I had been struggling for the last month or so trying to figure out what to paint for this project. Mike, who goes by kindohm, asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him for his new album by designing the cover art. I jumped at the chance.
Of course I had no idea what I was going to paint. Right up until around 2am last Saturday when the idea hit me like a bolt. The results so far is the first of two pieces. I decided to start with the simpler composition, which I imagine as the piece for the back cover.
Check out the video. It is about 10 minutes of timelapse footage of me painting plus some recorded voice over about the process.
Weekly Roundup
Endless layout labor, an alternate Dune, capital sequestration, and Rick Rubin always sucked.
My Work
I finally landed the plane on the Mystery Box layout and I am proceeding through the laborious process of updating all the files. The endless danger of working the way I do, is that I often have to go back to make tweaky updates. No days off for good behavior.
Gaming
Earlier in the year I got a copy of the TMNT RPG remake. The black, white, and red version, which is a beautiful thing. It was my first RPG and I have a lot of love for that game. The interesting thing though is that I got a flyer in the mail this week from Palladium about their promotions. It was delightfully analog, and if I were still into Rifts, I could see that totally working on getting me to make a purchase. I wonder what their ROI is on that.
Technology
AI companies are apparently cracking down on people's ability to do the vibe code reverse engineering of things. 404 Media, as always, has great coverage. My favorite bit from the story is this quote:
“This vibe-code hacking is only called ‘reverse’ when somebody who lacks a trillion dollars is doing it,” the science fiction author Bruce Sterling tweeted. “When you ‘reverse engineer’ the entire Internet Common Crawl, you just built a nice AI model.”
Creativity
Welp, Skydance just brought in the guy they wanted to drown everything that was interesting about what Gunn was trying to do with DC characters. Anything challenging, diverse, or weird will be homogenized. Once again proving that large companies suck and fandom is a load bearing structure for this nonsense.
