More illustration work. I'm not happy with them, perhaps I'm out of practice, but I'm also increasingly critical and unhappy with everything I do, and critical of just about everyone else too. This is a struggle. I must keep trying and pushing, trying to ignore the critic. Nothing is perfect, nothing awful. Emotions are not helpful; what is good or bad must be logically and pellucidly defined in emotionless terms, as must tasks and goals.
I've listened to David Bowie's Low and didn't like it; it's easy, anything-will-do electronica in the Tangerine Dream mould, a band who's most emotional and creative output of their entire career (from what I've heard) is their name. I'm being harsh though, with retrospective and personal eyes. In the 1970s such music was new, and I'm past this form of drift electronica and increasingly anti-electronic anything. I want depth of complexity and drama. 'Be My Wife' is a great track to play guitar to, and I like 'Always Crashing The Same Car'. The album after that could have been composed by a lift for fellow lifts.
I've also listened to 1. Outside, and liked the last track which was credited solely to Bowie. Again, Eno's influence is harmful (in Roxy Music it was transformatively good, though). Ultimately, Brian Eno is a dronist, a liker of music of the same note which lacks intellect because it is weak in informational content. 1. Outside, however, is packed with lyrical content and a lots of ideas and timbres. I don't dislike it, it has few melodies but is never boring and different from any other David Bowie album. I like the fact that it is very long too, this itself is a statement of hubris.
After my illustrations, which I will work on further, I worked on Argus. Spending 4 or 5 intense hours adding a G.U.I., which is no small task. I've added windows, icons, labels, dials and text boxes from Prometheus. The code is a mess, a jangle of unneeded rubbish and will need a lot of trimming down, but it does work at this, its most basic.
I've decided that animated objects will all be square, any parts (eg. body parts) of objects can be duplicate objects which are attached to the main one, follow its track. Objects can be animated, the texture on them, but each frame must be in dds format which is a bit of a pain, and I'll need a file-path for these textures too, as they will need to be loaded each time the program is kicked into 3D mode and there could be lots (the textures can be animated). Actors, the moving objects, will point to 'Costumes' which indicate their design. This will stop duplication of textures or memory when you need two copies of the same shape.
I must remind myself that this is a long term project, so any additions are useful. Prometheus, which I use almost daily now, and modify a lot, is 18 years old and is good partly because it has grown powerful over those years.
I must train and get back into visual art somehow, I think. This week feels like a bit of a dead week because Taskforce is launched on Friday. On we push.
