This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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I got a kiosk for two days at my school last week to present my ideas to college students to gauge interest. 16 people said they'd be interested. There's even a teacher that'd want to be involved, he teaches a game programming course. There's also a university club nearby that wants to team up. (Also mid to long term, I'm in Quebec City so I could contact the many local studios around the campus.)

I wonder what the people of Tildes expect when they hear about a video game creation club. Have you been in one before?

I wrote myself a brainstorm document, here are the general ideas:

• Every field of study is welcome. Game projects are great for multidisciplinary groups, and people can also do stuff outside their field of study.
• General roles (someone could have many): project lead, game designer, gameplay programmer, systems and tools programmer, art director, 2D/3D/animation artist, UI/UX, composer, sound designer, writer, QA, voice actor, etc.
• Around 2 hours together per week, meeting in either a classroom or a club location if we get one.
• Would be nice if people shared what they learned during the week at each session.
• Game jam orientation? A college semester lasts 15 weeks. We could pick a theme at the start to drive the game ideas we want to do. Scope control is really important.
• Building a portfolio should be a main goal.
• Do we allow people from outside the club to come hang out? There are probably solo people working on their own games.
• How to handle intellectual property? Should we eventually try to sell games for the club finances? I guess we should at least be allowed to use the games for club marketing.
• If we do console games, we'd need an NDA. Not sure a club can even get console dev access, though we could probably work with a third party for that.
• Some nice stuff: the school has a recording booth we could record voices in. We might also have access to the school's servers if we get the proper approvals.
• We could demo the games in the school's public spaces to get feedback.
• The club could have a website, itch.io page, Discord.
• How to train people who have never made a game before?

Did I overthink this or forget about important details?

Goooood morning dear users, humans, non-humans, and things.

This project is still ongoing and currently has 2 pieces. I once shared one of the pictures back in winter I think not sure brain empty and stuff

Gash

Bound

I really liked creating these and also writing this post. Thank you for reading this or even looking at the images.

This little exercise is reminding me of what we used to do in class. Criticize each other's work, which I always really enjoyed. And I do miss. So maybe if someone else wants their work to be criticized, please let me know; I will gladly take a look at some other artworks or work of some other people. Potentially this could even be a scheduled post if enough demand is here and available.

Also if you think you don't have enough knowledge about the medium or the technique, THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT.

Feedback and criticism is always valuable you may see something from a entirely different point of view that I or "we" have never considered. ˙ᵕ˙

If you need further clarification or have further questions, just ask. ˙ᵕ˙ I won't bite I think unless you want me to*

So, thanks so much for reading this and I wish you a nice day.

Anways that's all

Best regards,
your neighborhood creature

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

TLDR; I made an electroacoustic album based on artwork, poetry, and soundscapes in Portland, OR, USA. Inspired by ambient electronica and impressionist piano, CYLCE is a dark journey through nature and urban environments.

Bandcamp Link: https://nickalus.bandcamp.com/album/cycle

CYCLE is a project of mine that had an unusual life span (at least for myself). Originally, CYCLE was a sound installment commissioned for a gallery hosted by Open Haus in Portland, OR in collaboration with visual artist Jon Hwong and poet TKTK in a very strange turn of events. Over the past two years it has morphed into an audiovisual experience (I guess that would be the word for it???) using motivic development, creative coding (NO AI WHATSOEVER), and digital degradation.

In celebration of the physical release (and my first physical release as an artist), I plan to spend the next couple of weeks (as long as the mods are okay with these posts) discussing different aspects of the project in hopes of starting a conversation about other musicians’ practices, thoughts, or critiques. I have included a list of topics I plan on covering in future posts at the bottom of this one.

Context
The project started in 2024 (feels like yesterday) while working on my own gallery DEAD WORLD THEORY. A few months out from the premiere, I was introduced to Keith, a local poet, through my co-producer Jon. The three of us talked about their upcoming gallery hosted in the neighborhood. Jon was creating a collection of artwork exploring natural form within technology and Keith was premiering a new chapbook and giving a reading of selected works.

