Tic-Tac-Two

Had a nice night at Mark's art preview last night. I miss painting. I miss visual art and artists. My life feels like a treadmill of hope and isolation at times, but I am creating something with my treadmill.

Today's creation is an idea for a 'sequel' of sorts to the simple game of Noughts and Crosses, known as Tic-Tac-Toe in the US. This thought was probably inspired by my mural, and my recent work on games. How it plays I don't know, but here is an outline of Tic-Tac-Two:

As in the normal game, the game is played on a 3x3 grid. Players choose X or O as their side, and the aim of the game is to make a line of 3 symbols either or orthogonally or diagonally.

The game would be best played with tiles (perhaps with X on one side and O on the other) rather than pencil and paper, as the grid is more dynamic.

Players take turns, but this time a 6-sided dice is rolled first. The sides determine the player actions and are as follows:
1. Place. The player must place their symbol in an empty space on the grid. This is the normal play for the classic game.
2. Move. The player can move any existing symbol on the grid to an adjacent square (orthogonally or diagonally). The symbol moved can be the player's or their opponents. Moving into the same square as another symbol will destroy/subsume it.
3. Remove. The player must remove one symbol (of any sort) from the grid.
4. Flip. The player must swap a symbol for its opposite; an X becomes O, an O becomes X.
5. Skip Turn. The turn is skipped to the other player without action.
6. Change Side. The players swap sides, the X player now becomes O, and the O player now becomes X.

For these actions, if a play is not possible (eg. if the grid is empty on a Move, Remove, or Flip action, or is full on a Place action) then no action is taken and the turn is skipped. Action must be taken if an action is possible.

Notes:

Rule 6 is the most interesting, as it could upset any strategy and would require some empathy with the opponent (if it's disruptive, this roll could be Roll Again instead). The game may play better on a larger grid for reasons of strategy; 4x4, 5x5, or larger. It could also either win with a longer line (line-of-4 or line-of-5) or use shorter lines, eg. 3, which score points rather than end the game. Play could continue until the entire grid was full. It could also be used for 3, 4, or more players, with some rules to govern the symbol-flip and change-side rolls (a second die-roll could indicate the destination symbols perhaps).

I thought last night that this might make for a fun game called Battle of the Sexes where the male and female symbols were used. It would make the Change Side roll particularly amusing, if not overtly topical.

Bolt-On Work, Mark Edmonds Art Preview

A full day of work on the Bolt-On sound effect packs for SFXEngine, preparation these for distribution. First, rendering all 100 sounds and checking them for volume and looping. Then creating text for the itch.io page, and the 10 images for that. Creating Readme files, zipping the contents. Then preparing the animations for the YouTube videos to showcase these, and putting together the combined preview file; all of the sounds chained together. There is more to do. All this to hopefully sell a few. I must prove that SFXEngine is the best sound effect software in the world! I firmly believe this is true.

This evening, I'm going to the preview of Mark Edmonds' new art exhibition in his Spode works studio complex. I like Mark, and it will be the first time we've met in many years, certainly since before the Covid-19 pandemic. I will dress in a dark suit, with white shirt and black tie, dark silk-linen trousers, bowler hat, black umbrella, and a briefcase; like Magritte, or more correctly John Steed. I really need a red carnation and some grey kid gloves. I will have to suffice without.

Sound Effects, Pointlessness, Octopus Brains, and a Dynamic Higgs Field

Have spent today creating example sound effects for the different Bolt-on Effects/Plug-in packs for SFXEngine. These were to be used exclusively as free bonus content for customers, though I am aware that there are, so far, no customers of these packs except for legacy owners of the full $100 version, they get all of these.

It's been long and tiring work that has taken until 9:30pm. I've created 100 new sound effects for the 10 packs, each using the core engines plus the selected pack's engines. I'll make these free somehow, I think that the IndieSFX itch.io channel, plus a YouTube video might be an appropriate showcase for these, as well as giving them to the customers as the intended bonus.

A lot of the work I do seems hard and soul destroying, and today was no exception. I seem to spend my life doing pointless or ignored tasks with little aim, except that, of course, I remind myself that everything I make is for other people. My games, my music, my art; and, I remind myself again that some of it is indeed seen and experienced by others every day, and must be appreciated by at least some people. By the same token, most of the art or other things I create are not seen by anyone except myself. But, isn't this the case for everyone? We can't know the impact of our actions on the world, and artist is one of the most personally expressive, and uniquely contributive jobs.

