vaporweb

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Additional glitch styled cursors for my app's UI

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Adding additional cursors to my tape recorder app

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I've been working on adding a tracking wheel to my tape recorder macOS app. It's been a tedious process, but I've animated the wheel for both upward and downward motions. I think it looks pretty smooth.

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I have a lot of home videos on VHS. For years, I wanted to use my parent’s tape converter to transfer the footage to a CD, but the fear of it eating tapes was always in the front of my mind. After all, I had a VHS player eat my brother’s tape of Princess Mononoke that he blamed me for.

Not too long ago, I was talking to my mom and she said she shipped our home videos off to a company that does all the converting for you, no need to worry about VHS players destroying the tapes. It’s not a cheap process, but compared to the potential devastating results of DIYing it, it’s worth the cost.

Several weeks later, my mom hands me a USB thumb drive with gigabytes of memories: Cub Scout meetings, Christmas parties, vacations, 3rd grade birthday parties, GoldenEye for the N64. The list goes on. My wife and I had a marathon movie night and binged them all.

Still reading?

I really miss the authenticity of home videos. What will we reminisce about years from now? YouTube Shorts? TikTok videos? Snapchat/Instagram filters? Will they age as gracefully as analog media does, or does technology move so fast that they’ll be dated long before nostalgia sets in?

I started coding my first video editing program that functions like an old tape player, built in Swift for MacOS. I’m designing the whole UI from scratch so that it looks like a tape player/recorder too.

It’s a lot of work, but I’m trying to start relatively simple. Something that can grow as I learn more.

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Working on low poly projects in Blender for my YouTube channel. I’ve learned so many new techniques but I think my favorite is UV mapping color palettes!

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Pixel art tube tv in Blender to go along with my VCR media control buttons. Planning to put it all together in a three.js project eventually.

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Simple animation of well-used media control buttons

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Imagine you're watching a home video on your VHS player, reminiscing about your childhood home, your youth and before the terminally online times, only to be brought back to the reality in that we live: an advertisement popping over your memories on pause. A reminder that nothing is sacred, you don't own anything, and everything will be digitalized. Welcome to hell.

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I'm working on some pixel vcr buttons to go with the 3D VHS tape I've been making in Blender, and I just learned how to use sprite sheets with CSS and the canvas element, so now I've got a whole bunch of ideas floating in my head. And this post has too many acronyms.

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Learning animations in Blender. Still need to add more textures and some details in Affinity Photo, but it’s coming along nicely.

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Starting to add the little details to my VHS tape made with Blender. I have to learn how to add some rough textures to the cassette. I added a split down the center of the casing to distinguish the top from the bottom but it’s not pictured here.

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We weren't prepared for the World Wide Web to be a world of bots communicating with each other.

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I've been learning so many different tools and languages as of late: Motion, Aesprite, Xcode, Swift, and now Blender.

Blender is a whole other beast. Rudimentary objects in a 3D space can be so complex. I'm using it to make 3D pixel art, so I'm not sure why I'm focusing on all the details of a VHS tape (other than an exercise in problem solving).

It's got me feeling nostalgic for those thick plastic Disney VHS boxes, which are under a bed or in the attic somewhere...

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The Internet has always been weird, albeit harder to find.

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