Puppets.app
I’m all for cool new creative tools, and this right here is one of them. Using basically only a webcam and their software, you can rapidly put together puppet shows using only your hands and the assets on screen.
The truly incredibly thing about this is how the materiality of puppetry seems to be maintained - the use of it really feels like puppeting instead of “interacting with software to puppet something” a la traditional 3D animation workflows.
(Twitter thread with demos here)
Pit-Bull VX Review
I’ve been starting to look for a new car, and as such I’ve been reading more Car and Driver recently. And I’m pleased to report that their writing and prose is as good as ever. I think this is something that is maybe lost on people that just see the “brand” and reviews, but the fact that a major car reviewer (maybe THE reviewer) is able to maintain a consistent tone in its writing more akin to something like a hobby blog or Rock, Paper, Shotgun is truly incredible.
For a great example, read this review of what is effectively a consumer-purchasable tank. Delivered completely straight faced, this review is chock full of goodies like:
Should any roadside bandits pick a fight, they'll need some fairly heavy artillery to slow down the Pit-Bull—especially one with the VX's reinforced armor, rated to stop a .50 BMG round and withstand a grenade. Or 20 kilograms of TNT. Wrapped around the 20-inch wheels, the 41-inch Continental off-road tires have run-flat functionality. And since, as everyone knows, offense is the best defense, there are seven-inch gun ports built into the doors and rear quarters, plus one in the rooftop turret.
Stay real, Car and Driver.
The Institute for Illegal Images
I’m out to GDC this week so excited that this serendipitously came across the desk at Kukshtel HQ. Turns out there’s a pseudo-secret gallery in San Francisco that primarily displays art related to drug paraphernalia. Or more specifically, art printed on acid tabs.
The piece above looks more at the cultural significance of art produced in counter-cultural spheres, so is worth reading in general beyond just the “oh woah theirs an acid tab art gallery”. For that you can check out (you guessed it) Atlas Obscura.
Beyond the Crystal Frontier
The Between Two Cains podcast recently did an episode on the TTRPG module Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, and after looking more into that module (and buying it obv), I found the latest blog site of its writer, Gus L. And the latest post on said blog is a barnstormer of world building, providing all sorts of interesting ideas around the ideas probed and teased in the module. Read on for just some Really Cool Weird Stuff.
Picotron
You’ve very likely seen games made in the fantasy console Pico-8 float by you on the internet. There’s a distinctive color palette, a very low resolution, and then the attendant score of retweets and likes. The utterance “Made in Pico-8” summons similar energy to “Made in Rust”, and likely share an overlap in audience.
And now from the same creator we’re blessed with a virtual? Fantasy? OS that is somewhere between a graphical lua repl (also see this!) environment and a proper desktop OS, built to make more pico-8 flavored things.
This is cool. Why do I sound so bitter?
Something about the whole fixation on fantasy programming consoles feels like a soft flex by FAANG dropouts that are able to sail by on existing wealth or returns from years of their own Apple stock instead of working on tooling for people that don’t just want to make toy programs. By doubling down on a toy ecosystem instead of investing in “real” tools (yeah, I said that) the gulf between what is possible for entry level people and what you can only do at a company widens, further exasperating socioeconomic divides, etc. It makes it harder for more people to get started participating in the income generating modes that allowed these people to just toy around on fantasy consoles in the first place.
Do I wish I could program fantasy consoles all day? Hell yeah! It’s very fun. Is it an actual zero sum effort with increasing the tooling ecosystem for tools geared towards actually producing non-toy output because it sucks up the creative and technical energy of the people most suited to be able to meaningfully move those efforts forward? I think so, yes!
Till next time!