Welcome all ye wanderers

Hi, hello, it's me! I make things, lots of things even and sometimes they're good! There's going to be a lot of not-particularly well connected stuff on this website which include:

• Art, with dimensions numbering between 2 and 4
• Music, at least by the one definition
• Moderately useful software
• Weird generative toys and other creative coding projects
• A blog full of unhinged ramblings
• Links the moderately helpful software I may or may not make
• Guides and resources (assuming I ever learn enough that I can teach)
• Recipes which at least one person likes

Some of it is neat, you should look around for a bit. You should also come back later, I add something new every couple of weeks. You don't have to of course, I'm not your real dad after all, or your fake dad even.

I have host a music streaming service for myself of off my personal server for myself. Not only does this save me money while giving more greater support to the artist, but it also lets me stream some music which wouldn't otherwise be avaliable. This does come with the cost that I have to manage a bunch of mp3 metadata myself. To avoid having to manually copy the lyrics of thousands of songs by hand to my collection, I made this little script to do it for me. Nothing particularly fancy and Genius only allows for a few hundred calls per day, but that's enough for what I'm doing./

Love Letter to Generative Art

Generative art doesn’t get appreciated enough. To be clear, I’m not talking about the generative AI slop that has flooded the internet of late, nay! I speak of Mr. Darcy's Dance Challenge, of Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress, and all roguelikes and RPGs which let you make your own character. Let me attempt to explain.
Traditional art is art (obviously). The Artist makes choices about how to best portray their subject, what colours to use, what instruments to use, how to frame the scene. Their final piece is a single concrete thing. This is good. I like traditional art, be it painting, song or 3D model, but I don't think art can doesn't have to be so defined.
Like traditional art, generative artists need to make decisions about how best to portray their subject, but they don't work with elements, but trends, with rules that define all possible ways their subject could be created. Take for example minecraft. As you are likely aware, worlds in minecraft are randomly generated, each new game takes place in a completely unique landscape. Despite this, the worlds have an order to them, the worlds have grass on the surface, then dirt, then stone. Iron is only found underground, diamonds only on the lowest levels of the world. Sand spawns in deserts and snow on mountains. There are defined rules about what can spawn where.
All generative projects work in a similar way, they don't create a singular thing, but define a spectrum of possibilities. Roguelikes make use of tile sets that can be shuffled into new dungeons each time. Character creators use morph shapes to pack unlimited possibilities into a single model. Even a well thought out picrew is something special, where the artist doesn't know the final product and can only make pieces they think will be useful.
Wherever it's found, I think generative is neat and we should make more of it.

Do you want to be internet neighbors? Here's my blinky!

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