iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 18/09/2026

This is the color you see if you are a North Atlantic buoy gone rogue after your anchor chain rusts away.

Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/09/2026

Just don't throw your back out when you wheel your scandalously-oversized lutefisk barrel out from behind the water heater

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Reposted by Evan Balster 🍂

The Zium Railway (Available September 13th) @theziumsociety.itch.io · 13/09/2026

In the Valley of the Underground Mountain, within the compartment nation of Lyptch... 🛤️🏛️🎨The Zium Railway🎨🏛️🛤️ an open world gallery, a new exhibition, now available! Free admission. Be welcomed and enjoy. thezium.art/theziumrailway

youtu.be

The Zium Railway - Exhibition Now Open

YouTube video by The Zium Gallery

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 28/08/2026

One day we'll reassemble him from all those odd little convex pieces recovered in the aftermath of The Incident

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 25/08/2026

Saturn Eating His Fans (Goya remix)

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 24/08/2026

Optimizing harmonic ratios is not necessarily your goal so I would use it as a guideline and experiment. Almost certainly the 3/2 ratio should be one of your main considerations but a lot of a scale's character comes from the wrinkles. Also read up on stretch tuning and why it exists.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 24/08/2026

This will produce an OMINOUS PYRAMID

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 24/08/2026

But a really useful starting point is to plot out all the logarithms of rational numbers up to some maximum numerator/denominator, against a grid whose spacing is your temperament. log(max(num, den)) makes a good Y-axis or size/prominence heuristic, emphasizing the more prominent harmonies.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 24/08/2026

Hello, I chair the Pitch and Tuning subcommittee at the MIDI Association and, lol no

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 22/08/2026

This evening please join me as I send all my chi, chakra, mojo, mana and prayers to Sabbath the Awful Cat, and also to those raccoons

A ponderously blurry photo of a grizzled black tomcat is set beneath a fully-capitalized bulletin:
"THIS IS SABBATH. HE IS A FERAL CAT THAT I HAVE BEEN FEEDING FOR 7 YEARS. HE IS WILD SO DON'T TRY TO PET HIM. HE WILL ATTACK YOUR CATS SO KEEP YOUR CATS AWAY FROM HIM. IF YOU SEE HIM , PLEASE SET OUT SOME CAT FOOD. HE WILL EAT ALL OF IT AND LEAVE. I'VE BEEN CALLING HIM FOR TWO WEEKS, I THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD. IF YOU SEE HIM PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL TRY TO GET HIM TO COME BACK HERE BUT THE RACCOONS CHASE HIM AWAY. THE BABIES ARE RELENTLESS."

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 11/08/2026

Hi! As an machine learning model, I am fluent in human and several other languages. Happy to help!

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Reposted by Evan Balster 🍂

Dave Andress @davidandress.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Covid lockdowns demonstrated, in a deeply imperfect way, the possibility of large-scale social solidarity for a higher cause. That is a prime reason why so many powerful people want us to run screaming away from them into the comforting arms of selfish individualist competition.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 01/08/2026

They say capsaicin stimulates the immune system.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 27/07/2026

You already put this in Qud you ninny

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 26/07/2026

Yeah I looked at that code after sharing it with you and it is a bit of an odd takeoff on the original (which permutes a 64-bit state down to a 32-bit output). But it seems to work well enough as a 32-bit hash function for graphics stuff.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 26/07/2026

Here's a GLSL implementation of PCG as a hashing function (see the common tab) www.shadertoy.com/view/lXjGRw

shadertoy.com

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 25/07/2026

I have to plug PCG which is both simple enough to use in a shader and on par with the best non-cryptographic generators. It's just a little LCG that rotates its bits on output and I use em for everything these days. See example code: www.pcg-random.org/download.html

pcg-random.org

Download the PCG Library

Contents Minimal C Implementation C++ Implementation C Implementation Haskell Implementation Java Implementation Other Languages Minimal C Implementation If you just want a good RNG with the least

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 24/07/2026

They're actually the same town, founded by famous 19th century bilocator Esperanza Carlisle. She didn't last long in local government, as she always seemed to be talking to people who weren't there...

