toys not tools
"toys not tools" is my 2021 mantra. In my creative life, I tend to sink a lot of time into making tools for myself, and it has come to point where it's become this black hole of productivity. Tools for the sake of tools. It's a form of procrastination that has become a fruitless pursuit.
You can see my progress here, where I have made a TODO page for myself. Hopefully, it will be full of tasks and chatter.
Toys, on the other hand, are an interesting new challenge. First of all, Toys have an accessible narrative. Unlike my usual esoteric computer music works, the whimsical nature of toys can speak to a large audience. It'd be nice to try communicate some ideas of mine to a "normal" crowd while still maintaining some artistic integrity.
Toy design is small and clever. They are tightly scoped in function, and usually are manufactured to be mass produced. I mostly write software, so this last point isn't as relevant, but the idea of building small and constrained things has always intrigued me and can be found in many of my pre-existing works.
2022-01-01 10:56:21: toys are more fun, and tools never get done.
2021-08-23 20:19:17: make vocal tract models work on the Daisy
2021-07-24 16:22:15: (grid_tutorial) is a rough draft for using the monome grid with C, similar to how it is done with (monolith).
2021-06-24 09:40:32: SDFs are pretty neat. I've been very intrigued by 2d SDFs, and how they can be used to describe very organic forms. I really want to build anthropomorphic things like faces/mouths and make them sing/talk/blink/stare.
2021-06-19 10:59:51: I made a singing thing for #android called (vocshape). I don't plan on doing much more with it.
2021-03-25 15:00:35: something I've been musing over today is the notion of 'overpowered toys'. toys that have no right being as useful as they are. maybe this is just tools with whimsical branding?
2021-02-09 10:06:58: I need to make android apps again. Publically this time. They were so much fun for me.
2021-02-09 10:05:27: added a TODO for (toys_not_tools): (toys_not_tools_TODO).
2021-01-02 10:50:21: created a (toys_not_tools) page