everything again
An idiosyncratic drawing tool which gives you 3 mins to create art with a limited selection of tiles and colour palettes, each of which is chosen for you by the tool itself. I made this in a very short period of time, so the limitations might be annoying more than fun, but I like the visual aesthetic of lightly textured, tile-based pixel art.
This one was heavily inspired by my discovery of Mrmo Tarius' work, particularly images like this, where there's a light overlay on top of beautiful, crisp pixel art. There's something really appealing about lightly-textured pixel art; I wish more people would experiment with that kind of style.
Download everything again
Controls: escape: quit; mouse: draw/interact with UI
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (4/5/24).
- 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
A wonderfully-written look at the inner workings of F1 and the extreme wealth of the people involved. Wayback machine link, as Road and Track (who originally published it) clearly bowed to significant pressure and pulled it from their site.
v buckenham released Downpour this month; a really cool tool for making games with your phone. They also created a fantastic video explaining how the tool works in just 90 seconds. Here's the game I made.
Sticking with v buckenham, they also created this site for watching Marie Foulston's documentary The Grannies, a beautiful document of 4 Australian devs' explorations of the glitchy outer limits of Red Dead Redemption 2.
...which led to Ian MacLarty, one of those aforementioned devs, attempting to recreate it as an intentional experience, in Red Desert Render (best played with friends, if the server is behaving). I originally played Red Desert Render with friends a couple years back; now that I've finally watched The Grannies, it's remarkable how close MacLarty's game gets to the sense of awe and strangeness conveyed in the documentary.
"Beginners face a language problem: they can't ask questions because they don't know what the words mean, they can't know what the words mean until they can successfully use the system, and they can't successfully use the system because they can't ask questions."
Phil Agre: How to help someone use a computer (a lot of the advice here is generally applicable to a wide range of topics, not just using a computer)
Image Without Metaphor: Vicky Osterweil on Dune Part Two and the general recent tendency to steer away from metaphor and ambiguity in favour of strict literalism.
Closely related: Kayin on Design Lateralism, the Demon's Souls Remake and Why AI Art Can't Be Creative, but is Still Inevitable.
And sticking with Dune, An Anarchist's Guide to Dune; a fascinating look at Frank Herbert Jr's life and books. Including the influence of a former Washington anarchist commune named Home. Warning: this is a novella-length article, and does spend a good chunk of its word count recapping the main Dune books.
A microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects
Empires, a beautiful 64k demo by Conspiracy. If you've got a reasonably powerful PC I'd recommend running the executable; on youtube the video compression does it a disservice.
Another one from Kayin: Mario 64 B3313, Intended Experiences, and a bit of myhouse.wad. I hope we see more people exploring the design space that B3313 and MyHouse.wad inhabit; it feels like one of the most exciting things happening in videogames right now.
I love this DJ set by Charli XCX and friends (warning: flashing lights).
After a very long time spent not making music, I actually recorded a bunch of tracks earlier this year, and have just released an album under the alias while falling. It's a series of single-take recordings with a single Moog Subharmonicon and varying combinations of the same 3 audio effects (Reaper's Floaty Delay, Valhalla DSP's Super Massive, and a custom granulator plugin I coded myself).
It's also kind of open source; if you purchase it you get a link to the reaper project files and stems, plus the granulator plugin itself. I don't know if this is interesting to anyone, but it seemed like a fun thing to do. And if you're curious, I also filmed the final track on the album.
Anyway, hope you're doing okay out there. I'll write again soon.