Camel Tail: Generating Narrative in Metal

It's been 30 years, Metallica; what is the story you are trying to tell?

Camel Tail is a generative poem using every line from Metallica's 9 major studio albums, and is my attempt to find an overall narrative within Metallica's prolific work.

I was pleased to discover that often the lines become arranged in mutually relevant ways. At times, the verses share rhyme and meter, with the resultant stanzas grouped thematically, even though the songs could be written decades apart. Out of their original context, the lines become more personal, and seem to speak of hate bred through pain and loss. The scenes seem more grey without the pounding rhythm. The man behind the words becomes more contemplative, almost pitiful.

And other times it doesn't make any sense at all.

You can find it online here: Camel Tail

All words were written by Metallica (please don't sue me).
All lines are rearranged at random by your browser.
All lyrics are sic from http://www.encycmet.com/ (except for gross misspellings which I corrected here and there).

The javascript is based off Nick Montfort's generative poetry.

-SRT

one [seed] - Bonsai Grass for Atari 2600

The fruit of one [seed]

From the UnderAcademy files:

one [seed]
nō joystick required

one [seed] grows one blade of grass from your Atari VCS.

[]

Bury one [seed] about an inch deep into your Atari VCS cartridge port. Power on.

Within an hour, a single blade of grass will sprout.

Make sure to give it plenty of sunshine (colour); your blade of grass will not grow in the dark (b/w).

Water your blade of grass at least once a week (reset). Without water, your blade of grass will turn brown and die.

Within about a week, your blade of grass will be fully grown.

At any time, you may trim your blade of grass (game select) to a desirable level. The height and the reason are yours.

With proper care, attention, and focused meditation, your blade of grass will last as long as you do.

Download .bin file here: one [seed]

-SRT

UnderAcademy & Press

For the past few months, I have been participating in online courses taught at UnderAcademy College. Here is their mission statement:

UnderAcademy College is an unaccredited undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate anti-degree institution (of absence). UnderAcademy College situates itself as a shadow-academic environment offering alternative courses and anti-degree programs in a variety of subjects. The primary mission of UnderAcademy College is to remain open, marginal, and unaccredited

The classes at UnderAcademy tend to experiment with digital media (I have focused mostly on digital poetics), are taught by college professors and others from around the world, and are campus and tuition free (for me the ideal situation). Without going on and on about how ^_awesome_^ this unaccredited (take that, permanent record) institution is, I will leave it to you to explore their website, as well as some of the work that I generated during the first cycle:

Ionic Mascara Precinct - A selection of works by the students of Talan Memmott's Advanced Macaronics course.

[NŌ CODE (DEPROGRAMMING 101)] - An exploration/explanation of my compiled works for Eric Snodgrass' class. Includes: generative poetry, interactive fiction, books, a board game, Atari 2600 pieces, and even more!

Student Work - Et al projects from selected classes.

I was very pleased to be able to (non)attend UnderAcademy's first cycle, graduate with a CALLIDUS PARVULUS degree in Applied Marginalization &c., and am now honoured to be their first ever (in)valedictorian, as well as invitee to speak RE: my experience at the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) conference in June. I look forward to letting you know how that goes.

In the meantime, I am currently taking another Memmott-led course entitled: Catabolic Poesis, the blog of which may be found here: Catapo

In other news, I also had the honour of being included in a Kill Screen Magazine article RE: William S. Burroughs and cut-up, generative poetry. You can find that here: Gunning with Scissors

Finally, I have been asked to once again begin broadcasting Daily Moment Art exercises. Therefore, some time in the near future, I will be splitting this website in two, allowing one side to focus on moment art, and the other to focus on my experiments. I apologize for letting this blog take a narcissistic turn. I'll make it up to you.

For those of you disinterested in Moment Art but are following along with my digital poetry experiments, until I have a dedicated website for it, I will likely hold off posting my experiments in Sonny's Work page separately, though you can still find everything by browsing the blog posts (ugh...).

Thank you, come again!

-SRT

abbr. Game Poem for Atari 2600

abbr. is the final Atari game poem in my Monday triptych.

It was premiered at the Louisville Arcade Expo, March 2-4. Over a dozen people were genuinely interested! I want to thank everyone who was courageous enough to try it out.

I will have a postmortem in some form in the near future. Until then, however, I would like to offer you the game poem, the source code, as well as directions on how to build the bridge rail controller*. These can all be found at the Sonny's Work page, or by clicking here.

The directions to the game poem are found on the cartridge itself (look at the main label).

* though you could just use the right player's fire button. Remember, to simulate standing on the railing, you must hold the fire button in, and to simulate jumping, you let go.

