Qwertyuiopia

Candace and Joel’s Country Wedd’in is of course primarily an actual wedding, but then there’s the game.

The “32-bit-wedding” is a computer game that has been sent as an invitation for the wedding of Joel and Candace (who have asked me not to disclose their last names). It has been quite exciting working on this project for a number of reasons, like the fact that it was all manageable with a free software toolset, that the scale and requirements of the project made it just the kind of challenge I felt I could wrangle next and, last but not least, working with the couple (well, Candace was the mastermind behind it all, but Joel is the game’s star) has been really fun and gave the whole production a personal note, and a character-centered structure. So, without further ado:

The game is comprised of three cartoon sequences and two levels, one of which is side-scrolling and one fully three-dimensional, where Joel is sent by his spouse on a quest to find their engagement ring. It has been designed to be pretty straightforward, in order to not aggravate non-players, and also comes with an option to play itself. It runs on the blender 2.49b game engine (2.5 was a bit too young for production purposes when the project began), and all of its assets have been created with free software: namely inkscape, the gimp and makehuman.

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Presenting the creation of the internet god‘s concept artwork.

In this post I will cover the creation process of the artwork of the internetisgod.org website, on the technical and design side of which I have been working on the last few months.

The internetisgod is a pretty complex website we set up using drupal, created to accommodate the development a community-written book, to be published when “critical mass” has been reached. The starting point for this pursuit is a 9-chapter essay written by Frank Den, on how the internet in our age covers the same human needs that religion once did. Anyone may create a chapter and invite others to contribute in its writing, and a voting as well as a user points system ensure that both popularity and involvement with the project can be taken into account when chapters are picked. A separate, idea rating system exists to give the community the ability to steer the general direction of the project.

I think I first came across the concept of Indra’s net on the preface of a Greek translation of Samuel Delaney’s Empire Star. It is a metaphor developed by the Mahayana Buddhist school in the 3rd century and later by the Chinese Huayan school between the 6th and 8th century, and it goes like this:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.

The Avatamsaka sutra
Francis H. Cook: Hua-Yen Buddhism: The jewel net of Indra, 1977

So, it might have been the importance of reflections on our symbol that led me down this medium, as there’s probably no better way to get those calculated for you , or maybe I just got psyched by the Yo Frankie! demo showcasing blender‘s abilities (albeit in the completely different field of real time 3d), but I was sure I wanted to take this on with blender from pretty early on in the project.

What follows is a quick and not too technical overview of how the net was made.

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The Qwerty Admin Panel Theme is a plugin for WordPress 2.7 (tested up to 2.8) that styles the admin panel and login screen for all users, allowing you to configure groups of colors through an options page, and css through a stylesheet. Also, it allows you to swap the wordpress logos with your own logo images, makes your favicon appear in the admin pages and allows you to hide certain parts of the admin interface to end users.

It can be useful in helping to maintain your design, color schemes and branding on multi-author blogs and sites with user-contributed content, adding a nice touch to sites developed for clients, or simply personalizing your blog’s administration, look and feel.
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On Tuesday, June 5, I will be performing live in cafe Dionysos, in Lixouri, Kefalonia.

It’s been about 4 or 5 years I haven’t done that, and I’m quite looking forward to it. It’ll probably be just me with a classical and a borrowed 12-string guitar (being thus fully prepared for the case someone will like to jam in at some point). The show should start at 11:00.

This is the poster I made for the occasion

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