Gorgeous, expansive, cosmic.
That’s how I felt when I first discovered this book. I had seen some of these on the covers of various old sci-fi paperbacks, from long ago.
Tag: art
Building big
There have always been “mega-building projects”. In the past, these were large hydro-electric projects, and more recently skyscrapers competing to be the tallest building.
Today one such mega-project is “the line”, which aims to cut across the desert in a narrow strip blanketed by sheer glass walls.
I find this ridiculous, but hey I’m not the one spending half a trillion on it, so I’m happy to watch them try.
I want humanity to build something gigantic, but my desires had tended towards something functional, like a large space station, or a space elevator, or some such.
Then I discovered Étienne-Louis Boullée.
None of his buildings were ever realized1, but his are the sort of ideas I can get behind.
My favorite2 is the “Cenotaph for Newton” (image above), but all his buildings exude some sort of quality I cannot name.
This is something I wish would be made in the world today. It can be.
These are all within our ability to make, lacking only the will to make them. I don’t particularly care who makes them, as long as they exist and are accessible.
Circle Art
Some simple, quick, random (yet, it should be pointed out in this age of Dall-E, deliberate and human-made) art featuring colored circles:
circles :=
Table[{RandomColor[],
Disk[{RandomInteger[{-15, 15}], RandomInteger[{-15, 15}]},
RandomInteger[{2, 7}]]}, 20]
backgroundDim := 19
background :=
Rectangle[{-backgroundDim, -backgroundDim}, {backgroundDim,
backgroundDim}]
Graphics[{RGBColor[0.0117647, 0.313725, 0.588235], background, Red,
circles}]
title = StringJoin["Random Art# ", ToString[RandomInteger[10^10]]]
A painting
Came across this painting through Twitter.
Something about it appealed to me.
The colors and shape of the arches reminded me of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel.
The title of the painting is “Das Begrabnis Eines Kreuzritters“, by Franz Ludwig Catel.
Or, translated into English, “The Burial of a Crusader“.
A first NFT
I took one of Tara’s drawings from last year and placed it on OpenSea.
Mostly just to see what the experience is like.
So here it is, “A princess, her castle, and an apple tree“.
For more details, these are “the chains it shows up on”.
Turtle graphics
Discovered the PythonTurtle library, reminded me of LOGO a long time ago (!)
A sample session:
$ bpython
bpython version 0.18 on top of Python 3.7.6 /usr/local/opt/python/bin/python3.7
>>> import turtle
>>> silly = turtle.Turtle()
>>> for i in range(20):
... silly.forward(i * 10)
... silly.right(144)
...
>>>
(there is a Golang version of this too, to try later)
Personal Media Summary: December 2015
A bunch of miscellaneous stuff, in no particular order …
- Two books on deep history that I added to my far-in-the-future reading list: “On Deep History and the Brain” by Daniel Lord Smail, and “Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present” by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail
-
A bit of wasted time on Youtube followed the discovery of gameplay videos for “Urban Assault”, the one game I ****ing loved when I was younger (as with all nostalgia, I obviously think it was underrated).
-
Someone else pointed out that “Dead Poets Society” was an overhyped movie, and in fact a bit ridiculous.
-
A playlist of H. R. Giger Art if you’re into surrealism at all
-
More wasted time on Youtube, this time on revisiting an old album by “Enigma” (remember?!) — and then it was depressing to find out exactly how old: twenty years
-
Someone in Japan got up close and personal with a Giant Squid. Skip the article, watch the short video clip in the beginning.
-
Finally, here is something that blew me away. It’s not science fiction, this isn’t CGI rendering for some upcoming movie, this is real. This WIRED article catalogues some “retro-futuristic” architecture (public housing, by the way) built half a century ago. Separately (I’m not making this up) I came to know that one of these sites, the one whose image is at the top of the post, was a filming location for “Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2”.
(for some reason, I had saved this draft 20 days ago, but neglected to actually hit “publish”)
Baktoo: Taking baby steps with generative art
Continuing (or stumbling) along a path to using Common Lisp for stuff I consider fun, I came up with this.
As mentioned in the `README`, I need to work on making this more efficient.
Stuff I learned along the way:
- I love how I can focus on “making it work” _before_ worrying about “making it fast”
- Utilities exist for a reason. _Use them_ (I’ve decided to stick with `:rutils`)
- Don’t be afraid of using libraries. I found `:cl-log`, which is amazingly well-written and I will never use all of it, but just the basic use case of toggling levels of verbosity is good enough for me, and something that would normally be hard to do.
- Building up the system works really well. This is the first time I’ve had an experience of writing stuff that sort of _just worked_, since it felt like I was **directly translating my thoughts into code**.
- It’s easy to rapidly create and modify functions, stubs, what not, while keeping them all in view, in the same 100 or so lines of vertical space (contrast with switching between (say) multiple `.java` files)
Anyway, here are a couple of samples I made with this (click to see detailed image):
Abacus Noir 