Now, here's the spiel I used at the expo:

"Okay, now: You've spent eight hours at a job you loathe. You've spent hours more in traffic just getting you to and from this job. It is at this point where this day, this Monday, you find yourself on" [turns game poem on] "the 2nd Street Bridge.

"That little line there is you. You stand there amidst traffic. You have no money. You're topped out in anger. These are the only things you can think about, and you do so obsessively. Impulsively, you stand on the railing." [instructs player to stand on bridge rail controller]

"See you now, standing on the bridge railing? Now, just close your eyes and listen to your heartbeat. Breathe. Can you imagine being at a point like this in your life where this is the best alternative?

"Your time has come; jump off the bridge." [player jumps off controller; character jumps off bridge to blackness]

"And that is the end. It's over." [player reacts]

"Now, since this is my creation, my re-imagining of my world, I can do something about it. Since this is on the Atari, I can do what I've always dreamed of: I can put the difficulty switch to easy," [switch difficulty to easy] "hit reset," [hit reset] "and boom: I'm on the beach.

"I'm on the beach, where the world is black and white, everything is right or wrong, and I know exactly where I fall morally and ethically. Simple.

"The storm is always off in the distance, and all I can do now is pick up rocks, and chuck them into the water. Listen to the ocean roll, and throw rocks into the water.

"A perfect life."

-SRT

Nothing is 0k: Atari 2600 Generative Poetry

Nothing is 0k is a randomly generated poem for the Atari VCS.

Because of the size limitations of the Atari 2600 (4k rom), it is nearly impossible to hold text of any substantial quantity in memory, let alone display it on-screen. In order to do so, I've chosen to represent words in the playfield with each letter's binary form of its ASCII hexadecimal equivalent.

Nothing is 0k for the Atari 2600

With six lines total (two stanzas of three lines), each line contains words with either four or two letters (4-2-4 stanzas). The playfield itself displays the binary form of the hexadecimal code for each letter.

Secondly, the colours of each line represent one letter of a six-letter adjective that represents the mood of the poem, or could also be inferred as the title for each two-stanza poem. The Atari 2600 uses hexadecimal code to represent colour, so by looking at the TIA colour codes (NTSC), you can decipher the randomly generated words.

The poem from above, decoded.

The dots on the bottom of the screen are to aid in reading. Each dot represent one bit; a space, another.

I found the graphical representation in this abstract form an interesting way to view these poems. It can be likened to reading poetry from another language with a different iconography. I suppose it lets you see the forest without knowing that it's made of trees.

Generative poetry on such a constrained platform represents, to me, not only a personal challenge, but also a way to prove that the Atari VCS is so much more diverse and capable than imagined, or even originally intended. I love exploring its boundaries.

Both the .bin and the .asm files are available, free.

Press left joystick button to begin, and to generate a new poem.

-SRT

iFound Jesus: An Interactive Acrylic Painting

or, My Act of Contrition.

About:
iFound Jesus is my latest iOS creation for the iPhone. It is an interactive acrylic painting, wherein you get to play hide-and-seek with Jesus, his disciples and apostles. When you find them all, Jesus gets to find you!

Basically what happens is this: You start at home base, and have to look behind buildings, trees, graves, and other such objects for Jesus and his friends. Upon finding them, the children begin running, with a 3-second untaggable head start, toward home base. If you manage to catch these elusive youngsters, they will teach you a passage from biblical scripture. Then, when everyone has either been tagged or returned safely to home base, you get to play as Jesus, finding his friends, and ultimately, you.

Screenshot from iFound Jesus for iPhone

Creation:
Everything in this game, sans text, was painstakingly painted with acrylic at the exact scale of the iPhone screen. Why? Masochism. Personal challenge. Also, I'm a stickler about wasting paint. Mostly, because I wanted what you see on the screen to represent the actual painting itself. I know it would have been much easier to paint everything larger and then downsize them, but having the brush strokes be actual size was important to my vision.

Everything painted at scale of iPhone screen

Once painted, the images were scanned and saved. Each frame of animation was numbered, labelled, and reversed for direction. All in all, each character has between 22 and 28 frames, half of which were painted, at a size that was especially challenging with the types of brushes that I own, and the thickness of the paint applied.

I especially thank this picture for animation models.

It's hard to say how many man-hours went into painting this piece, since I worked on it over the course of a couple months, at short intervals when I had the chance. I must say, however, that overall I was pleased with how the images turned out.

