As inspired by a second wind of late-night posting.
While using the Twitter search engine looking up terms involving rotating pixels/'mixels' and subpixel rotation, the writer came across a post by David Walter, the creator of Thunder Helix (showcased here: https://twitter.com/HiddenAsbestos/status/1501203058554028034), and one of the two developers with which the original post starts with.
These are two in-active-development games featuring arial combat taking cues from pre-Doom 3D games like flight simulators and such including the one mentioned prior and Tiny Combat Arena (showcased here: https://twitter.com/Why485/status/1502416666956898306) a being going by their Twitter handle of Why485. One's catch in their Twitter bio is "Solo dev making a new helicopter game from 1992." The other is even being published by a necently revived Microprose.
While keysearching Why485 for "minimalism", a reply comes up for one of their original posts from October of 2020, wherein they share a "gif" video of a 1991 flight simulator titled "F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0". The visuals are striking, the low resolution of the flat-shaded 3D shimmers all over in a beautiful of color and jagged pixels at 30 frames per second.
//..//
Also in a similar vein is this long-canned game by the Sub Rosa developer crypticsea, called A New Zero. A link to a 2012 demonstation on YouTube by the developer themselves: https://youtu.be/P_DeZUg9HiY
The description of it being less than 1MB while still having convincing enough movement instantly caught my eye those several years back in 2012. Similar to how the japanese-made X-Operations was less than 4MB in size and could likely fit in a floppy disk, despite being made in 2003 for Windows XP. That was an FPS game willing to do raw sound generation even for gunfire.
(https://youtu.be/RS_-FbBE-0I is one of the newest recordings the writer could find of this videogame). It's impressive where the developers cut corners to fit that file size. Even the keyframe animation of characters is slashed, there's no viewmodel for weapons (though an older videos show their existence), only a rotating window at most, and synthesized sound effects. Oddly enough, textures and a custom font are still implemented. This absolutely had to have been optimized for even the most paltry Intel Celeron and AMD Duron and it's awesome.
So the whole year of 2020 had come and gone through the slide, yes. However, while the world may have been radically changing and forming new stress fractures and breaking old states of status, the time was like any other at that time.
It was still another year of creatively spinning tires in an iced out divot. The effort and creative know-how gained would make the truck dance for a moment or two but it still remained constrained by these false potholes. After 10 minute of automotive flailing, you get frustrated enough to walk to the nearest store and buy the cheapest cat litter. The granular material is placed, and it is now enough traction to move the vehicle from out. The vehicle is reversing, it's coming out, you're out. In less than a second, the gravity of this planet comes back down on the truck. You are now in another set of holes. And the cat litter only has a single coffee mug quantity left in its box.
//..//
I had gained 100 Twitter followers after grinding posts for about 3 years joining or so. But during its time of usage, I could not forget how much more frequently I was still willing to post on the ActivityPub web, on the Pleroma servers that I continued to regularly use. Twitter has yet more of the same Networking Effect that Facebook has. It's where all the artists are now, because these centralized social networks cram hundreds of millions of users into only a handful of data centers in Washington state or France. I did not like how Twitter somehow managed to become even worse in both design and basic function for who is supposed to be a casual user.
It was years where while meeting interesting people and even mutuals on it was of good time spent, the original purpose and intent of modest growth was not happening. While I knew that even 5,000+ followers simply isn't feasible or personally desired at this stage, seeing the ratio of Following to Followers move so heavily to the former it was infuriating. I was squandering the creative essence, by using its shards for posts that almost never gained traction, spent unnecessary hours following accounts that barely contained what was looked for, be it creative work, interesting insights, or even just straight-up funny posts.
If I want to continue growing the BRAND in an unoptimal way, then I want it to be on a platform that one does not have a permeating aura of vain self-deprecation and a cottage industry of clout chasing Posters that openly intended to fleece less active posters. The desire is for it to be on the Fediverse, on Pleroma, or PeerTube, the smaller internet. I want it to be on IRC, or XMPP. I want it to be with literary submissions, efforts to Various Artists compilation albums. I don't want growth determined by a glorified roulette wheel of Engagement. I don't want All-Or-Nothing.
