An animator, video producer, Lego artist, and author—I am moderately skilled at a lot of different things.
I held a seminar at ElectroFringe 2016 on how to program the Atari 2600 and gave a demo of Barky Pup, the barking dog simulator for the Atari 2600 written in assembly.
While I update this post with content from my talk, feel free to download the game and play it in the Stella emulator.
The goal of Barky Pup is simple: you bark! But how often can you keep up the noise before your owner gets fed up and has you put to sleep??
In the chapter Simulacra and Simulations of his Selected Writings, Jean Baudrillard offers an analysis of simulacra—a representational image without an original—which I believe can be applied to icons. In particular, Microsoft Word’s stupid save icon:
As Baudrillard explains:
These would be the four successive phases of the image:
- It is the reflection of a basic reality.
- It masks and perverts a basic reality.
- It masks the absence of a basic reality.
- It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Using Baudrillard’s explanation, let’s describe the life cycle of the save icon in MS Word:
And this is how Word’s save icon became a simulacra to represent nothing.
The Apple Icon Garden from 1 Infinite Loop, depicting the icons from the original MacPaint software designed by Susan Kare. Clarus the dogcow says, “Moof!”
Here’s how I took a Mac SE/30, a 30-year-old impact printer, a disused VCR and some extraordinary effort to create my MFA directing application, and how nearly everything went wrong.
A family member is quite the skilled brewer. To celebrate that, I made a one-off Lego set of him with his home brewery. The detailed brewery features boil kettles containing studs for hops, barley, yeast, and water, a fermentor with tap, and propane tanks with a temperature control pad. The set has a stirring paddle, six-pack of bottles (with caps), two kegs, and chemistry lab.
The package has custom box art and instructions.
(LEGO logo used without permission.)
I’m not saying this blog, but the concept is on its way out.*
Just as Facebook will go to its long goodnight as its users go to other sites, some leaving because they just want to make pithy comments passing other peoples’ content around, share photos of their lunch, or turn the idea of a newsletter inside-out, there are better sites for all these things than one’s own blog, and each of them comes with a strength the independent blog does not: a built-in community. Unless you’re one of my five friends, or came across this site looking for an (increasingly outdated) way to customize the RSS output of a Drupal feed, then odds are you aren’t even reading this.
I’m the man in the high castle, the fool on the hill, who built a fortress around himself, and wondered why no one ever visited.
But don’t worry… as per my habit, I’m behind the times — I haven’t even listened to ArtPop yet — so I figure timtoon.com still has a few years left in it.
*Todd would say this sentiment itself is outmoded.
“CPS” An unexpected visitor is summoned by a call… from inside the house!
Starring:
With:
“Father Bishop” Chase moves ahead with the exorcism, with help from one of his bros.
Starring:
With:
Miss Ghede holds a seance to contact the ghost, and Chase makes a shocking revelation.
Starring:
With:
Chase investigates a hottie’s haunted bedroom, and a new member is added to the team.
Starring:
With: