Yesterday, you may have heard I wanted to or rather was thinking of, making an arcade game in flash 8.

Well, doing it by myself isn't going to work out. I rather be good at a single thing than try (and fail) balancing out both the computer programming and the art direction together.

I'm completely open to the flash 8 idea, but I simply won't do the programming. I'll leave that to someone else. I'm happy because I can focus exclusively on the art and be good at one thing than terrible at two.

Some might be able to somehow dish out doing multiple things at once, I sure can't, and I've pretended for too long that I can.

Nothing huge, just a small (but fun and challenging) arcade game. Get my feet wet. I do wonder if I could push flash AS2 to its limits like how AS3 was used for the bullet hell games @matt-likes-swords made.

Why flash 8? Nostalgia and huge contempt for adobe (I'm going to stick to my principles with this one) makes me want to use the 20 year old program.

I doubt I'll revolutionize anything, but I'll have fun and hopefully you will too if (and that's if) I make anything.

For like 2 days, I've been casually slapping together a perl script to do ANSI artwork. At first I thought to just embed the ANSI directly in the file. Then per @s3c's suggestion to automate it, I realized it needed work. So instead of getting messy with the sigil '$' character (Such as $A$B$C which was my original intention), just regex substitute each character from an external file. I've updated it just now to allow comments. So if you like ANSI artwork, this might be cool to check out. It's very simple in design, nothing impressive, but gets the job done. It turns this:

# This is a comment. Everything beyond it including the pound sign is ignored.

222222333333333
1555555#6789ABCDEF

FFFFFE#1235677444444444
# Notice how this is not shown.
ABCDEFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF1111#4444444

into this:

Note that blank lines are also printed as well. I don't consider this to be an issue honestly. I thought this was a good learning experience from it all. The link is here.

ASCII and its expanded form, ANSI, is the coolest thing ever. Artwork using just regular keyboard characters has been around for as long as ASCII has even existed (which was around as far back as the early 60s, in the late 60s Lyndon B. Johnson mandated that all government computers MUST support ASCII). I finished this just minutes ago in a text editor:

         #### /-|
       /\####/  |
      |  \##/   /    /\/\/\/|
       \       |     ---------    
        \      |    /         \          *
         \     |  /   [@] [@]  \        *-*
         |     | |            /         *-*
         |     | |      U    |          *-*
         |     |  \---------/           *-*
         |     \  /         \         *******
          \     \/           \        {8***
           \                 \         8888}
            \                 ---------8888}
             \                         8888}
              \               ---------8888}
               ++++++++++++++/          ***
               |      /\     |
               |     /  |    |
               |     \  |    |
               |      | |    |
               |      | |     \
               |      | |      |
               |      | |       \__
               |      | |          \
               |      |  \          \
          _-----       \  |          \
         -             |  |           \
        -              |  |            |
        ----------------  |____________|

Coolest thing about ASCII is that you can do it in any text editor. What about ANSI? It started popping up in late 80s because it has a larger array of characters and can do even something similar to pixel art with colouring. Late 80s bulletin boards used ANSI for pornographic distribution because of its very low amount of bandwidth requirements compared to downloading a data image like a jpeg or png. There exists to this day, a subculture around ASCII and ANSI art, who knows, I might make my own the future with regards to animations.

Just remembered I had a neocities page.

https://xeiavica.neocities.org/

Until I get a dedicated domain, this will suffice as a personal website.

My plans for 2025 are to get my priorities straightened out. I'm cutting out any desire to do game dev or programming because despite I find it to be cool, it's really just a manic delusion I can do that and balance everything else out. So that previous Tahoma2D/OpenToonz pack? Really just a manic delusion at its core.

Going to put art and animation my top priority. I can't wait to see what I make. As for writing, it's a secondary thing.

One of my favorite things is toying with technology, most commonly taping together shell scripts to do what I wish for it to do. My favorite would have to be a lesser known one called ksh93. It's better than bash, it like zsh has floating points and it has what no other shell has is compound variable. It's very similar in execution to C structs or pascal records where you can group a string or variable or even a function to a single name and use "." notation to avoid a million different names.

Here's an example from a really old unix related website that still works in the community fork of ksh93:

$ typeset -C var=(elone=10 eltwo=20 eltree="Billy Bob")

$ print -r "$var"
(
    elone=10
    eltwo=20
    eltree="Billy Bob"
)

$ print "${var.elone}"
10

Note that this won't work in bash, it doesn't even have floating points in it. But ksh93 is very cool, it's not as complex as awk or perl or python, but I find it to be really cool. Every unix system needs a shell of some kind, be it fish or zsh or even bash. So it's not dependency demanding like say setting up perl or python or ruby. Either way, it's pretty cool.

Well it's almost 2025. I'm going to make it a new habit to enforce the 50/50 rule where one half is somewhat aimless drawing for the sake of it and the other half is dedicated practice. With how I'm doing things right now, it's sucked all the fun out of it regardless if it's practice or to entertain myself.

One show that I think left a big impression on what I like to see more of would be courage the cowardly dog. I think the best example would be the episode with the snuff film directors who want to murder Muriel and Eustace for their latest film.

It's a snuff film. You can't get around it, they wanted to make profit off their murder victims being filmed. That's why I'm in a way, convinced the animators wanted to more than a mere kids show but didn't have much of a choice because adult swim hadn't come out yet. Today, courage would fit in perfectly branded as an adult oriented show as a love letter to B films and grotesque horror films of old. Along with other things I grew up on, I would say it's impression left me wanting to see more horror or at least elements of horror in animation. Back then and still today, you really can't say killed or died in something marketed as a kids show, but the choice of wording makes it sound more terrifying than had they just said killed. That's why I would say courage is possibly my favorite thing cartoon network came out with, because of the risks it was willing to take.

Now, I don't subscribe to the notion that shoving in a lewd joke past the censors auto changes it from being a genuine kids show to something made for adults. Because the very premise of courage was a horror film or at its tamest a thriller of sorts.

I'm starting to when practicing or just drawing for my own fun or whatever, that pen & ink is the most enjoyable out of any tool as of right now. Why? Firstly it's the cheapness of the tool because it could be a mere ballpoint pen or a dedicated fine liner or whatever you have lying around. Secondly, it is essentially permanent so it alleviates any pressure of perfection. And thirdly, it's just very cool to see how it turns out. You can if you know what you're doing range from very detailed drawings to very surrealistic sketches. Like this taken from a book called "how to draw in pen and ink"

To me, this is beautiful because of the limitations of the tool used to its advantage. I'm certainly not against pencil, pencil is perfect for certain types of tasks or desired outcomes, but pen and ink is cool in a way that graphite can't replicate the same thing in the same way.