canonical momentum

much writing to do. website for shaderland is in progress along with public demo release on Steam. writeups of Revision and EMF are needed. more Umineko is significantly overdue; so, too, more of the programming grimoire. resuming work on Undefined Behaviour. more drilling into the plurality stuff.

however this morning we ended up on the hard-to-escape attractor of reading shit about AI instead. american AI companies turn out to be even more shockingly lax in their security than previously revealed. Rust adopts an LLM contribution policy which is fairly described as 'reasonable, given the constraints'; even if we'd prefer Zig-style full rejection, Rust is not organised in a way that it could adopt such a policy, it would be a likely project-destroying schism of 'LLM rust' and 'anti-LLM rust', and instead locking down acceptable LLM use so as to minimise damage to the overall goals of the project seems like a sensible approach.

from there we landed on some writing by Alice I. Cecile (Bevy maintainer who we respect) and a Marxist critique of same, to wit (hehe we got to write 'to wit'):

taken together it feels pretty bleak. the second article, though fairly boilerplate, is right about the limits of the first; nevertheless the prospect of any of the things it calls for actually happening feels pretty close to zero, short of the accelerationist fantasy that if things get miserable enough, The Workers will finally get up and do something about it - entirely unsubstantiated and morally appalling. but the future is impossible to predict. we must hold onto the inevitable fact that something entirely unimaginable from the present vantage point will happen.

an ex-cultist as we are, some parts of canmom are fascinated by AI and some parts of canmom loathe it; the porygons can assemble personas to correspond to various milieus. but we now agree that we won't fucking touch the stuff. we have no desire to let those evil silicon valley bastards churn up our ability to think and sell it back to us. still, alice comparing the ai-abstentionist stance to veganism or mennonism is pretty fair. turning our nose up at it won't make it go away.

so what is indeed To Be Done, and by who? what's our role in making the future less shit? like all lifeforms, we do what we can to cultivate the world we want to inhabit in the cracks of this one, and hold onto the hope that something presently unimaginable will happen. we try to protect the creatures we love, to help them hold onto agency and act on desire. there is overflowing beauty and life in these hacker camps, film festivals and kink parties we now inhabit. not everyone has handed off their thinking. we haven't lost yet.

don't know what else to say. we hoped it would hit a wall already; instead advances are 'spiky' (for example it is quite weird that solving difficult mathematical problems proved an easier nut to crack than navigating indoor spaces and folding laundry) but they have not stopped. so far as we now understand, these wretched things are now very good at the short-term, measurable task; in other words whatever can be trained with RLVR.

bryns were at the Assembly demoparty in Finland, hanging out with other members of MARMOT. that part for sure was very cool, it's great to finally meet them. assembly did not quite hit the same energy as other demoparties we've been to; despite some very impressive releases, the demoparty part of the combined gaming event/demoparty/kpop event felt a little big vestigial. more on that if we manage to write a full party report.

our big PS1 prod wasn't ready for release in the end, but during the party I managed to use the models and make a little teaser for it...

so you can get an out-of-focus glimpse of where we're going with it, with a little pastiche of Finnish newscaster YLE and a last-minute model of Helsinki Cathedral, minus a few fairly important architectural features.

unfortunately this placed dead last in the 3D graphics compo!! not even close either, it was like 100 points behind. oh well. hopefully beings will like the actual demo a lot more.

also during the party we decided to join the game jam, cooking up an algorithm to render ultrasound-like slices of 3D models which was intended to be used for a parasitic worm exploring a body...

unfortunately the actual game part didn't get finished during the jam because 1. we decided to write the game from scratch on top of winit+wgpu instead of using Bevy like a sensible creature, which meant reinventing a number of wheels and 2. also during the party we contributed to Marmot's compofiller entry in the One Minute Demo competition:

muffintrap wrote the Love2D renderloop, raccoonviolet and vurpo modelled and textured the bunny, and then we woke up early in the morning a few hours before the deadline and helped code up the feedback tunnel shader effect and also threw some PBR on the bunny because why not. the first 15 seconds are sorta neat, would that we coulda finished the rest x3

lesson learned is basically: we can partycode demos and watch compos or join a game jam but trying to do both is pretty silly.

