Lizard persons not depicted.

Since then it has garnered an astonishing ~500 GitHub stars, blowing past all of my other open source project repos. It made it to the front page on Hacker News and friends tell me it got featured in multiple tech newsletters.

It only took me a couple of days to put together Doodle CSS. The idea is one I've had for a long time though. The right combination of knowledge and motivation finally arrived last week and spurred me into action to implement it.

What a strange world it is building in public. Imagine spending your whole life as an open source developer with low-key popular niche repos, and then a literal scribble that took two days to make is what everyone latches on to.

It's useful feedback though, and that is the value in building in public. It seems like I've hit upon some deep seated doodle desire with this release. I feel like there is something bigger here I should develop. I will think about this some more.

For now I am happy with this as an open source project that other people are enjoying, and I'll admit the brief glow of popularity is very enjoyable.

I thought it would be fun to set the graphics free and see what other people do with them. Let me know if you make something using Doodle Rogue!

I'm relatively new to drawing. It's taken a couple of years of drawing badly to get to the point where I am comfortable enough for a tileset. This post is to show you some betas of the tileset I'm working on, and also the art that has inspired this work.

Doodle Rogue work-in-progress sketches

Here are the tileset beta sketches.

Doodle Rogue scenery sketches

Doodle Rogue item sketches

Doodle Rogue character sketches

Doodle Rogue mockup sketch

There is a ton of work still to do on these. I need to redraw them as vectors and clean them up, and finsh drawing the remainder of the tiles.

Research & references

I used Pinterest to explore different reference styles for the tileset. Here are some of the artists I am using for inspiration and referencing. There are actually a lot more references than this but these are some anchor points that have stood out.

You can find my game-draw reference pinterest feed here if you care to follow along.

Dom 2d

Dom2d has been a big inspiration for my drawing in general. I love the balance he strikes between quick-draw simplicity whilst still looking good.

Slowquest (Bodie H)

I love the gritty detail in Bodie's drawings of items and dungeons. Studying his work has taught me a lot about texturing with lines.

Timecowboy

Timecowboy is a web comic artist.

Varguy

Varguy has the rare skill of the ligne claire artists, combining seemingly simple shapes and lines into images that really come to life.

Mike Yamada

I found Mike Yamada's work when reading The Noisy Garage to my kids. I love his animal characters.

Moebius

That's everything for today. I hope you've enjoyed these images.

I thought back to when I was learning to code with my mother on our Apple IIe. The computer was ours. The code was ours. The data was ours.

I thought back to shareware. First diskettes and then FTP. I thought about my first website and those first Multi User Dungeons. Nethack and newsgroups and bulletin board systems. Trading ware with friends. I remembered running Linux for the first time on a Pentium. The freedom and power of getting to do what you want with your computer and a network connection. How can we take our computers back?

I started thinking about what a personal computing platform would look like today. A platform that a kid could jump right into and start coding. A platform where a kid could build cool stuff without asking for permission. Systematic convex tinkering with computers. Where they could own their software, and their data, and their device.

A way to make, run, and share web applications without needing site hosting, SSL certificates etc. An app repository and a text editor in a single web app. A way to share apps peer-to-peer, directly between trusted friends, family, and associates.

Then I re-read this:

• Personal computers – in the original visions of many personal computing pioneers (e.g. many members of the Homebrew Computer Club), the PC was intended as personal property – the owner would have total control (and understanding) of the software running on the PC, including the ability to copy bits on the PC at will. Software complexity, Internet connectivity, and unresolved incentive mismatches between software publishers and users (PC owners) have substantially eroded the reality of the personal computer as personal property.

This desire is instinctive and remains today. It manifests in consumer resistance when they discover unexpected dependence on and vulnerability to third parties in the devices they use.

Nick Szabo in Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes.

This is the important thing. It has to be self sufficient. It has to work properly whilst depending as little as possible on third parties.

Last Monday I started building this. It's called Slingcode. With it, you can write, run, and share your own web applications directly in the browser. You don't need any build system, hosting provider, SSL certificate, or any thing else. You don't even need an internet connection. Just a web browser and the single HTML file containing the Slingcode web app.