I'm feeling particular ignored, isolated, obscure, and useless today. I reflected that my life has always been a struggle and scrape, endless work for bare scraps or the hope of scraps. Each year and each month I hope for something better, and each year and month is a struggle. Perhaps it will always be so, perhaps it will not. Perhaps I will have a 'hit' one day, perhaps not. I will, however, whether I experience great success or not, keep striving, keep trying, keep working, keep doing, keep rolling my Sisyphean rock, keep defying the gods and cruel world, and keep battling fate.

Two interesting thoughts:

First. Deborah informs me that the nervous system of the octopus evolved in two halves separately; the head and eyes part, and the stomach part. These two systems later merged into one brain. I would guess that the same occurred in humans (perhaps this occurred in the common ancestor of octopuses and humans). The brain and gut are separate nervous systems, and are often conflicted or have differing personalities and viewpoints. The gut consciousness is probably the result of much of the social, animal feelings which are out of balance with the civilised world, which known to and better engaged with the brain.

Second. I'm still thinking about the Higgs Field. I wonder if, rather than matter and mass spontaneously forming from it, that there is more of a communicative, symbiotic system in effect between the two; that the two systems of seen and unseen matter are in a subtle flux of communication; a dynamic relationship. Thus in inter-galactic space, where dark matter does not exist, light matter does not, and perhaps cannot, either.

Final Town Vocal Recordings

A day of vocal recording and production for A Drive Through The Town, as planned. I recorded the vocals for 'Anyone Can Fall In Love', 'Burning Meat Outdoors' and 'Pictures On My Telephone'. The latter was the most fun due to the drama of the tune, the first the most difficult because of the odd melody which shifts key with each chord change, but also required delicacy, being a gentle love song. Burning Meat was a bit frustrating, as it's focused on a low-E, a note which lacks power. I decided to move up an octave for the second repeat, which became rather high. Most songs benefitted from harmonies.

I did some general training too, though this served to remind me how difficult singing is.

The rest of the day was adding the vocals and tweaking the mixing all of the songs. The track listing is now:

I'm In Love With My Car
American Lawyer
Go To Bed And Miss Me
Excessive Consumption Has Laxative Effects
Pictures On My Telephone
Anyone Can Fall In Love
Style Guru Fashion Queen
Mister Moan
Incomplete Version Of The Writer
An Autumn Tale
Cat Parasites
Cat Covid
Burning Meat Outdoors
Thinking About The Cats I Used To Know

I'm reaching the end stages of the creative phase before the long mixing, mastering, filing, and promotion phases. These stages make me wonder why I'm doing this, making music nobody will hear or care about and will earn me little in money or prestige, perhaps even be forgotten in a blink... but no! This is wrong! Perhaps we shells on the beach can shout a sound, a burble in the puddles among a population of other burbles.

This is the soul of art: any sound is infinitely better than silence. Many great musicians of the past and present lose heart or vision, and sit in their silence. Yes, the world ignores me, it ignores us, it ignores all of us sooner or later; that's the nature of civilisation - only intimate relations are not ignored, and those relations are transient. This must be known and internally conquered. Nothing is ignored forever.

I listened to some music new to me recently, by Peter Godwin, a musician most well known for having his song 'Criminal World' covered by David Bowie, yet, I liked his early/mid 80s sound and wished he'd written and recorded more. Of course, back then, he may have wished the same.

This album is better, I think, than We Robot, a continual step up in performance and technical skills. A step up from the slow start of Fear Of The Thing Itself, and The Modern Game, and The Dusty Mirror. It took a long time, over a year, to make small improvements at first, but now I'm making better albums faster and faster, which must be a positive thing. This is one of my key aims; to learn and improve. Today's vocals were done quickly and easily; more easily than ever before.

There is less of a theme and message in A Drive Through The Town than in We Robot. Some songs are social or character observations. Some are surrealistic; unconscious inspired songs which then evolved new narratives, such as Cat Covid and Excessive Consumption. Incomplete Version and Autumn Tale are some of my oldest songs re-recorded. I'm sure that trend will continue as I've got a lot of older songs, several of which lack vocals but have some production laid out.

Let us burble. Onwards we march.

Album Work, A Drive Through The Town

Back to work on my new album today, and production work on the three final tracks: 'Burning Meat Outdoors' (another fast-paced surrealistic race, a bit like 'Someone Else's AI' from We Robot), 'Pictures on my Telephone', and 'Anyone Can Fall In Love', which was originally called 'A Gift Freely Made', but the first words are more memorable.