So I made a goal: 100 followers, and then delete all posts, 50 original posts, and then delete the account. A Twitter Meltdown is made. The only way I would be willing to return is if a complete Single, and an audio commentary of whatever material was created.
//..//
The last notable thing that happened was the release of Jumblo 2, the second in its sort of audio series. It is merely a collection of tracks made over the course of three years. Mixed feelings about it in whole. It and the previous release have an unfinished track each. What is important to resume learning a Digital Audio Workstation like Ardour or Reaper or even Renoise. With the newer changes in Linux audio coming in recent history has prospects looking brighter.
The Writer was listening to quite a while in the category of 'Early Music', which included the hymns and songs of the early Christian churches. This is a realm of such beautiful, even awe-inspiring music they still aspire to create, despite the teachings and the worlds constructed by Christendom to have been distasteful for longer than they followed. But despite the time of then, there is still an affinity for sheet music, with a rudimentary education taught by one of the elderly church ladies. For the time she was in my world, it was one that enriched it to a deeper level than most people currently known even now.
This spree of listening had renewed a motivation to dig up the songbooks they had grown with. Looking for the previous iteration of the songbook of the church/religious organization they had grown as a family with, for they had a notable revulsion to the revisions made of 2009 and later.
Online, the organization openly displays the dozens of iterations. Sixteen multiple iterations of songs. Blood is now running colder. This is intensely upsetting to realize.
They abandoned four-part harmony in the 1980s. The excuse then during that time was done for the explicitly expressed purpose of "simplicity" or "simplifying" to make "easier to understand". The latest iteration of the collection is only 5 years ago as of now. That five years ago was the exact moment they had installed a Five Year Plan. This is why. The Soul was that unsettled by the changes made during that period of time, for this stretch was the last straw for them. Changes and overhauls were made that transformed the environment into a tacky caricature of contemporary aesthetics of the time. For as the previous stage of the organization had a few hangups for them (no piano performers, MIDI playback), it was merely a handful of steps that would have made it a nearly-graceful stability against the world's changes.
It is the research of facts like these that make the writer more a reactionary at heart. Why was there change, from dropping of instrumental accompaniment, to MIDI playback, to prerecorded orchestrations of MP3 files, to warped cribbings from other cultures and pop music. Change almost never happens for the better. To understand that even the fleeting, minuscule kernels of enjoyment of the past were designed by committee this deeply. Words that only deserve the most frugal of respects, and to writers and creators uncredited.
You quite literally cannot go back. The quietly modest design of pale white walls, clean wooden trim, understated green benches and carpeting is gone. Everything is a flavorless muddle of brown. They managed to ruin Brown. The notes of the manychurch project need to begin writing down as soon as possible.
THEY STILL REMEMBER
THEY STILL REMEMBER
THEY STILL REMEMBER
Everything repeating all at once. How many times have you been here before? The same as it ever was. Hey, I'll be going to hospital, wanna come? The wires have.
The staggered loop (130 mi.)
Dove's Loop (144 mi.)
I have been one of the more dedicated customers of the loop.
//
(The Meltdown)
Oct 17
It begins.
It all happens again. The wires are always there, by the night stands and shelves. Not even the most active living room can push out the circuit blocks.
Those rooms. The CRT in the rooms. Tubes larger than any monitor I have ever owned. The bunk bed. The house had a regular number of stink bugs inviting themselves inside. Bugs were found merely crawling on the floor.
I wear the shirt. It is from a third, possibly fourth rung of hand-me-downs. From the same elderly woman that helped to teach music fundamentals. All remnants left as tie-dye rags. Clothing dyed to represent the colors & rainbows and other psychedelia. The many years take age.
Past Midnight. I can't sleep. He said something more about coyotes came. They approached the house. They got the shotgun. One of the kittens is gone. Not too devastating, for there are many remaining. I can't sleep. The CRT is back on, volume at the single bar. The PS2 lights up.
I wear the shirt. It's been a week now. Why am I sleeping in the other room? Nothing has changed beyond the backdrop for the wires crawling. This mattress won't last the longer I'm on it. 20 push-ups, new action. This isn't my room. This isn't my clutter. My mess on his own, ok.
