It's been a while since I last posted here. Work has kept me super busy, leaving little time or energy for side projects. I'm making an effort to dive back into books instead of crashing in bed the moment my day ends.
The only side project I'm currently active on is img. I aim to return to my new x220 with 9front, but time is limited. With a trip to Spain approaching in less than a month, preparations are a must.
Life — an endless weave of people, requests, and demands.
My front row seat to a view of endless waves, oscillating back and forth; sometimes going fast, sometimes going slow. Did you know? The highest part of the wave is called the crest, and the lowest part is the trough. In the crest, I can feel the warmth of sunshine on my face; but when it blocks out the sun while I’m in the trough, temperatures run frigid and it becomes cold and dark. “The trough is a rough place to be,” they say.
But doldrums are worse.
With doldrums, there are no waves, there is no wind. Empty. Desolate. Enough to drive you to the brink of despair. It could last for maybe an afternoon, maybe an entire day, until the wind picks up again and I am momentarily saved from limbo.
But the birds always know.
Birds sit in the water when they know there won’t be wind. And all that means is I’ll be stuck here for just a little while longer. I recite my ABCs and count 123s, forwards and back. Like a blunt force trauma to the head; anything to numb the mind and keep it from slowly untethering.
When the wind meets the water, I go through the motions all over again, moving up from the crest, down to the trough, drifting like driftwood, as lost as I’ll ever be.
I always forget about the wind. The birds never do.
Up before every sunrise, not much time to take the computer out of the chart table, drifting in many fjords through countless snow-covered mountains, taking too many photos.
I honestly believe Steve Albini, as humble as he was, shaped modern alternative music in countless ways, many of which are still under the radar and yet so fundamental.
It would be an understatement to say that my life wouldn't be the same without those specific sounds and shapes. His legacy is far more than just a 90s thing, his style urges you to feel artists' emotions in a way that most producers still dream of.
Goodbye; your records will spin endlessly.
2024-05-06 - Kill them with kindness - Cutting Tofu
My hands are trembling, I’m dripping in sweat, my heartbeat racing— have you come prepared? People are waiting; let me carve out my own chest first.
I pop a pill for every disorder, who knows how long I‘ll last. I can’t keep steady, you better be ready to catch me else I stumble on my two left feet.
Beat my notes hard and jam my toes. I’m afraid of falling off the cliff, the floor is caving in, and the music only gets louder, a rising crescendo cut short by staccato. This isn’t hokey pokey, I’m already out.
Muttering to myself, words to my own inner monologue breaking out of my skull. Don’t put me in asylum, I’ll only escape. But I’m a prisoner of my own inanity; I won’t make it out very far. I can’t go on, I’ve already lost control. Even the Scared is scared of the things you’re scared of. What is left? What is left?
The following program lets you scrub the mouse downward to find more and more precise approximations of π within the red optical sight in the center of the screen.
We've stowed away our 120v devices, untied the lines and begun our sail north toward Juneau, Alaska! During the next few days, we will sail through the inside passage and out the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
As we hop between anchorages, I'd like to try exploring the question: Is a graphical environment running on top a naive string rewriting computer possible, or even usable?
Pulled a badass 3-disc CD changer/AM-FM radio/tape deck combo stereo system out of storage today for the purpose of digitizing some old cassete tapes my dad had laying around so I could tape over one of them in order to use another, vintage tape deck he also has for some reason to generate authentic lo-fi FX™ to use in my music.
That project's on hold for the moment, though, since my audio interface apparently has two mono inputs, and getting stereo audio into it requires running a splitter, which I presently don't have, into both, so I'm waiting on one I ordered online to continue with that. Regardless, I didn't actually have a dedicated CD player despite my extensive collection, so this thing has earned a place atop the cabinet where I store them.
While my dad was demonstrating its functions to me, he implied it must seem strange and archaic to me, like when his dad would show him the old reel-to-reel projector while he was growing up in the '80s, which seems a weird comparison to make given I own literally dozens of CDs and remember using this exact unit growing up. Though, it's not like I ever touched the tape deck.
Speaking of my music, I've actually started making it again! I'm close to finishing the third of a planned four of these EPs I've been doing with the eponymous basic-shape-headed Guy on the cover. Only problem is I'm having a hard time coming up with cube-related wordplay I could use for a name. Fortunately, for reasons that will become clear when it releases, album #4 will not have this problem.
I finished the hakum sequence kaizah. I'm pleased with the result! I also went over a lot of the comics in the hakum archive, as I've said before they are no longer canon, but I did update some of the text anyway to bring them more in line. The handwritten text wasn't easy to read, so I updated all of them with the font I made(see making a font). I also published an older short sequence I had finished named aftermath that follows night terror, a short comic to show that Dae and Seir have a really difficult relationship.
I released a new Wunderland Rabbits image. Spring is here on the West Coast of Canada, camas plants are in full bloom. We are getting ready to depart for northern waters, filling the boat with food, gathering e-books, etc.
Because I am learning modern standard arabic on the side, I've started keeping notes! I will append to this page as I go.
To recap, you basically have a line of cells that can be in one of two states ('alive' or 'dead') and rules that decide how a cell's state evolves based on the state of its immediate neighbors to the left and right. The images below show a snapshot of time in a row of pixels, and time advancing from the top row of pixels to the bottom.
Starting from a single live cell, of the 256 rules 16 immediately wink out (empty grids in the picture below), 16 don't change (vertical lines), 48 move the cell (24 each to the left and right), 30 grow into triangles over time (6 each to the left and right and 18 on both), 18 form Sierpinski patterns and 22 are more chaotic. Here's a detail in Lua Carousel where you can see many of these types.
However, things look different if you start from a random configuration of live and dead cells. Seemingly well-behaved rules hide subtleties, and seeming patterns vanish.
