December 29, 2021
I re-uploaded my developer projects back to GitHub:
Reason being is that I wanted to distro-hop on my personal machines (laptop, Desktop, etc) like a mad man to check out some other workflows, though mostly because I think Thunar file manager’s bug in XFCE desktop on Manjaro desktop that automatically mounts SD cards as ‘root’ is crazy hence I’m switching out to something better.
The less I have to actually depend upon existing on the file system for a given laptop or Desktop via a different Linux distro .iso used in ‘Ventoy’, the better.
This will save me some time since I keep having to re-deploy a laptop like my Thinkpad X230 each time I change my setup, so I’d rather just offload stuff to either GitHub, or my file server.
Really, I’m just aiming for something a bit more simple and hands off going forward.
I’m aiming to play around with Puppy Linux to make an Emacs specific Operating System, since I don’t see too many Puppy Linux derivatives that give you a decent Emacs config from the get-go.
On the art side of things, I finished most of the Watts Atelier art course. Learned a ton, but man does that guy like to talk too much. Dude’s got respectable skill though, and I definitely will use the course PDF handouts later as a reference.
I’ve been going through the ‘Meds Map’ from Ahmed Aldoori (https://medsmap.mykajabi.com/landing-page). Probably one of the best digital art courses I’ve sifted through in a while.
Other than that, I’ve completed a few digital art illustrations, and am working on getting my workflow between GIMP, Krita, and Grafx2 down pat.
I do plan on scanning stuff in, but it always take a ton of time just to get some images scanned in the first place.
But, I’ve since turned away from using sketchbooks for this reason, and literally just draw on printer paper to make the scanning process 100x easier. Plus, printer paper looks awesome with ink anyway.
My current art workflow includes the following:
- Scan in an ink drawing at 300 DPI with GIMP with the ‘SANE’ scanner plugin that you can install on any Linux distro
- Open the same drawing in GIMP, and remove the white layer to create a transparent .png
- Bring the same transparent .png into Krita to then lower the opacity to 80%, and to then create a pencil layer ontop
- Print the progress, re-ink the printed ink drawing, and re-scan it as a new layer with ‘Multiply’
- Use a new layer on the layer below and fill in the color with a round hard brush in Krita
- Once it looks completed, save it, and then re-scale a different copy with 256 pixels at its width
- Re-index the painting to ONLY 16 colors
- The result is a cool looking pixel art piece, but which can still be brought into Grafx2 for further dithering
So far, the results have been pretty sweet. However, I’m still trying to figure out which specific demoscene parties to upload my work to since there are ton still going on these days at these sites:
I’ve already decided on an alias for my new work, which will be ‘Shortstop’ for a few reasons:
- Funnily enough, I actually don’t like baseball much at all, so there’s some irony already present
- However, I do consider myself to be an alright mediator, hence the name
- Kinda fits my personality already
Now to make my pixel art pieces more known :)
I don’t plan on posting my pixel art on this site either because of the overhead, and plus, no one really cares to go to Joe Schmoe’s personal site for that kind of thing.
It’s just expected to be on those platform sites above, so I think I have a better shot on those instead.
Regarding music, I also thought a bit deeply about the instruments I currently play aka synth and guitar, and even though I’ve relegated them to just on the weekend to devote more time to art, I think my main goal going forward is to at least always create every time I sit down and ‘practice’ or ‘play’.
Reason being is that I’m kind of sick of the ‘maintenance’ mode of playing that comes with playing instruments, ex: Playing old songs so I can remember them etc.
I’m really only interested in creating new things going forward.
Career-wise, I’m shooting for getting both my documentation skills and web development skills up to par. I plan on focusing on Typescript first as this is heavily used for most frameworks anyway, and serves as the foundation for things like NodeJS, Electron, React, etc.
Sure, you might get your job automated later in the future as a documentation based technical writer, but that track still might teach me the right skills to make commits on larger project repositories.
Furthermore, you never see anyone saying that there is perfect documentation out there, only the lack thereof.
Luckily, work has been really cool with allowing me to gain some related skills by allowing for some work based GitHub projects, and the opportunity to also edit the related documentation as well.
Might help out Puppy Linux, Emacs Org Mode, or some kind of emulators. Not sure yet, but documentation’s a good place to start no matter what project it is.
There’s even a cool Hungarian based Puppy Linux page that might be worth checking out to help out, who knows:
Might give me some cool translation skills for Hungarian as well since the dude who runs the site writes the entire page in Hungarian and is into pretty much the same things I am into for the most part.
Whatever it takes, I’ll make it happen :)
~ Sam