Oh, the moments of inspiration and beauty! Strange visions and thoughts float above my head like soap bubbles. They lift up my spirit, startle my mind, then they pop.

Indeed, modern life is full of steely obligations — meeting, cleaning, cooking, flossing — from which I cannot turn away. The moments of inspiration, interposed between the muddles of life, are too soon extinguished and forgotten.

Gradually, I shape my sense of self to the shape of bell curve, align my tongue to the bullet-point poetry of business, and optimize my heart rate to the pace of treadmill. Life is once again reduced to rushed meals, bad coffee, bullshits to-and-fro, and a sore spine.

To let a day go by without intellectual excitement, without a passionate attitude for art and beauty, without an eager appreciation of lovely useless little things around us… is to surrender myself, alas, to the “zombification” of the heart.

Metaphorical.net is a notebook that collects and extends strange thoughts and passions.

I learn best through experiments and sketches. I create, refine, discard, sift, undo and redo. I seek to impart lightness and intelligence to a multiplicity of things and ideas.

So I must echo Montaigne, who said of his assays:

I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.

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Oh, the moments of inspiration and beauty! Strange visions and thoughts float above my head like soap bubbles. They lift up my spirit, startle my mind, then they pop.

Indeed, modern life is full of steely obligations — meeting, cleaning, cooking, flossing — from which I cannot turn away. The moments of inspiration, interposed between the muddles of life, are too soon extinguished and forgotten.

Gradually, I shape my sense of self to the shape of bell curve, align my tongue to the bullet-point poetry of business, and optimize my heart rate to the pace of treadmill. Life is once again reduced to rushed meals, bad coffee, bullshits to-and-fro, and a sore spine.

To let a day go by without intellectual excitement, without a passionate attitude for art and beauty, without an eager appreciation of lovely useless little things around us… is to surrender myself, alas, to the “zombification” of the heart.

Metaphorical.net is a notebook that collects and extends strange thoughts and passions.

I learn best through experiments and sketches. I create, refine, discard, sift, undo and redo. I seek to impart lightness and intelligence to a multiplicity of things and ideas.

So I must echo Montaigne, who said of his assays:

I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.

Related notes on:

• Metaphorical.net V4
• William Ngan
• RSS feeds

Gravity - Interactive installation @ Utopia, Bordeaux from 2Roqs on Vimeo.

I had the opportunity to teach several workshops, give a talk and show Gravity during the month of March.

• La Chose Programmée, a workshop held @ BBB in Toulouse (February 23th to 26th), where code together with Bluetooth technologies on mobile phones were explored with Etienne Cliquet and some students of the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Toulouse.
  Read a more detailed article on 2Roqs website.
• Openframeworks workshop, held @ Craslab in Paris (February 28th to March 1st). By the way, version 006 was just released a few days ago and has now support for iPhone development. Check a tutorial on Memo’s website (more to come).
  Slides about Openframeworks (pdf, french)
• Code as a creative tool, a talk followed by a short Processing workshop given for the festival Siana in Evry (March 23rd). Yay, it was very cool to talk about the early Atari & Amiga demoscene in the end of the 80’s.
  Scroll some more text about this on 2Roqs website.
• Gravity was exhibited twice in Bordeaux (March 17th to 20th) . The first installation was shown for “la semaine de la langue française”, and it was set up in an old nunnery that is part of the Drac Aquitaine, a french government organization responsible for promoting cultural events.
  The other one was set up as part of the E.motion electronic festival in Bordeaux. The animation was projected on the Utopia movie theater’s facade. This event was a huge success as the application received more than 1000 sms messages in roughly 3 hours!
  Videos, photos on 2Roqs website.

The journey of an apple-seed. Simply beautiful and much too short! Anyway.. there is also a making of available.

(via Grafikjungs)

A company with the name NeuroFocus could play a role in the flow-testing of games. Instead of filling out questionnaires, what in the game is rewarding or boring could be just measured with brainwave-technology. I even could imagine real-time statistics and nice visualisation about the things, that drive gameplay. Gamasutra writes about, what packages the company will offer. Quite a lot:

“The NGame suite includes NSequels, which is designed to identify core game elements that build into a franchise; NTarget, which offers user group analysis, design, implementation, and marketing recommendations; NeuroNet, which is geared for multi-player and social gaming; and TGA (Total Gamer experience), which measures multi-sensory gaming effectiveness. NGame also offers NPlatform Analysis; NLevels, which identifies “NeuroFrustrators/NeuroRewards” in games, and GCA (Game Compressions Analysis), an automated selection of the most powerful neurological components in a game.”

Another take on the Mondrian fractal. Again, visit zenbullets.com to see how this looks turned up to 11.

Yay! Snakes! Wrote up a post about the process I used to create these lovely reptiles with code. Read it over at
the Barbarian Group blog.

Here it is in action…

Snake Study from flight404 on Vimeo.

Top reading of the day is the sum-up of 2D-boys / Polytron’s speech at the Indie Games Summit over at Offworld, about successful hints, to market your game effectively. Well, the thoughts are neat, but no revolutionary. Best figure to start the day comes from Kyle Gabler:

Valve’s Left 4 Dead marketing budget was $10 million, Spore’s $35 million (compared to its $50 million development budget) and Wii Fit’s was $40 million, a figure Gabler reckoned could buy 21,917 indie devs a burrito every day for a year.

I left your thoughts with that beautiful new trailer of the Fez-game from polytron. Also note the beutiful music and colors!

Ok, guys and girls. Bad Hint is a small experimental game-exploration from Qixen-P design studio with a soundtrack delivered by favorite chip-artist Goto80. And they like it experimental. You are a “little thought” that has to escape the “playful mind”. In order to do so, you can move, jump, pickup objects and use them, using the key A. It’s been a while, since I was confronted with experimental and exploratory gameplay and design as well (the website from the Qixen-People is just as cryptic), but it seems, that I totally suck at this game, not even getting the bright pink star. Any (bad) hints anyone?

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Author: freqout
Keywords: processing.org
Added: March 24, 2009

This here is an advertisement for the ink and marker-manufacturer Krink. It reminds me, that it has been a long long time, since I worked with “real” colors. The video features real and digital colors as well, made in collaboration with the Megawords-Magazine. Krink itself are somehow obsessive and radical about their products. So, let it drift.