Past Midnight. I can't sleep. Let's try that 'Out Of This World' cartridge he's got. Says that it's impossible. It's impossible. Fire up the PS2 again. Mortal Kombat has a lot of characters, too many even. He is asleep, waking up shortly. The wire travels to the beds. He sleeps.
I wear the shirt. Two holes are only separated by six threads of fabric. Skin becomes transient appearing with the motions by the bearer and outside moves. At what point is it more prudent to be shirtless? No person passing has commented about my state. Is it a fear of conflict?
It enters the mouth, cold and near frozen. Just like ice. It's been years since I've been able to crush ice. The dreams of prying out the metal bars return. Forget about overbite and crowding. I want ice. To suck with the tongue and molars cannot substitute the feel. 20 push-ups.
The floor below is running a latin news channel. Don't know enough to read beyond the giant bold words. Uncle is out, he will be gone late night. All the younger ones crowd in the other room. There's another television, this one much smaller. Half the width of a 15 inch monitor.
Everyone sitting in plain wooden chairs. The glass jar of cow's milk has a distinctly stale smell. Taste's stale too. Bowls of sugar will fix that. Their family's Pentium III still has the General Mills advergame. Still no internet, not even dial-up. Why don't they have internet?
Why don't they have internet? We just got it, why don't they? Just call CenturyTel, they can fix it. Their Windows 95 system says 'dial-up internet', I heard that's cheaper. Oh well, that sucks. There's still the Wires of game, not going anywhere. I wonder how the dogs are doing.
Yeah, I was plugged to the Optiplex box for four hours. So what? That's nothing compared to school. Comic books suck. Movies suck. The Wii sucks. I love my GameCube though. School is okay, I think it's boring. Where did John L. go? He left? I hope he is okay.
He is sleeping. Bored. 2 AM. Nobody in the top bunk. She's in the other bedroom now. Bathroom is cold. Why am I barefoot. Want to sleep on their couch. Still sleeping. He's snoring. I've slept through louder noises. Can't get used to this smaller couch. He is sleeping.
2 A.M. I went prone to make less noise on the wood floors than normal walking. Slowly opening the back door. Only socks. The street lamps bouncing off the concrete dip and asphalt. A beautiful orange hue clinging to everything. Nobody else is up. Only me, and the orange streets.
Memory of confessing to parents on theology. If one is to practice what is to be preached, why run prosaic readthroughs of the supplemental books? Why can't it be an actual bible study? I want to read the bible deeper. Why should I trust the monthly pamphlets?
The couch was flipped over. All cushions gone. There were an assortment of toys scattered across half of this main room. Fair amount of marbles on the floor.
In next room was similar to the other, with nothing but collateral dust. The door had a small lined paper with scriptures.
The scriptures were marked, taped to the door. "Don't worry, we'll trash that too." I folded & pocketed the paper. In the same room was a business card for a dispensary. Not even in the same region, but all the way on the other side of the state. Somebody's name in blue ink.
I will never know what happened. One can only speculate so much from the aftermath of family. Would be deeply insulting to dig deeper.
With some maneuvering, the flimsy couch hits the dumpster. It's taller than the both of us.
Out goes one family, in comes another.
Need water.
They will get you eventually. Nothing stays in stasis. Not even the most deep stagnation can remain in their way forever. Something happens & miniscule fractures and cracks widen. It's gonna snap out. On the day after. Hold the elk heart. Electricity is out, freezer burn no more.
Little mention for the sticks holding the music up. The strings have not been plucked in a short while. Do not like the electric narrowness, the acoustic is wider. Good for playing fast while not overshooting. Notable improvement from last one. Previous shredded callouses quick.
Curiosity kills. So I shall no longer ask questions. Questions bring unnecessary danger. Hold the family line.
I have been stuck on the mental skyblock for nearly 15 years. How do I fix that? "Ask questions." The only path of life ahead is a constant game of chance cards, okay.