Most of today was work on Pictures on my Telephone. The sounds are much more electronic than I first envisaged, which was something like Heartbreak Hotel, but I realised that I should actually move in the opposite direction and aim for a highly electronic sound, partly for this very reason, that classic blues is rarely electronic. Also, the song is about technology so the timbre should be too. My recent toying with the Microkorg has reawakened an interest in analogue waves, too. Much of the song was balancing noise and silence, sharp dramatic stabs lead to pregnant silences.

Finally, work on the new song, 'Anyone Can Fall In Love'. It will follow Telephone, so I began by using the same bass, but I realised that the dead end of Telephone must remain. The sounds here remain electronic and analogue. I made some simple synth-strings using saw and pulse waves and band-pass sweeps, and added a regular pulse of a saw, a little bit like the intro to 'My Baby's Non-Binary'. These however, play along more to the melody. They also start in the centre, then move apart spatially, alternate notes to extreme left and extreme right, like distant lovers singing to each other. At the end of the song these pulses re-unite; a romantic gesture in one tone and told entirely in stereo placement.

There are some Vangelis-style brass sweeps, and much romantic drama. Perhaps I need to add some booming drums or gongs like Ultravox's 'All In One Day', but as things are it still sounds rather nice, epic, lovely.

The vocals for these all need doing. Hopefully I can record these tomorrow morning. Deb is too ill with a cold-like virus for us to attend the open mic on Tuesday. She is coughing and probably infectious, so the lack of attendance is as much precautionary for others as it is for her health. Still, I aim to sing on Tuesday, as has become my regular day.

I'm really pleased with this album and must make plans for its release. For a title I toyed with two: Cat Parasites, as named after one track. This would be a play on Bowie's Diamond Dogs. I've decided on A Drive Through The Town though, making this a partner or follow-up to A Walk In The Countryside. There is a cat link between both albums, and as a pair they pay homage to Queen's A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races (and those in turn paid homage to the Marx Brothers).

The cover art will, as Queen's did, be an approximately negative version of the other. I'll release singles, press CDs, and do more for this album, a worthy successor to We Robot, but there is a lot of work, a lot of months, to come yet.

A P.R.S. payment came today and I found the stats interesting. My most popular tune in terms of raw performances was 'There Is No Love, and the More I Search the Less I Find' from The Love Symphony, via YouTube India. The most royalties came from 'Lou Salome Remembers' the biggest European hit, and indeed lots of the Salomé album is popular, more than expected. 'The Planet's Oracle' is the most popular vocal track, with 420,000 plays in Spain, for example, and 'Sit With Your Ghost' is popular too. Of my songs, the most popular is 'You Make Me Happy', with 1.5 million performances via YouTube India, but a large 149,000 in the UK, and over 10,000 in Germany, France, South Africa, and Sweden. In the UK, my next most popular song was 'Remembrance Service' from that album. I find these statistics fascinating and encouraging, but I'm unsure what they really mean. They do however indicate growth over time, and with each passing quarter, so that must be a good thing.

Many of my songs from The Dusty Mirror onwards were, for me, conscious exercises in training; certain to be improved upon, and always intended to be remade at some point. No matter how things are now, things are getting, and will get, better.

Final Mural Day

Some images, by Peter Robinson, from yesterday's Day 2:

After that, there were a few paint drips and little accidents, plus many star-like dusty fragments of broken yellow sponge. Last night I vowed to revisit this morning, with the dark grey paint to hand to fix things. I'm so pleased I did. I managed to overpaint the drips perfectly, and the yellow bits were extensive. I could have done with a wide soft brush to clean them all, but had to wipe everything by hand.

I fixed up lots of smaller bits, tiny areas where the grey was untidy, then stepped back to check it all. There were many areas of the wall which had larger-scale problems, including mould growths, dirt and mud, missing paint or bare areas. I couldn't correct everything by any means, but I could use new paint rolled and blended with the old to give the whole surface a cleaner and more uniform finish.

All of this took another two hours, but made all the difference to the final presentation. Here are a couple of finished shots:

All in all, it's taken 4.75 days, since 31st August, excluding the three council meetings (half-a-day each), plus 6.5 days for the rejected first design. Some of the planning from that first design would have been useful for the second. Costs included the unused high-working platform I bought for the first design, but almost everything else was needed, so very little was wasted. I estimate I spent £300 to £400; that platform, the insurance, and the paint being the biggest costs. I'll calculate this soon. I didn't need the quantity of paint by any measure, I must have used only 15% of it, but I bought the smallest amounts I could, and the quality of the paint (Wethertex AP77 Flexible Smooth Masonry Paint) was excellent.

