Welcome to Marin's Digital Playground

Creativity meets technology. Join me as I dive into a world where programming exercises reveal not just code, but the stories behind them. Follow the things I learn in public and the mistakes I make. Let's explore vibrant hackathons, the incredible demoscene, archaic yet inspiring retro computers, and quirky comics.

Writing
The Unrestrained Energy of Rob Liefeld

September 2025

The Unrestrained Energy of Rob Liefeld

Why I Still Love These Wild 1990s Comics

Rob Liefeld may never have been the most polished or technically precise artist, but in the late '80s and early '90s, his comics were pure energy on the page. Explosive, chaotic, and gloriously excessive, they captured the imagination of a generation of readers. For me, his five-year run of unrestrained creativity remains unforgettable.

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From Pigments to Pixels

September 2025

From Pigments to Pixels

Why Art and Technology Have Always Belonged Together

We often imagine art and technology as opposites. I think the story is different: from Renaissance painters grinding rare minerals into pigments to today's artists coding immersive digital worlds, creativity has always relied on technical skill. The divide is less a truth than a myth we've inherited.

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Exhausted at Evoke 2025

August 2025

Exhausted at Evoke 2025

A Very Personal Recap of the Demoparty

Evoke 2025 once again turned Cologne's AbenteuerHallenKALK into a playground of code, art, and sound. This year's edition brought some fresh surprises: From live Amiga coding battles and a dazzling drone show to heartfelt reunions with old friends. For me, it was a slower, more reflective Evoke. Yet still full of moments worth remembering.

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How I Stopped Worrying About My Static Site Generator

August 2025

How I Stopped Worrying About My Static Site Generator

(and Let Copilot Do the Work)

For years, I clung to a messy little static site generator I'd hacked together in Node.js. Every so often I'd think about rewriting it but the motivation never stuck. Then GitHub Copilot showed me I didn't need to rebuild anything at all.

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From the Archive

Here is a random selection of articles from the archive. You should read them, they're okay.
You can find all articles on the Writing page.

Dev Projects
I Couldn't Decide Which Library to Use, So I Wrote My Own Website Search

January 2025

I Couldn't Decide Which Library to Use, So I Wrote My Own Website Search

I needed a search function on my website without bloating it with heavy libraries or server-side tools. Instead of relying on frameworks, I decided to write my own lightweight, client-side search from scratch. Here's how I did it, and why building it myself turned out to be a good idea.

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Mansion of Trepidation

April 2023

Mansion of Trepidation

This is a choice-based solo fantasy adventure in the style of the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books I developed in vanilla JavaScript. The graphics and text descriptions are generated using AI tools. The player can search the 'Mansion of Trepidation' to defeat the villain and rescue their young nephew.

Videos
Design Videos

A Wide Variety of Videos

Over the years, I recorded a number of Youtube videos on many different subjects like the Bitmap Brothers game "Chaos Engine" on the Atari ST, about the iPad apps that support the full resolution on external displays, on how to draw Captain America and a number of different design topics.

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Creating Videos Using AI

Using AI Tools to Make Explainer Videos

What if you could create your own explainer videos without much effort? I decided to try it myself and made three explainer videos in only one day using generally available and cheap artificial intelligence tools. The results are perfectly workable. Take a look at the three videos that came out.

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Comics
The Blind Woman and Cats

A Lucid Dream Comic

This is a three-page comic based on a story from the dream diary of Lucid Fera. The dreamer watches a blind woman encountering her cats and contemplating existence. I drew the comic on paper, colored the panels using Procreate on the iPad Pro, and used Comic Life on the Mac for layouts and lettering. You can find the detailed steps of the process in the project description.

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Timelapse Painting Youtube Videos

Timelapse Painting Youtube Videos

These timelapse videos show the process I use to paint pictures on the iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil 2 in ProCreate. They are quick and easy to make because ProCreate is superbly snappy and delightful for quick paintings and I can record the process automatically using the built-in feature in the application.

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