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.
The roguelike game portion of the software sketches is also haunted, on some windows machines it hangs on page load WHEN it’s running alongside the game launcher. Why?? It’s fine on the mac, and it seems to be fine on the windows machine I plan to have it on in the space, so I am not touching it again until after the show.
I had to switch from three synced raspberry pi’s to a mini pc for ‘video goldmine’. It’s so much video footage that it would have been a huge task to recompress it to work with Batsly’s custom player. This will be less wires, less speakers, it’s fine. It was just kind of an expense and I don’t have a lot of money right now.
Painted the sign, it’s obviously paper maché but I think it’s fine. This is a very DIY affair, and it’ll be outside. Not sure how I’ll light it yet.
returned to the writing. It’s still all over the place but its starting to knit together more. I had wanted to add a branching text mini game to the software that tied into it more (a prophesy generator that would connect to the geomancy sketch at the beginning) but it’s getting too close for me to keep messing with software and potentially adding more bugs.
Meeting with James tomorrow to pick Spectrum games and demos to put on the Spectrum Next. James was nice enough to code a front end launcher in BASIC, that looks great.
I’m pretty sure someone could level criticism at this collection that it’s very loose, that there’s too many pieces, maybe that the software stuff I did doesn’t tie in close enough to the writing? For me the writing isn’t an explanation of the work, it’s a story of how I got from one influence to the next, what I was thinking about while I tinkered and made discoveries.