Stay tuned.

Last week I was in Singapore with my friends PVI Collective, consulting with local artists Ekamatra and Drama Box. We were hacking on eachother's artworks in their studio loft above Chinatown. Locative code, smart watches and dark LARP-arts - it was like I'd stepped into a post-cyberpunk William Gibson novel somehow.

I also gave a talk at the Singapore JS meetup on Bugout, the library I wrote to help build decentralized web applications. You can watch the talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfPX-dR6LeM

This trip gave me the headspace to think about priorities and progress on my side projects. At the moment I'm focused on two main things apart from paid work.

Firstly, I'm working towards the launch of the paid version of SVG Flipbook, an SVG animation utility for people using Inkscape and Illustrator. Hopefully this will be ready for launch in the next couple of weeks. This is a project I started a while ago and I'm coming back to now.

Secondly, I had some time to think about and work on WebRTC Signaling Mesh, which is coming along nicely. It will be a way to do WebRTC signaling without resorting to centralized services. I've had the design floating around my head for a long time and I've finally begun implementation. Will hopefully have an update with progress on that soon.

Thanks for tuning in!

Droneship. Study in the style of thisnorthernboy.

Yesterday I released Hacksilver, an album of procedurally generated "algorave" music. Some people had questions about the technology used to write it so I thought I'd write this up.

The beats and melodies were generated using drillbit, a LISP codebase written in a Python variant called Hy. The project outputs Impulse Tracker mod files which are then played and mixed live.

The interesting parts of that codebase are in the generators folder. For example the drill-n-bass choppage generator is here.

Each generator has three functions:

• make-sample-set: which generates IT wav tables that are used by the generator (e.g. individual drum kit or synth sounds)
• make-pattern-settings: which sets up parameters & context that will be re-used by the pattern generator to provide similarity across pattern variations
• make-pattern: which outputs the pattern data in a format easily consumed by the Impulse Tracker file writer

Mixing and live-effects are performed in Pure Data. Originally I was using a fully software based mixer. However I discovered that a nicer mode of operation is to have individual bits of sound generating/filter hardware chained together. So I started using this Raspberry Pi based mixer + FX unit from another project to mix live.

One other bit of software in there is jsfxr which is wrapped by the LISP code and outputs 8-bit synth sounds (which are then used by the pattern generator). Because the synth definitions are simple JSON hash maps there is a fun pseudo-evolutionary technique I was able to use where you interpolate between the values of two synth definitions to generate new sounds based on two synth definitions that you like.

I also built a little hardware Impulse Tracker renderer based on a Raspberry Pi running XMP with my friend Dimity. It has a Pocket Operator style sync output and runs directly into the mixer that both share the same timing and the fx can be quantised to the music which is playing.

If you're interested in the music hardware that Dimity and I are building and selling you can stay updated at bzzt.studio.

In the image at the top of this post the hardware Impulse Tracker renderer is the little box on the right hand side. The RPi mixer/fx unit is to the top right of the C64 keyboard. The Korg Nanokontrol2 strapped to the C64 keyboard is controlling the fx and mixing parameters on the RPi. They keyboard itself was for playing live synth sounds (a very simple arpeggiating subtractive synthesizer built in Pd).

I just released Hacksilver, a new album of procedurally generated music.

It uses a whole slew of weird tech to generate the beats, melodies, synth sounds including beat-generating LISP, 8-bit synth generating Javascript, and Pure Data for the mixing and mastering. One thing that was particularly fun was procedurally generating Impulse Tracker files.

Would appreciate a re-share if you know of anybody who might be into this type of thing.

Enjoy!

Speccy is a browser based environment for live-coding 8-bit algorithmic rave music in ClojureScript.

You can watch the videos of everybody who participated here.

SVG Animation Assistant is an open source companion application for Inkscape.

It runs along side Inkscape and helps you animate by cycling through the layers of your SVG as you edit it.

This allows you to do basic flip-book style animation. Each layer in your SVG is one frame of the animation.

