Evan Balster 🍂

@art.imitates.life

335 Followers 105 Following

they/them. 🪗 game dev, audio software, harmony and decay, swords into ploughshares. Free Palestine. worked on: imitone, Cave Story, SoundSelf, MIDI 2.0 standard. currently: HYPERCITY VERMIN, a co-op game 🏠 @evan@merveilles.town

"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.
My ink-stained fingers handling two shaggy inkcaps. The first is a day immature and pale cream in color; the second is fully matured and deliquescing itself into an ominous black slime.
The asexual flag: stripes of black, grey, white and purple.
"Microglia are specialized macrophages capable of phagocytosis that protect neurons of the central nervous system.[22] They are derived from the earliest wave of mononuclear cells that originate in the blood islands of the yolk sac early in development, and colonize the brain shortly after the neural precursors begin to differentiate.[23]"
A photo of my bedroom nook, occupying a bay window at the tail end of a renovated RV. The window is decorated with a botanical poster overlaid by an alchemical symbol. This is flanked by plastic vines and a pair of lamps. The decor is in shades of moss green, mimicking the colors of the pine forest beyond.
Bullet points from the compact mug warmer manual. Keep mug, warmer panels at least 0.9 m away from combustible materials and keep them away from thermal coasters. In case of violation of this code and thus causing loss of life and property, it is not our company's responsibility. Please disconnect the power cord with the mug. Warmer is not used for a long time. If you violate this code and thus cause damage to life and property, it is not our responsibility. Do not place the mug warmer on the side of a bathtub or other water-filled container. It is not our company's responsibility to cause damage to life and property if this code is violated.
An illustrated, brightly-colored page from an instruction booklet reads: "The compact mug warmer is stylish and powerful. The 59 inch plug cord will fits on your desk perfectly."
January 2022. Evan's disastrous first attempt at a King's Hand has melted into a vast flat monstrosity of hot cookie dough.
A tiny human, freshly emerged from an egg and clad in sky-blue pajamas, flaps and screams senselessly.
Camera footage from a motley fleet of boats sailing into the morning sun. Their names are Estrella, Huga, Morgana, Wahoo, Paola 1 and Fair Lady.
A screenshot of the Sumud Flotilla GPS tracker, depicting a flotilla of forty-five humanitarian ships making a beeline across the Southeast Mediterranean for the coast of Gaza.
Location data for 42 humanitarian ships off the coast of Crete in the Mediterranean sea.
I hold a hand-sized share of raw blue clay, freshly collected from below a cliff face.
A photo of a subterranean chamber, illuminated by flood light and filled with a grid of deviled concrete columns.
Many of the academic types who were involved in creating the earliest implementations of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and various universities sort of sneered at the first generation of personal computers when they appeared in the mid-seventies, since the early personal computers were much less powerful than the machines that they were used to programming. There wasn't that much you could do with only four kilobytes of memory and no disk drive. But Larry Tesler, who was a key member of the Smalltalk team in the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC, felt differently. He was really excited by the potential of personal computers, buying a Commodore PET as soon as one became available in 1977. He was one of the demonstrators at Apple's famous Xerox PARC visit in December 1979, and he was so impressed by the Apple visitors that he quit PARC and started working at Apple on July 17, 1980, as the manager of the Lisa Applications team.
A tilted photo of a forest meadow. A curious doe enters from the right side of the frame.
A screenshot of a post-it note labeled "Experiment #19: each time you find some trash while digging, permanently add 1 gold to your allowance. Successful triggers: 15"
In the colophon to this work, Hokusai writes: From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.
A series of annotations that were traced over a satellite map. Circles mark out units of distance from our home. Blue annotations mark explored areas and red rectangles mark some zones of avoidance.
A burnt solid state drive pinched between my ash-stained fingers. The pried-open, incinerated carcass of MacBook pro sits in the background.
A page from a scorched and rain-soaked copy of Mushi-Shi volume one. An enigmatic spirit teases the protagonist from the rafters of an old cottage.
