The "I Want to be an Artist" Post

There was some mention of a show in Chicago in February. I would like to start having a dialogue about the details so that we can plan what we are going to do.

Chad is the curator so I believe he should start. How big are the rooms? What is the rough layout like? Drawing, painting, multimedia installation? Some sort of theme or just cool graphic stuff that people would want to get tattooed across their stomach?

I also think Pete should spend his time making cool art for the exhibition and not detailed computer models and schematics of a tattoo parlour (unless that is part of his art.)

"Punk Rock tried to kill the Metal . . ."

The "Online Gaming" Post

I recently upgraded my operating system and this gave me easy access to a number of mature, free, cross-platform, online games. I have got myself hooked on TREMULOUS, which is an online ego-shooter with a few building and strategy elements thrown in. It is a lot of fun if you get on a server where players do not spend the whole time camping in their cushy base. I would like to renew our gaming sessions and thought this might be a good place to start.



"You cannot kill the Metal . . . the Metal will live on."

Other ideas are:
Sauerbraten
Scorched 3D

These sound even better but I have not tested them yet:
World of Padman
Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory
Beyond the Red Line (Battlestar Galactica!!!)

Blebs!

Check out the menagerie on Golan Levin's page. A few of his applets and flash widgets haven't aged well (the novelty is gone) or don't work (at least on my installation). Several of them, though, still have the "gee whiz" appeal so important to the milieu he works in; even a decade after being made, like Blebs and his portraits grown from Voronoi diagrams (both pictured below). I think it has to do with modeling the mathematics of the natural world. (Yep, definitely something like that.)

Link to Blebs.
Link to Voronoi portraits.
Link to Golan Levin's page.

Notrium

I found a game somewhat similar to the one you were describing to me, Alex. It is a freeware game of the survival genre, and begins with the player's character crash landing on an unknown alien world. The gameplay seems like it could be quite rich, but it is also incredibly difficult. It might be worth checking out, none the less.
Link via Abandonia Reloaded.

Roller coaster

The engineers at our firm are designing the footings of this new roller coaster. (The ride itself is being designed in Germany.) I saved myself from drawing and redrawing hundreds of boxes by writing a Visual LISP program that reads the spreadsheets of design data, and then draws them for me. This is pretty "junior league" and is a simple program, but I have never worked with LISP before, so it was an exercise in "stare at it until it makes sense". Anyway, it feels good to circumvent a month of work.