This was a collision of multiple niche interests of mine. Technology and nature have always been something of interest in my work since joining an electroacoustic ensemble during college. And before then, I was writing weird concert music that was interested in the idea of non-musical sounds (think: hypnotist/New York school of contemporary music), and specifically setting poetry and common speech to music (similar to work such as Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “IBM 1401 - A User's Manual”).

As you can see, the synchronicity of this project was insane. I needed to be in it.

I immediately pitched the idea to the other artists: I’ll make a soundtrack for the gallery that combines nature and technology, and the poet and I could perform an impromptu lieder of his work. Both artists loved the idea and took it to the producer of the event. With a little negotiation, it was decided. I was on the bill and even invited to speak on a panel discussion they were holding that evening to discuss my own upcoming project.
The event was a great success. We had a nice turnout and I had a chance to talk with some phenomenal artists that attended the event.

Inspiration
As mentioned above, this project was a perfect storm of my influences and niche interests. I’ll break the project into two parts. Sorry you can't hear the last part (should’ve been there).

Nature and Technology: The Soundtrack
I have always been the person to challenge a rule, not because I want to break it, but because I want to understand it. Naturally, as a pianist studying composition and performance with a wicked resistance to authority, I became interested in the avant-garde of music. This new fascination started with the usual suspects: Ives, Cage, Monk, and Schoenberg. But it quickly led to the modern approach of this idea such as noise, harsh ambient, industrial, etc.

This turn of events led to joining an electroacoustic ensemble where we utilized traditional instruments with technology to create shows, galleries, and sound installations. I immediately felt the shift in my peers:

Was I a pianist or was I a DJ? Was I a composer or a producer? Was this music or was this art (or neither)?

I began to obsess over this question. Where is this line between electronic and acoustic? Where is the end of nature and the start of technology? What is the line between music and art? If you are familiar with music history I am sure you know this is a pointless question that has been argued for centuries in either direction under the conversation of programmatic and absolute music. CYCLE is a culmination of my interested in ecoacoustics, technology, urban development, rural preservation, and the psychoacoustic effects of noise.

The Impromptu Lieder
The second half of the performance was an impromptu lied with Keith’s poetry set as the libretto. This was my second cycle of lieder as a composer. The first being a song cycle for Piano and Mezzo Soprano which used T. S. Eliot's “Cycle of Preludes” as the libretto. The preludes were traditionally set using Western notation and assigning pitches to the libretto. I wanted to do something different for this one.

In my journey of the opium dens of contemporary music and the avant-garde (circa 2018), I had discovered the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The piece was titled IBM 1401 - A User’s Manual, an opera that used a printer’s user manual as the libretto. Jóhannsson correlated the user’s manual with childhood memories of his father who was a salesman for IBM. I would not consider myself a printer enthusiast, but this work was striking. This took the programmatic style of impressionist lieder but worked from something that would be considered wholly technical and categorically “Not Art”. But, now the silly manual printed on cheap paper n’est pas une pipe.

I wanted to emulate the “Treachery of Image” in a sonic medium. However, the poetry I was working with is ART. So, rather than subverting the source material I decided to subvert the performance aspect. Rather than prescribing singing to the text, it would use common speech. I worked with Keith to transcribe the natural rhythm of his collection of poems. This allowed the rhythm of the poetry to be the pulse of the music.

Doubling down on programmatic vs absolute, I worked closely with Keith to understand the meaning of his work. I kept seeing the recurrence of phases (or cycles) of life, nature, grief, love, and healing. The work had hope, but hope that was sustained through a hostile world, fighting against the downward pull of pessimism. I also asked my poor poet to destroy their own work by telling me one word. This singular word would become the “narrative motif” of each piece.

I decided to work with impressionist aesthetics for two reasons: extended harmony and programmatic composition. Firstly, the growing class of piano-composers during this era such as Rachmaninoff and Debussy were a huge influence on me as a Pianist. Secondly, the “narrative motif” from Keith would be used to decide the sonic motifs. One specific example of this is using planing fourths upward rather than using a Picardy third for moments that reflect sadness changing to happiness.

