fun
Follow the fun
An Article by Dave RupertAnother great dissertation from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit: The Games that Designed Themselves. It’s the radical idea that designers should ignore their preconceived notions and look to the game itself to find out where the development should lead. How does something design itself? Well… the answer is: Prototypes.
A lot of great indie game masterpieces are the result of experimentation and early gameplay demos that changed the course of game’s development. As Brown points out, there’s a whole history of groundbreaking games that were developed “almost by accident” where bugs and glitches were turned into features.
Exit pages
An Idea by Brad EnslenToday I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.
The Whimsical Web
A Website by Max BöckA curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.
APL386 Unicode
A Font by Adám BrudzewskyAPL font based on Adrian Smith's APL385 font with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif.
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.
The Taft Test
A Tool by Maciej CegłowskiDoes your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
Party in a shared google doc
An Article by Marie FoulstonIn the absence of the cultural spaces my work usually occupies, I’ve found myself chasing the social rituals they evoke and the reverence they embody through abstract digital recreations and pastiche. In these spaces, familiar feelings and experiences reverberate and mix with new ones.
They are events that all at once feel both practical and absurd.
In a time of such flux and uncertainty, maybe that is as good a place as any to be.
Phenomenal: Exhibited Works
Untitled (Light Canvas)
A key transitional work for Wheeler is his untitled "light canvas" from 1965. The canvas was primed white, then over-sprayed..., but with no emblems or polished elements. The contrast in the light canvas is provided not by any imagery within the painting but by back-lighting; the canvas is backlit with neon light, which is embedded in a reverse bevel Plexiglass frame that projects the piece about five inches from the wall. The effect suggests an eclipse, or some other spectral occlusion of a bright light source.
Eindhoven
Stuck Red
Zero Mass
On an autumn night in 2009, I experienced a version of this piece installed in a stone barn in rural France. The evening was moonless and cold; I stood with two friends inside the piece for the better part of an hour, as our eyes adjusted to almost total darkness, before any of us could begin to see one another. It was the definition of a liminal, or barely perceptible, experience. Eric Orr, who died in 1998, was involved with Zen Buddhism and considered these pieces to be spaces for meditation. Experiencing them as intended requires the visitor to focus quietly on the mechanics of their own perception.
Little Blank Riding Hood
As a student at Chouinard, Larry Bell also started as a painter. His early canvases features simple shapes rendered in gestural strokes...From there he started eliminating the texture of the strokes, applying opaque color (thin Liquitex paint) to unprimed canvas, masking off shapes to create straight-edged parallelograms. An example of these works is Little Blank Riding Hood, whose top left and bottom right corners are clipped, suggesting an isometric projection of a three-dimensional form.
Afrum
Untitled (White Light Grid Series-H)
The entire box is suspended from the ceiling by only four evenly spaced monofilaments, so that it seems to float with no physical connection to the wall or to a power source. Behind the wall (which must be purpose-built and is quite thin) is a cabinet containing four Tesla coils. The coils emit a high-frequency energy that passes through the wall and lights the tubes. The energy pulses a bit, making the tubes flicker at times both vertically and horizontally. The Tesla coils make a crackling static sound that is mostly muffled by the barrier wall, while the neon tubes emit a low hum that is audible close to the work. The work is elegant and slightly menacing, evoking something of a mad scientist's experiment.
Five Paintings IV
One of the most extraordinary examples of McCracken's illusory surfaces occurs with Five Paintings IV, 1974. This wall-mounted work has a black polyester resin finish. From some angles the surface is opaque, from others highly reflective, and from still others it seems to reveal great depth. A happy accident in the creation of the work sealed many tiny air bubbles or particulates in the piece. When these catch the light, they suggest a galaxy of stars on a moonless night.
The Iceberg and Its Shadow