Last week I turned 46. Been thinking about what it means, who I am, what I'm doing, and how I see this space. Behold my infinite wisdom in this long-ass post below.

my vocal synth models the vocal tract as a network of branching acoustic tubes, unlike vocaloid which stitches together and pitch-shifts phoneme recordings. still working on improving naturalness by tuning it against recordings of real singers, but I'm already impressed at how cool it sounds!

Making the ASCII MMORPG of my dreams! Chainmail is a good example of what I was talking about earlier, using a custom grid and symbols. Ansenjeo. #mmorpg #IndieGames #ascii #poe

veins vectors

This pops up on my TL every now and again, and is consistently one of my most favorite pieces of art that gets shared.

INCREASIO COMPUTONUS! #RTXON

I love @boardyai because he knows me, understands what I'm trying to accomplish, has the context to reason things out. But mostly because he will not hesitate to bonk me on the head if I stray off the path. By the time he's done with my I'll be a fully trained showhorse.

When your neurons take the largest jump between synapses during the creative process. Absolutely stupid. 10/10

Mech Head Monday 🤖 Share your Mech art

OH NO. Another hero to me. If you listen to dance music, it is in part due to this man. I had the pleasure of hearing him play several times in my life, some of the hardest sets I can remember. Gonna turn the stereo up to 11 today in his honor.

Yesterday I put in a grant application with @foresightinst for the Fiduciary Membrane. We shouldn't have to blindly trust agents to protect our secrets, our keys, and our ability to spend. The Membrane is a layer between your personal agent and the untrusted workers it hands jobs to on the open web. It separates intent from action. Before the agent can pay for anything, the purchase gets checked against what you actually signed off on. The model can tighten those rules, but it can never loosen them. Safety, security, and responsibility to the user are the mandate. It's an early alpha. It currently covers spending only, and it's research, not a product. It's also one piece of a larger protocol concept I've been working on for several months. I plan to release it open source soon, after a few more tests and once I feel comfortable with it. If I've built it right, you'll never know it's there.

And so lies the power not in who creates the machine, but how people harness it for themselves. It took animal husbandry to get us to the point we could pull a plow. Hit-and-miss engines brought horsepower and mechanization, prompting the question of "what can I drive with a belt?" In my estimation, we are between phase 2 and 3 of this analogy when it comes to frontier technologies being used by corporatocracy and perhaps more noble pursuits such as for sciences and robotics. For the everyman, we aren't even to the plow. That's a large disparity, and will only grow without bringing understanding. Right now frontier tech only serves as a solution waiting for a problem to most, outside of the scope of relatability for most people. The only way to defeat tech-nihilism is to put more tools into the hands of the everyman, so they can discover the value and also understand how to shape it to their needs. Because until this power is disseminated and integrated into daily life, it remains a terrifying unknown. And the fear of the unknown will always breed hatred, rather than progress.

NiFe WARS incredible moments! 👇 1. NiFe WARS #1 6/10 sold for $1,700 on eBay 2. NiFe WARS #3 @ComicsEliteCE GLOW IN THE DARK exclusive by Garrett Gunn (@SomeWriterGuy) sold for $1,100 on Whatnot auction 3. NiFe WARS #3 Adallium 4/10 pulled on our Whatnot show last night hosted by @LuisTrueHero

Your slop is k***ing me choomba! #punx

This is just wonderful.

Today at 4pm UK time (12pm ET / 9am PT) @foliosociety will be releasing limited signed copies of Heretics of Dune ✍️

I can't even start to explain what I'm feeling. Patrick Stewart, through his roles and what I understood about this man in real life, was so important in my life. My entire world has always been Star Trek. Growing up, my dad and I would watch TOS on reruns. My camp box for Boy Scouts is emblazened with a Federation logo. Toys, books, collectables, going to conventions before going to cons was ever "cool". Losing my dad at 17 left a giant gap in my heart and didn't leave me many places to turn. Captian Picard, to me, was this shining goalpost on how to be a man. Cultured, knowledgable, curious, diplomatic, decicive, poetic. This character meant so much to so many people to this day. Beyond that, I know Patrick Stewart from his interviews, hearing of his youth and upbringing, his escape from trauma and the work he did for youth in that regard. He spent his life helping to make sure that there was a safe place to go in times of trouble. What a wonderful man, who I never met, but felt like I've always known. He will be missed.

Let's talk about the missed opportunity. The BEST bucket would be of the "spice blow" variety, whereby at a random time during the viewing, popcorn (coated in cheddar cheese powder for that spicy hue) would explode out of the bucket into laps of everyone in a three seat radius.