Below is a list of the topics I plan on covering in the next couple of weeks:

Location specific

Portland: Selected Soundscapes

Associated Memories: Places and the Past

Song Cycle

Modulation without Keys

Timbral Motifs

Song Cycle/Story Structure

Ecoacoustics

Nature/Transition/Urban

Audio to Video

Audio to Video: Motifs

If there is something you are particularly interested in or something you don’t see on the list please leave a comment and I’ll add it in! Additionally, this entire post is meant to be a discussion for musicians and fans of music to talk, so, please leave your thoughts below for myself or other people to jump in.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Hey there Tildes -- just checking in to see if any of y'all use Fusion for work or for hobby projects?

I've been using Resolve for a while with personal projects and have used Premiere for work for years. I have basic understanding of After Effects as I've had to use it off and on for work for many years (though, it's been a while since I've had Creative Cloud subscription) and now I'm just moving everything to Final Cut for simple stuffs and Resolve for work or big projects. Hoping to move to exclusively use Resolve since I got a new M5 iPad and their iPad app seems nearly complete (feature-parity with Desktop).

If anyone has good understanding of Fusion, how did you learn? Could you point me to specific sites/creators/etc.?

Thanks!

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

I journal sporadically, and have sometimes wanted to record a thought as a poem. I like idea of using constraints to further my grasp on the thought I'm trying to express, and it'd leave me with something I'd feel proud to come back to.

But I don't really know where to start? I'm hoping to find a form of poetry can be short enough to not feel daunting to start, but still forces enough structure to make the exercise worthwhile.

I imagine this effort means I'll also need to read more poetry and find stuff I like. My only real experience with the medium is from school, and thinking back to that time only reminds me of how confused I was while guessing if a foot was stressed or unstressed. I do remember liking Arthur Rimbaud's Le dormeur du val though. If anyone has any recommendations for poems they like, I'd take those too

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Art is an escape, an outlet for creativity. I tend to also view it becoming a burden as barriers to creation arise. Even moreso should the business and networking aspects of it be involved, however necessary an evil it may be.

I'm curious what the process is to enter your artwork into a local gallery or museum. Do you mingle during art gallery events? Perhaps you encountered a formal application, wait-list, maybe an interview?

For context, I wanted to submit a 15 minute surreal Dadaist recorded performance about modern technology and the current climate of refusing to engage in active listening.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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Hey, tildes - cqns here.

I know tildes ain't never do me no wrong (apologies for the heavy colloquialism), but I've been working off and on with a worldbuilding project for the past decade and a half. Some four years ago, I finally hunkered down and created a world map completely from scratch. Due to my extraordinarily high standards, I couldn't help but slowly figure out that there was a lot of things wrong with it after I went through the effort of making it, so I ended up redoing it several times over with additions and subtractions, still feeling like there was something missing.

Turns out, my hunch was correct. Long story short, I found a website called World Orogen that procedurally generates a planet within a certain degree of "realism". Tweaking some settings, I came across a design that was good enough for working on outside of the website, in which I was beset on another issue that quickly spiraled out of control, and I found myself completely out of my depth - map projections, which is a rabbit hole all on its own, and I could only understand the bare minimum basics, such as lat/lon, but that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge. Seriously.

Undertaking this next phase of the project would eventually (and I do say "eventually" because I haven't even gotten around to it yet) lead me to making individual isolated continent maps like how one would find in an atlas. I have asked the Orange Alien Website for tips on r/mapmaking, and while I did get some nudges in the right direction, I'm still attempting to wrap my head around the programs they had suggested. QGIS and G.Projector being the areas of my focus. It's hard enough for me trying to fathom the extensive features of QGIS in general, and as for G.Projector, it comes with its own kind of clunkiness that I'm slowly getting used to. My ultimate question here is...how would I go about finding a map projection to ensure size and area accuracy (because both are apparently different) of all of my continents?