luckily other groups were more sensible. Byterapers (I know...) dropped a bunch of demos to celebrate their 40 year retrospective, getting a hat trick in the oldschool, one minute and PC demo competitions. Gray Marchers also entered a very impressive 300kb web prod featuring raymarched humanoid characters. new friend Pulu did some very cool entries in the wild compo, including a synchronised dance of hacked cleaning robots.

we also caught the 'Boozedrome' at 'Boozembly', a kind of satellite event happening in the woods just outside the event hall. basically drinking isn't allowed at Assembly (they're pretty strict about making sure nobody smuggles beer inside a PC case or anything), so there's a secondary demoscene event, with a single compo focused entirely on Amiga hardcore music. it's pretty silly. here's Miku the raccoon and the blue shark bestowed on us by @hamiltonianflow hanging out...

very cool to witness this (a bunch of Finnish guys in a wood); we danced for a bit but then went in for the main compos because it was way too hot out there.

the non-demoscene parts of the party were very fascinating: this is a huge event, maybe second only to Gamescom. people were bringing their tricked out custom gaming PCs to fill the hall, and often heavily decorating their PC areas as well (with a competition for coolest PC/computer place; you can see the winners here). a lot of esports took place which is as opaque to us as the demoscene probably is to the gamers. there were also various old game consoles set up, along with a number of imported Japanese rhythm games from Helsinki's Japanese arcade Sugoi. the audience skewed pretty young, especially compared to other demoparties we've attended, and it was fascinating walking around the hall and seeing what people were playing.

the KPop side of things was rather more unexpected. this seems to have been a thing since last year, sponsored by the actual Korean embassy, and various groups went up on stage over the weekend to do impressively synchronised dances. there was some tension here since I think sceners felt that it was pushing aside the actual demoscene stuff and it's pretty hard to work on a prod with all the noise, but it was still pretty cool to see.

the hall at Assembly is absolutely enormous, as these rather grainy photo might hint...

It's hard to convey the sheer scale of the room and that screen at the front, but you could easily pack four Revisions in there. there were other halls too, with a few big shops selling computer bitz, and various other tables - among them a cool group from Tampere hacklab who'd set up their laser engraver. (we got to briefly visit the Helsinki hacklab too which is shockingly well equipped.)

sadly we didn't catch the Assembly tradition of the 'siika march', where the kids form a long chain with hands on each others' shoulders and do a circuit of the building saying 'siika' (whitefish); it's also known I think as the Elefanttimarssi. here's a video of it from 2012 though.

(see also anthropic doing a sudden aboutface on whether mythos/fable was too dangerous to deploy when their government started talking about actually banning it!)

EMF was fucking incredible. the collision of algorave and demoscene we got in trash compactor, going nuts dancing to all the amazing djs at nullsector, the planetarium dome demo compo and the shader dome, seeing all these crazy hackers running around with their dorky projects, the fact that about 50% of the population were hot trans girls lol, all the fucking about with the microcontroller badges, the antics that glastonledburyshire-on-severn were pulling, finding out about the wild stuff the biohackers are putting in their bodies, nightshade showing off its insane tetris skillz, meeting synth artist laurie black, the incredibly energetic australian guy in fetish gear running 'the dark room' interactive comedy thing...

and then of course there was shaderland!! after a lot of last minute effort to fix the remaining bugs, the demo got to show at emf. we saw a bunch of people play it, some instantly clicking, some struggling, some really taking the time to pick up what it's saying. joe at the arcade tent was incredibly accommodating in updating builds and such, and took a really enthusiastic interest in the game.

the demo will be live on steam soon, and a series of devlogs (text/video tbd) explaining how it's made. really hoping it can help bridge these worlds of trans shit and graphics shit and get people into this ridiculous art form we think is so cool.

got two years to hack together a much crazier outfit with latex and LEDs and shit. but goddamn. we clearly missed our calling in being a hacker all this time x3 you can just be a cyberpunk creature if you want to.

and after all the fallout of losing nora memdmp (who came along in blåhaj form), it's really good to be reminded of what this subculture is even for in the first place. it's so good to see people using the wizard arts to make such idiosyncratic, personal shit. seeing three trans girls get up and livecode a wild crow sample-based strudel set along with distorted video of them wrestling in a livecoding tool one of them wrote? that's what it's all about