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 amazing Revision Demoparty 2025

April 2025

Revision 2025

A Journey Through Train Chaos, Creativity, and Community

Travelling from Thessaloniki to Saarbrücken wasn't easy but for Revision 2025, it was absolutely worth it. Amid wonderful demos, arcade machines, bonfires, and a sea of creative minds, I found once again what makes the demoscene so unique: the awesome community of technology and art.

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BuildX Voovo Hackathon 2025

April 2025

From Spectator to Juror

My Tiny Role in the 'Oscars' of the Demoscene

Wanting to contribute to the demoscene in a bigger way, I became a jury member for the midschool category at the Meteoriks 2025 awards, sifting through an overwhelming number of demos, debating their merits, and helping to decide the year's best. It was a wild, but ultimately rewarding experience that deepened my appreciation for the passion and craftsmanship behind the scene. I even held one of the award speeches.

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BuildX Voovo Hackathon 2025

March 2025

Brains, Voice, Eyes, and Beard

Our Hackathon Adventure at BuildX Voovo Budapest

The clock was ticking, pizza power was flowing through our veins, and our team, the Health Hackers, was racing to build an AI-powered quiz generator at the BuildX Voovo Hackathon in Budapest. What followed was a whirlwind of late nights, AI struggles, and last-minute twists in a battle against time and technology.

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Why I dislike PowerPoint

February 2025

Why I Dislike PowerPoint

(At Least How It's Used In Some Large Companies)

PowerPoint is everywhere in corporate life. Meetings begin with it, discussions revolve around it, and after everything is said and done, the slide deck is all that remains. But this is the problem: PowerPoint was never meant to be the presentation, it was meant to support one. In large companies, this tool has been twisted into something it was never designed to be, and that's why I dislike it. A lot!

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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
Archiving the Archive Thumbnail

February 2024

Archiving an Archive

My Adventures Scraping the Contents of the Archive of Digital Art

A while ago, I wanted to learn web scraping so I wrote my own little suite of applications based on Puppeteer/Node.js to grab content from the Archive of Digital Art (ADA), parse it into JSON and extract the images. Join me as I scrape the bottom of the web archive.

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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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