drawn in the gaps

I had very little time for fun things this month, so this month’s piece is a very simple colour-tracking webcam toy. You can select a pixel from your webcam and the shader will then fill in all pixels of a similar colour with a colour of your choice. And you can play with some of the parameters for different effects.

I had plans to implement fancy fire effects in the shader, but I ran out of time, so it’s just a very simple toy that you can play with.

Download drawn in the gaps

Controls: escape: quit; left mouse button: select tracking colour; f1: show/hide parameters; tab: hide/show webcam; space: pause

The Rules:

• The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (3/3/23).
• All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
• All source code and assets are included, licensed under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
• As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.

Further Reading

An absolutely fascinating paper on how cognitive science’s overwhelming reliance on exclusively studying the brains of English speakers has massively impacted (hindered, really) scientists’ understanding of the human brain.

Andi McClure writing about Sylvie Lime. I’m including this really for the screenshots she includes at the end, the text of which I’ll include here:

“In areas like consumer product design, it’s often said that good design is “invisible”. Game design is the opposite. A good game should get up in your face and force you to struggle with new ideas. I don’t want to be invisible. I want you to understand that there are real people behind this work who poured their heart into it.”

(I think I said last month that the writing in Sylvie Lime didn’t really work for me. Looking at those screenshots, I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. This is exactly the kind of writing I want to see in games)

Closely related to that is Sylvie’s The Designer’s Heart Laid Bare essay from last year, and this follow-up post on cohost where she talks about Doug Wilson’s concept of Dialogic Game Design.

I like this concept of the dark forest of the web, and how the flood of AI/ML systems are in the process of massively decreasing the signal to noise ratio of the open web.

National Rail have uploaded a series of cab videos chronicling the West Highland Line in gorgeous Autumn colours:

• Mallaig → Glenfinnan
• Glenfinnan → Spean Bridge
• Spean Bridge → Rannoch
• Rannoch → Crianlarich
• Crianlarich → Arrochar & Tarbet

I really liked Queer Man Peering into a Rock Pool.jpg.

Reading Ian Bradley’s The Coffin Roads this month lead me to this beautiful version of Pi-li-li-liu, part of an old death keen (caoine). Bradley quotes John Purser explaining the structure of the caoine:

“The caoine was in three parts: a deep murmuring repetition of the name of the dead; a dirge (in Gaelic tuiream) in which the dead person’s character and virtues were evoked; and the third part was the call or cry (in Gaelic sesig-bhias) - a chorus using meaningless syllables, perhaps to establish contact with the other world, as may have been the case in fairy songs.”

Stunning pictures from a (very) early morning hike up Ben Nevis.

I’ve just started reading Max Haiven’s Art After Money Money After Art, but already there’s 2 paragraphs that really jumped out at me:

p.11: “Capitalism and other systems of power are ultimately vested in how we cooperate; they can only be overcome or changed if we cooperate differently, not only on the level of small experimental collectives or individual subcultures, but as a society. If the radical imagination is something we do together, art can and should be part of that doing. But in a better society, where that doing was truly liberated, I find it implausible that we would still have a discrete category of activity known as “art.” Creativity, imagination, autonomy, symbolic communication and intellectual play would, I should hope, be integrated into the fabric of life, not (as today) encrypted, dead and yet alive, in a rarified sphere of “art.”“

p.14-15: “”Art” as the unique product of a creative genius is a derivative of the rise of the moneyed bourgeoisie who, unlike previous versions of the ruling classes, did not imagine themselves to have an inherent right to rule. Collecting, patronizing and cultivating an appreciation of “art” as such offered them not only a means to ornament themselves and sequester their ill begotten wealth in precious objects, it also offered a point of individual and collective pride in their intellectual caliber, their social benevolence and their moral and cultural rectitude.”

Well, I kind of left this to the last minute this month so I should really wrap things up, but I hope you’re doing okay out there. I’ll see you again in a month.