was spent doing genealogy on the Czech side of my family, since these are the relatives I was exposed to going furthest back (I often visited my great aunts and uncles on their farm in Kurten, Texas) and it’s the branch of the family that is the most storied, through my mother. While doing supplemental reading on Bohemian/Moravian immigrants in Brazos Texas, I found accounts of the minister who enticed them to make the journey, to serve as laborers under the promise of large expanses of cheap and fertile land. This started a chain migration that my Czech family followed in 1872. This was my grandmother Dorothy’s family- and it was Dorothy’s house that held the Mud Room that serves as our conceptual entryway into the maze of cenotaphs.
English translations of early Slovak digital games from the late 80s period, created in cooperation with Slovak Game Developers Association by Stanislav Hrda, Slavomír Labský, Marián Kabát, Darren Chastney and Maroš Brojo. […]
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Good day of work with @thismatters today, we installed the django-rest-framework which enabled api pages for rooms. This will enable abstracting the grotto data out into new UI’s. I had hoped to get the new html/css/vanilla js UI I started working on in time for Monday’s review, but it seems unlikely.
After struggling a bit over the holiday with the javascript inventory UI, I did a little exercise where instead of slogging towards my very elaborate initial idea I ask, “What’s the version I could make of this in n days/weeks?” In this case, what’s the version I could probably get done of this in say, two weeks?
I talked to Jenna yesterday broadly about the transition between the introduction video and gameplay. There was a suggestion that the player start in Bob’s cenotaph, where they must figure out how to light (and maybe even place) a candle to proceed. I’m onboard with this. Jenna also suggested the idea of having bob’s actual note and blood in the cenotaph which I went with for a second but really don’t like. At first I thought I didn’t like how explicit it was, but gradually I realized that what I didn’t like was that it didn’t make sense in the game context. When I initially thought there would be a note in the room I was thinking of like, an obituary or something because these are constructed gravesites, not like…. a place where a death happened.
These are crude pages in some forgotten and repurposed game, like a facebook page after the end of facebook used to memorialize someone. They’re data with a strange but appropriate new topology overlaid on it that suggests actions over time. Someone barging through would just see the game, and just see me carrying out tasks in a room in this maze as an npc, but I have motivations because this is a new landscape that was shaped by historical data. What the game isn’t is a polemical story about family suicide by way of environmental storytelling. Those deaths happened outside the game world. It’s true that they created this place, but it’s not that direct and stagey. It did seem convenient to leave clues like a conventional videogame to lead people through onboarding, but I think cleaning in the cenotaphs is just cleaning “something”… digital entropy and neglect. If there’s a note it would be a note from me that I leave as part of my work that is candid about what happened. Maybe you could have the best of both worlds if the appearance of blood was a sort of phantasm- you think you are cleaning up blood initially but its just the dirt of time. Or wumpus blood that you make a mental connection to real death with before learning it’s just another peice of rotting videogame mechanics.
When Lars Nilsen was growing up in North Carolina in the seventies, his local multiplex used to program kids’ movies on summer afternoons. Stuff like Swiss Family Robinson or (far more meaningful to Nilsen) Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster that you could watch for a dollar while your parents worked. […]
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Since version 10.2, Modo uses the Instant Meshes algorithm to implement its automatic retopology feature. An interview discussing this technique and more recent projects is available here. The following binaries (Intel, 64 bit) are automatically generated from the latest GitHub revision. […]
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I caught this quick talk at roguelike celebration about Ursula K. Leguin’s The Tombs of Atuan, and how it was kind of a better fictional prototype for roguelike games like Nethack than the Tolkien stuff that’s usually referenced. I had coincidentally just listened to the audiobook on a drive from Oregon to California, and the book has been on my mind a lot as I’ve been thinking about Mud Room- I like the idea of performing as an NPC in my own game, as a priest or caretaker of a network of cenotaphs (empty tombs, the bodies are in the indexical ‘real’ world) of my family and ancestors. Instead of blindly attacking anyone who comes into the cenotaphs to loot or desecrate, my relationship with the places I am guarding is being questioned and re-evaluated, like the priestess in Tombs of Atuan. Cenotaphs might be abandoned or cared for. The maze of tombs is as vast as all life that has ever lived on earth, though many connections are barricaded or destroyed.
One of the things that having all text links for exits in Grotto accomplished was that any amount of exits could be added to a room and there was no need to figure out where to place them spatially. Mud Room is returning to a spatial representation of a room and exits, so this problem will need to be dealt with. Generally in a videogame we would make a room bigger to accommodate more exits. This makes me think that, like swordquest, there will be an “outer” side of a room, which shows exits, and then an “inner” side, which is the cenotaph, and is a more 2d conception that holds objects. This frees up the outer version to be shown and traversed in any way we like. This is the most poorly defined part of the game so far.
play.p5 has both sprites and animations that can be added to sprites. The sprite is what can be scaled, not the animation. Was able to remove the confusing push/pop scaling and positioning by directly positioning the sprites. Using sprites also alleviates the need to slow the frameDelay.
I’ve expressed this to Jenna, but I want this project to get its look from its processes and materials. Obelisk was a weird project where I strained to make unity look like a 1 bit Mac with some kind of big monitor and great processor and it was obviously dishonest, the comments on the itch page that I asked for where obviously fake, there was a winking fakeness about it that came from not having the resources to just write a Taskmaker-style game in Pascal or whatever on an actual old Mac. It’s ok to straddle time periods and refer to things, but I think there’s a way do do it, even with humor involved, that honestly inherits an aesthetic from actual processes instead of straining to make something look like what it isn’t.
Tried pseudocoding/sorta coding the initial gui for a room today in p5.js… I got about 50% there real quick and then everything ground to a halt as I tried to apply any juice to the play.p5 animated sprites (like zooming them a little to show which one was selected). You have to do all sorts of weird stuff in p5, like increasing the animation frameDelay by how many animated sprites are on screen :/ I didn’t think what I wanted to do was very complicated and I really liked the idea of having each room be an individual real webpage with some accessibility, but maybe I really do need to just make a unity game with an online database after all. ¯\(ツ)/¯ Or use something more complicated like phaser?
In a booth at Ted’s Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse. It was November 1994, just as the graphical web was becoming a thing, and we thought that the 3-D web could be just a few tweaks down the road. […]
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The python GedCom parser is maintained by Brigham Young University, The Mormon Church being famously obsessed with genealogy and the retroactive baptism of the dead. I wonder if its something I should engage with. Do cloaked figures need to be chased away from cenotaphs before they baptize my ancestors into an unfamiliar faith? To complicate things, I’ve realized that my paternal grandfather Red, who I never knew, converted to Mormonism late in life after abandoning my father’s family for a younger mormon woman.
