I like this one :)

Whoosh

Here's another one. It looks like it's all being sucked up into a giant vacuum cleaner in the sky.

3D-ish texture

Most of you know by now that I've been writing code to randomly generate blobs like this for some time now. The only new thing is the texture (most visible in the light areas above). I was led by a friend of mine to Ken Perlin's "Making Noise" tutorial, and sort of adapted the general ideas from that. My images are completely 2D; there is no Z dimension involved whatsoever. But Ken's noise algorithm (and my bastardization of it) can be applied to 3 or more dimensions, so what I'm doing is "lying" to it. I'm telling it that the original "un-noised" brightness of the pixel is its Z coordinate. So now the noise sort of warps itself over this dimension that never really existed in the first place, and gives the appearance of depth; your brain is left with the responsibility of interpreting whether bright is close and dark is far, or vice versa.

Stamp out illiteracy: snuff an illiterate!

Well no, no, don't take that at face value, I'm actually anti-homicide.

Yesterday, I hit the "next blog" link in the upper right hand corner for the first time ever. It's random. So I kept doing it, and laughing at how horrible some people -- most people -- are at managing, maintaining, or even grasping the concept of a journal. Sometime when you're in a relatively curious and masochistic mood, you should try it yourself.

When I found any decent ones, I bookmarked them and left comments. I figure if you're going to wade through a bunch of garbage, you may as well plant your flag when you find anything that isn't.

So here are four that I liked reasonably well:

http://onewhippedmother.blogspot.com/
http://jessicajournals.blogspot.com/
http://frankeleynstale.blogspot.com/
http://crushedbyinertia.blogspot.com/

And just think, if all the others didn't suck so magnificently, I probably wouldn't even be mentioning these four! So here's a great shout out to the unsung heroes, the mountain of illiterate (both regular illiterate and computer illiterate) morons that help make the few decent writers shine all the brighter. You are the wind beneath our wings.

I think I'm going to cry.

Flows right off the tongue

One man's thing that he does as a last resort to cover up something that sounds crappy, is another man's sound that he's heard on the records since he was young and now hears in his head and devotes himself to achieving.

Okay, so no one, not even me, is going to be able to remember that word for word. But the idea of it is still interesting. Some of what you're working on right now might be just busy work or problem solving, but could still be magical and inspirational to the next guy.

The magic 40 ms, imminent collage

This is the me you won't like so much -- the just waking up, thirsty, headachey, sore-necky, no directiony me. Hopefully a little later I can come back with good stuff to report on, in spite of the tension that comes with knowing my whole life is one big overdue library book.

A couple of cool things I've done over the past few days: more work on the remixes for the first two songs from TFBD. It seemed like song #1 was going pretty well and song #2 was going to need a lot of work, but now I've kind of reversed it where I'm really happy with song #2 where it's at. I got it to that point -- the holy grail of anything I'm working on -- where I found myself saying "okay, I'm just going to listen back one more time", and I wind up playing it "just one more time" after that, and so on and so on.

I don't even think I did anything drastic to it, mostly compressed and EQ'ed the bass, EQ'ed the drums, and did some nitpicky things with a few notes that sounded a hair off, either nudging their pitch or their time. 40 milliseconds seems to be the perfect amount to nudge something by when it's on the right beat, but just feels a little too loose or draggy. Yes, being this picky can make a difference, because it impacts feel. I think the reason it works is because, to my ears, 20 ms is just small enough to be rhythmically imperceptible -- so if you go in increments of twice that (40 ms), you're bound to get within 20 (the "happy zone") pretty quickly, usually within one nudge for that matter.

Another thing I did yesterday was to go through all of my photos (prints, not digital) -- I have few enough that they all fit in one of those envelopes that you'd get your photos in when they came back from the "de-vel-o-per", that is if you were shooting pictures back in my day -- to find a few reasonable likenesses of myself to put on my bio page. I have a few more than I need, and they range from semi-flattering to ridiculous, so I'm trying to figure out how I might arrange them into some sort of collage.

Multiple choice question (easy)

Which of the following is true:

A.) Generative == the only relevant art today
B.) Generative == neat way of doing background stuff
C.) Generative == altogether useless

If you picked "B", give yourself a cookie. Yeah, I know, it's the middle ground; I would be a lot more interesting with a more extreme position. I've also thought about publicly pretending the generative stuff plays a larger role than it really does, making it my "schtick". "Ooh, how clever, his computer is the artist and he's the manager!" But, sadly, I have other talents.

Warning signs

How do I know when it's time to put a remix away and clear my head?

There's no one-size-fits-all answer, but ... when things are sounding great, it's so close to wrap-up time I can taste it, and I suddenly find myself, in all sincerity, thinking "hey, maybe this introduction should have a cello on it" ... that's generally a good indication that it's break time.