rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

1:05:19.

Went off the rails briefly to look at a later tutorial, namely key states.

There's stuttering that I can't explain. I'll bug IRC about it.

Whoever wants an upvote, here's a set to share:

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Helped myself to one, I hope you don't mind

32:26

Pausing to make a sandwich with the missus. I don't travel this road alone

27:15

Let's see how far I can get through lazyfoo.net's SDL tutorials tonight.

3...
2...
1...
Go!!

https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php

Okay, yeah, that works. Some minor tweaks and I can move on.

Okay, here's an idea.

Instead of a super busy spiral form, I've made a simplified, iconized stand-in for the cAMP spiral phenomenon.

Since it's self-contained and not too busy (right?), I can apply common monshō layout variations to it. And I don't have to worry about any of the shapes interacting, because they never touch.

Okay, I can tackle this conceptually.

A line that goes in a spiral has an end on the very inside and an end going around the outside.

The icon for size 1 is trivial. The icon for size 2 has the option of joining the two spirals' outside ends together. But the icon for size 3 has three total "outside ends" of spirals. One of them is a third wheel. There's no way to fix it, apart from a triskelion, which is famously European in origin.

But size 3 is tricky. I figured I'd make something radially symmetrical, but as you can see, I can't just snip up pieces of the original spiral and smash them together, their lines don't line up. Generally speaking, spirals just don't line up, they change as they progress further away from their starting point.

I might be able to layer things carefully so there's interesting overlaps, but it's really fiddly. And it's honestly a little to busy to pass as monshō. I should rethink it.

My plan for size 2 and 3 was to use 2 and 3 spiral "sources".

And I think size 2 could be derived from what I came up with below— mirroring the spiral and aligning them. This looks bifurcative, without being too busy. At least the principle is sound.

Now, I can't just take a screen grab and shove it in a circle. monshō are made much more purposefully, according to principles that predate the west's graphic design discipline by centuries.

So this evening I tried making a basic spiral to use as a visual basis. I planned to snip it up and recombine it to look like the dictyostelid cAMP waves.

For Size 1, this is pretty straightforward:

These waves are chemical signals broadcast by single-cell organisms. They've all run out of nutrients to eat, and they're trying to organize themselves into a "slug", a sort of slime parade visible to the naked eye that looks like an animal, but isn't.

It's fucking weird. It's also a very rare biological example of a "nonlinear oscillator" (similar to the BZ reaction).

Chaos theory in a petri dish!

Spirals form out of this stuff, and they're visually striking. I think they'd make a good icon.

I've been stuck on the fourth icon for a while now, but I found inspiration the other day, and tonight I tried taking a crack at it:

the spiral cAMP waves of dictyostelids.

https://youtu.be/2HA9jOYdj1E?t=177

The third set is meant to reference Fuligo septica's multinucleate (as in, multiple nuclei) plasmodium. These are the slimes my game's named after and most closely resembles; from time to time, you hear about these weirdoes efficiently solving mazes in the shape of national rail systems. Pop sci publications like using Fuligo septica as a prompt for readers to rethink what "intelligence" can mean, in what forms it can manifest.

The second set of three icons is a sort of stylized oyster mushroom or chanterelle.

The difficulty in classifying slime molds (which we once thought were fungi) based on common ancestors means we end up throwing them into a "polyphyletic group", a sort of rummage drawer of related families of organisms, while we figure out what we're doing with them.

Either way, my game's original inspiration conflated them, and I'm comfortable with conflating them too. They all serve as nature's recyclers.

#theWorkshop

I'm working on slime mold and fungal icons for the player pieces of my game Fuligo. They're based on Japanese family crests, or monshō, for various reasons.

The icons have three versions, to visually indicate the three sizes a players can grow to. Fortunately, monshō have traditional variations to designs that I can refer to.

This first one is an abstraction of fruiting bodies. When the time is right, slime molds make these stalks with spores on the ends to disperse themselves.

REUNION_###_##_#__#_##.JPG

IM_THE_ONE_IN_THE_BACK

You know what? I've finally had it.

I've had it!

Modern life is just fraught with misery, confusion and distrust. We need a day where we can all just chill and not worry about our shit. And I'm picking tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I'm not going to work, and I'm gonna prioritize the stuff I find fulfilling. I'm calling it Chill Day.

Feel free to join me, maybe we'll make it a tradition or something. December 25th! Happy Chill Day! If anyone gives you trouble tell them Rezmason said to fuck right off.