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 21/07/2026

Ah, that's just the delayed arrival of your astral👁️self. You took work home with you too many times and now your bad habits have rubbed off on your archetype.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 21/07/2026

Cruelty Cube 1.0 was released last month, but curiously, the beta test is still ongoing. No testers could be reached for comment.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

The learned mental image is what disambiguates the front/back/up/down cues, and you'll notice this with other impressive binaural recordings (such as walking on public streets, where you expect sounds to pass from front to back). As a gamedev you can use simple DSP & focus on familiarizing a space.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

In the field there was an oft-cited binaural recording called the virtual barbershop (look it up). This was used to sell people on the potential of HRTF as a concept. But it was recorded with a mannequin head, and more importantly, it relied on your foreknowledge that a barber stands behind you.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

Second, it presumes that recreation of a proximal anatomy is what makes spatial sound perception work. But our friend the motorcycle helmet begs to differ. Our memory and other senses create the framework for our ears to adapt in real time and this is much more important than static anatomy.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

The trouble with realism is twofold: first, it poses we can pick a close proxy to the player's anatomy from a small library of HRTF profiles that are exceptionally expensive to collect and subject to practical resolution limits in 4+ dimensions (azimuth, elevation, distance?, frequency, intensity).

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

Last I checked (~2021) performant HRTF algorithms do tend to degrade sound quality a lot, mostly for reasons of resolution. I suspect the nicer-sounding ones are just mixing the dry audio back in in the high frequencies.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

One of the more interesting results I heard about in the field was that you could replace HRTF with a somewhat arbitrary pair of audio processing effects for the forward/back and up/down axes and, given the right visual and spatial cues, people would quickly learn them. Like we learn the helmet.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

Without harping on those... People make extensive use of sensory synthesis and foreknowledge in their perception of spatial sound. And these seem to be more important than our intuition for the acoustics of our own anatomy (otherwise wearing a helmet would greatly inhibit our ability to spatialize).

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 15/07/2026

Many years ago I was part of a research project investigating the efficacy of HRTF spatial audio systems and came away pretty dubious of them after working with some state of the art tech. It's an idea that looks good on paper and falls short of that promise in practice for a number of reasons.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 11/07/2026

Although for the record I've been loudly speculating about the Dumb Evil Quantum Tech Bubble for a couple years. It has all the necessary characteristics: so confusing it is assumed to be highly useful, vague connections with previous bubbles, impossibly unready in ways only evident to the learned.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 11/07/2026

Something I have been thinking about for a couple years is how comparatively cheap it would be to massproduce little rockets that each put a little bit of useless flak into orbit. Send enough of them up and space is closed for a few generations. In case we can't wait for them to do it accidentally.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 09/07/2026

I've just been participating in a discord group with some folks I met at GDC.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 07/07/2026

Lately I've been getting a lot of morale mileage out of swapping playtests with a few colleagues. It's a good launching point for more digressive conversations about making stuff, which I'd been feeling starved for for many years.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 06/07/2026

Alternatively: the scavenger hunt version www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/...

"Can you spot all 17 ash statues in this picture? Caius can't, and he hasn't slept in days."

Caius Cosades from Morrowind looks nervously over his shoulder in a room absolutely infested with leering, red-eyed statuettes.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 05/07/2026

PSA: If you live in the United States, there are going to be a ridiculous number of lost dogs and other pets tonight and tomorrow due to all the noise. Keep an eye out.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 30/06/2026

Ok I'm making a game with a trash rifling mechanic and now I want to add a 1-in-too-many chance of this

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 29/06/2026

That is a possible outcome fwiw

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 29/06/2026

I prefer the one on the right. If confronted with the one on the left I would immediately apply a 180-degree rotation about a horizontal axis

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 29/06/2026

It all started when those dudes insisted we store everyone's spelt and millet in their fancy granary on the hill. Once you get God-Kings they're almost impossible to eradicate

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 25/06/2026

North of town, a thousand-year-old hill begins to sag like a failing souffle as the temperamental modular reactor eats further into the permafrost. The children still go sledding there, but they return with bog-wet boots.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 23/06/2026

The greatest makers, those most dedicated to the craft, sequestered themselves 300 to 360 million years ago.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 23/06/2026

Well at least you got the carbon part

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 22/06/2026

If I were to build a high, solid wall and make a ruckus about how it can't be destroyed by an egg breaking against it, the invention of the relativistic egg cannon would surely follow.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 22/06/2026

Petitioning to replace Achilles' Heel with Houdini's Stomach in the metaphorical canon.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 21/06/2026

Armed with this metaphor you may now exorcise the ghost of Barthes.

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Evan Balster 🍂 @art.imitates.life · 21/06/2026

OK, bring me a knife that can cut off its own handle.

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