Almost missed a week of blogging. I have been feeling an elevated amount of ambient stress and I think it all stems from AI in various ways. Can’t wait for this fucking bubble to pop! Come on, bubble!
Came up with a clown routine and a framework for creating a clown routine on a walk home from the Elysian a few days ago. I took some notes on this that I'll turn into a blog post soon; it's part of the ongoing saga of my Live Show Idea.
I started helping some friends with their video game project this week. They’ve been working on this for a few years, I’m very impressed with what they've got so far, and I’m feeling very grateful to have the chance to help tie up some loose ends so they can launch. I might share details here at some point, but they’re developing this game pseudonymously so I’m not sure I’ll be able to. What I can say is that it’s my first time really using Godot in earnest and I just don’t vibe with this kind of work environment, where a major portion of your code/config can only really be touched through a UI. I get that this makes things more accessible for more people but I just want to boop around in my text editor please! I generally keep Sublime open alongside Godot so I can more quickly find references to things in the codebase or rapidly make a repetitive change in a config file. It's definitely not built for this and it doesn't like when I try to use it this way.
Parallel to this and in reaction to this, I’ve been playing with a prototype for a game engine with no first-party interface, where 3D asset development (modeling, level deign, placing interactive elements) is handled exclusively in Blender and game logic (what happens when the user interacts with those elements) is handled in Ink. Probably nothing will come of this but I always gotta have a little thing going and it's kinda invigorating to try to reverse-engineer some of the more complicated physics stuff that comes for free with a sophisticated engine. Right now I am trying to reimplement move_and_slide from scratch with THREE.js. I also spent a few hours today building a web app that shows the aircraft in the sky in the direction I'm pointing my phone. I should have spent those hours doing something else but it felt nice! (This isn't done but I'm sure I'll finish it eventually, and I'll show it to you when I do. If you know of a neat public API, please feel free to nerd-snipe me with it.)
We booked a trip for the end of the summer! In early September we're going to London, then Paris, then Minneapolis. More on that later but share anything you think I must see in any of those places. We have theater tickets for every night we're in London, and I'm already planning to spend a lot of time at Disneyland Paris and The Mall of America.