Freestyle Dancing
/Here are 3 recent clips of me dancing. Uhm, not much more to say bout it than that.
Tech Ethics, and Ken Perlin's Blog
/Ken Perlin has a blog. It’s unassuming, it doesn’t try to be too much. In the sea of internet CONTENT, this blog is one of those places where a person is simply just letting their brain run, with no agenda other than just letting the world in on their interesting perspective of the world.
I find it inspiring in that I wish I had that type of relationship to tech. I wish I could attend to my web presence as a tap into my brain, as opposed to what I sometimes let it become: a black mirror into which I reflect vainly on my self image.
Anyhow, I added a comment to one of his posts and just wanted to document share a link to it from here. That’s all:
"The Tributary"
/I’m experimenting with an online social network game, that uses a digital currency (“tributary water”) to track value of the social network. The premise of the project came up when I wondered what would happen if your currency depreciated at a rapid pace.
Eventually I landed on this idea where 10% of your wallet of this currency would be forced to be directed to other players twice a day. This forced spending would hopefully force people to participate in defining value in the network.
After all, what is value in a social media platform? I tend to demonize advertising as systems driven off of ads incentivize weird behavior — where engagement is the only thing that counts. People trying to game the system of making money off of engagement is why we have click-bait, the re-emergence of mainstream conspiracy discussions (like anti-vax, pizza-gate, etc…), and amplification of enraging content. These things make lots of money in ad-based networks because they command attention! So I want to try something else.
In this alternate network, participants are FORCED to declare value in the actions of others, as they are always paying back into the network as a function of the network.
I don’t know if this is going to work, but it’s fun trying at least.
Anyhow, here are the Game Instructions If you want to participate, please hit me up.
Development Notes
I’m hosting the game on Slack and made a bot using https://stdlib.com/ — which I’m mostly pretty happy with.
Made a bunch of in-progress videos for this game. I really don’t expect people to watch them, but recording and posting them was helpful in my process. Here are those progress videos.
Lego and VR Games (Beat Saber, Catch the Beat) as Dance Notation
/So just publicly posted a video to YouTube. Mang, it’s been slow going on those public videos. I think being so secretive at FB for those two years was really not so good for my creative process. Also, like YouTube has changed a LOT since I started posting, so I think navigating that new landscape is a bit of a beast, too. Anyhow, enough of my hangups with the internet as an old man : ) Onto the video:
Okay, so in the video I talk about a lot of things I want to link out to. First off…
Kai’s work on Annotating / Visualizing Tutting
So Kai is a dancer I’ve known for a long time. He produced these really cool visuals on Tutting if you’re interested:
Plenty more of those images on his Pinterest board on the topic of the Grid, which also has links to videos.
Lego Tutting
Using Bricklink Studio, I created a Lego version of the tut sequence. If you want, you can download and install Bricklink Studio (it’s free), and peep at the source file of my work by downloading and running this.
Using what I discovered in Bricklink Studio, I made this animation. The source PSD is here, if you’re curious. It has guidelines and stuff, too.
Where I learned the Tut Scale
I learned it from Houdoken in person, and fortunately we filmed it. You can hear the students in attendance gasp at the concept of this scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XQrlIEYFPg&t=5m10s
Also, I talk at great length about this topic in this other video:
Catch the Beat
This is the VR rhythm game I made before Beat Saber was a thing. Or at least before I heard of it. You can get Catch the Beat from itch.io. Here’s me playing it:
Here’s a video of someone else playing it:
ASDFJKL; update -- video of difficult song, new visualization, and storyboards of VR experience
/In my last blog post I shared a link to a really difficult song. I decided to try to make a video of me playing / performing the song:
Another Visualization…
I built a new visualization on key input. It more closely emulates the shape of a keyboard:
I like that the mapping doesn’t have “a” and “;” right next to each other.
I don’t know why I’m attached to this circular shape. Maybe this is just an arrangement that feels like it maps closer to how my brain thinks about keys. Not sure. Maybe I should also just try a straight line across with this pattern.
Sketchy storyboards of an ASDFJKL; crossover VR experience…
I have very vague plans for converting all this json data into a VR rhythm game… meaning that you could encode some choreography on a website, and then experience that choreography in VR in the space around you.. Anyhow, I made a few sketches describing how I might imagine doing this.
The main idea from my scrawlings are that the player sees ASDFJKL; in front of them like a xylophone or wood blocks. They have to strike these objects that are thrown it at them with their wands. I think the objects that you need to strike are tossed in and respect gravity, but maybe at half or quarter gravity.
The neat part is I’ve done most of this work already. Catch the beat has the throwing mechanic. I believe I have an ASDFJKL; choreography interpreter in a sketch somewhere. I think those are the major things for now… will want to build a prototype environment for just me to try, film it, and share those results when I can.
ASDFJKL; -- new hard song, and dev on visualizations
/One of the shows I really enjoyed recently was Halt and Catch Fire. In addition to it being a great show, it also has a pretty amazing theme song. Take a listen:
So anyhow, I made an ASDFJKL; song for it. The choreography is pretty challenging, but I feel pretty proud about it:
https://albert.github.io/asdfjklsemi/?v=yD_kCKiSkoI&choreo=32488779637710864
Also, on top of that, yesterday I made a visualization of my key input for ASDFJKL;. It’s offline only, but here’s a gif of the experience. I guess I’m just curious to see what different ways there are to visualize homerow interaction…
