rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

Moving this to Merveilles.town:

#introduction

I'm a NY-born Oakland resident who programs for game companies to survive. I teach Scratch to kids at our town's video game museum.

In my free time I used #Flash a lot, then #Haxe, and now a lot of modern #JavaScript. I port things as a way to preserve ideas. I have a loving wife and 2 cats.

uh.

#webgl #threejs #pasta #halloween #science #wordplay #gpl #matrix #macintosh #darkwave , uuuuh, #antifa #kielbasa #netneutrality #humanity #flan #pasta

Err on the side of noshin'.

#theWorkshop

Got the volume, trill and pitch shift worked out I think. See how the pitch reflects what's in the spectrogram?

Now I need a waveform.

I think "Absalom" would be a good name for a cow, because of how close it sounds to "abomasum", and because it's a name that encourages you to ruminate.

#JustCowThings

#TheWorkshop

Current status. So glad there's a bad-eyesight mode!

@neauoire I'm inching my way there 😅

Okay that is adorable. 🖱️

puredata vanilla is 22.7 MB. A new document has no apparent interface. The only thing I know about it is, if you make anything of value in here it ends up looking like the alien primer in that movie Contact.

This is where we camp for the night. ⛺

The Playdate has spoiled me. This is how it begins.

The SDK was only 20 MB. I made a simple program that's only 60 KB. Now I want to learn how to make audio from scratch, and everything I see is multi-gigabyte downloads and software plugins that rely on other software. Half this stuff is asking for weird system permissions, and I haven't even made a simple beep, let alone a wild eep.

Bits, please. I own a polyphonic triscuit. Go small or go home.

#TheWorkshop

Finally isolated this sound effect. All I want is to learn to additively synthesize it.

Should be easy-peasy, right? If it was just an image, and I wanted to produce it procedurally, I'd be done by now.

(Before anyone asks, this is a build of Audacity from *before* they went evil.)

Noteworthy characteristics:
- multiple tones (I count 32!)
- pitch rises then drops, like doppler
- through kind of a... staccato?
- waveform's something punchy
- noise sprinkled on top?

Forgot to share footage. You'll have to settle for an emulator screencap, for now, because I haven't mastered holding a phone while operating the crank.

When the crank is undocked, the effect slows, and can be driven backward and forward by cranking.

And when you hold down the A and B keys, there's a surprise!

Next stop: playing with the audio synth API!

Something I've been meaning to do in my web projects that I haven't gotten to yet is introducing some kind of audio. For now, they're all dead silent, and that attests to my unfamiliarity with audio programming, and my abject fear of making the worst sounds I've ever heard.

😖👂🌀📢

But the Playdate SDK seems to have something accessible enough that I can inch my way toward making something I'm proud of.

#theWorkshop

Happy again with my Playdate, post warranty claim!

The perceived theme of relatable underdog protagonists à la Herman Melville (Merman Merveilles?) continues with each week of Season One.

Went ahead and ported the matrix demo to Playdate. Got cozier with Lua and then carried it to C to find out what that's like.

There is an eager-beaver scrappiness pervading this entire tech stack and friends, I am here for it.

I just had a glimmer of hope. Thought you should know!

Even my plan last month to plot dreary Mediocrepolis got delayed. My upcoming three-day weekend may give me the chance to finally walk its mundane streets. Or not? I don't know?

...For the first time in ages, I'm building something out of spite. It's still a kind of feel-good thing to share with the world, but it's kind of morbid. It feels so off-brand I'll probably make an "alt" to share it.

But that part of me needs an outlet.

Anyway, fuck the rough beast for slouching toward Bethlehem!

"What've you been up to, Rez?"

Oh hey! I dunno, I've been sort of stressed and super bummed out! Constantly!✨

My previous plan to make something this year that'd overcome my usual challenges has been totally replaced these past few months by a plan to just maintain my bearings for as long as possible. I have about zero confidence in the human project.

Yes, the light from you bright glimmering fusion reactors still cut through my night sky, but boy is there a lot of empty void in between!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-oFFx01Tl0 #theStudio