Peter Burr and Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s 4-channel video installation Cave Exits (recalling both Hans Blumenberg’s ‘Höhlenausgänge’ and a history of cave exploration videogames) explores biology and architecture through a trans lens in a game-like zone with mutable parameters. Informed by both game and cinematic conventions, the project illuminates the challenges of both the world-building and self-building drives of game design and transness, and suggests an alternative to the ideas of completeness and stasis in both constructed world and constructed self.
I always bring up the Shapes (and Other Shapes) installation/performance I did with The Octopus Project and Everest Pipkin because it was probably the most fully realized non-movie art piece I’ve worked on in the wild before I started art school. One part of the show was a phone tree you could call that I built with the old ruby version of Tinsel. The phone tree was big and let the caller hear recorded and text to speech audio from Everest’s text generator output. This application had been running on Heroku for years and you could still call and play with it. Recently Heroku forced moving to a new VM, which required a newer version of Ruby. Updating ruby for the application was a nightmare of sorting out package dependencies, but after a day of futzing with it I got the dependencies worked out and was able to push to heroku and have the application build. But now when you call you get a voice saying “an application has occurred”. This all happened right around the time I really would have liked to have it still working to show at a talk I was giving.
I had to give a 10 minute talk yesterday in front of the faculty and cohort of my department on my art practice (Do I have an art practice? I guess I do). What seemed like a simple task went south on me kind of quickly as I raced through topics trying to stay within the time limit. Probably no one really cared but me, but all last night I found myself thinking “Why did I say that? Why didn’t I say that?”
I’ve just returned from a week of study under Allison Parrish at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Colorado. It was a week of studying a number of methods of generating and manipulating text using computation and machine learning. I had already been using the markovify python library to build text generators for a lot of my work, but this week I was really able to suppliment what I had been doing with a number of complimentary methods.
The year is 2021. The future has already happened.
This may be a reverie of our increasingly virtualized world that is submerged into a directional flow of information and disparate impressions that takes shape as a slow-burning anxiety; a rupture in linear time.
Composed of a single take, “Incomplete” invites us to traverse an endless choreography of bodies in perpetual free-fall and updating images that reflect a world in constant change.
“Incomplete” is an ode to what artist and media theorist Hito Steyerl coins the “poor image.” The image which is collected, copied, and processed to the point of disorientation and anonymity. The image which is not one but consists of many while presenting a different perception of coherency.
We had our DMA senior show, and I was really gratified that my friends played along and posted itch.io comments to situate the game as being a diminished version of some sort of idealized game from their childhoods.
I finally figured out how to situate obelisk and connect it to folks without multiplayer or networked elements or having the game placed in New Art City and it’s so simple and good and I am really happy and excited about it- like the last important puzzle piece just connected, and it won’t add any complexity or stress before the show.
In Race after Technology Ruha Benjamin describes whiteness as “a form of property.” That excellent phrasing made a connection for me to cryptocurrency “whales”, who are sitting on a massive investment that is slowly being shown to be a useless, massively-destructive waste- but in order to maintain the value of their investment they must convince new people to buy into cryptocurrency, driving up the price, but further shutting the door on legitimizing it as an actual currency. Whiteness can also be thought of as a sort of pyramid scheme- If you can convince someone of their natural superiority, or even their position as a “default” human, you continue to maintain the implicit rationalization of their place in an exploitative and violent social hierarchy, and dangle the hope of in-group citizenship as a carrot for any groups that could threaten to dismantle that hierarchy. I’m also thinking of the smirking cruelty of the all-pervasive crypto slogan “have fun staying poor”, and the edge of desperation that it carries- and how it ties in to ideas of class aspirations bound to extraction. I felt moved to include that slogan in the game, along with a reference to the stones as “whitestone”. I hadn’t yet addressed race directly in the game, but ideas from American Artist’s Black Gooey Universe are definitely part of the mix. And my fixation on the early macintosh was part of my own class aspirations as a child.
In Obelisk, the disaster to blame for the state of the game isn’t so much the invention of money, rather it’s a system of extraction and materialism difficult to challenge, since it’s enshrined in the rules of the game. The obelisks in the game can’t be reasoned with, they remove the slippery complexities of human judgement and relationships in order to assign value to humans and to smooth the path for war and enslavement. The NPC’s are just trying furiously to get some pie in the sky, and the ground is collapsing.
This was a vibrant land.
The limb of the horizon, viewed from the dark rocks of its shores, was engulfed in the green sea and the teeming business of whales.
The sun at noon was high and gold and blessed the air and the clouds and the collaboration of birds that bore it aloft.
The forests of this land were rich and verdant.
Its soils were fecund and bore great and plentiful fruit.
The people of this land were close and storied and they sang great epics of their histories.
The wildlife of this area was rich and too numerous to name in a lifetime.
It is said that even the animals of this land were heroic and had known deeds and adventures that changed the history of the world and of which humans could only guess at.
The stones of this land were full of beautiful gems and useful metals that were treasured but never knew a price.
The people of this land understood debt but minted no coin.
It’s said these people had no kings or queens, and all of those who lived here were equal and valued.
It is said that the days in this land were long and the weather fair.
The seas here produced enough fish so that the waters were always thick with them, shimmering like quicksilver.
This was a holy land. Its people loved one another.
This land was filled with music.
This was a peaceful land.
This was a land that lived in harmony with death.
This land knew no borders or flags but was prosperous and storied.
This land knew hunger and strife but persevered through work and kinship.
There’s some npc behavior now and one “ending” is in (and I need to finish in a week for the Capstone show) so I am calling this version 1.0 beta. ¯\(ツ)/¯ After the show I am going to need to stop working on this and move on, but it would be nice to revisit it some day collaborating with a “real” programmer to make it more deeply systematized. One of the things I wanted early on that just isn’t feasable with my current design and the time I have left was a sort of economy where the obelisks exchanged stones both through workers and then automatically when one territory encroached on another, and then a great obelisk that was some sort of representation of worker’s bodies tokenized in stones. It’s only kind of hinted at here. Also, slightly more intelligent npc behavior, it’s very clunky in my prototype.
Search is also more than the specific mathematical algorithms and deep-machine learning developed by computer scientists and software engineers to index upward of a trillion pages of information and move some from the universal data pile to the first page of results on a computer screen. The interface on the screen presents an information reality, while the operations are rendered increasingly invisible. 36 The media and communications scholar Alex Galloway destabilizes the idea that digital technologies are transparent, benign windows or doors providing a view or path to somewhere and in themselves insignificant-the digital interface is a material reality structuring a discourse, embedded with historical relations, working often under the auspices of ludic capitalism, where a kind of playful engagement of labor is masked in vital digital media platforms such as Google. Search does not merely present pages but structures knowledge, and the results retrieved in a commercial search engine create their own particular material reality.
