Start!
Annndd… finished!
I’m soaked, and my legs hurt.
But, despite the sting, I’ll walk across the street to the gas station and buy a can of juice and a stick of string cheese.
You know, as a… treat?
I figured out, if I set the string cheese in the crevasse of the passenger seat, and the can of juice on top of it, then the cheese is oh-so-perfectly-chilled by the time I reach home.
Wide eyed and slathering, I’ll wolf it down in pico-seconds.
Well, maybe not that quick.
But pretty quick!
Some pleasures aren’t meant to be drawn out. They’re meant to be ripped from the moment and consigned to oblivion with all the speed your hands can muster.
I love feeling the sun soak into my face early in the morning. I’ve mentioned it before, true, but goddamn… it’s an easily overlooked pleasure.
A few weeks back Apple finally agreed to pay out $500 million to settle a lawsuit over slowing down Apple phones back in 2017. If you’d like, you can read up on it here.
That same year, several months before any of that came to light, I’d had a heated debate with a friend on the subject after noticing my phone seemed slower in certain circumstances. It hadn’t been the top of the line, but five months in, and with the same number of apps open, I’d noticed a distinct sluggishness when switching from one app to another. I’d done quite a bit of troubleshooting: I’d checked various forums for similar complaints, and also done a factory reset before installing the same apps over again and testing afterward. Nothing changed. Frustrated, I’d mentioned during a conversation with said friend that I honestly had some suspicions that an update may be throttling performance at some level, for some unknown reason. Despite being exceptionally tech-minded himself, and even MORE suspicious/paranoid soul even than I am, he’d disagreed. He’d laughed it off. Unlikely, he’d said. Implausible. Someone would have noticed. Or, he corrected, more people would have noticed.
Months later, a class action lawsuit was filed. Users were angry because an update really had throttled their phones and capped performance. Apple shifted to damage control mode, the narrative began, and then it finally ended this past month when they agreed to pay five hundred million dollars to put the whole fiasco to rest once and for all.
Each user gets roughly $25 in reparations.
Makes you wonder how they arrived at that number, doesn’t it?
We take a lot for granted. We assume the manufacturer of a device that sits in our pocket most of the day has our back, and that they want their devices to work as well as possible for as long as possible. We assume this, because it’s easier to believe it then it is to do otherwise. It’s easier to trust the updates than it is to be suspicious and question their necessity.
Even if you did have doubts about an update, what alternative do you have? Without subsequent updates, you’d have trouble with individual apps that required newer system updates.
As I said, it’s simply easier to have blind trust then it is to doubt.
Anyway! Moving on!
For me, Saturdays are so much fun, and grow in proportion.
Rarely do I remember waking. Instead, I simply recall shambling out of the bedroom into the bright light of the living room. I let myself wake up whenever I feel like it, and that too, is a luxurt. At present, I’m watching a documentary on the Voynich Manuscripts, which is fascinating. It’s about a book from the 15th century written in an as-yet-unbroken code, which is accompanied by diagrams and illustrations of everything from flowers and stems, to pregnant women bathing in pools of green water. Advances in cryptography have been possible the last fifty years due to the technology we have at our disposal, and many historical examples of coded work have been unraveled and discerned.
Yet the Voynich Manuscripts remain a mystery. Cryptologists claim that, upon initial examination, the coded alphabet which is used appears possible to decipher. But, time and time again, they find themselves unable to comprehend it sufficiently.
However, while the documentary I’m watching discusses a myriad of possibilities, I find myself suspecting two in particular.
The first is that is, largely, the work an eccentric, idle mind. Someone talented, and well off, who simply didn’t need to work, and labored over the book for several years as a type of private, cathartic pursuit which need not have any true meaning, or purpose.
The second, again leaning somewhat upon the eccentric mind premise, is that it’s ciphers themselves are tied to incredibly mundane yet mutable phenomena, like the regional weather patterns and rainfall local to the book’s author/artist.
Oh.
Didn’t I mention that?
Yes, the author appears to have created the art within the book as well.
I find it curious how these experts tend to gravitate towards explanations and conclusions which are, themselves, tied to very ordered and cohesive assumptions.
But, this appears to be as much art as it is a code.
And art?
Well, I can talk about art all day, my friend.
And what I know… is that an artist will go to any lengths to execute a vision. And if that creation garners notoriety? Bonus!
Now, five centuries after it’s creation, the Voynich Manuscripts are legendary. And what’s more?
It was hard to make. The pigments were composed of strange minerals, making the process of ‘painting’ with them very difficult.
Fascinating!
Wouldn’t you agree?
I feel like I always phrase this the same way, and perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that… but progress with GREEN KNIGHT continues (as always) with each week bringing some fresh new nugget to the fore that I want to talk about, refine, and polish even further. Below are four images you’ve seen before, likely, and are my favorite work from 2019. Two are character designs, and two are actual in-game models. Color theory has always been fascinating to me, and I have high fucking standards for myself and all of my work. Each of the images below are photos I’ve taken of the work printed to transparencies and pinned to the wall, with the morning sunlight coming through the windows providing a source of illumination. Personally, I like the slightly scattered/grain look that approach produces.
I simply cannot wait to show you the alpha version of the game running.
