Les Orchard @lmorchard@hackers.town

Alert: The computer situation has escalated

Still very quiet around these parts, but thought I'd share this item of holiday goings on in my office, having gotten all my old computers doing a thing at once

Hello. Been awhile since I last posted here. Kind of have gone into a hibernation mode fugue state of getting work done by day at the job from which I was not laid off and playing EVE Echoes at night. Brain feels pretty bruised from this year so far, so I think I've slipped into a dumb period.

Want to see something kind of chill? I spent all weekend soaking my head in Sunvox to cobble together a cover version of the C64 Swinth Demo cover version of the theme to The Stationary Ark.

More I want to do with this, but here's work in progress

https://lmorchard.github.io/swinth2020/

Random thing: If I were looking for a game that evokes sensawunda and is not Mass Effect, what might I play?

So I took a break from not finishing a video game to glue together the SunVox Library and my glowy vector drawing code.

https://lmorchard.github.io/swinth2020/index.html

And also I remembered that there's a deep groove made in my brain from hours watching the Swinth demo as a kid on C64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiHyTJsE3AU

So, like, I remembered that there's a JS / WASM version of the SunVox Library for playing songs from SunVox

https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/jsplay/

There is a corner of my brain that is never not playing Something Good by Utah Saints

Uploading some weird stuff to itch.io in a misguided effort to motivate myself to make more things to upload to itch.io

https://lmorchard.itch.io/

Love too have Sunday Scaries on a Monday because I have the day off

While I fret about this, I have at least moved my laptop to a table outside in my back yard, opened a beer, and am watching bees be productive.

Current status: I have several more days than usual off work. Woke up with many ideas of things do to. Started thinking I should organize these ideas.

... time passes ...

None of the kanban or todo apps I've surveyed are satisfying so I am now considering writing my own card sorting web app and maybe learn the Svelte web framework while I'm at it

As is my wont, I made another Spotify playlist while doing my space trucking in EVE Echoes. It's kind of weird but I think it flows.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2bvRetf4on2ez6FYPNWbxI?si=XjQ7UJLpSQOFCDHQj4A4kA

Hnnngggg, I want to get good at SunVox so I can make music like this for the game I'm working on that I will never finish

https://soundcloud.com/nightradio/sets/sunvox-music-best-of-august-6

Playing a bunch of EVE Echoes lately. There's search on the star map. It's case-sensitive. A Redditor speculated that Chinese devs missed that English should be case-insensitive.

Regardless of truth, this makes me feel some sympathy for all the Unicode crap we've screwed up.

For reference, this is the kind of vibe I've been aiming at for years now :)

I'm using the Hershey vector fonts, made back in 1967 and available in a form nicely parsed into x/y line coordinates. That this particular typeface looks nicely future-retro is an amazing perk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts

Got some letters & numbers rendering in my little vector graphics engine last night. Rather pleased with how Nixie-tube-esque they look

And because I also want glitchy malfunctioning vectors, I'm also playing with this.