Lots of lovely finds recently while doing research, in particular some period appropriate hypercard stacks, some of which I was able to reach their creator.
You ever get an idea for something that should be complicated, that you shouldn’t do, because your codebase is a mess, and you’ll probably need to refactor everything to get it to work?
And then you bang out some barely-not-pseudocode and it just works the first time you run it?
While looking for python fantasy map generators, I came across Martin O’ Leary’s Map generator and through it their NaNoGenMo entry The Deserts of the West, a procedurally generated guidebook that is pretty closely related to what I hoped to accomplish with the Obelisk manual, but a thousand times more technically sophisticated. The map generator itself runs in the page I linked as a sort of jupytr notebook style demo, or you can download and generate a full version of the book from Martin’s github.
I’m now successfully generating text from Python which is then in turn built into an ePub (with a web reader) by Triple Canopy’s B-Ber static site/book generator. This is pretty exciting to me. As a warm up I generated 100 tables of Potion recipes, preceded by a markov-generated fantasy quote:
“For most of my life, my experience of being trans consisted mainly of me thinking that some tiny aspect of my behavior could be a ‘tell,’” writes Allison Parrish in the introduction to her 2015 book Everyword. “As a consequence, I stopped writing stories. […]
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I’m starting to think now about the box, manual and ‘Feelies’ for Obelisk. The full piece should really push the dissonance between what’s in the game and what is hinted at in all the supporting materials. For the game manual, I’d like to have detailed tables of runes, crafting ingredients, spells, etc that I’ll likely generate with python scripts. I’m starting with some python scripts from Allison Parrish that help with creating “Asemic” glyphs. I’m building my versions of the scripts as she does in her example, using a Jupyter notebook. Even though these runes won’t be in the actual unity game, I’d like to create them with some consideration of how they might have fit in an earlier version of the game world. I think they would be cuneiform-like markings in the construction stones, they’d likely have square limits, and the marks would maybe be wedge-shaped like a marking-implement.
Quick bug fix, I had introduced a bug trying to start world space ui elements for individual obelisks that made all but the first obelisk territory broken.
Maybe this is overelaborate, but I keep thinking about how adding the ability to place stones back in the ground if they are connected on two sides gives the player a limited ability to restore the ruined world. You could potentially borrow from obelisks, rebuild the ground, decrease their power and just not pay them back.
This would likely be balanced out by npc behavior, as they’d be frantically extracting and repaying obelisks, but as that’s a future design problem to address, what’s a nice way to respond to rebuilding the ground?
I’m thinking this is the time for me to finally get to make a cellular automata- make a class of flower and grass objects that build off of the handful of grass sprites i’ve made, and allow them to reproduce in areas where there’s large plains of ground stones without obelisks.
To understand the history of the Web and the role of its users, it is important to acknowledge that people who built their homes, houses, cottages, places, realms, crypts, lairs, worlds, dimensions [Fig. […]
Link by Olia Lialina
After problems with an export bug in Glycon3d (that the developer says will be resolved in the upcoming version) and some problems with rendering, I was able to make a standard clip of the first portion of the piece, which is added to the videos section of the progress page.
I fed a few texts on different subjects into my python markov chaining script. I generated a few hundred lines at a time and then I pick through them, adjusting them and putting them in sequence that makes sense to me. I like to write this way because it feels more like gardening than writing, because it feels like I am writing with a partner, because I cannot speak for the dead or speak with authority, but I can do this- hold a seance.
I spent some time today playing with glycon3d animation in cinema4d (I’m relatively new to both). It’s an impressive piece of software that allows a vr headset and your hands or controllers to record mocap animation information and export it as an fbx of a mixamo-like skeleton. I’m still trying to use the animation fbx though. The skeleton it exports uses standard mixamo joint names, so I thought maybe I could use a retarget tag to add the animation information to my existing mixamo-rigged model, like so.
but a simple retarget ended up doing this, which looks like a skin glitch.
The Appalachian mountains share their story with us in many forms, beginning from their wise and weathered peaks, through their towering forests, and down to the rushing roar of their rocky streams and rivers. […]
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Celebrate ten years of Urban Omnibus and support ten more years of fresh, independent perspectives on citymaking with a donation today! Cell, cable, and internet service providers control fundamental infrastructures for communication and survival. […]
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[…] the underlying relational pattern of our contemporary technologies, especially as we move more towards artificial intelligences, is to find a way to maintain the extraction of labor that makes your life better, but to avoid paying any person or seeing any person or interacting with any person to provide those things. You would rather invest time and money to build a machine to do the things that people can do and have done efficiently and effectively (and to pay those people a minimum income instead), because you don’t actually want to deal with people. Or you know what you’re asking them to do is so demeaning and horrible and harmful that you want to escape the consequences of asking them to do these things, which means you don’t give a crap about your technology…
[…] wouldn’t it be interesting if we designed technologies that built relationships between people in the natural world and each other? What if relationality operated at the same level of efficiency as these systems of disintermediation that we’re building? And that, if you want to be innovative, seems much more worthwhile to put your energy into. That’s the real innovative challenge that we have. Making things work faster, we figured out that part. Can we make things work more justly and faster? That insertion of that value of justness, that insertion of that value of respectfulness, that will drive whole categories of innovation that we don’t even know how to imagine yet.
writing this down while I am thinking about it- instead of left click right click, only left click, there’s a cursor that’s a highlight that snaps to grid cells that looks like feet when it’s far away but walkable, looks like nothing when it’s not walkable, and looks like hands when it’s within one grid space away. if it’s one grid space away and you click it gets/puts a block.
my bff Nick Crockett fixed my pathfinding prob, during play it must not have been updating the navmesh, so placing block tiles wasn’t doing anything. Instead we use pf.SetNavTileBlocked(gridPosition, true); to add a pathfinding block. The problem with not following the path exactly I was able to fix with my pivot offset gameobject.
I spent the past 15 years flying to festivals, galleries, events, art fairs to exhibit and distribute my work while building my art practice. Most of these projects are unsustainable, so when I decided to lower my impact and cut plane travel, I started looking at alternatives. […]
Link by Joanie Lemercier
So obelisk is using a z-as-y tilemap that makes it easy to stack tiles as if they have height. I’m having a time figuring out how you will be able to click on an obelisk, including any of its stacked tiles, and interact with it though, as folks are discussing here and here.
