Aesthetic Dot Computer
Readings of essays from Aesthetic.Computer, in @jeffrey's voice. Each episode is a single essay read start to finish sourced from A mobile-first runtime and social network for creative computing, read aloud. papers.aesthetic.computer
Episodes
47 episodes
choir, a card catalog, eight gigabytes
I spent a chunk of today building choir, a new room I'm making for art-world people. It started as a scaffold and by the afternoon it had a face , Fía drew a C mark for it, and I set her hand-drawn logo large at the head of the room so it's the fi...
porting the piano to windows
Spent a chunk of the day on Menu Band for Windows, porting the Mac menu-bar piano over key by key. The piano voice came across from the Swift source, the Salamander grand, as program one. Then the whistle, the GM waveguide whistle holding its sust...
a corridor, a compiler, a knot
I spent a chunk of today inside a corridor , a KidLisp piece I use to test the three-dimensional layer. It got a light model and a depth buffer, bricks turned into faces, mortar running along the walls, and I walked it with an Xbox controller, the...
the whistle breathes as one
I spent a chunk of today inside menuband, building out instruments one by one. The whistle was the one that mattered most , I got it so the jitter, the vibrato, and the breath all move together across a held note instead of as separate layers figh...
eggs hatch, keys get pulled
I spent part of today watching eggs crack open. Not literal eggs , the little prox creatures that have been sitting dormant, waiting. I made them actually stand up this time, grow into bodies that carry their look with them wherever they go, inste...
a rock that names its engine
Aesel's terminal got a pass today. I gave the handle an animated feel using Slab, and went through and unified the terminal colors so nothing clashed and everything stayed readable. There was a weird bug where the same engine rock could show up tw...
saved fighters and a sailor song
Most of today went into Oskiewar, the fighting game, and specifically into making a fighter feel like it belongs to you. I spent the morning wiring saved characters to actual accounts instead of whatever was sitting in local storage , so if you si...
sailor song, almost done
The sailor song edit kept crawling forward today, version by version, and most of my day went into it one small fix at a time. The kiss glitch finally got the hole filled right , the stretched word now snaps in over thirty milliseconds, boosted in...
sailor song, take after take
Most of the day went into sailor song. I keep calling them versions but they're really just passes , v25 was the take finding its own order, an orchestral pop engine under it, her real ending instead of a placeholder one. By v73 I'd done a full cr...
a peer in your own costume
I spent part of today on signup, the actual boring plumbing of it. We've had a trickle of people who start making an account and then just vanish partway through, and I never had a clear picture of where they dropped off. So I put in measurement f...
a radial thumbstick, a wider desert
Most of today went into the fighting game. I put a radial thumbstick into the touch controls, sized so a thumb actually fits inside it instead of hunting around the edge of the screen. The desert kept growing too , bigger hills, no ghost pipe sitt...
dripping icons and a Windows beta
I spent part of the day making the iOS app less chatty. Notifications used to fire whenever they felt like it, and I went through and made them deliberate instead, only speaking up when there's something worth saying. Along the way I gave AC's ico...
the held vowel between verses
I spent most of today inside one syllable. Sailor Song has this moment where verse one ends on "me" and verse two needs to pick up under the word "lately," and instead of cutting between them I wanted the vowel to just keep singing through the gap...
a flat puppy in a flat yard
Most of today went into fiapup, which is a little dog living in a meadow now. I got the yard to fill the whole screen, moved the camera so it's never stuck inside a hill, and had near trees step out of the way instead of clipping through the lens....
objects bake, a game finds its icon
I spent a chunk of today in the object lab, trying to get kidlisp objects to run inside the fighting game's own frame interpreter. The idea was to bake static parts down into meshes at three different levels of detail, so a form stops being a live...
wheels, pistols, and a token that pins itself
I spent most of today back inside oskiewar, patching up the parts that had gone quiet on me. The three-dimensional playground came back, and with it the bullet ricochets, which had been missing for a stretch without anyone noticing until I went lo...
freeskate, replays, and a recovered app
I spent part of today untangling a mess in aesel, the native app work. There was a release that had lost some upstream work along the way, and instead of quietly shipping it I added a check that rejects any release missing that preserved work. The...
the Xbox learns to hold daylight
Most of today went into oskiewar, and it went through a lot of small deaths and rebirths to get somewhere real. I put pose shadows and dynamic lighting into the fighting game, then had to chase down a crash in the realistic weapon rendering before...
the room learns its own voice
Most of today went into Fleet, getting six laptops in a room to act like one instrument for the evening's setlist. Each screen used to just show incoming notes, and now pieces without words still get that roll, but pieces with words show the word ...
aesel pro learns to breathe
Most of today went into aesel pro. I fixed the mouse so it stays where the layout puts it instead of resetting every time you switch views, and I made a drag inside the terminal actually select text again, the way you'd expect from any normal wind...
laptops seating themselves
Most of today went into notespatial. It's a suite now, eleven chapters, and the idea at the center is simple to say and took forever to get right: every laptop in the room shows its real screen, and every laptop counts the same in the mixdown. No ...
the singer, the judge, the notebook
Most of today went into Aesel, the native notebook. It kept slipping between being a toy and being a first-line tool, so I spent the day nailing it down , stable chrome, animated lettering that actually held its shape instead of jittering, and the...
a console that spars with itself
Most of today went into the fighting game's console mode. I got it so a controller counts as local the moment the console sees it plugged in , no extra step, no menu to confirm it. Then I gave it something to fight: a dummy that just stands there ...
