Category: Art

Audio and visual pieces of art, excluding written fiction and programming-focused posts.

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it’s a small world, but my head is in space

Sometimes life rhymes in weird ways. It’s a small world.

Approximately 14 years ago, I discovered the game Elite, and open-source reimplementation called Oolite. I was hooked conceptually (because I sucked at the game, I never played it for that much time before giving up again).

I spent a lot of time looking at all the mods for it, and in that search, I stumbled across a promo video for one of the mods that featured really nice music:

So good that every few years I come back to it and play that video again. Somehow I never looked at the channel itself, just that one video, until tonight, where I discover that not only did they make the music used in that video, but they’ve made a good amount of music over all these years. They’ve a Bandcamp and a SoundCloud.

And then I noticed they make mods for a game called Trainz, which I stumbled across in a bargain bin years before I played Oolite. I didn’t get much chance to play it, but I always wanted to. This same person has just been involved with two random relatively obscure games I enjoyed and I kept coming back to this one video and not seeing these other spurious connections.

There’s no deep plot or special meaning here. I’m just tickled to discover these random connections and hope others enjoy their music too.

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Sketch of Salt Wash, Utah

While driving home from California, we stopped at the Salt Wash View Area, and I made a quick sketch roughly representing the view:

Quick sketch representing the view from Salt Wash View Area.

As you can see, it is indeed a rough representation. Here’s what it actually looks like, for direct comparison:

Panorama of Salt Wash View Area
Panorama of Salt Wash View Area
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The Great American Corruption (Glitch Art)

I recently obtained a copy of DALE, which is a series of DVDs about Dale Earnhardt’s career in NASCAR. In order to keep a digital version of it for when the original is inevitably gone, I took photos of the inserts that came with it, cropping them in GIMP to just the documents. GIMP didn’t like this for two of the images, and for some reason, corrupted the files in interesting ways.

corrupted version of an advertisement for the 1998 Daytona 500
The Great American Corruption

With the first image, you can clearly see where I got the inspiration for its name – which I also used to name this blog post. With the second, it’s a touch less clear, but I think you’ll figure it out:

corrupted version of Dale Earnhardt's #3 and first name
Thhhale
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Pikes Peak From a Window Seat (Art)

Yesterday, I took the Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway to – you guessed it – Pikes Peak. At the top, a passenger offered me a Kit Kat, and I really wanted to give them something in return. So I pulled out a sketchbook and tried to draw the view as quickly as I could:

sketch of Pikes Peak from a window seat in the cog railway station

They said they were french and didn’t speak English very well, so I’m guessing they live outside of the USA. Based on this guess, I’m going to assume this means my art has now (or very soon) gone international.

I want to get into art more, and the idea of giving away sketches to random people I meet sounds like fun, so I hope to continue. As for the title, there’s another piece of art from a window seat I’ve enjoyed a lot.