Currently I’m cloning instances of a gameobject called obelisk that sits at the origin of each stack and holds things like the obelisk’s name, an id and height. I’m thinking that there should be a way to programmatically make that game object the same dimensions as the stack of tiles and make that the clickable part.
Obelisks are programmatically drawing their shadows and territories now. I will prob have to refactor a lot of this stuff once I figure out how adding and removing blocks will work as a function.
Over the weekend I got obelisks stacking programmatically. You’re able to sort through all the tiles on a tilemap a couple of ways in unity and I had to try a few. Initially I was getting the bounds of a tilemap using -
I got some assistance today with automatically connecting rooms by symmetrical exits from my friend Paul. Now, as you generate rooms they randomly link to up to three previous rooms, so that you get a repeating node pattern that balances out into shapes like the Hunt the Wumpus “squashed dodecahedron” I linked in an earlier post. I added a sidebar of exit links to rooms & made the bullets lil emoji doors because why not.
libsass is installed and working. I started making some cursory room styles with a couple of fun background-image outliers for weird room color names. Login/registration page is next.
I’m behind on figuring out stacking, but today I did some fun UI and background animation additions. I have a dithered cloud animation that looks great. I’d post video of it but any compression at all mutilates it.
Room detail pages are loading, room generator is working and creating rooms!
Before I start writing any css, I want to figure out how to install sass. Django’s default system of lots of app-level static folders confuses the hell out of me when it comes to managing css, I’d like a single compiled stylesheet and sass partials can live at app-level if they have to.
some grotto pomodoros- I got rooms listing at /mapBuilder/index.html and the button triggers the old room generator script, but the script still needs to be adapted to add rooms to the database not make flat html documents. right now markovify can’t find its corpus text document even though the path looks right to me.
Pomodoros today involved evaluating how the block-stacking function will work (goal is to implement this before the end of the week). For this I’ll need to be able to check a location to see if a block is there. We may be able to just check the grid location to see if the tile there is null (I kind of remember doing stuff like this in Thicket, but it might be better to come up with a way to store data about tiles like this.
To get a block:
pomodoros today involved tilemaps and tilemap colliders. Now the player is bounded by the ground tilemap (still a little weird) and can’t walk through tiles on the ‘stacks’ tilemap.
I made some progress today with the Django installation for Grotto. I had been stuck trying to get my new models (room, character) showing up in Django admin, but it was because I was trying to copy the pretty elaborate admin.py models for the tutorial polls app, which wasn’t working for some reason. Diana suggested I follow the general case from the django docs instead which was much easier-
Had time for some Grotto pomodoros today. I am most of the way through the django tutorials but I still don’t really know what I am doing. The parts that are the main mystery to me atm are views and models.Today I am looking at views.py. I conceptually understand what a view is in MVC but I don’t really know anything about the python functions that views.py is using to construct those views. Today I’m starting here in my reading.
This is the first (official) day of work on Obelisk. I had a previous project running where I experimented with point rendering and turning off anti aliasing, but it was a universal pipeline project and this time I am just working with a 2d only project. I’m going to switch the repo over to this new instance. Remember that even in a 2d unity project you need to set your camera to orthographic!
Animators often build characters and their motions at the same time, creating an equivalence between who someone is and how they move. It feels natural, but in fact it’s a technique designed to aid storytelling. It’s a fairytale of motion.
I reposted Paolo’s Games Without Players piece yesterday because every time I think about how best to situate Thicket, I feel like it would be as a zero player mode simulation, constantly reseeding itself. I don’t think of Thicket as being a particularly healthy space to inhabit, it’s purposely about themes that bother me- predation, hierarchy, violence, manipulation.
Is it bad that I am thinking of starting Thicket over again in something like Clickteam Fusion? I’ve never used Fusion before but it seems like it would be much better suited for this, Unity seems so sluggish for a 2d turn-based game, when a lot of the problems I needed to solve should have been boilerplate. Plus, I’ve overelaborated too early with things like piece movement and post processing layers. This should have started out as a grid with cells that fill with characters like emoji simulator or a roguelike, but I got fixated on trying out hexes because of games like Ogre and Hoplite, and the idea that there would be rooms. Now that I am thinking more and more about Hunt the Wumpus and its squished dodecahedron with 20 nodes I like the idea of linked nodes… that’s the simpler version of what I was trying to accomplish with a hexgrid and filled hexes for walls.
Thicket 1.1.2alpha is a little bit more game-like but definitely still an experimental space and not particularly fun. Thanks to James Curry, Nick Crockett and Alex Rickett for fielding my bumbling programming questions.
Maze generator is centered and working nicely now thanks to some help from James. I now need to stop manually placing player and npc objects and place them in unoccupied spaces in the mapbuilder script (right now if a tree lands on a character there’s a hang)
I’m back in Austin but I’m “bubbled” with my partner and her mom and sister. My Mother lives in Austin but I haven’t gone to go see her. We quarantined two weeks when we got here, and then my partner’s Mom had an exposure scare so we waited longer. My mother has gotten increasingly despondent, even though we had got her an iPhone and managed to show her how to facetime with us on it.
Today’s post is from Cindy Keefer, archivist and curator, Center for Visual Music. She’ll be here this Thursday introducing that evening’s screening, Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane. Jordan Belson is an enigma and a legend of the experimental film world. […]
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It occurred to me that since I’m already writing some python for this and I need a CRUD app with users and a database, maybe i should use Django for this.
Today I repurposed one of my python random text generators to use as a grotto page generator. Pulling from a corpus made of these dungeon descriptions, this spits out 20 html pages, with hashid filenames and titles from a master color list I’ve compiled (part of which I scraped from Joyce’s Ulysses with another python script). Then I try to detect major color words in those names and assign a background-color to the page body (this is one of those times it would be great to know how to use more advanced machine learning 😒). For not a ton of work, this is creating some pretty cool results! The room descriptions are mushed up rpg-inspired poetry which I like, since this game wouldn’t have any room interactions really, just moving from room to room, looking for/avoiding other people.
YOUR ONLY OPTION IS TO REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR STREAM THAT LIKE THREE PEOPLE WATCH […]
The purpose of this project is to demonstrate an alternative to centralized streaming platforms like Twitch. Instead of a very large, self-contained ecosystem, DIOS is aimed at small, self-governed streaming communities. By design, only one person can stream on a DIOS server at any given time – the inability to scale is a feature that is necessary for any sustainable online community.
