October 2024 Mildly NSFW
Boris Vallejo and the Pixel Art of the Demoscene
As an epic fantasy painter, Boris Vallejo had a great influence on 1980s and 90s fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and the demoscene. Through the decades, his works have been replicated by pixel artists. This article features fantasy art history, demoscene drama, and a lot of pixel art fun creating a Boris Vallejo imitation graphic using only four colors.
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September 2024
The Future of the Past
Avoiding Stagnation in Archives of the Amiga Demoscene
Let's explore the Amiga Demoscene Archive (A.D.A.), examining its role as a demo repository within the demoscene, and take a look at its carefully curated collection. What are the archive's strengths and weaknesses? And what can we learn from this archive of media art?
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August 2024
The Magic of Evoke
Demoparty Report by a Bloke at the 25th Evoke
The 25th edition of Evoke was held from 16th to 18th of August 2024 in Cologne. It was an amazing event full of creativity, cooperation, and demoscene magic!
Here are my impressions of this wonderful demoparty.
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August 2024
Making Compo Graphics for Evoke 2024
Evoke is an awesome demoparty. I participated in three of the graphics competitions. Here is how I created my submissions and alternative graphics that taught me what I wanted to do.
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August 2024
Time Bandit
A Love Letter to the Game That Sold the Atari ST
When the Atari ST was introduced it had a stand-out game: Time Bandit by Bill Dunlevy and Harry Lafnear. It was a wonderful action-arcade game with kick-class graphics, puzzles and text adventure elements. In this slice of retro gaming and computer history we dive deep into the colorful time gates, two player action and strange new arcade worlds!
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July 2024
Steganography in Python
How I Felt Compelled to Find a Hidden Message in an Email and Ended up Having Fun
When a coworker invited me to a feedback call, I found a hidden message in the email. Join me as I go down a rabbit hole to decode a message that turned out to be hidden in an image. I used Python to extract the message and learned a lot about steganography in the process.
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February 2024
Archiving an Archive
My Adventures Scraping the Contents of the Archive of Digital Art
A while ago, I wanted to learn web scraping so I wrote my own little suite of applications based on Puppeteer/Node.js to grab content from the Archive of Digital Art (ADA), parse it into JSON and extract the images. Join me as I scrape the bottom of the web archive.
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April 2023
Mansion of Trepidation
This is a choice-based solo fantasy adventure in the style of the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books I developed in vanilla JavaScript. The graphics and text descriptions are generated using AI tools. The player can search the 'Mansion of Trepidation' to defeat the villain and rescue their young nephew.
A Wide Variety of Videos
Over the years, I recorded a number of Youtube videos on many different subjects like the Bitmap Brothers game "Chaos Engine" on the Atari ST, about the iPad apps that support the full resolution on external displays, on how to draw Captain America and a number of different design topics.
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Using AI Tools to Make Explainer Videos
What if you could create your own explainer videos without much effort? I decided to try it myself and made three explainer videos in only one day using generally available and cheap artificial intelligence tools. The results are perfectly workable. Take a look at the three videos that came out.
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A Lucid Dream Comic
This is a three-page comic based on a story from the dream diary of Lucid Fera. The dreamer watches a blind woman encountering her cats and contemplating existence. I drew the comic on paper, colored the panels using Procreate on the iPad Pro, and used Comic Life on the Mac for layouts and lettering. You can find the detailed steps of the process in the project description.
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Timelapse Painting Youtube Videos
These timelapse videos show the process I use to paint pictures on the iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil 2 in ProCreate. They are quick and easy to make because ProCreate is superbly snappy and delightful for quick paintings and I can record the process automatically using the built-in feature in the application.
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