Rant- Retro Gaming and Nostalgia Goggles.

So wandering the interwebs as I am want to do I have come across a raging debate in the gaming community about retro games compared to the new games. Now I am not above the occasional "in my day we only had three lives and liked it" kind of comment or feeling (being raised in the era of Mega Drive and SNES) but it truly baffles me just how much some people get so angry about the fact games have progressed.

It seems a large amount of the gamer community is just so stuck in their ways that it sparks aggression just suggesting change.

I truly wonder if these people are the same ones that as children dreamed of VR-headsets and having personal robots... If they were how did that spark die?

Now this post was spawned by this YouTube vid:

It's witty and funny and part of me can't help but agree with the some of the sentiment. However having actually played Hart Gold I can say that I give full thumbs up for remakes!

I like the fact that games have and will continue to progress, its a good thing and gets me one step closer to my VR-headset!

Making a Meal out of Data

Just some old work I found to post today. In essence this old project was about:

a) Making a Photo-montage.
b) Interpreting data and then converting it into image.

This is the Original photo-montage made of many of the pictures taken during a picnic in a place called Mount Edgecombe. These are fairly sequential and work their way out as the day wore on in a rough time scale relative to the picnic. There was a lot of raw data to interpret here but I just broke it down into two categories:


1) Light/Shade.

You can see light represented very simply with off-white colour stars and shade represented very simply with dark indigo stars. 

2) Nature Sounds / Man-made Sounds.  

The red and orange spikes represent man made sounds the more orange the spike means the more likely it is to be things such as talking or breathing and the more red means the more likely the noise is to be of the objects making noise like crisp packets rustling or mobile phones ringing etc.
The green leaves represent the natural or nature noises such as the wind or birdsong.

Final Image:

The entire thing when layered together looks like its own mini country. Both the data-interpretation and the photo-montage make for an interesting and busy final image.

So that is how to make Data out of a meal :p

Edit:  I found the initial concept work for this project so I thought I would post it for brevity.

Interactive Rooms

Bit of a random post today... As I mentioned in the last post, due to my beloved computer with all my software going boom, my attentions towards creative summer projects have shifted.

They have shifted towards decorating my best friends house, where I happen to be living to now. :)

Now aside from the normal decorating and us mixing paints to achieve the EXACT pallet we want / need I have been allowed a lot of creative freedom. So it looks like her sons will have an interactive bedroom in terms of paint.  This means: glow in the dark, U.V. reactive and thermocromic paint!

Thermocromic paint and indeed ink has been a passion of mine for a fairly long time now. The basic concept is you have a pigment and a regular acrylic, these are mixed resulting in a paint that at room temp is the pigment colour and when heated changes to the colour of the acrylic. Meaning that for instance little hands will make things change colours, thus making a bed room far more interesting
Here is a bit more science...

There will also be glow in the dark paint to brighten the rooms up at night and UV reactive paint, well, just because I can really :)

Also the hallway may have glitter on the lower half of the wall. In an effort to bounce a little more light around the very dark hall, glitter does move the limited light around a little more and actually gives a really great effect on the walls.

So in short the house is transforming into a interactive, changing space that is very conductive to creativity.

Technology FAIL :(

OK so I haven't been able to do the projects I wanted to do this summer. This is for two reasons, firstly the cost of a good internet service is staggering and secondly the untimely and rather upsetting death of Elecktra my main computer. So I am pretty much technology-less. This coupled with the death of my phone has not left me well. There are plans in place to get me a new computer bigger and far better than before however, also at some point to get my old laptop fixed. Till then all plans for technology based projects have gone on hold.

In other and more happy news I have been very busy, painting and decorating! I have found out that it is actually very arty on occasion and it is good fun. I have moved in with a friend and the house is gradually transforming into something very pretty. It may not seem related but I think that decorating and design on this level is helpful to widen my style and expertise.

Also in other arty news I have now taken up cross stitch. Its very relaxing, yet has proven to be more skill intensive than I had anticipated. However anything arty to occupy myself in down time is all good.

Larping About: My Crazy Film!

Here is my film Larping About!

For those that need a link:
TADA

Video: 

Photoshoppery!

OK so I decided to make some lovely pictures messing around on Photoshop.

Random GPS Adventures

GPS Drawing:

The idea behind GPS Drawing is to track a picture by walking around a landscape. It was a lot harder to do than it first seemed as there are buildings and roads in the way, so making a pattern is hard. The site I picked however was because of the natural star shape I saw in it from above. I really like stars so I thought it would be good to make use of the natural flow of the space itself. Despite what the drawing looks like I actually walked along the paths. I really liked how it turned out however in hindsight I would have liked to have done a much larger picture over a bigger area. My first ideas included a bunny and a Spork. I picked this site however because it’s fairly compact and small yet is still very effective. The natural dimond-ish star shape is, to me at least, very appealing so I enjoyed the project.

GPS Ramble:

Another project I did with GPS was based on the quote “It’s a dangerous business, stepping out your door. If you don’t watch your feet, you never know where they may take you!” It is from lord of the rings (a favourite book of mine) and it got me thinking. In this day and age everyone knows where they are headed. We put signs up everywhere and build roads that take the most direct route to where we want to go. People say that the journey is what's important but we hardly ever just go out to experience a journey however I don’t like the confines of a set route. So I was curious to track were a random wander would lead me. I thought it would be a good idea to use GPS in a new and inventive way and see what happened. In this project aimed to show how we can use our man-made system, which is designed to keep us on course against its nature, in taking a method of knowing where you are and using it to get lost, to actually take GPS and flip its purpose around so it does not help me make a path or journey, simply it observes and records the journey taken free of restrictions, Kind of like GPS drawing but in freestyle. It may have show a structured route to nowhere or possibly an unstructured route to somewhere. So off I went on a LotR Style ramble...

There seems to be no great pattern in where I walked however I am convinced I can see a part towards the bottom that looks a little like a pot. I would like to have spent a little longer and taken more cuts across grass. That’s how you can use a tracking device to get lost! It proves that if you let go you never do know where your feet can take you well, unless you use a GPS device!