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Anyone who came of age in the latter part of the twentieth century will recall the constant flow of animated cartoons that made up most of children’s programming on TV. In a culture of supposedly short memories, they were an art form that reached right back across time. […]
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Nice article about Riccardo Uncut on Artsy: “This Artist Duo Paid a Man $1,000 for His Smartphone Photos—and Turned Them into an Artwork“, thanks Scott Indrisek! Our new piece “Riccardo Uncut”, commissioned by the Whitney Museum, is public!!! […]
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For furniture designers, color is primarily about aesthetics; the designer chooses colors they like, or that they feel will have market appeal. […]
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A compilation of demos created at Bell Labs from 1981-82 on an experimental real time computer graphics machine known as the “Animation Processor”. […]
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The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faster communication would be an unmitigated improvement to society. […]
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against better judgement, the last 20 hours were spent driving feom LA to Austin, without stopping or having any contact with strangers. I’m about to collapse, but I had an idea during the drive. I keep interrogating these old game ideas (Thicket is a really old one) by asking myself, “how is this situated?” Where does the game go to connect it to the world and prevent it from just blowing away, never interacted with, like so much digital media in a now fathomless sea of noise?
I picked up this CJRB folding pocket knife on a whim and it has a really nice feel to it. The closing action is really satisfying and I’m almost wondering if there’s a little magnet in it (there’s not! The same tiny metal bump that gives a little resistance when you start to close it locks it when it’s closed. It’s folding on ball bearings).
It’s been a hairy quarter so far and I haven’t had a lot of time to look at Thicket, but I have been playing with maze generation a little bit. Alex Rickett sketched out a possible implementation of Primm’s Maze and I’m experimenting with parts of it. I’m drawing a hex-shaped island of ground based on a given radius int, then trying to draw a boundary around it (shown by these debug red dots) and then adding bramble scenery which are both opaque and add obstacle tiles (red dots). Right now the ring around the map is slightly too big and the brambles are drawing off the edge of the map, so it’s probably problems related to coordinate conversions. Also I’m not sure if Alex’s node-based solution is a good solution for me. James Curry also experimented with a grid-based version (all in php!) worth looking at here
As the 2020 presidential election draws near, March for Science and Voto Latino are making efforts to get people to the poll in Texas. News broke yesterday that Greg Abbott has issued a proclamation limiting each county to one location for dropping off mail-in ballots by hand. This is a form of voter suppression. Travis County, a county with a population of 1.2 million people will have only one location for mail-in ballots. March for Science and Voto Latino are continuing their efforts to fight voter suppression and mobilize people to the polls in Texas. March for Science provided links and resources to help individuals in Texas register to vote. In May 2020, Voto Latino sued the Texas Secretary of State over unconstitutional voting restrictions.
Many cultural designs are based on math and computing principles. This software will help students learn these principles as they simulate the original artifacts, and develop their own creations These applets run best using Chrome, and screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or higher. […]
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I haven’t had a lot of time to play with Thicket lately, but I updated FOV to increase and decrease with the in-game time of day. I did this by wiring the turn counter into a Mathf.PingPong function and using that as the FOV size int.
In 1562, Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder completed a painting called “The Triumph Of Death”. In this panoramic landscape the sky is blotted out by black smoke; ships and dead fish litter the ocean shore; and an army of skeletons experiment with myriad death techniques. The living are badly outnumbered and the variety of fated tortures seems endless. There is little room for whimsy in this tableaux.
It’s a normal afternoon in July. I’m at work in my little corner, speaking into the camera. The children are in their rooms, regressing. I leave the bedroom-office to get more coffee. My spouse is in our small kitchen, kneading dough while on a video call of her own. I eavesdrop for a minute. […]
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Field of view is working now. There were a couple of issues previously- one was related to a rounding error in hex line drawing, which James helpfully caught. Another was a missing hex-to-offset coordinate conversion. Now I have very nice looking FOV erasure of fog tiles.
Next steps will be to turn the fog on always and to map the vision range to time of day, so you see further during the day than at night, rather than night happening all at once, also I need to redraw the fog each turn so the fov is turn-by-turn rather than cumulative.
I haven’t posted about Thicket lately because I’m in a 6 week long compressed summer statistics course which is kind of kicking my ass. I am still consistently working on Thicket though. Right now I am working on field of view for fog of war. This consists of a couple of functions that I ported from the Red Blobs site with the help of James Curry. Field of View uses a rangefinding function and then uses a line drawing function to draw a line to every tile that range finds. If the line hits an obstacle then we dump the hexes from that line, if not, we add them to the array. Then I clear that array of hexes from the Fog tilemap by adding a null tile to them.
Right now the range function works and the line drawing function mmmmmostly works? (It draws some slightly irregular lines sometimes and I’m not sure why) But the whole field of view function is choking for some reason on the method I use to check for obstacles, which are a type of object I call scenery which can have a bool called “opaque”, instead of using the pathfinding tilemap which is a whole different thing. Now why this scenery check is causing a problem, I can’t yet determine. I’m using it in the Spoor script (spoor is the scent object that animals leave behind) to check for water tiles, and it works fine there, and uses the same kind of coordinate (offset) input. for some reason in my field of view function it hangs everything up, however, with no error. I miss having a class instructor to bounce problems like this off of- James doesn’t know/have Unity so he’s best to ask about things like the psuedocode on the Redblobs hexgrid site, not stuff deep in my unity project like this.
This piece seeks to contextualize the problems of the video games industry within its own mythology, and from there, to imagine and celebrate new directions through a lens of anti-capitalist and embodied compassion. […]
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Hylics 2 is a recreational program with a unique graphic style and droll scenario. The tyrant Gibby’s minions seek to reconstitute their long-presumed-annihilated master. It’s up to our crescent headed protagonist Wayne to assemble a crew and put a stop to that sort of thing. […]
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I was able to make my own functions to convert from offset coordinates (what unity tilemap and SimplePathFinding2d use) to cube coordinates (what I presumably need to be able to get hex ranges and line of sight). I replaced the square range finding for highlighting moves (which was complicated and distorted every other column you moved) for this hex one- this is currently just moving out in each direction in a star shape, but with a little more puzzling I should be able to get the whole range (I hope).
The original model I had for Thicket was for exploring the problem of how a powerless actor defends themself against a powerful one (the solution is still pretty ugly). So, what happens when we also design for the perspective of the predator that is just trying to survive? Or for the chicken that potentially gets sacrificed to distract the wolf from the deer? What happens when we say, “what’s the least awful solution to this problem?” (presumably one that kills the least number of pieces on the board). How do we design for a game that doesn’t conveniently end when the predator animal is killed or put in check or the prey animal is eaten? The answer is we try to imagine the best possible outcome for the situation, one where you can’t just redesign predation itself, and that’s one very much like the actual balance that happens in nature. Predators cull older, less healthy animals and the populations are relatively stable in this relationship. The other option would be to eliminate predators, in which case the prey animals might overpopulate and die of disease. Rather than treat the scenario as just a chess game, make it a simulation where the game never ends, but different kinds of stasis can be reached, like- everybody dies, or populations stabilize. So the original strategies of manipulating powerful animals into eliminating each other are still there, but that’s not the only level the game operates at- the game would continue if the player dies or the predator dies and you see what happens. Then use the engine to move on from the predator/prey problem and model different problems, the problems should represent themselves- they don’t need to be metaphors for anything to be valuable or meaningful outside of the idea that problems can’t really be solved by just ‘eliminating’ an enemy.
