Graffathon 2015

This past weekend, I took part in Graffathon, a three-day hackathon.


This demo (link has binaries/source) was made during the time of the party. It placed #25/32. The idea for it was to make a simple "memento mori" type of thing. We shall all melt away, like the skulls shown. I am skeleton jelly.
The music is by my friend, tzaeru. A later, more finished version of the song is available. The effect is a recreation of one from Doom, while the graphical assets were from VectorFree:

• Skull Decal by Jonny Doomsday
• Skull Vector Pack by inZane (unused)
• Skull Vector Image by Vecky Graphics

It uses a meter analysis tool by Wavesum for sync data. Syncs could have been improved a lot, but I gave up on this as I was unable to work on the prod on my own computer.
Releasing this made me realise I had not updated here about another HTeL production that I was a part of. The theme here is doing more with less - ironic, as the new demo plagiarizes an effect that the 386s of Doom's time had no trouble with, and yet it completely exhausts my Samsung N145 Plus (Intel Atom N455 1.66 GHz). It's likely that I just can't code - time, indeed, to "upgrade my software", ie. thinking.

   
These days, everything, up to and including thinking, is becoming increasingly controlled. Just recently, a german was the victim of a police operation because she is a holocaust skeptic. Even in my native Finland, there have been outcries for laws against holocaust denialism. The fact that both of these cases deal with holocaust skepticism is purely accidental, by the way.
In any case, HTeL, as I see it, stands against this kind of infringement on our freedom of expression, with no internal quality control and an open joining process. Indeed, within our small sub-culture, it has elicited a very similar response to the skeptics mentioned above - to wit, a quote from the demoscene:

can someone ban this nazi scum please

As a funny aside, while editing this blog post on the bus, I got the message "The site you requested (matiaswilkman.blogspot.com) has been blocked". It seems the automated algorithms we employ to sanitize our information feeds are not as infallible as we'd like... or maybe my writings are more dissident than I've thought! Well, this blog ought to make it to a few more blacklists as I publicly and unequivocally deny the Holocaust. That's right, I'm now going on record stating that the Holocaust never happened. No such events took place. It was all made up.
There, now ask yourself: is my saying this a threat to democracy? Should it be a criminal offense? A string of words with a particular meaning? What if I'd denied the moon landing, instead?