abtheb - Tumblr blog

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playing it on the safer-ish but yes here's a dino boy

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Tag yourself I’m the “Overdressed and Underappreciated”. Artist : http://www.mattadrian.com/ 

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Disco Elysium out there with the real artist experience

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Cool article about viewing the internet through an ecological lens and why it's bad for the vast majority of online stuff to be owned and run by Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

"Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control."

"many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are 'where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.' Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?"

That's what we in environmental studies call a crisis of imagination!

“Ecologists have reoriented their field as a ‘crisis discipline,’ a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same.”

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MISS CONGENIALITY (2000) dir. Donald Petrie

Stan Fields: Describe your perfect date.

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Worms discover the fresh food section 

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yeah

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Memento of Father.

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This machine kills AI

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This is/was my big end of term project.

In December, our class of 16 was randomly split up into groups of 4, given art prompts based off dice rolls, and told to make a level/map/game by mid-April. I ended up in a group with 3 people in the class that I never really spoke to until that point, and our prompts were uninteresting and hard to create a concept around. I ended up doing nearly all the work because that's just how group projects go I guess. Ultimately, it came out pretty ok. I'm not in love with it at all, and it's hard to be enthusiastic about something that was (1) made for school, (2) generated from random prompts, and (3) a forced collaboration with 3 strangers, each needing to include misc assignments-based criteria. But it was very good practice for learning Unreal Engine, in particular the Blender -> UE workflow for exporting models, baking textures, assembling materials, setting up animations, etc. It was also my first opportunity to design and make a level/map from scratch, and populate it with foliage and props that I modeled myself. Combined with the Skeletons, Attack! video I made as the final for my Animation class, I also learned a lot about making scenes and staging my models in UE, lighting, filming, rendering, post-processing, etc. I think what I've learned can really elevate my art and make it shine in new ways, and I look forward to what I can do next.

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April 23, 2024

And now we do it in reverse, but with a bit more gray in my beard and an updated perspective on myself.

School is done. I learned a lot about a lot of things - though the most important being that nothing destroys the joy of art like trying to make a job out of it. I look forward to taking the time to apply what I've learned and going back to making art for fun.

September 1, 2023

I packed my important belongings into the back of a one-way rental car and moved to Toronto today. Time to start a new life I guess.

I'm still mostly on auto-pilot as I get settled in. I start 3D video game art school on Tuesday 😵‍💫

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