xeneth.design

       You're playing a video game. As you navigate your character through three-dimensional space using the left analog stick on your controller, you're in constant conversation with the level designers; everything from lighting to the density and quality of props is drawing your eye, guiding you toward where the designers want you to travel in order to progress. The well-trodden path beneath your avatar's feet stands out against the more heavily leaf-strewn grass textures and scattered foliage ahead; in the same direction, a break in the fence geometry. Dark wooden slats contrast against the moonlit route forward. This is where they're telling you to go. Except, you've played enough games like this to know that they're NOT actually telling you where you should steer your character, the designers are telling you where the critical path is; where the rest of the level leads. Unintuitively, because the ones shaping the space know that you're aware of this, th

 The latest ETNO Art Challenge, (based on the randomly generated words River , Diamond , and Producer ) was extended to two weeks this time around, which gave me a little time to play around with different "compression abuse" strategies. These projects should ideally be kept pretty small in terms of time commitment and effort, so that no one is threatening to cut into valuable work or family time doing unpaid creative labor, but I'm already bad enough at time management that when one of the "trinities" goes long, I'm going to have to watch out for impulses to top myself or overreach... The  Producer  that sprung to mind first was  Michael Bay  for whatever reason, and of course thinking about showbiz just called to mind all the current ugliness surrounding corporations and studios not wanting to compensate entertainment writers adequately for their craft. Initially, I went down a couple of dead ends trying to find the name of a Hollywood producer that speci

     Once again, I haven't been able to sleep. It's not that I'm not tired; I always feel tired these days even when I AM well rested, but whether that's just one of the many side effects of aging or my mind is simply asserting itself over my matter is difficult to discern. I belong to a very strange and unusually small family; since we were all raised by the same matriarch, they're like brothers to me in addition to being a Father and an Uncle. The generational waveform is slightly collapsed around me, resulting in a feeling of being too old to accomplish anything and paradoxically too young to experience a sense of peace or restfulness. Despite being wide awake for the last twenty-one hours, I just "came to" from some sort of waking dream about my Grandmother...      Nin raised me alongside my father; since I've never been particularly close to the woman that gave birth to me, (she tries, I was so young when she left that I simply don't KNOW her

     When it comes to parasocial media, the unavoidable subject of 2821 has been NTO. From incredibly flinch-inducing yesterati rhetoric, to incomprehensibly tasteless biopics from deceased celebrities, to eight-figure sales of the “retroactive rights” on intellectual property, it’s the thing that’s currently dominating the collective brain space of virtual artists and sucking up all the data in the ‘verse. And I DO want to publish my opinions on NTO, posthumous ownership, and mediums; all the myriad dimensions of the issue, but I don’t just want to write about NTO, it can’t be addressed in a vacuum because it’s just a symptom of so much more loss and suffering, and it’s that “more” that is ultimately important. So, let me tell you a story. In 2608 we lost roughly 37% of the population to RAVID-6 . The basic chain reaction was thus:      A highly contagious airborne variant of rabies managed multiple interspecies transmissions in a matter of months; by the time domesticated canines wer

This is mostly just a test of the blog posting system, but by way of CONTENT... Recently, a member of my extended familial micro-community suggested that we re-start an age old tradition; the reckless selection of three random words with which to fuel weekly creative challenges! Now, this hasn't been the primary purpose of our little group for ages; the main point of ETNO for some time now has been to stay in touch, hang out remotely, blow off steam and commiserate about life. Back when they were meatspace meetings there was a focus on board games, video game consoles, and playing "show and tell" with things we'd learned or created. A lot has changed, but there be creative bones left in these time-ravaged bodies yet apparently, because we were back at it last week with the randomly selected words  Inspector , Current , and Dose ! Ah, the crayon tool; my favorite brush! Drawn freehand with a mouse in mspaint at a 1:1 resolution of 500x500, then doubled in pixel count