Customise frame timing and behaviour by editing the layer name:

• Set the number of milliseconds to pause on each frame by entering a number in brackets in the layer name like (100) for a pause of 1/10th of a second.
• Add static background frames by putting (static) in the layer name.

The animation live-reloads in the assistant window whenever you hit save in Inkscape.

Run on Linux

If you are a Linux user you can use the online version of this app.

You can get the full source code to this application on GitHub.

I had an idea for a video game a while back. It's a multiplayer mission game with rogue-like elements, set in various procedurally generated airports through which you can transit.

Airport ambience by wichiogarcia on freesound.org

Everybody's missions are all mixed up together, so you might have a mission to deliver a package and somebody else's mission is to stop you. You might be trying to transit throuh several airports and other people are trying to catch you. You might be trying to find an item that somebody else has hidden. You might be chaperone to a VIP and the VIP is another player. Missions would last an average of 5 minutes each and feature a count-down timer as in the game Counterstrike.

The visual style would be vector based similar to those isometric maps you sometimes see in airports.

I don't play many video games but I very much enjoyed the pace and aesthetic of the game Rymdkapsel by Martin Jonasson.

I found it was an easy game to put down and pick up again for short bursts of play.

Probably my favourite video game is Another World by Eric Chahi which features a vector style and is similarly easy to play in small increments.

Recent-ish sketches. Been learning from The Etherington Brothers, Dr. Seuss, and How to Build Treehouses, Huts, and Forts.

Speccy is a small utililty I built for live-coding chiptune music in the browser with Clojurescript.

You can copy sounds from sfxr.me and paste them in as synth definitions, using code to modify any parameter over time, or start from scratch by building a synth up from basic parameters.

You can paste the following examples into the online editor to try it out:

; blippy synth
(sfxr {:wave :square :env/decay 0.1 :note #(at % 32 {0 24 3 29 7 60 12 52 19 29 28 52})})

; donk bass
(sfxr "1111128F2i1nMgXwxZ1HMniZX45ZzoZaM9WBtcQMiZDBbD7rvq6mBCATySSmW7xJabfyy9xfh2aeeB1JPr4b7vKfXcZDbWJ7aMPbg45gBKUxMijaTNnvb2pw"
      {:note #(or
        (at % 57
          {5 35
           27 34})
        (at % 32
           {0 24
            6 29
            18 21
            26 12}))})

; hi hat
(sfxr {:wave :noise
       :env/sustain 0.05
       :env/decay 0.05
       :vol #(sq % [0.3 0.1 0.2 0.1])})

; snare
(sfxr "7BMHBGCKUHWi1mbucW62sVAYvTeotkd4qSZKy91kof8rASWsAx1ioV4EjrXb9AHhuKEprWr2D4u4YHJpYEzWrJd8iitvr23br2DCGu7zMqFmPyoSFtUEqiM64"
      {:note 36
       :vol #(at % 16
         {4 0.5
          12 0.5})})

The full source code and documentation is available at GitHub.

Enjoy!

I'm playing a show tonight at the local science education centre, Scitech, for their adult event, After Dark.

I'll play live electronic music using some Gameboy, Commodore 64, and Raspberry Pi gear and algorave Pd patches. I'll also give a little talk about the tech and how it works.

A couple of years ago my friend Joe recommended this stuff called Plastimake to me.

It is a hard plastic which goes soft and malleable at around 60 degrees celcius. You drop some in boiling water until it goes clear and soft and then you can mold it into whatever shape you want. It cools and hardens again quickly in whatever shape you have molded it into. You can re-heat it to soften and re-use it again.

Scout and I have used it several times to hand craft little figures for play. I've also used it around the home and when prototyping things as it's a very quick way to get a hard plastic into exactly the shape you want.

