November 2024
Things I Learned at Drupalcamp Berlin 2024
(Yes, I Know, I'm Late to the Party)
On November 8th and 9th I went to Drupal Camp Berlin. I learned about Starshot, a bold initiative to make Drupal more user-friendly and accessible. Among the many talks I attended, I also went sessions about the open-source tracking tool Matomo and the Drupal Association's plan to overhaul documentation using the "Docs Like Code" approach. I learned a lot at Drupal Camp Berlin!
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November 2024
Coding Counter Culture
Attempting to Draw Determination in a Coder
In this drawing tutorial, I'll guide you through creating a powerful and resolute female programmer, drawn in a style inspired by the bold, iconic imagery of socialist realism. And I only use six colors for it! Let me show you in a step-by-step video how I draw determination in the face of a coder!
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October 2024
Voxxed and Loaded
The Voxxed Days 2024 Tech Conference in Thessaloniki
The Voxxed Days 2024 in Thessaloniki are probably the premier tech conference in town bringing together developers, architects, and tech enthusiasts from across Europe. I managed to attend a wide range of talks, workshops, and hands-on sessions covering topics from email, technical debt, cloud computing, and the omnipresent AI, to software architecture. Here's what I saw and did!
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October 2024 Mildly NSFW
Boris Vallejo and the Pixel Art of the Demoscene
As an epic fantasy painter, Boris Vallejo had a great influence on 1980s and 90s fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and the demoscene. Through the decades, his works have been replicated by pixel artists. This article features fantasy art history, demoscene drama, and a lot of pixel art fun creating a Boris Vallejo imitation graphic using only four colors.
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September 2024
The Future of the Past
Avoiding Stagnation in Archives of the Amiga Demoscene
Let's explore the Amiga Demoscene Archive (A.D.A.), examining its role as a demo repository within the demoscene, and take a look at its carefully curated collection. What are the archive's strengths and weaknesses? And what can we learn from this archive of media art?
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August 2024
The Magic of Evoke
Demoparty Report by a Bloke at the 25th Evoke
The 25th edition of Evoke was held from 16th to 18th of August 2024 in Cologne. It was an amazing event full of creativity, cooperation, and demoscene magic!
Here are my impressions of this wonderful demoparty.
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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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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.
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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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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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
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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