Daily quilt poems, The Oregon Trail, and flower clocks

Hi, another Lee Tusman email about my current projects. It's nice to have a place I can share my things that isn't on some corporate platform or making money for a billionaire. Here's what I'm up to. Feel free to respond to this email and let me know about your projects or link to music you're listening to, good books, protests, etc.

Request for help: If any academic friends have ever published a textbook or similar through turning their curriculum / class notes into a book, I'd love a chance to chat with you about the process. I take extensive class notes for each of my classes and basically build up a textbook with my own notes and (mostly) creative commons sources. It might be nice to package these as books. I'm also going to work in the fall to turn my podcast interviews into a book as well.

Working with 50 year old video games: Hamurabi, The Oregon Trail, Drug Wars..

I'm speaking at the Electronics Faire on March 14 at Temple University's Charles Library. This is a free conference with performances, talks, workshops over two days.

My workshop is Programming a BASIC game. I'll be speaking about the history of early BASIC, communal game-design, games as simulations, and show early games Hamurabi, The Oregon Trail (originally from the 60s, then ported to BASIC in the 70s), Star Trader, Lemonade Stand and others. Then I'll show YABASIC, a modern BASIC variation that dates to the mid-90s but has been updated up until today and works on every computer platform and we'll make some games together. I've ported a number of 70s games from the great BASIC Computer Games books to a modern Basic implementation.

One way to die in my game Gobi

I've written some blog posts on my process to port the original code from the 70s. You can read about Hamurabi and The Oregon Trail and I'll probably post some more. It's pretty fun working with code and comments from before I was born. When I get closer to the conference I'll post all of the code online on a page so that the games can be played or adapted into new works. Some of the games I've made so far: a protest-consensus decision-making sim, a dopewars clone, a science fiction cyberpunk game, and a few others.

Generative daily quilt poems

Something small: I turned my Quilt Poems project into a daily quilt poem site. Each day at midnight a new visual poem quilt is generated.

Lazy Gal is the style of quilt pattern in the above generated quilt. Other styles include: log cabin, bullseye, amish bars quilt, little coins, big quarters, checkerboard, and more.

Is there an after-taste of life in these graves? (website)

The site I built for Sara and Michael’s exhibit at Timeshare Gallery is online. Its full title is Is there an after-taste of life in these graves? And in the flowers’ mouths do bees find the hint of a word refusing speech? O flowers, prisoners of our instincts toward happiness, do you return to us with our dead in your veins? Flowers, how can you escape our grip? How can you not be our flowers? Does the rose really use all its petals to fly away from us? Does it want to be only a rose, nothing but a rose? No one’s sleep beneath so many eyelids? The site works like a 24 hour film. I programmed it to run like an extremely slow flipbook animation. Here’s a screenshot of the site at the moment about halfway through the minute at 2:13pm. Due to the fires in LA the exhibit opening was postponed, so I wasn't able to attend the opening.

Mini tools: Pomodoro Timer and LoremSoft

I made this a while ago but added some improvements last month.

If you own Pico-8, you can find this as Pomodoro Timer in the splore. Or anyone can access it through the web player. Someone I don't know commented they used it as an egg timer!

LoremSoft Lorem Ipsum generator

I also built my own little shareware-like Lorem Ipsum generator LoremSoft, and in the process wrote a small tutorial for generating text with Tracery on a website.

Tiny technical log

Speaking of programming, I started a tiny log page on my website to track my progress on all of my projects, if you need even more writing from me on the technical aspect of my work, screenshots of my projects, and the like ;)

Links page

I added a links page to my website. Would you like to be added there? Let me know.

In cahoots, Lee

P.S I'm not up to commenting on our dictator-in-chief and threats to society currently. But suffice it to say, yes, let's do it.