widdershins

Test etching in dual colours. Just straight up wax and acid with a thin needlepoint.

I’m glad to be drawing again. It feels like a fog has been lifted, and things are clearer. Drawing always makes me feel better, even when it looks bad or the lines are uneven or wrong weighted. It’s one of the few things in my life is that consistent, even when time and memory cannot be trusted. That said, my family recently chipped in to send me a package!

Can I say how awesome my mom is sometimes? She knows I get upset when I start disappearing more frequently, and surprises me with a box of CANDY and HERBAL TEA. It’s just so hilariously like her I can’t help but smile and it’s like even with millions of miles away and so many years between it’s like rolling in the fluffiest warmest socks of love (so warm, it even keeps your toes happy!) And it’s true – it’s hard living alone in a foreign city, I miss my old friends and siblings and listening to roadside noise and shopping mall chatter and sometimes, it feels like reading with your eyes closed

Recently I came up with an idea for a prototype, or just something to show for final reviews. A wandering mage dressed in tattery red robes with a sandbucket. A blazing sun. A giant desert with shifting islands and an ocean full of sand – so hot that steam rises from the baking earth obscuring the scorching sun. In my head, I call this: desert islands

It’s a kind of game-ish, except there’s no points or no score or any of that sort. Basically you just hop from island to island where it intersects. Every time you pour sand from your sandbucket it freezes time for a moment, and then in the next turn (when it unfreezes) the islands move faster and faster. There’s no end zone. Just islands, intersections and a sandbucket.

I talked to C.P. whether it’s possible at my level of webgl to make it, and he was like: ‘yea, definitely.’ which makes me feel 1000x better. I expect there’ll be the usual problems of debugging, but I already have an exisiting collision code (thanks to processing) and since it doesn’t require external linking/back-end organisation of file systems it makes it more do-able within the time limit.

Anyway I’m meeting C.P on Tuesday, to show him the animate function I’ve been working on for webgl so xxxfingersxxx

Otherwise it’s been a lot better. Calmer. I’m actually drawing again and going out with other people and feeling less shaky. I have so many people to give thanks to, and hopefully one day I can pay them back for being so awesome (you know who you are!!) I went for J’s party on Saturday and met N & B — B actually works as a consultant to the opendata/opensource movement and she totally digs Pathways and thinks sticking to webgl is a great idea and most of all, she’s really nice (I have her email, and plan to do it soon probably after thanksgiving)

Besides that, PlayThings event is slated for next year Feb 2013 and I’m pretty excited at the panellists and potential interests and running this weekend event. It’s a nice change to do something fun, family-orientated and playful (most of all it doesn’t require zillion of hours). I reckon if thesis/art doesn’t work out, at least I could get a job in event coordination or organising.