For reference, I have included the map in question so that if anyone wants to give it a go and offer up a solution.

Catbox Link

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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You know the trope: an epic fantasy world with magic materials that have strange properties or give people superpowers or what have you. It seems half of the time, this material is a type of crystal with some kind of electric power, and the other half of the time it's a type of metal that's basically steel, but stronger or something. The main examples that come to mind are Marvel, where you have the Soul Stones, Adamantium, and Vibranium.

Are there any other cool types of materials to use for this type of resource? Like maybe an obscure type of material that certain scientists study, but the general public doesn't know much about?

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I’m in the process of helping someone come up with lore and I was wondering if there was a website to help with suffixes related to lore and mythology. Things like adding ist, kin, age, folk, etc to try and make new words for beings or creatures.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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1

We are the funny men
The laughter men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with mirth. Alas!
Our wavering voices, when

We giggle together
Are loud and senseless
As hyenas in dry grass
Or gales stirring shards of glass
In our dry cellar

Form of clay, color of slick.
Fictitious force, turbulent motion;
Those who have crossed
With eyes darting to and fro,

To death's other kingdom
Remember us -- if at all --
Not as grasping, violent souls
But only as
The funny men

2

Eyes I dare not meet in ads
In death's advertisement kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Blinding light on a broken column
There, is a tube man swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More shrill and more booming
Than a cancelled star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's advertisement kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
(Thinnest phone, cleanest drip, slickest rizz)
On the grass
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer--

Not that final meeting
In the Find Out kingdom

Here you go! I’ve rewritten the text to avoid direct reference to the theme:

III

This is the slop land
This is swamp land
Here, the seed rounds
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a gilded man's hand
Under the twinkle of a parasite star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Fully sure that
We and our money are soon parted.

4

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of choking stars
In this hollow valley
The worms atop our kingdoms' bones.

In this last of meeting places
We wail together
A barbaric yawp
Gathered on this beach of the sunken river

Sightless, unless
The flames reappear
As the perpetual star
Tetraethyllead rose
Of death's Find Out kingdom
The hope only
Of unserious men.

5

Baby shark
Mommy shark
Daddy shark
Grandma shark

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Comedy

                Don’t want to meet your daddy

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Comedy

                Just want you in my Caddy

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Comedy

                Don’t want to meet your mama

Just want to
I’m just
Just want to make you

Grandpa shark
Where’d they go
No one’s here
Sleep again

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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I’m a highly creative person with strong execution skills on the makers side of things, design, fabrication, ideation, problem-solving. Where I consistently fall down is follow-through when working solo: logistics, setup, listings, shipping, scheduling, the last-mile admin that turns finished work into something that actually exists in the world.

I have a lot of very good monetizable ideas and skills, and I LOVE the creative part, but I just flounder at the rest.

I've joked in the past about needing a manager, someone who tells me what to make and how much of it, and I just make the deadlines and they ship, but more and more recently I've realized that might be exactly what I need.

Recently I've been doing some free design and branding work for a local indigenous restaurant and despite not getting paid for it, I LOVED doing it. And I've been getting asked about why I don't do it for other businesses too, as I have the experience and skills to, and it's like I would but the freelance aspect of having to find my own clients and stuff is just daunting.

And same thing with a couple ideas I've had that utilize 3D Printing and 3D design. I have a product idea that would fit a perfect niche that isn't currently being filled by any big players, as well as a monetization and resale license plan, but it's the execution.

When left to my own devices I kind of just fizzle out.

And I have a lot of designs and artwork that can absolutely translate to clothing and apparel, and I used to have a very active redbubble / society6 presence.

Like I know body-doubling is a really good ADHD hack that works, but I'm not sure how to body double something like this, but I would if I could.

So I guess I'm asking if anyone else has had to deal with this or if anyone has had to hire a creative partner/assistant/manager, and if so how'd that go and what is that like? Also where do I even go to find a person like that?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

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If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.