weeknotes: Shenzhen, drawing bird feet

We visited the Marisfrolg headquarters, which is a wild-looking building housing the popular Chinese fashion brand. They talked about things that are built at “Shenzhen speed”, while this building took around 15 years.

The entire place was covered with these hand-crafted patterns, which I very much enjoyed.

I did enjoy some of the ogee patterns that showed up, and I gave a small presentation in that building about ogee systems I’d worked on!

Other things

We also visited OCT Loft, which had a lot of artsy shops.

Since I had a cold the previous week, I finally got a chance to go visit the 24-hour spa Tenz. It wasn’t… quite as peaceful as I’d hoped for, but after you pay the not-so-expensive entrance fee, there was unlimited free fruit.

Also, ordering food usually means using a WeChat app, which has a way to translate. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to translate mushrooms as things you shouldn’t be eating, like “botulism cream” and “escherichia coli.”

Illustrating bird feet

Very important: I updated the bird feet in birds.rs to look more realistic. Okay, maybe it’s not that important, but besides making the bird look more realistic, I do feel like I’ve built up some useful primitives for building parameterized shapes!

Something I’m trying to do more of is thinking about whether the thickness of a stroke (or a bird leg) really is uniform!

PureData

I had an upcoming show, and once again I was trying to perform both audio and visuals I picked up SuperCollider again and… completely forgot how to use it. So I took that as an opportunity to try something else. In this case, it was PureData, an open-source node-based language that is a cousin to MaxMSP. I immediately liked it. It is low-level like SuperCollider, so I’m building sounds by adding saw waves. I can trigger it from OSC, so I can hook it up with my visuals. And it’s a fun-looking, minimalistic style.