My mum was a huge and vital help on the first day. It was kind of Peter Robinson, a star press photographer by every measure, to come on the first two days to document them, and nice of David Lidster to come too, in case I needed help on the first day. It was nice just to have someone there rather than working alone. The council were as frustratingly slow as any bureaucracy, but that can't be helped. I'd have still have loved to paint the first design, but yes, perhaps that was beyond the remit of this small and cheap job. My first thoughts are always big, dramatic, spectacular.

It is done. Onwards.

Mural Day 2

Two hours of minor finishing tasks to the mural today, removing most of the guide lines, and adding the lines which connect the circles, which couldn't be done on the day due to the masking requirements. I missed one line, and one large drip fell onto the work. Once dry, tomorrow or later, I'll need to remove the final guide lines, these were amidst today's painted lines, so couldn't be removed today. I'm toying with using some of the grey to paint over and fix some of the white marks.

Peter Robinson visited again to take a few photos of the work in progress. Here are a few of his wonderful photos from yesterday:

David Jewkes was there today. It seems that he envisages his design to take several months of occasional spare days. He seems to relish the public spectacle of painting outdoors in summer. I'm more of a military-precision planner, with no time or tolerance for inefficiency. I'm relieved to complete this in the planned 1.5 days, and still rather amazed that it worked so exactly to schedule.

This is my second Cheshire East commission, the other was a series of postcards in 2011 to celebrate the centenary of The Lyceum Theatre; the Council ran the theatre back then. David Lidster suggested that my work was like that of Fact, Liverpool, asking if I'd worked with them. I could probably do more work with and for other arts organisations if I were more proactive. I have a general policy of doing things when asked, but never asking or enquiring myself. My years of enquiring with games companies, where every contact led to exploitation or abuse, led me to deeply distrust this way of working. My personality has changed dramatically since those dark and strange days.

Now I must recover physically from the busy two days, and move back to music, and possibly an Outliner update. I've done a lot this year; updates to Gunstorm, Gunstorm II, Bool, and Firefly, most of my next album, and scored two albums; but only completed and released the Gunstorm games. The album is on track, though, and the open mic events have further boosted my performance experience and abilities. I need to complete and publish more. Any creativity is a treadmill of creating, publicising, releasing, publicising, creating; a chain of products and ideas.

Onwards we march.

Mural Day 1, and Higgs Field Dark Matter

My day of mural painting on the Lyceum Square, Crewe. All went to plan, though was (is!) very tiring, complete with over a mile to walk there and back carrying all of the equipment. My mum came with me and helped, helped hugely. I could not have done it so efficiently without her. I'm so pleased, and amazed to some extent, that it did go to plan and worked so correctly. So many plans and contingency plans were made. The days and weeks of planning paid off.

I started work at 08:30 and finished at 17:00. The drawing out was complete before 11:00. A few lines were missing and needed redrawing. I got through two watercolour pencils just for the guide lines. I needed three pencil sharpeners, the first wasn't sharp enough, the second had a fault. The mask adhesion, my biggest worry, was the biggest problem, as feared, but masking tape stuck well. A few masks fell off during painting, but only one (the first) resulted in paint in the masked area. After that, I moved more slowly and used the faults as part of the design. A sort of industrial grunginess, and imperfection, was always part of the idea. Firstly perfection is so elusive; there's no way a smooth design could be done, but secondly, the concept is about order becoming organic, the balance between mathematics and nature. Thirdly, the format of wall painting lends itself to a graffiti-like, raw look.

Photographer Peter Robinson visited twice to take some photographs of the work in progress, and local arts volunteer and co-ordinator David Lidster came by too, to help supervise things, and find me a barrier for site safety.

I needed my bright orange workwear. I needed much of what I brought, though not the staple gun.

My morning began, however, with thoughts about the Higgs Field, after reading about Peter Higgs. A scalar field which is non-zero everywhere doesn't seem right somehow, and there is also the problem of 'too much' zero-point energy. I wondered if the Higgs Field, rather than being ubiquitous and homogenous, could clump, and that Higgs Bosonic Matter of some form could be dark matter.

Earthly concerns now concern me. I'm exhausted and have a second, though lighter, day of work tomorrow finishing the mural. Two of the designs need separate masking after drying. It seems that today is (amazingly) the first non-rainy day of the year, and even tomorrow is due for some.