A bad night of hardly any sleep, partly due to stress/anxiety/excitement. I had an awful pain in my jaw last night which Deb informed me was neuralgia. I have not experienced this before. The day of straining at screen images for printing, and the video work, probably contributed to this. I also had a late-night message about a Covid-19 test for the early morning which disturbed my peace. I knew it was nothing to worry about, I am taking part in an Office for National Statistics study into Covid, so have regular tests an interviews.
Despite this, I rose feeling relatively alert. I upgraded Argus and Prometheus first. I added an option to limit modulator noise. See this:
A simple modulator (part of a sine wave, I made this in Sound Forge). I can add noise to it at random, which can be useful. It's more useful for Argus than Prometheus... this irregularity is rarely heard in audio and when it is, it sounds like, well, noise, so isn't always desirable. The old version simply clipped the noise, so today I added an alternative version which detected the highest peak and limited the result, thus:
I also added a few little features; removal of the -0.000 reports (minus zero, never useful to know this).
After that, and the Covid PCR test, it was time for the last of the Spotify Canvases. I pondered You Make Me Happy overnight... what is best for this song? I thought of clouds and blue skies. The tune is also very bouncy, so I thought of a Lego man who jumps to the music. I took two photos; standing and jumping with arms up. It was easy to make him move in Argus:
Here is the modulator for his leap. You'll see how surprisingly complex it is. I wanted a pause on the floor, a quick leap, then holding at the top for a while.
Then Deflexion, which I started yesterday. This one is very sci-fi looking:
It, unusually, uses a 3D object. Most Argus objects are 2D planes with textures wrapped on them. This time I thought I would use the actual Gunstar ship from Gunstorm. The red ring caused a lot of problems. It looked too stark on its own, so I made two, one white and one red glow. The white one flashes like a disco light.
Now I need to find a new creative focus. These Spotify Canvases are fun and easy but how will they last in the great scheme of things? I want to change my will to instruct my heirs to print and publish this blog as a book. A real book for the world's libraries, more stable than the ephemeral internet and its weak magnets and static forces.
In the night I wondered about a simple way to print bytes. Perhaps a byte, in black and white dots, and its inverse below, like DNA, a mirror, then the inverse again; so ABA in a layer. This should be reasonably error proof. Perhaps 24 dots per cm, so three bytes, and 24 bytes per square cm. A 20x29cm page would store 13,920 bytes, and 72 pages would store one megabyte.
