Two foods that taste better with plastic eating utensils
- Pasta salad
- Strawberry yogurt
Dominik Hofmann Blog
I'm Dom. I'm a designer, developer, and musician living in Brooklyn, NY.
I've created some neat things you use every day.
You can reach me by emailing sevenflow at gmail.
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Rainbow Arabia - Haunted Hall
Rainbow Arabia have made a lot of progress in less than a year. Digging the dub influence in this new track.
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Eero Johannes - We Could Be Skweeeroes
This has pretty much been on repeat at home since I discovered it. Eero Johannes mixes 90’s R&B (think TLC) with obscure patch choices to create some pretty compelling electronic tunes.
Sony Agrees to Deal Putting Older Songs on eMusic
Very interesting. It’s only been a few years since I was working in the eMusic licensing department reviewing their agreements, and at the time, I would never have imagined that a deal like this could happen.
To be completely realistic, this is very bad for independent music. The introduction of Sony’s catalogue to eMusic has caused subscription prices to skyrocket. A look at their forums or blog shows hundreds of users crying out about the effects this deal is having on their accounts. Users that previously paid a monthly fee for 90 downloads will now be charged that same fee — or one that’s very close — for 50 downloads. That nearly doubles the price per track. My own plan, which ran $75 a month for 300 downloads is being downgraded to a plan that costs $43 a month for 100.
So what does that actually mean? It means I will be downloading less independent music. When my total number of downloads is decreased and my price per track is increased, I am less likely to risk trying out an album I haven’t heard of. I am not talking about Pitchfork’s “Best New Music”. I am talking about real independent music — the type of music that depends on early adopters like me or other eMusic users to ever make it to a site like Pitchfork.
So once again a major label fucks over artists that aren’t even in the same ecosystem. Is that really worth it for a few older albums most people could find for cheaper in a bargain bin, digital or otherwise?
Free idea
Missed connection business cards. There’s a million different ways they could work, but that’s why the idea is free.
“This song is so good I’m holding my pee.”
— Bronques
Working on some new music. It starts to get really good around this part.
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The Beta Band - Out-Side
Today is a Beta Band kind of day. If I could post their whole catalog, I probably would.
I revisited Sumas and Nubas today. Mostly I researched single-celled organisms, though I made some changes to the code as well:
- New color scheme: blue background (“water”), green nubas (“chloroplasts”), tan sumas.
- Elements are drawn more realistically: no black borders, and sumas are ellipses instead of squares.
- When a suma dies, it fades away instead of instantly vanishing.
- Nubas are 1/4 the size, instead of roughly the same size as the sumas, who eat them.
Future goals:
- Add collision detection, so two sumas cannot occupy the same space.
- Refine suma locomotion, so they have to swim toward their food instead of starting and stopping on a dime / instantly changing direction.
- Sumas should asexually reproduce when they’ve eaten enough food, instead of “playing” (spinning in a circle).
- Allow sumas to ‘team up’ into multicellular organisms.
Nice work. These sorts of projects are always fun to play around with.
One thing you can do is have the sumas apply additive “bursts” of velocity (think Asteroid-style controls) that drive them closer to the current location of their desired food. When they’re within a given radius of the food, they can then “lock on” and eat.
Pretty simple, assuming you update the location of the suma’s food for every tick. If you then take this a step further and tie the mechanism that updates their food location to a probability seed that is decided at creation time (say 1 out of 5 ticks for some, and 4 out of 5 for others) you’ve come up with a simple way to have some sumas appear more intelligent than others. The less intelligent sumas would get less food, causing them to theoretically die off and now you’ve got the basis for evolution.
As it turns out, this concept is also useful for rudimentary swarm behavior when applied across multiple axes.
