Author: Jacob

My final project is a smeared and messy adaptation of a classic etch a sketch built on the guts of the old school arcade game asteroids with an intended theme of showing distractions that always take up our main goal in any situation. When creating my final project my thought process was on of many changes and last minutes shifts. As I started constructing the project I originally intended to have words fly around the screen in place of the blinding colored blocks seen in the final version and have your little character try and avoid those words. As I was working on this code I saw that nothing was appearing as I intended it too and instead of being an art piece on words related to distractions it instead looked disjointed and didn’t really match what I was going for. With the words not being distracting enough from your character I set out to remove the background to give off the blinding smear effect that left when you do not add a background color in the draw function. I also instead used a more typical array of randomized rectangles that would shoot out and leave a very distracting mark on the screen as you try your best to use an etch a sketch that’s entire purpose is the blind you. When you have these flashing lights in your face and any distraction content it becomes very hard to stay focused on your main goal.

 

References:

Etch a Sketch Owned by Spin Master Toy corporation

Asteroids designed by Lyle Rains (1979)

Learn Processing Tutorial-Arrays-Daniel Shiffman

 

I wanted to create a simple clock that used a very basic structure to tell time, the small strips moving along came across as a very easy and visually appealing way to tell time.

By reading the articles on creating software and using the time management calculator I realized just how much time I could be using on my work throughout the week as opposed to doing it all on one night or the day before or after it is assigned. According to the experience of many project managers when it comes to codding time is purely based on the skill and focus of those who are doing the work at the time. I have 100 hours of free time in my week according to my calculator, if I did say, an hour a day of homework I would possibly save even more time.

The artist I choose to listen to was Josh Begley. Josh Begley is an american visual artist whos main goal is analyzing the oppression of different groups across the world and how we can see this oppression using visual programming. One early example is a program that shows the number of prisons in america through a randomly generated algorithm, the program uses birds eye images just to show how inhumane the US prison system is by showing how lifeless the structures are. Begley also discusses how the new age of mobile apps and social media has made global issues clear as day and very easy to communicate. He advocates for the people of a nation knowing the dirty secrets of country, he believes with new tech we cannot live in the dark anymore.

The concept for my clock consists of reading time trough the use of squares. By this I mean the squares will each represent a minute, second, or hour. I think this is an interesting take on telling time and while I have seen it done before I plan to put my own twist on it with the use of different colors and block moments. How I will organize the squares is what I am still considering but I plan to have the colors change to represent which square is currently active and its placement will tell you exactly what time it represents.

Here is my randomly generated face based on the design of my original face sketch from part 1

I wanted to make this image heavily stylized and not realistic

Sather 1.0 is an evolved and reworked version of the original Sather 0.1 coding language. Sather is often credited to Stephen Omohundro, Chu-Cheow Lim, and Heinz Schmidt as its creators and driving forces. Sather was a language hard-translated to C and based on the framework of Eiffel. While Sather 0.1 was a basic language, Sather 1.0 made some incredible strides forward with the addition of features such as run-time checks, proper code organization and line spacing, as well as  bound routines and iterators to name just a few more strides the upgraded version of the language brought upon the world of coding. The language was created mainly to be very hard to decode and decompile meaning that you had to understand the language itself in order to code in it, it was a very difficult language to pick apart and look at the inner workings of. That said the code itself was always very easy to understand and actually code in. The language is mainly used to create graphs, data charts and calculate mathematics at a fast rate. The code is also great for creating new GUI interfaces. While decompiling the language itself may be difficult actually compiling code itself in the language is very easy. Sather is a fantastic language for creating visual representations of mathematics, and analyzing and compiling disorganized code.