This stage of developement has necessarily been primarily a study in programming skills and design patterns for games. I learned a lot about creating event driven state machines, delegates, pathfinding, using singletons, and more. All of these things are currently incorporated into the game and will influence the development I plan to continue on it after this course.
I film for some of the top media companies and all over the world. When I have time I grab footage while I am traveling. Be sure to check everything out and … […]
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Ongoing investigation into the aesthetics of distributed networks, feedback, collaboration, and chaos in live performance/on the internet. is a browser-based platform for live coding visuals […]
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Consider adding Democracy Now to your daily news sources.
Verso Books has made the ebook of its book The End of Policing free during this crisis.
Consider a donation to national bail funds, as thousands of people are being unjustly jailed for protesting police violence. bailfunds.github.io
If you protest, here are some information security guidelines for using your phone. Here is a web tool for removing exif data from photos and bluring/blacking-out faces.
Game developers are putting together a bundle to raise money for Community Bail Funds and the NAACP Legal Defence and Education Fund.
If you live in a place where black voices aren’t heard, consider distributing this document to neighbors- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b9ym-YBA3njoU7De4UnTNMzWvPC7nQXP/view
I’m not sure if I have posted about the current structure of how things work, and it’s probably time to start documenting it now that I’m reaching my first sort-of-milestone: i.e. the end of the quarter.
In may 2006 Jos Dreesen send me the following photos of a surviving, but then not functional Lilith. In january 2008 Jos succeeded in having this machine running again, one of the few functional remaining Lilith computers (there may be a functioning one at ETH, about ten are known to exist)! […]
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So There’s a few ways of adressing a hex on a hexgrid. One is regular square grid style co-ordinates (just offset), and another is Vector3 cube co-ordinates- For a better description and visual aids, check out this page on red blob games.
This is a work-in-progress guide to web scraping as an artistic and critical practice, created by . I will be updating it over the coming months! I’ll also be doing occasional live demos either on Twitch or YoutTube. You can sign up to receive updates at: https://tinyletter.com/scrapism. […]
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Revising the split between the natural and the artificial, xenofeminism offers ways of constructing a viable future from former spaces of violence and inhibition. The Xenofeminist Manifesto is a particularly upbeat text. […]
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ABOUT NL_CL NL_CL (Netherlands Coding Live) is a self-organized assembly of live coding artists based in The Netherlands. NL_CL organizes monthly gatherings, discussions, concerts and other cultural activities to help bring together and give a platform to this community. […]
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I revisited the interactive fiction version of the game I tried to make a long time ago and forgot how dark it got. The wolf den is just called “bad place” 😕
Ok, refactoring was a very good idea. Nick suggested that we separate a bunch of stuff out from piece into behavior scripts, then get rid of the GameController script, make a pieceManager that is in charge of looping through pieces turns, and then have lists of behaviors on each piece that execute in order. Anyway, now enemy movement and eating pieces both work.
The suggestion for my AI movement woes is to refactor and create a player script and an ai script that both inherit from piece. This kind of depresses me a little but I’ll try it.
I’ve been stuck all week trying to figure out why my AI pieces aren’t moving when they seem to be correctly making paths. I’m sure it’s probably something easy about the way the simplepathfinding2d package I am using works, but I am stumped.
Conlon Nancarrow (/nænˈkæroʊ/;[1] October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was an American-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1956. […]
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Computers are the enemy … Third Avenue between 14th and 24th Streets is an unremarkable stretch of Manhattan. The street is lined with white whale apartment buildings, with the shells of that species of disappearing diner for which Forgotten New York grieves. […]
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So, I made a lot of progress the other day with the addition of Simple PathFinding 2d… I’m successfully drawing debug paths that conform to my hexgrid. The next step is figuring out how to grab a list of Vector3Ints for grid locations along a path and then turn them to world positions with CellToWorld and then step through them one at a time (each piece has a range var that represents how many spaces they can move each turn).
Gray Area Reads! takes a look at some of the original works around media theory, the confluence of art and technology, and the impact of technology on society and culture. Together we will work our way through discussions around how culture and technology can engage with society. […]
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As a member of the Experimental Response Cinema collective, Tara Bhattacharya Reed has curated many a thought-provoking screening of avant-garde cinema. […]
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Duration: 10 minutes “In this first film by Moholo-Nagy, the documentary description of everyday life in Marrseille leads to a study of the famous transporter bridge, which was a symbol of modernism for an entire generation of photographers and filmmakers. […]
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For as long as budget-strapped film and TV productions have existed, there’s been a cottage industry of “stock” music libraries providing them with cheap canned soundtracks, cutting the cost of hiring a dedicated composer. […]
The language of illness is a language of platitudes. Get well soon. Hoping for a quick recovery. Sending love. Take care in this tough time. Adjectives become few: quick, tough. The same verbs are used over and over: get, send, take, hope. The language of revolutions is also one of platitudes. […]
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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi charts the spiralling collapse of the social order under the effects of COVID-19. “The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. […]
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I played with those hexgrid helper classes for a while and then put them aside. I’ve decided to start from scratch and then return to them later. Right now I want to just conceptualize the most basic objects in the game, and if there’s something I don’t know how to do immediately I’ll pseudocode it.
In 1989, the American pundit Francis Fukuyama presciently declared the ‘end of history’: the collapse of all existing alternatives to liberalism. That apparently unassailable order has been crumbling for years. Coronavirus is the final nail in its coffin. […]
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McCoy Tyner, one of the most distinctive and influential jazz pianists of the past 60 years who became best known for his work with John Coltrane’s legendary 1960s quartet, died at age 81. […]
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You encounter so many people every day, online and off-, that it is almost impossible to be alone. Now, thanks to computers, those people might not even be real. […]
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Named by the British Film Institute as one of the fifty greatest movies of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction masterpiece called Stalker is, among many other things, a one-of-a-kind filmwatching experience. […]
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Netflix’s Maniac has a distinctively retro vibe. The producers wanted to create an actual mainframe that blinked and talked, so they hired Alan to build and animate it in less than a month. His experience was as crazy as the show itself.
