March 2008 Archives

When you can teach programming, master the innards of the C++ newsgroups, do SCUBA, caving, edit open-source map data for kicks in your free time, travel to foreign lands, program flash games, and still make the remainder of rent via your pirate-themed web site, you know you're good.

You probably already know that Gary Gygax is dead. What you don't want to know, is that upon hearing the news, I immediately wanted to compose a clever haiku on the subject.

Still working on my generative art homework. Set up eclipse to pull the processing via svn, and configured a builder to run make.sh with MinGW's (or was it MSYS's) sh.exe and an appropriate PATH variable. It seems like it built ok, but the output gets clobbered by the messages from shell script about finding quicktime java. What I don't know now, is how to make-install. Maybe that's the other run.sh. But I still have to poke at it and make art.

The Crack Master has done some dope-ass audio for a great game mod, and works with me as an audio dude.

He's also really into math, audio, and many forms of art; he turned me on to (you got it) Dwarf Fortress, and some generative art tools. And all of Alistair Reynolds' paperbacks. Crack I say.

Almost has me inspired to tackle my least favorite topic, sequences and series, and get back into math. Almost.

Well, no he didn't. But he did write a shit-ton of space opera science fiction that consumed my daily El and Metra commutes. And after having sucked those down, reading the plot description of Mass Effect did not really inspire me to think 'Wow, what a cool RPG!'. I was more like, 'Whoa, what a derivative idea'.

A Spectacular New Vision of the Future
---------------------------------------------------------
The galaxy is trapped in an endless cycle of extinction. 
Every 50,000 years, an ancient machine race invades the galaxy. 
With ruthless efficiency, the machines wipe out all advanced organic civilization. 
They leave behind only the scattered ruins of technology, 
destroying all evidence of their own existence.

However, the wikipedia plot summary (which you will have to go see on your own, since it probably has some spoilers) makes Mass Effect seem more reasonable. And the videos look pretty dope. PC should be out soon, so they say.

I'm off on a kick to grab and use processing to try to make some generative art as part of my generative art homework. I'll post results on flickr and link here. I'll probably also kick it around the Eclipse IDE and try to rebuild it. Wish me luck.