Life does not have a debug menu, or designers enabling continuous redos. Failure does not have a barrier preventing permanent fail states. Does this require that the very action of failure must be meaningful? Do the newer wires and timescale require a sort of 'Optimized Failure'?
What's 'icebreakers' to do with real communication? What is there to go on with color or fast food resturant? I want to hear a story of your stepbrother's face getting shredded by a chihuahua after taunting it for minutes.
To not ask and stay is to remain a stationary sponge. Yet the current system does not intend on creating human sponges (yet). How do I 'connect' on real people. No social MSG button to @ and announce "I AM OPEN". Should I ask in some fashion of wacky, zany voice for the person?
I did it, and I did it again. Later, I did it again. When I thought wouldn't happen, I did it again. And then it stopped. Everything of the bush's side had seized up. I don't think any fruits have come ever since the event happened. But they still remember.
Sponges and barnacles live stationary lives, no? Always sounded like the most fitting excuse for meditation. Like that story of the man getting paid a million yen, while achieving a 50-50 chance of having to endure a million years immortal in an empty vaccum. Would that be bad?
Stop asking questions. Even the rhetorical ones will land you into trouble. If you have nothing polite to say, nothing good to say, nothing constructive to say, nothing engaging to say, say nothing. Silence is golden. Good citizens don't rock the boat. Good people follow through.
Human faces are not as clear cut as caricatures. Caricatures and illustrations are more truthful. How will you manage physical doubt and face? Everything reads wrong. Their eyes are open. Are they mad? Did you do anything wrong?
Ask?
No, get out. Something will happen. Leave.
Something Happened.
Why is she crying? Don't intrude. Your actions cause more trouble. Father is reassuring her. He never behaves like this. What is happening? Did somebody die? Not your story. Children's cartoon is on the television. Just sit on the sidewalk. They won't notice.
This volume of Harney-Barrow is coming to a close. This is an ending that has been long overdue. A cleaning that must be done, as this time most needs.
Album review and new links.
Business and Personal.
Social media too.
May this go to a more resilient BRAND. 50 Posts End
My lists are now open. Two years of sediment buildup have lead to their foundations and creations. From informationals, to Whos Who, and faux reflection. All from the collections packing other hands and people into categorized boxes for my own personal consumption. Lists now on.
Have I been pretending to be retarded all along?
Could this be the state the figures and other heads coin 'learned helplessness'? The will of the self-fulfilling prophecy, atomization of one so online? Looking so deeply, curiosity may have ended vocally, but The Wires sated it.
//
What am I doing? This was never part of the 5-Year Plan. I have no money. I have no art out. Haven't entered the next semester in over a year. There is a no clause for the new coming. One of my sandals broke. Today's pacing set is now the boat shoe alongside the remaining one.
Did he lie? I don't blame him. After all, life continues to be the crude dance of social signals. Will I reach a self-sustaining ability to merely 'know'? Fear has returned home to roost. I feel it more than anything. Haven't been this close to him since the whole district.
The wires have been with me before greeting other children outside the congregation. The wires keep the noise of the world away. But every day I must speak somewhere in the span of the next 24 hours. Can't stay in either space for too long. Instinct wins. But things are changing.
I physically shut my mouth one night. Nothing changed the day after, life simply went on. It felt similar to those days, where I could no longer speak. These behaviors can be pressed down & contained for the public. But once the home appears, & the caulk breaks away.
See you soon!
//
(Twitter Replies)
I am an incapable. Assistances have kept me alive past the stages of growth. Follow the orders. The cruise control functions, but now sputters and hobbles like a 2-stroke on its last cycles. I grind against the walls while still accelerating. You aren't last & that's what counts.
He'll be done with this. An group agreement has been settled and written down. As a group, the H-B unit sends our token apologies. The agreement has been signed by key members of the unit, but it should take another day until it's digitized. Struggling with the copier, sorry.
Maybe in the next phase can we cross weapons. Skin has began shedding for god knows how long it's been. Beginning to suspect more with that contract signed than thought.
//
(Account Afterword)
The wires love me and I love the wires. We are together in connection. I am running the first Prestige mode. It is now time to reallocate my knowledge. Where will my classification go? My Nomadic future is now an uncertainty.