The primary research for this essay was completed with support of the Media Archaeology Lab as an on-site resident in January of 2019. In the 1970s, the personal electronics market was experiencing a revolution. […]
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I don’t have much time to write about this at the moment because I’m in finals week, but this is the most amazing thing I have seen in a long time. AI text generation modeling classic text adventures that absolutely works, making the text parser completely reactive and creating dreamlike open-ended game experiences.
AUSTIN: This month’s East Austin Studio Tour will include a mega-restrospective of Fantastic Arcade commissioned arcade cabinets, with artist designed playrooms for each cabinet. Not to be missed
Cited by: , , , , , §1, §1, §2.1, §2.2, §2.3, §2.4, §2, Figure 4, §4. L. Gatys, A. Ecker, and M. Bethge (2016) A neural algorithm of artistic style. Journal of Vision 16 (12), pp. 326. External Links: ISSN 1534-7362, Link, Document Cited by: §5. I. Goodfellow, J. Pouget-Abadie, M. Mirza, B. […]
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slimetech.org ?? work by theo triantafyllidis ✓b. 1988 Athens, GR ✓does art with computors ✓based in LA, US ⌕ contact + cv news “Twister became a success when actress Eva Gabor played it with Johnny Carson on television’s The Tonight Show on May 3, 1966. […]
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Artist Kathleen Ryan creates a conversation between the beautiful and the grotesque in her oversized sculptures of mold-covered fruit. The New York-based artist uses precious and semi-precious stones like malachite, opal, and smoky quartz to form the simulacrum of common green rot on each fruit. […]
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Visual poetry Technopaegnia The Greek Pattern Poems are six texts transmitted by the Greek Anthology (AP XV 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27) and the Corpus Bucolicorum, ascribed to Simias of Rhodes [Σιμμίας Θηβανός] (“Wings”, “Axe” and “Egg”), Theocritus [Θεόκριτος ὁ Συρα […]
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CURRENT: Residency at Cashmere Radio, Berlin, May~June 2019VHS release on ARs Media, Baltimore, May 2019UPCOMING: Performance at Gardena Fest V, De Player, Rotterdam, June 29 2019RECENT: Screening at JIKAN Design Space, Osaka, May 11 2019Interview with MASSAGE, Tokyo, March 2019Screening at Museum o […]
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By Staff Writer Sep. 5, 2019 3 AM Deep in a basement laboratory at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, conservator Kamila Korbela peered at the moon-cratered image on the screen of her microscope, searching. […]
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|| by EDWARD CHARLTON || [updated] This month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Lilys’ powerful and mysterious Eccsame The Photon Band, a unique collection even among the oeuvre of Kurt Heasley, the band’s notably restless songwriter and only constant member. […]
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Along U.S. Highway 281 headed north to the Comal County line, drivers can see shopping centers and housing developments that look indistinguishable from suburbia elsewhere in the country. […]
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Minimalism can be luxurious, an opulence of absence. Brendan Landis, who records as Hey Exit, has found an opulent minimalism by taking some of the most spare music ever, Erik Satie’s classic “Gymnopedie 1,” and maximizing its presence through simultaneous repetition. […]
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This is a black and white photograph. Only the lines have colour. What you “see” is what your predicts the reality to be, given the imperfect information it gets. […]
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This demo shows that many types of sounds (e.g. textures, speech, environmental sounds etc…) can be heard to continue over short masker durations, but only textures elicit extended, multi-second illusory continuity. […]
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In 2011 I helped found Juegos Rancheros, an indie games community meetup group in Austin. The monthly meetups were initially meant to build interest and support for Fantastic Arcade, (at that time) the indie games showcase at Fantastic Fest. Over the years Juegos took on its own life, spawning other events, an artist’s residency program, game jams, and itself becoming a full fledged arts nonprofit. Fantastic Arcade grew too, splitting off from Fantastic Fest to become it’s own festival.
In 2007, the Brentwood Neighborhood Software Archive team was formed. It was intended to be a community effort to preserve the neighborhood’s electronic newsletters, flopty disks, and correspondence dating back to 1987. […]
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A new videoclip for delay_ok – an alternative music formation from Tricity, Gdańsk.
Every scene was prepared in Processing without use of any outsource code.
Because I’ve been studying animation for the last couple of years as a foot-in-the-door path to art school or a media design/theory program at a University, it’s occasionally easy to forget the broader picture of why I decided to start school. A big chunk of my reasoning was a desire to get involved with projects like Forest of Sleep. I’m very interested in both how we create our own meanings from randomness and how intentional meaning is encoded into things. Ed spoke about this project at Fantastic Arcade a couple of years ago and I’m excited to see where it goes.
Help an intrepid game conference attendee navigate the ins and outs of attempting to advance their career while also taking care of their body. Will you capture that coveted dream job or will you collapse from exhaustion? […]
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The Ground Itself is a one-session storytelling game for 2-5 players, played with highly accessible materials (a coin, a six-sided die, and a deck of cards). […]
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Flat is a library for creating and manipulating digital forms of fine arts. Its aim is to enable experimentation with and testing of unpredictable or automated processes, to inspect the beginning of the “new”. It grew out of the needs for generative design, architecture and art. […]
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I’m going to start using this space to semi-publicly start tracking time. I haven’t really worked out the best way to do that yet. I’ve been doing some time tracking of development work using WakaTime, but I haven’t been tracking the majority of my time, which has been spent on school work.
