Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Mr. Elevator | Go on interdimensional elevator rides

    Mr. Elevator is a surreal first-person puzzle game featuring a talking elevator as your companion.

    See, in Portal, riding elevators is just a formality; you only get in them because there's nowhere else to go. In Mr. Elevator, your character has a motivation to seek out this elevator specifically.

    You meet and interact with Mr. Elevator, who is some kind of spirit (???) that merged with the elevator. He seems friendly and is open to talking about what worries you.

    Looking at his control panel, there's only a down button on it. Once you press it, he'll take you to some strange places to solve some puzzles there, as he helps you explore your desires.

  • intertwined

    there are multiple things
    happening simultaneously
    not cause and effect, not really
    but intertwined, entangled 
    woven and blurring together
    and whenever I pull the thread
    to try and gently untangle 
    I find another knot 
    and another 
    endlessly
    

  • The gap between vision and skill

    There's this story I've been trying to tell for years. The better part of a decade now. I've always been one to latch onto ideas for years at a time, but this one is surely the most enduring. As an ongoing project, I think it's safe to say that this is my life's work as an artist. And yet, only two people in my life know about it in any detail.

    More recently, I've been trying to change that, but I've been struggling. It took me a very long time to build up the confidence to start sharing it with others, even in a small way. Today, I think I believe that I'm a good artist, in the sense that I personally like the art that I make. Still, looking back on all the stuff I've made for it, I feel that some of it works, and some of it doesn't. Some of it doesn't really capture the vision. Some of that comes from the fact that the vision has shifted quite a bit since I started working on it, but there's more to it than that.

    Recently, I've come to the conclusion that I essentially lack the skill to realize my vision for this project.

  • Doing good

    I don't spend much time thinking about whether I am a good person.

    For a while I worked in the solar industry. I met people there who seemed to experience their work as part of a mission. They were helping move the world toward clean energy, and that gave the work itself a kind of moral importance.

    I liked that I was contributing to something useful. But it never had much to do with how I experienced my job.

    I do think there are right and wrong choices. I try not to hurt people. I try to be kind. But I don't experience any of this as a grand moral project. Most of the time, right and wrong show up in much smaller decisions.

• Politics and World Events

  • Reflections on Bad Religion's All Ages

    I recently came across some of my music writing from years ago where I reflected on my favorite albums of all time. Since I've been listening to one of these in particular a lot during the last couple of years, I thought it fitting to dig in to a few of the tracks and discuss why I find them relevant in today's world.

    The album in question is All Ages, by Bad Religion, which was released in 1995. This is a compilation album that mostly focuses on their best work from the late 80's and early 90's, where the vast majority of the writing credits are represented by Greg Graffin (aka professor punk) and Brett Gurewitz (aka Mr. Brett, founder of Epitaph records). In their early years, both men were titans of influence on the American punk and hardcore scene.

    Interestingly, this compilation is the first Bad Religion album album that I purchased, and the circumstances around it are funny to think back on. Back when this was a new release, information about a band's discography was harder to come by. At the record store, I usually made my selection based on 1) knowing the band by name or by reputation and 2) how cool the album artwork looked. In this case, judging an album by its cover worked out well, and I stumbled upon something that I plan enjoy for the rest of my life.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Acquiring the Taste

    The title of this post refers to a Tempest's chiptune cover of a track by progrock band "Gentle Giant". It is a long way but I got there like this:

    I very much enjoy works by Keith "Vim!" Baylis, he started as chiptune composer on Amiga, later moving to PC and then to, I guess, proper DAW software. Sometimes you get curious, and ponder what the man who has been my musical inspiration for a while has said about this and that. Given that vim did mention being part of a demoscene group, I decided to look around for interviews and scrolltexts⁽¹, thanks to the magix of janeway.exotica.org.uk, demozoo.org and indispensable AmiNet a few disks popped up.

    Most of these are just tune uses, or greeting text, but around 2015 Slash started the Chiperia Project — Amiga chipdisks, featuring an assortment of well known names in chiptune scene. That caught my attention and I've dived into disks right away, both for tunes and comments.