GameSalad:
GameSalad is another "no coding required", "build it yourself" game creation engine. In the past, I used the Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 (SGDK2) to create my Adventures of the Overgrown Oatmeal game for the PC, and GameSalad is very similar. The reason I chose GameSalad this time is because they allow for iOS game creation.

Essentially, in GameSalad, you drag and drop the images and sound you wish to include, then go through a veritable labyrinth of drop-down menus in order to create your game. Perfect for people without a lot of coding experience (i.e. Me). Although it crashes frequently, isn't the most efficient method of game creation, nor is it easy to define AI behaviour, GameSalad is a great way for us to create this type of art without spending countless hours in Xcode. In other words, for you more adventurous Moment artists, I highly recommend GameSalad if you wish to give this type of art a go.

Peaceful Play:
For this project, I was going for the most nonviolent, peaceful experience I could think of. A scoreless game of hide-and-seek with the Son of Man seemed to me the most innocent form of game play imaginable.

However, upon reading Devin Monnens' War and Play, it became clear to me that what I created was a jihad against a Christian horde.

Whoops.

Okay, so through a certain lens, this game can be viewed as a seek-and-destroy mission. Please believe that that is not my intention. While I highly recommend reading Mr. Monnens' paper (an analysis of war in games of all sort), I intended this to be a calm, self-paced game of chase and reflection, family friendly for all.

Now that I have become better acquainted with the concept of conflict in games, I have a much better understanding of how to approach my next game, which will instead address conflict resolution.

Intended Rhetoric:
Naturally, I have chosen to try to say something with this game beyond that of just playing hide-and-seek, and beyond that of promoting a peaceful way of thinking.

First of all, there's the very act of searching, actively seeking Jesus, his friends, and more importantly spiritual guidance.

Also, there's the rule that you play as Jesus as often as you play as you. This is me trying to say that we are all one and the same as Jesus.

And yes, I do realize that I painted all characters as white people.

That, too, was intentional.

I'm certainly not a bible thumper in any manner; in fact, I addressed my issues with the Christian concept of God in an earlier blog about my first iPhone app. The Word. This piece of game art is mostly my attempts to reconcile with my own issues. I consider myself a spiritual seeker, yet have hit a road block which I believe I cannot get past until I work through previous foundational trauma. Knowing that I'm not the only one, I hope that this may help others along the way, or if nothing else, awaken others to a different light.

Intended Audience (and Inadvertent Alienation):
Intended audience, again, is mostly myself, and those in the same boat as I. Furthermore, I hope this game can be enjoyed by children while learning about selected beautiful ideas of the bible, without any of the hatred and violence that so profusely scatters its pages.

The problem is the inclusion of Thomas and Mary.

On the one hand, by including some gnostic literature that was not deemed acceptable by the church so long ago, I am trying to spread ideas that are foreign to most of today's Christians, but ideas that are just as enlightening as many other mystical traditions. I consider these relatively recently found writings (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary) just as important as anything included in the New Testament.

Others will disagree. In fact, most may disagree. For that, I am heartily sorry. I realize that this will be a deal-breaker for many. But again, while I would like as large an audience as I possibly can, I will not sacrifice my integrity for a couple bucks.

Sorry.

Overall:
I am incredibly pleased to have put my heart and time into this project, and am more than happy with the result. Yes, I believe I could have created something "better" by doing the coding myself.

But I didn't want to.

I wanted to enjoy the process of creating a painted work of art, which was both interactive (forgive the term, academics) and as animated as the paintings at Hogwarts. In this arena, I believe I succeeded.

Moreover, I wanted to use this as a tool to alter some signification when it comes to God. Has it worked?

I don't know yet; I have a lot of work to do.

In the meantime, the game is available here: iFound Jesus

Your comments are welcome here, and I would love to hear from you about your experience with this game.

Thank you all for checking in. I can't wait to show you my next project!

-SRT

Cimmerian Cell: My First Card Game

ABOUT:
Presented with minimalist artwork to replicate the style of early ASCII mazes, Cimmerian Cell is a logic-based adventure-style card game that brings the concept of randomly computer-generated dungeon games to a non-digital format. The narrative is intentionally left out for maximum imaginative play.

The rules are designed to be simple. There are no character stats to stumble through, and no complex battle system to learn. Games are easy to play for all ages, don't require hours to finish, and allow for virtually limitless dungeon-space possibilities, demanding endless and exciting replayability.

Cimmerian Cell is a single and multiplayer game, provided each player has their own deck.

INCLUDED:
45x ROOM cards
2x STAIR cards
3x MONSTER cards
1x SWORD card
1x SCEPTER card
2x Instruction cards

Check it out here: Cimmerian Cell

The kids had a blast play-testing this one!

-SRT