Here's their video which is clear and honest:

• In which physical folder is my child's birth certificate?
• What items of mine are not here?
• How much hand soap refill is left in my bathroom cupboard?
• What is the smallest storage space in which I can fit all of my furniture?
• Which items that I own do I never use?
• At what time of day do I interact with different items I own?
• What is the total weight of my filing cabinet and work desk?
• I need a new one of these, pull up the page where I purchased it in my browser.
• This thing does not belong to my grandmother. Who did she borrow it from before she died?
• List the items in my craft box which have "needle" in the name.
• How much television are my kids watching and what percentage are educational shows?
• Are there any NE5532s in my tool box?
• Graph my family's diet composition. How much of it is fresh food?
• Place a grocery order under $50 for the items I most commonly use that I will soon run out of.
• Search all of the physical books in my personal library for the following phrase.
• Are my running shoes in this house or the holiday house?
• We are leaving this hotel. Have we packed everything?
• Where have I put my phone and keys?

Most of these question could be answered without an internet connection. "Of Things" sounds kind of weird by itself though.

"Internet connected lightbulb" does not provide a use-case that anybody wants or needs.

The things should be telling us their data. They should not be telling corporations our data.

What you want is dumb little things that do one thing well. Good traditional design plus CPU, I/O, and memory.

Things that talk straight to us [and nobody else] with IR, sound, light, QR code, and raw radio.

Is there a word for "Internet of Things" objects which don't have an internet connection?

Maybe "ov things" lol.

"Neat little ov thing you got there friend."

Secret project.

I just finished another sketchbook.

Recently a friend linked me to The Etherington Brothers and I've been doing their tutorials.

Lately I've been concentrating on plants.

In the style of this guy in the style of Scott Robertson space ship sketches.

Some mountains I copied from some website.

Scout and I made this stop-motion short film.

How we made it:

• We used an old Android phone with one of those $10 phone tripods to take each frame.
• We flipped through the stills in Ristretto by hand, recording the output with RecordMyDesktop.
• We used avconv to convert between formats.
• We used Audacity to record the audio.
• We used OpenShot to edit the video.

No point crying!

-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-- Thoreau, Walden

Over the Xmas holiday my friend Fenris and I built this geodesic dome (actually a truncated icosahedron) out of corrugated plastic sheets and gaffer tape.

It took about 4 hours over two sessions of cutting and then taping.

After 14 years of playing music together on Gameboy Advance and Commodore 64 my buddy Fenris and I finally recorded an album while he was visiting during Xmas.

You can listen to the album for free or purchase a download for however much you like.

All of the software we use to play music is Free and Open Source:

• Looper Advance
• aSid
• Raspberry Pi FX unit
• c64 paddle MIDI controller

I hope you enjoy the music.

In November I was in New York for PdCon 2016 and to visit my brother, thanks in large part to my friend Joe Deken and his not-for-profit, New Blankets.

The conference was fantastic. Many fascinating performances, a chance to catch up in person with people from the Pure Data community, and the opportunity to present and perform some of my own work. A highlight for me was hearing Miller Puckette, creator of Pure Data, talk about his approach and philosophy.

On top of that I got to catch up with some awesome people outside of the conference, especially my brother. We went hiking together one day - a rare opportunity to hang out together in nature.

Tonight my friend Fenris and I will play some music in a park here in Perth, Western Australia, on Gameboy and Commodore 64 powered by batteries and broadcast over FM radio to local speakers hanging from the trees. We'll start playing at 9:30pm and after us our friends Atomsmasha and Kataplexia will also play some music on Gameboys.

Might see you there!

Drawing practice in the style of Ben Hatke.

Scout and I finished Zita the Spacegirl recently which was a wonderful adventure.

Tap or click to interact with them.

More here.

Source code here.

I am trying to teach myself sci-fi style vector painting and this a piece that I think meets the post-on-blog standard.

I tried to copy the basic palette/mood/style of this image.

I am playing algorithmic rave music at Rhetoric in Western Australia.

• February 5th, 2016
• Game city { Raine Square / Perth Train Station }
• Doors open 6pm
• $10 Entry
• Free arcade games
• With: chr15m, cbat, marko maric, atomsmasha, kataplexia, amnesia, polite society & free arcade games.

"An astronaut stranded on an alien planet, with only a few minutes left to live."

Orchids to Dusk had a powerful effect on me.

I dreamed about the game the night after playing it.

The creative power of code is the microwave background radiation of my subconscious and this game made me notice it again in a visceral way.

Inspirational.

