BLOG 07/2003

26 JULY
So here we are again - another weekend, another glitch for spiritual
refreshment and a long, long halflife.
Just to remind latecomers, glitches are currently per-weekend due to
external circumstances beyond the control of the strange quark.

Today I have been mostly playing with Stella. No, not the drink, the Amiga emu.
Here's a picture of the Galaxian.bin being edited. I ended up replacing about 40%
of the data with zeros, and still the damn thing ran!



And here's one of the results en route to the thing not running at all.


CLINOLAC1000

Some other nice glitch results were obtained. I'll show you next week.

Second-up, I have received my lurvely Dragon32 t-shirt and mug!
I understand that Richard, who runs THE DRAGON ARCHIVE
is producing the merchandise, but it's being sold through another web site, which
I'm not going to name because it's merely a commercial entity and I bet they
pay crap commission; follow the link from Richard's site instead. The t-shirt logo is
produced using a vinyl-cut method, which creates extremely durable images.
Heh, of course this is a blatant plug, but that's one the many rewards you get
by being a friend of beflix.com! And if you need further proof that buying stuff
increases happiness, click my BX link you doubter!

And onto the New Bleep 6 event in 2 weeks, it looks like I've been teamed
up with Russell Haswell (Mego/Warp Records) for the visuals. How cool is that, very
exciting. Did anyone buy a copy of his SATANSTORNADE CD? I think it was in
collaboration with that Japanese Merzbow bloke - some sort of godfather-of-noise.
Bring on the fucked-up audio and fucked-up visuals!

19 JULY
Yay, another NEW BLEEP noise extravaganza and retro gameplay-inspired fun
next month. Look forward to trying out some new ideas, provided I can get the
code sorted out. Everything boils down to lines of (quite literally) bloody code.

This is just a straight-up data visualization of a program exe.
I'm playing around with my current fixation of "greyscale plus a bit of blue".
Colour is everything, don't you think? I mean, the images on this venerable
site are abstract taken to extremes, so aspects such as colour and
even aspect ratio are given more thought than might otherwise be
the case.

The strip on the right-hand edge looks like factory chimneys
polluting our green and pleasant land. Hmm, yes, and the bit next to it
even looks like a railway. 

It's funny how people see things differently. I went to see some
artists at their studios, as part of Cambridge Open Studios 2003. 
In particular, I was chatting to Mike Tedder
about one of his paper collages which was particularly striking. 
[Boulogne Sur Mer]

Mike said this image of a young boy wearing big yellow-rimmed goggles was taken
on a lovely bright sunny day. I couldn't resist saying (truthfully)
that I thought it looked like the boy was watching a nuclear bomb test,
and was wearing the goggles for protection from the glare.
Gathering more confidence, I said this was because the shades of 
blue and yellow in his image weren't happy  - instead
they were dirty, menacing hues. Well, anyway, he seemed a bit amused at this!
I bought a card with the image. It's good, it'll go up in the Operations HQ.


BORROW ONE FROM TENS COLUMN

12 JULY
Today is the 2nd birthday of GLITCH ART! 
Bless you! Bless you all who have been touched by
my robotic hand this past year!

Best of Year 2 has been distilled to a density of experience
that's bordering on the illegal. Crivens!

There's a traditional Nuke Party™ at my place this afternoon -
bringing 20g of decommissioned nuclear material and a box
of Ice-Pops™ gains entry b4 9pm.  And there will be
yellow byte-sized party pixels for nibbles. Paper plates are non-mandatory.

A value in your eye is worth two in the tummy.

Pixellating your brainwaves for 2 Human™-years.

Irradiating your retinal input devices for 712 Earth™-days.

Reprogramming your beliefs for 17088 Telstar™-hours.

05 JULY
Military low-flying fighter aircraft. 
Television receiver picks up crew-to-ground message
in the inter-frame datafragpile. 


CREEP ONE UNIT, RETREAT, REPEAT