Evan, dressed for forest exploration and accompanied by two cats, raises a teacup in salute. Their floppy green hat is adorned with autumn leaves.
A pair of garter snakes cuddling as they mate on a log. One is resting its head upon the other.
My favorite page of The Quiet Year's rulebook, asking players to embody two contradictory roles as they explore themes of community struggle. It is rain-soaked; symmetrical pattern of ash and charred paper runs between the pages.
James sits in front of the burnt out and partially dismantled wreckage of a class C RV. Pine Forest towers over the scene.
James. A black and white tuxedo cat lounges on a forest path in Texas.
James. A haughty tuxedo cat lounges beneath a lichen-covered tree. Taken in central Texas.
A column of fire envelops an RV in a pine forest late at night.
A column of fire envelops an RV in a pine forest late at night.
An inscrutable presentation about an algorithm that smooshes a big polygon down. The result is an approximation of the remaining space between all the smooshing planes.
A work-in-progress algorithm that starts with a regular polygon and allows it to be smooshed from various angles. It retains its angles and tries to stay as big as possible without overlapping any of the planes that have smooshed it. It's called a D.E.A.P. constraint because it's based on a Direct Equi-Angular Polygon.
#include <property_accessor.h> struct Virtual_Rect { struct RectPtr {Rect *rect;}; // PropertyAccessors(RectPtr, // Give the real RectPtr structure a name so we can assign to it. UnionMember(RectPtr rect_ptr;), // Proxy (reference) property accessors Proxy (int, x1, rect->x1), Proxy (int, x2, rect->x2), Proxy (int, y1, rect->y1), Proxy (int, y2, rect->y2), // Value (get/set by copy) property accessors GetSet (int, width, rect->x2 - rect->x1, int new_width, rect->x2 = rect->x1 + new_width), GetSet (int, height, rect->y2 - rect->y1, int new_height, rect->y2 = rect->y1 + new_height), GetOnly(int, area, rect->area()) ); };
A bizarre nutrition facts label whose serving size is "1 quivering pool". All of the weights and daily values are hundreds of times higher than normal.
A wheel made of keystone shapes that light up when facing a grey orb, which is controlled by the mouse. A pair of white lines run from the center of the wheel to tangent points on the orb; the keystones are activated when they intersect with these lines or lie between them.
A figure seemingly levitates in a narrow doorway, clothed in a hooded blue corduroy jacket whose buttons are clasped all the way up over their face. The wearer's baseball cap, eyes and nose poke through giving the impression of a visor. Their bony arms are crossed in an intimidating pose.
The blob is colored orange and glows brightly around its edges like boiling metal. It dances about and occasionally flings pieces of itself, which bounce merrily back to the collective. The visualization extends beyond the edges of the blob forming a ghostly cube shape.
The inky blob dances about energetically, flopping and folding like oily dough. Its three eyes float along its surface chaotically as it bumps into the wall. Occasionally a piece of it will break away, quickly rejoining the mass.
A featureless mass of inky goo moils and folds into itself restlessly, expelling a bit of itself which bounces out of frame.
A three-eyed liquid creature resembling a mass of mint-flavored snow bounces about, flinging bits of itself that quickly rejoin it.
The creature is once again amorphous and gloops about like the contents of a lava lamp. A central mass containing her three eyes breaks away from the rest now and again, bouncing as it goes.
A three-eyed blob of ink musters itself up into a ball in order to roll around, flattening out again when it stops. It is traveling in the middle of a street; some crudely-drawn pedestrians stop and exclaim as it rolls by.
A jiggly, three-eyed blob of inky black goo slides about on a concrete surface. Nearby are a brick wall and, inexplicably, a piece of fried shrimp.
A featureless, slightly pixelated glob of the inky stuff slides around, chased by variously smaller pieces that merge and split like the stuff in a lava lamp.
Panning around a small parametric model inside a box. The model itself is a blob of inky stuff with six 'legs' arranged in a hexagon. The box uses bright pastel colors to visualize ray direction when rays miss the model.
The little goo creature sits breathing on the floor and occasionally jumps up, glancing beneath itself as it does. The animation is rather crude but the creature deforms to preserve its volume.
A three-eyed, gelatinous creature shaped vaguely like a fish or seal. Its body is made of an ink-like substance that pancakes out onto the floor around it, and its three eyes stare blankly.