I am extremely excited to announce I have a NEW book coming to Kickstarter Sept 22. It's literally called "FUN." Sign up below to get alerted when it launches 👇

From the vault: Rocking January 2007 with my new Les Paul Classic guitar. All I recall from that session was the cold 😅👍 In other news: I am doing much better, thanks for the well-wishes!

Normalize fucking with the surveillance state. (reposting for alt text)

I have no interest in your inability to guard against null-pointers, all I want is functioning software, Adobe.

Create a drum of any shape and hear how it sounds.

https://eigendrum.com/#p=circle

' Striking a spot drives each mode in proportion to how much that mode moves there. Hit a line where a mode stands still and you cannot excite it at all. That was not programmed in; it falls out of projecting the mallet onto the modes.

So a strike is never one mode: it is every mode at once, in a mixture set by where your mallet landed.

Writers: here are ten free and easy ways to add a dash of visual interest to your blog posts without resorting to AI imagery (which signals to readers that your blog post is probably also AI and there’s no need to bother reading it):

1) A thoughtful photo you’ve taken yourself — a nice sunrise you saw, a cool angle spotted on vacation, your pet curled up on the couch, flowers. Play with your phone photo app’s filter settings to nail the tone. It doesn’t need to be particularly related to the post, it’s related to you as a person.

2) An image from Wikimedia Commons that’s somehow related to the subject matter — there are unfathomably many, you can search by keyword. Remember to credit. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

3) A screenshot of a scene you made in a sandbox game such as Minecraft or Animal Crossing

4) A scene you made with toys such as Lego (you can also use free Lego design software such as Bricklink Studio) https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/main.page

5) Play with the effects in whatever image editor you have access to, using your own photos or free-to-use images, to create something a bit abstract and avant-garde

6) Even if you can’t draw or paint very well, you can probably make some pretty cool abstract or collage imagery with whatever art supplies you have around. Dampen some paper and randomly dip watercolor paint onto it and see what happens

7) Those stickers you stashed and never used? Yeah you can make something with them. If they’re individually cut, you don’t even need to peel them, you’ll still find the One True Way to use them one day, I’m sure

8) Shelfies. None will dare question your competence after they see you have a real paper copy of Subject Matter Tome Volumes 1 through 6

9) You can get a lot of mileage out of compositing pre-made video game assets into an image. A good place to start is Kenney’s free and generously licensed 2D assets: https://www.kenney.nl/assets/category:2D and the Tiled editor which is specifically meant for assembling images out of video game asset tile sheets https://www.mapeditor.org

10) the most ridiculously amateurish thing you can scribble on a post-it note or in MS Paint is preferable to AI imagery because it clearly signals a real human cares about the post.

#writing #writingcommunity #collage #blog

Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse

Here’s some things that actually haven’t:

• Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
• Solar: cheaper than natural gas
• Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
• Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
• Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
• Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
• Union membership in the US: rising
• Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
• CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
• Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
• Electrical access: still rising worldwide
• Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
• China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
• You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster

And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.

Improvised eclipse watching can be fun

Inspired by @mavica_again I made some classic anti-AI HTML buttons myself. Feel free to use them, no attribution required 😊

You can get them from here:
https://pixelprophecy.com/stuff/item/images-phils-no-ai-html-buttons-vol-1

#noAI

new web button feel free to use

Inspired by @mavica_again I made some classic anti-AI HTML buttons myself. Feel free to use them, no attribution required 😊

You can get them from here:
https://pixelprophecy.com/stuff/item/images-phils-no-ai-html-buttons-vol-1

#noAI

I'm super pessimistic when it comes to the #videogames industry. I don't see a bright future for us all. More than ever, buying, playing, SHARING video games is a political act either you want it or not. It says what you'd like the industry to be in general.
Please, look who makes games. Learn about your favorite #gamedev. Review their games. Interact with their content. This industry is doomed, but we can all make it a little bit better while it still exists.

Because of Twitch/Amazon's shenenigans I had to add this to my About page there.😮‍💨

At some point I might even fix the typo 😅

Was just made aware of this over on Bluesky, so might was well spread the word here too:

Twitch has just rolled out a setting that allows them to train LLMs/GenAI on your channel content (and it's enabled by default, of course).

You can turn it off by going to Settings > Security and Privacy > Training for Generative AI (gotta scroll all the way down).

Alternatively, here's a link to your Security and Privacy panel ( https://www.twitch.tv/settings/security ): all you gotta do is scroll down and turn it off.

Here's how to opt out of Twitch's new generative AI training setting.

https://www.404media.co/twitch-training-amazon-ai-models-how-to-opt-out-setting/

Submit original #music, #animation, #shortfilm and #shorts at https://theindiebeat.fm/the-indie-beat-tv/#form 📬

Total Replay v6.1 is out. It features 519 Apple II games, all playable from a single bootable 32MB hard disk image. This version primarily fixes several crashes discovered by our new automated testing framework.

https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay

Code & changelog: https://github.com/a2-4am/4cade/releases/tag/v6.1

No LLMs. We tested every game, we squashed every bug, we sweated every pixel, for 7 years.

Thanks to @a2_qkumba, @txgx42, @helix_nrg, @Roughana, Frank M, and everyone else who contributed.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

Loom (DOS EGA)

After working on Multi-GIF Studio for almost 2 years, it's almost ready for launch (Win/Mac; Linux next).

Few weeks ago I shared some vertex color comparison GIFs that had a mosaic of 4 views, I was testing this tool (and I lied for whoever asked if they could download it and I said no 😅 ).

It will be 100% FREE donation-ware via itch and my website (or paid via Steam/Mac App Store, same version).

I created a newsletter for it, if you want to hear the launch: https://tinyurl.com/multigifnews

Does your screen capture, whiteboard and editing software have a @kenney (asset god) theme? What about an @aseprite theme?

Does it have pixel perfect drawing tools? Can it handle and edit a multi-track GIF with 5 MILLION frames (a 45h GIF 😅), doing everything non-destructively and instantly?