Instructions: grow the white square's heart by clicking and dragging to the other squares.

Link to the game here.

Source code here.

Play/review/rate it here.

A "zero asset game" is a game that does not use any external art assets.

Game art is instead generated procedurally or by using artifacts of the rendering environment.

The following is a screenshot of a tiny game engine I built a little while ago in ClojureScript.

The renderer runs on Facebook's React library so it is just a couple of lines of code.

I've spread it over several lines here for readability:

; DOM "scene grapher"
[:div {:id "game-board"}
  (doall
    (map
      (fn [[id e]]
        [:div {:class (str "sprite c" (:color e))
           :key id
           :style (compute-position-style e)
           :on-click (fn [ev] (sfx/play :blip))}
        (:symbol e)])
      (:entities @game-state)))]

The sprites are utf8 characters which are instantiated like this:

(make-entity {:symbol "◍"
              :color 0
              :pos [-20 300]
              :angle 0
              :behaviour behaviour-rock})

The function behaviour-rock here gets called once per frame and returns the new immutable entity-state for the next frame.

When you click on something the blip sound is generated procedurally in the browser using jsfxr.

This is a video game I made for Scout to help her practice using a gamepad.

Play it! You'll need at least one gamepad and Firefox or Chrome.

• It's hard to find nice games that fit the search "two player gamepad-enabled couch-co-op suitable for four year olds".

• Game design for a four year old is quite nuanced. To make a fun game without all of the normal risk reward mechanics basically comes down to "make rude noises".

• It's 360 lines of ClojureScript, rendered in the browser DOM with React. It took me a handful of evenings over a period of one month to develop.

• I don't play many games, but the gamepad is probably my favourite human-computer interface.

Source code: https://github.com/chr15m/fubbles/

Update

Fubbles is the first game I have made using the new infinitelives ClojureScript library for game development that my friend Crispin and I have been building.

Prediction: within 3 years the stylus will be the killer feature of Android tablets.

Since then I've felt a little embarrassed remembering that post. Grand claims, ha ha!

With the recent announcement of Apple's "Pencil" I feel somewhat vindicated. I got the details wrong but I think broadly speaking that hand-drawing, sketches, doodles, will feature strongly in the future of human-to-human communication. Maybe even more strongly than typed messages for some people.

• I'm thinking about the 16% of people worldwide who can't read or write, but who are rapidly adopting hand held technologies where they can draw.

• I'm thinking about the tens of thousands of years of human beings using sticks as a technology for making marks upon a surface.

• I'm thinking about the popularity of emoji, the universality of pictographs, the cross-cultural and language-independent nature of the medium of drawn communication.

• I'm thinking about my kids and how the second thing they learn after talking is drawing.

Maybe one future is a world in which many of our planet's population do a significant fraction of our communication through the medium of doodles.

I feel grateful because this year when my daughter said to me "I want to be a mummy, not an astronaut," I was able to tell her about Anna Fisher, who in 1984 became the first astronaut-mother in space, and to show her the stories and images online of the several astronaut-mothers who have followed her into space.

Anna Lee Fisher by Bren Luke.

I feel grateful this year to Jess Frazelle from Docker, who wrote an honest blog post that reminded me of my privilege; reminded me how lucky I am to participate in tech and open source communities without friction and harassment; reminded me of a hidden strength and fortitude exhibited by amazing people all around us that I can aspire to; and reminded me that there is always more work to be done to make the world a better place for all humans.

I feel grateful that I am not alone in thinking and wanting that our culture can change for the better. I'm grateful that the internet can amplify the voices of people like Jess, and counteract the Friendship Paradox every time somebody speaks up.

I am grateful for the writing of bloggers like Pamela Fox and Liza Shulyayeva and Nicole Reid who demonstrate the technical, evidence based counter-factual to every trolling Hacker News comment.

As I do every year, this year I feel deeply grateful and so very lucky that my parents bought our Apple IIe when I was eight years old and that my mother taught me to code.

I feel grateful to have worked, and to continue to work beside amazing people who every day prove that smart, capable, technical people don't fit a stereotype.

The stereotype disagrees with reality, and so it is wrong.