This weekend saw 2 parties in Finland: Byterapers 30 year anniversary, and Jumalauta Sweet 16. Let's skip over the part where Micron needs to read demoparty.net and won't, and go straight to the part where I am still damaged, but came away wanting to do more stuff and, well, able to (:

Ok so I'm physically damaged from "wrestling a bear" at [B]30. Mostly the right side. Which is not where the diodes are, so I am not Marvin. But I feel a bit like that.

I didn't do anything for [B]30 other than the bear wrestling.

I did not do ENOUGH stuff before JML16 - the picture I worked on 2 weeks ago sort of devolved into a non-picture, and was sort of lost - have to redo that intel stick to not use the integrated wireless and sound. Because it just... it's a one-off slightly-modified chipset that has enough edge cases to be unwieldy without a proper driver. And the Windows version also does not work. I don't mind, it's good enough for what I do with it, and I'll just do what I do. But no, I don't really reccomend the intel compute stick first generation. Get a RPI3 or 'chip' instead.

RM had the 'chip' portable thing that runs pico8. It is twice the size I expected! The keyboard ... is actually better than I expected! It sucks though. And pico8 has some odd issues on it, but I'm getting one anyway becuase it rules. Either that or I'm building one myself but I don't think I can do it for the ... maybe I can. I'll see.

I messed about with my pi zeros and the display units while in "recovery from bear mauling" mode. There is potential there I need to tap this week. Quite a bit of potential to tap this week (:

I did a picture in swanky paint for the EGA compo, and ... it's the title pic. I think it's actually pretty good, tho the background dithering is possibly ... well I could have done a different one. I did the overall thing without the background and I think the bananas are quite good. The J and L aren't colored badly either. EGA is tough. I could have gone larger, but quite frankly the 64x64 allowed me to concentrate on the design of the bananas and the limited pallette and NOT trying to go for realism. I may try to make a larger picture eventually using "draw bits of the pic in 64x64" mode, we'll see.

I did not do any other code and anything that suggests I did is lying. Had I done something in a half hour and not seen someone else do that and submit it, I'd have maybe done some fiddling in the sound part of pico8 and thought "hmm need to do some more in this area later."

However what was REALLY impressive was Felor's entry. First of all, Felor told me he'd taken my suggestion of looking at the pico8 and run with it. (Hooray!) Blueflame also said he was impressed with what Felor had done, as Felor is not a 'coder' as such but more of a straight up graphics artist. (And a very talented one.) So cross-pollination of creative things (w007!)

Felor's production may not look exceptional to many but there were some things that impressed me, so I asked about them, and saw some under-the-hood things that I should work into what I'm doing - fairly quickly.

A> he has a timeline browser of sorts. Forward/Backward, ability to pause, that sort of thing. Yes, basic things, but when you're doing something quickly it isn't immediately obvious how truly useful that will be. B> he wasn't clearing every frame. Thus some effects were more possible. C> he ran in 60hz mode. (Throws off the export to HTML mode, but - works fantastic.)

So really I came back from JML16 impressed as hell with Felor's entry and wanting to do something to maybe give him something back for what he's given me from his production. Which, really, is the reason why so much stuff in the demoscene is awesome - the inspiration from others and the deferred collaboration via osmosis.

Not copying someone elses code verbatim (: