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baumgarn

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I fondly remember creating simple narrative stories and games with HyperCard at 6 years old on my dad's Macintosh SE. It was my first contact with programming and a fundamental seed to using the computer as a creative tool. It has shaped my life in a substantial way. RIP Bill - HN bar should be blacked out.

GPT-4o 2 years ago

it should be possible to imitate any voice you want like your actual parents soon enough

This is not really what brutalism is about. Brutalism in architecture is often very playful and indeed more like a poetry and celebration of the raw materials and structure, not at all about the pure functionality absence of any aesthetic as formulated in that text. Brutalist buildings often neglect functionality in favour of architectural idiosyncracies. Like for example Trellick Tower: the elevators are in a separate tower outside the building and only serve every third floor. Brutalism celebrates raw form over function, and mostly people really don't enjoy living in these buildings.

Honestly, the battery status is within reach of just a single mouse click in the Mac OS menu bar, I check it maybe once a week. I think there is even a warning when it reaches very low levels. In the rare case I forget to charge and run out, it is enough to charge it for like 15 minutes to keep working for the day.

A charge lasts me about a month of all day use, so this is still a non issue for me. Let's see how long until the battery becomes weaker. Enjoyed working with the mouse for a year so far.

Zoomquilt 2 (2007) 6 years ago

Would be curious to hear more about what you did. Would you share it with me? Always thought about trying something with VR and the Zoomquilts.

Zoomquilt 2 (2007) 6 years ago

Lol good to know. Original author here. I very occasionally get strange emails from people with mental health problems who are overly fascinated by it, as well as Google Play reviews accusing it to be "evil and demonic". I later created http://arkadia.xyz/ for a much more wholesome experience. The stuff in the first Zoomquilts is just fantasies of all the illustrators who participated back then, I assume there really was no evil intention :-D

Zoomquilt 2 (2007) 6 years ago

Original author here! The original implementations of Zoomquilt 1+2 were done in flash. I created the HTML5 port in 2013. Zoomquilt 2 consists of 88 single images, each 1024x768px. Basically each image takes place at 50% the size in the center of the previous. For each frame, there are at most 4 images rendered at once on the canvas. The first Zoomquilt has smaller images of 800x600, hence the better performance. Arkadia.xyz has source images of 1200x900px.

The performance in Chrome is noticeably better than Firefox. The smaller the window size, the smoother the playback. Since it is only four images at once, whenever one image leaves the scene and a new one appears, there might be a small lag when the image is loaded into memory. I don't have a deeper understanding on how this could be optimized further for the browser.

For the Android OpenGL implementation I was able to take care of loading the images asynchronously before they enter the scene and freeing up the memory again after they leave the scene.

Happy to take suggestions on how this might be optimized further, as it would be interesting to work with even higher resolutions for future projects, but this quickly leads to much higher performance load and choppy playback on weaker machines.

Zoomquilt (2004) 6 years ago

Thank You! We tried the prints thing but nobody ordered any, so we took it down again ;-) The one thing that is generating a bit of revenue is the Zoomquilt Android Live Wallpaper app were you can purchase Arkadia as an add-on. If you have an Android device you should definitely give it a go as the infinite zoom effect makes a super nice wallpaper.

Zoomquilt (2004) 6 years ago

There was some nudity in there which I removed for the Android version to keep it family friendly as required by Google Play. I decided to change the web version as well.

Zoomquilt (2004) 6 years ago

Zoomquilt 1+2 was done by a bunch of illustrators. A person would paint a single frame, which would be scaled down and given to another person to continue painting around while blending into the previous frame. The picture would develop much like the Cadavre Exquis surrealist drawing game, and part of the fun is to continue and transform what the person before you left. Arkadia I painted together with my friend Sophia Schomberg.

Zoomquilt (2004) 6 years ago

The original wasn't done with code but animated with Macromedia Director and later ported to Flash. The smooth full window HTML5 version you see here I coded in 2013

Zoomquilt (2004) 6 years ago

I created this project back in 2004 together with a bunch of other illustrators. It grew out of a community where people collaborated on artwork over the internet. Happy to see it continues to gather interest. You might also enjoy http://zoomquilt2.com (2007) and http://arkadia.xyz (2015, my favourite)

There is nothing wrong with 100% black. It's good to understand the author's reasoning, but better to regulary break one's self imposed rules. Design doesn't have to be smooth all the time.

Regarding the section "The World is on Fire": The farmers protests recently in Berlin were a normal expressions of freedom to demonstrate in Germany. Not much to worry about, and a sign of a healthy democracy.