For a given rule, different random initial configurations largely look the same from a distance, which suggests random selection yields more realistic pictures for a rule.
Eye-balling the surface, I think 47/256 rules are chaotic.
Rule 30 is the famous one, but my favorites are rule 150 and 165.
(I've also been skimming Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" as I do this. Wolfram separates "nested" from "random" patterns, but that seems to be an artifact of starting with a single live cell. "Nested" patterns (like Sierpinski triangles) are just a milder kind of chaos our visual cortex can get a grip on.)
Starting with a single live cell is 'simple' but grossly incomplete, exercising only scenarios 0, 1, 2, and 4 in the first step.
And if we truly care about simple, why not just start with all dead cells? Rules don't care.
Anyways, I see two fairly simple initial states that exercise every possible scenario in time step 1: the mirror images 10111 and 11101 when surrounded by runs of dead cells.
Now I see only the one real stable rule: rule 204. 204 is binary 11001100, each bit of which is exactly the middle bit of numbers 7-0. In other words, every scenario maps to the central square.
Even here, though, the long runs of dead cells keep the "true nature" of a rule from coming out. I think random initial conditions do that much better.
Perhaps what would be best is to keep our simple pattern in the center exercising all scenarios, and then pad it with a random initial state. We do have to remember to pad it out with 3 dead cells. Let's do that on both sides for symmetry.
Ah, here's a nice screenshot of a central portion of the ruleset, ideal density for chaos to emerge.
Wow, March just zipped by. It was packed with stuff to do, and here I am, almost at the end of April, finally taking a moment to think about all that happened.
Honestly, March was way better than February. I felt like my life had a bit more sparkle, and things just seemed to go my way more often.
I got my hands into a bunch of different projects, which was cool. Plus, I'm back working out of an office space that wasn't my home for a couple days a week, which honestly helped me keep a solid routine.
Ah, I also attended an ambient music workshop. it was pretty neat.
March was also about healing and grieving. Right after it, April came along with its own kind of intensity, but in a good way.
So, looking back, March was like this quiet little haven for me to get my head and heart back on track.
This month I got out more than usual. Spent more money than usual, too, both on necessities and otherwise. Tip: you have to make yourself a present now and then. Besides, like a good friend says: we don't do this every day. It still feels wrong to spend money, then ask for help keeping the website online.
There was good weather in early April, too good for the season. It was fun going out to see nice places old and new — the more things change, the more they stay the same, and life goes on; but the city feels too big now, while I grow tired too easily. All the noise and chaos aren't helping, either.
These days I write story fragments that don't go anywhere and sketch art pieces that never get fleshed out. At least working on my websites is going well.
Well, it's real now. We are moving to Nashville. I came to Boston in 2009 to study computer science and stayed for the career opportunities, loud and then quiet music scene (where I met Alejandra), and the wonderful friends we've made over the years.
Becoming a parent has reinforced how important family proximity is. Last year {was a doozy}. There were tough, tough moments, both from the challenge of Keep Baby Healthy and stress from my work. We have friends who would leap to help us here in Boston, but it's intangibly different. It feels like asking for a favor rather than something unconditional. I'll note how lucky we are to have a family like that.
I spent the last week starting to prep the house for a move, packing the basement and de-cluttering. We put loads of free stuff out on the curb which was scooped up with alarming immediacy. My parents visited to hang with Meadow and help prep. It was a good week.
I'm especially proud of some repairs my dad and I made: each room has a spot where where radiator pipes penetrated the floor. Those radiators now removed (we replaced the gas furnace with heat pumps a while back), the holes are apparent and unsightly. We cut fit pieces of hemlock and plywood to plug the holes and artfully stained them to match.
Tomorrow is back to work, though. Woke last night to an onslaught of stressful work thoughts I had blissfully suppressed for the week away from the computer. Alas.
A lot of work ahead to do the whole sell house thing, but very excited to be close to parents and brother.
2024-04-20 -
I noticed I have so many things I want to talk about on here, so I better hurry up and create a section for writings. However, it's not gonna be something that uniquely hosts elaborated and long forms of text: I've made that mistake once, and the result was that I simply stopped writing stuff pretty soon. Instead, the only requirement I'm setting for something to become a "writing" is that I can give it a title. That's it, which is good enough to differentiate it from the kind of "whatever I have in mind" stream of words that is the journal, this section.
But aside from that, how am I feeling? I'm not sure. I've set up a personal server through cosmos cloud, I've been ripping my many CDs onto it and being extra careful with metadata. I've been replacing KDE with GNOME, just because I needed some change. I've started Fallout 3 once again - will I finally get to the end of the storyline without losing interest? All of this is somewhat covering up the harsh truth: I'm procrastinating, because it's time to study again. I have five exams to take, and I'm getting assaulted by fear and anxiety. Everyone's telling me it'll be fine, but I feel a bit lost; if I like these topics so much, why is it so hard to absorb them? I am at this point too old than I'd like to admit, and time is taking a toll on me in terms of my decisions in life: am I just lying to myself about my studies? Am I just faking the enjoyment and the excitement I get out of these things so I can have something to grasp onto while I live?
After finishing the map, I've been paying attention to the "meta game" of manually adjusting box positions and widths (height depends on amount of text) to make the arrangement pleasing to the eye. Constraints I've grown conscious of during this process:
Lining up child nodes vertically
Lining up nearby nodes. (imperfectly)
Avoiding long edges.
Keeping nearby edges approximately the same length.
I'd appreciate if anything seems jarring in this image, or if you have new OCD rules to infect me with :)
One frustration: I spent a while adjusting widths of boxes to not wrap lines within words, only to find that adjusting zoom messes things up again. This is an old problem: I can have precise scaling or crisp text, but not both. All my apps choose the latter.