Open to the URL Searx dot ME. Type into the search bar "COINTELPRO".
It's happening again. Like paper cuts, but it has been industrialized into a torture device with multiple forks and divisions. On the hands. On the legs.
I respect the mindworms. We take our coffee can & carpool to the nearby lake. At about route 40 to the left. You'll hear that some trout is coming through, mutual exchange of life for bass.
Those smokestacks have been out of commission for decades. So has been the building centerpieces. Former for ecologic & economic. The latter promoted by a recent myth that took me. Many years before the even tree began, a supervisor disliked the building aesthetic with intensity.
A handful of bricks were covertly loosened by hand in an unknown amount of time. As a time during a warm summer day, a brick fell. At first, nobody had noticed a brick was there at all. The supervisor had to ring attention to the other federal workers and inspectors for people to even pay attention to. The building was condemned by inspectors. It was prescribed as being unstable for earthquakes and as a fire hazard. Just one problem with this conclusion:
There is no fault line. There is no wooden skeleton. There was no bad building.
But time squats on the property and it is now genuinely bad. Thank you, supervisor. Thank you for making the town a worse place.
//
On the subject of us:
Know this: What we as a collective unconsciousness observe are not in tandem. The Mind is constantly scheduling and getting shot at by drive by distractions and stimulants by the constant minute. New sights and sounds and sensations are at the lenses of what is being observed. Being me, it's hard to control the wheel. But seeing it near-instinctively whip and turn across the mental lanes frighten me. The road has darkened and ice has formed in many splotches. The deer are coming and her offspring are gnawing at the edges of the black asphalt. The cougar comes down to meet the nested vessels. The disc brakes are not good enough. We slide. Gliding on the patches. Same corners of the memory are returning to a worsened hydroplaning. We will overcorrect and jerk us all. The Soul breaks from the ever present whiplash. Nearing the bump strips. The last mile marker signed at 44 miles, so it's not even close to our counts. The car taps the deer. Immediately ran off. Don't know if it died. They're more resilient than a not insignificant amount of people believe to be. Just ignore the seasonal viruses, that happens to all things.
//..//
(End 'A Twitter Meltdown', enter postscript)
For now, I will not be on Twitter for this year. At most, I have an account or two registered on the ActivityPub federated network, colloquially known as the 'fediverse'. The public facing handle is '@HarneyBA@pleroma.site'.
Will bring the another into public view once the time is right.
This was originally the posting of a personal account on audio production many months ago. This felt like the best candidate for merging with a new status update on Harney-Barrow. But this is not a clean cut post like the previous ones.
//..//
An old wash of paints. Suspect it's from 2018.
//..//
Ancient doodle.
During the last financial quarter of 2018, I had purchased a sizable swath of new equipment. Among the pieces bought included a brand new 4-in/4-out audio interface, a multi-effects stompbox, a thrift store bass amp. Even a 'new' (pre-owned) acoustic guitar. Purchased a pre-owned office computer to set a new general-purpose workstation.
I have made less than 10 minutes of professionally recorded audio ever since that point in time has passed. This is not good. Before buying this new interface and effects pedal, I was able to generate new audio files every week, whether it be an impromptu acoustic jamming or an old Yamaha "practice piano". I made a compilation album that was over two hours long.
What happened?
Really, probably Linux killed it.
The Harney-Barrow music project that began in 2014 had always been intertwined with the GNU/Linux operating system from the start. But I had always stuck with using Audacity, even to this very day.
In a way, one can see this formation of creative block I haven't encountered. Or is this a case of burnout? After all, my attitude on the case of 'power user' usage and subjects such as the command line ecosystem has been demonstrably soured after years of everyday use. My enjoyment of computer technology has long since dried up several years ago. Didn't need to get a job in it to smother my few remaining hobbies.
Quick and dirty play with printer ink.
H-B website must transfer the old site onto something more stable, now that hosting has priced up again. The exercises have returned but the mental blocks are strong. This year of absence has left further regression to come back. The Harney-Barrow brand will not die like this. Not in continuous effort deficiencies.