[Drew MacQuarrie] recently wrote some software to allow projection mapping using Unity. The project code is available […] here. Notes on how to use the software are included in the README of the project. One of the major hurdles was the different coordinate systems used by Unity and OpenCV. […]
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A pioneer of “Afrofuturism,” bandleader Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band. […]
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port of the Mini vMac emulator to iOS 9. You can see it in action on this video: You can import the ROM (vMac.ROM) and disk images (with .dsk or .img extension) into Mini vMac from other apps (iCloud Storage, Dropbox, etc), using AirDrop, or via iTunes File Sharing. […]
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Make games to watch robots play. For too long the exhausting manual labour of actually playing videogames has been outsourced to irregularly compensated, non-union Youtube employees at tremendous psychic cost to all involved. […]
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Tuesday, February 6, EDA, Broad Art Center, 6pm ”Traces of Toshio Iwai’s Media Art” Ever since he was a boy, Toshio Iwai has been creating media art in any imaginable form. This lecture will introduce an exceptional career that covers both high tech and low tech, digital and analog, personal a […]
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I have generally spent my entire career giving people compelling narratives for their misery. So in keeping with tradition, the bookends of this mix are things I have either played on, recorded, or spent endless days in the general proximity of the artists, and all are old friends. […]
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Following our announcement of brand new games from the artists behind Panoramical, Beglitched, Fjords and Strawberry Cubes making their debut at Fantastic Arcade, we have just announced more than 20 additional games rounding out this year’s showcase lineup. […]
The time has finally come! We’ve just started to announced our plans for this year’s Fantastic Arcade – our first year independently curating, organizing and operating the festival as JUEGOS RANCHEROS, hosted by the Alamo Drafthouse at their newest Mueller theater this November 17-19th (full […]
Hi, I’m artist and coder James Paterson. Norman is the animation tool that I’ve always wanted. I built it in JavaScript, it runs in a web browser and lets me animate naturally in 3D using VR controllers. Here’s the source code. […] Link
The Silent City II is an audience-propelled musical audio play set in the ambiguous future. Immersed in a glowing, dynamic environment, attendees will play audio consoles following a simple projected graphic score.* Due to interactive nature of the piece, attendance is limited. […] Link
The year is 198X. Disgusting creatures terrorize a small seaside town in Japan as reality starts to crumble, and the Old Gods reawaken to sate their primal hunger. It’s a losing battle, but maybe you’ve got what it takes to postpone the inevitable. The end of the world is at hand. […] Link
At some point, we’ve all wondered about the incredibly strange names for paint colors. Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. […] Link
Additional vocals on “Wrong Gong” by Toko Yasuda Additional vocals on “Woah, Mossman!!” by Madeline Allen & Valeree Rodriguez Trombone and Trumpet on “Ledgeridge” by Michael St. Clair Spiritual Advisor: Horry Manqs III Esq. PhD […] Link
Search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes. Unfurl tent flaps, cut through bushes, slam doors, and poke some crocodiles! Rooooaaaarrrr!!!!! February 15th on iOS, Steam, and Apple TV. […] Link
After more than 13 years of development, the HandBrake Team is delighted to present HandBrake 1.0.0. Thank you to all of our many contributors over the years for making HandBrake what it is today. We again remind everyone that the HandBrake Website is the only official source for HandBrake. […] Link
Join us, dear listener, on a long-overdue journey through some of the brightest stars in the night sky and discover just how easy-going this whole astronomy thing really is. […] Link
H.264 is a video compression codec standard. It is ubiquitous - internet video, Blu-ray, phones, security cameras, drones, everything. Everything uses H.264 now. H.264 is a remarkable piece of technology.
Monday is the first day of Fantastic Arcade talks and tourneys, but you can play this year’s games already, either in the Highball, in our Arcade lounge or at home, with five new experimental games that were incubated by Juegos Rancheros, the Austin indie game collective. These games are running in custom cabinets at the festival but you can get them together as a bundle from itch.io.
I have a short 4 channel video installation included Monkeytown 6, a scrappy experimental-video-dinner-theater-event that’s running for a few more weeks here in Austin.
Sometime last year I discovered that the blog I previously hosted at this address had become slowly riddled with spam links due to a security flaw in a Wordpress extension. I had been dutifully posting to it since 2002, as raw html and then as a Blogger site, finally as Wordpress. The spam was insidious- nothing overt enough to gain my attention at first, years-old posts were having random words linked to spam sites. I was able to fix the security problems, but the amount of effort it would have taken to scrub the posts of the links was too much for me to consider. Also, as I was flipping through the posts, I had an impulse to flush them all out and start fresh.
Nearly 30 session videos from Fantastic Arcade 2015 have been posted on YouTube. Fantastic Arcade is one of several game related events that Juegos Rancheros programs for Film and Cultural Festivals each year.
Spring break has given me more time to sit and play with projects. No big breakthroughs. I rewired the doorknob plinth from Doors and now the action on all the knobs and doorknob is much nicer than in the show. Unfortunately there’s still communication issues with the blinkm rgb light that lights up the keyhole. It’s possible that I rewired it wrong, but maybe more likely that it’s an OSC issue. It’ll take a little work to remember how it was meant to work and do some troubleshooting, since it was the last feature I added before the show and probably the least documented part of the project.
Do I even want to get this working again though? I can see it being part of a show with more grotto-related stuff, but part of me thinks it’s probably better to concentrate on other stuff.
Not sure what to tag today’s log, I’m still working with the tileset from Grotto, but it’s moving into other areas, like the cellular automata I started working with a few months ago. I’m starting to take all of the small javascript projects that use the tiles and bring them together into a single repository with a separate node.js app that would hypothetically get input from switches or other devices and then switch between/effect the small projects.
I haven’t been posting work notes while the world crumbles, but I’ve been keeping them locally. There’s been a few updates to the unnamed roguelike that are worth mentioning, the first is I’ve been experimenting with a creeping plant class, working off the idea that once the player dies the game keeps going, and plant growth would be nice. Other than that, lots of little tweaks, like refactored item and entity classes, arrows that can spread fire, fire destroying things, and I experimented with multiple player instances, which just worked on the first try.
Now I am deciding what to work on next. I think there was potential in the installation I did for my graduate thesis show, but it was missing some important pieces to be effective. The first think it’s missing is a legible mini-map. Navigating a maze that is a tree structure is incredibly frustrating. It’s maybe the worst possible level design. people get trapped in branches too easily looking for the one door back up. I’m experimenting with maps in the web game using the api, but it’s very difficult, as I’ve said before, to automatically lay these maps out. You really need a force-directed nodemap, which clashes stylistically with the patterned-tiles-on-a-grid style. I’m playing now with some nodemaps using D3, and I’m going to functionally solve the problem first and then deal with the aesthetics.
A big thing that is missing is fog of war. I made kind of a mess getting my Grotto tiles working and it’s not as straightforward as it would be in a normal ascii 
I added fire and death to the little rot.js roguelike game I am tinkering with. This is separate from Grotto but uses the same visual language. It’s a difficult proposition to try to integrate this with 
I also had some moderate success using my tileset to build a small dungeon map using the roguelike javascript library 
The scripts that generate book content from Grotto are done, the output requires a little bit of tweaking after they run, the pdf output looks good and I’ll try printing soon. This is going to be an expensive print job, as the book is over 1000 pages, 500ish 2-sided. I intend to print signatures and stitch it coptic, including whatever thesis writing is done.
I’m happy to share that I’ll be moving on to UCLA’s 
[…] 
Dizzying New Kaleidoscopic GIFs by Anna Taberko. […] 
The Oikospielen Opera is developing an epic global-gaming festival called THE GEOSPIEL, scheduled for the year 2100. […] 
Search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes. Unfurl tent flaps, cut through bushes, slam doors, and poke some crocodiles! Rooooaaaarrrr!!!!! February 15th on iOS, Steam, and Apple TV. […] 
Incredible design project of scale model working lego devices
[…] 
