MrHoatzin

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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About MrHoatzin

  • Rank
    Once Upon a Kingzjester
  • Birthday March 20

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    http://hobolobo.net

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  • Gender
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  • Location
    San Antonio, TX
  1. Plug your shit

    Word Salsa is a San Antonio Tricentennial Art Object traveling around town for the duration of the celebration year. Dozens of San Antonio poets throughout the ages contributed their bodies of work, we fed them to a robot and taught it to think like a San Antonio poet. When prompted, it produces a brand new, unique poem, reads it out loud and prints it on a numbered card. Create art with the press of a button! We'll move it around town to various venues in the coming year. Are there any San Anto thumbs who might actually be able to write a Word Salsa of their own?
  2. Plug your shit

    Man this is pretty sweet!
  3. Heyo Thumbs fam, how've you been? Some of you might know that for the last few years I have been teaching at this creative youth development nonprofit in San Antonio. It is a long-term after-school art program, project-based learning, free to students and all that fun stuff. My studio focuses on anything made on or with computers, new media, transmedia and video game design. This summer, with the extended summer hours, we're gonna have a little game jam project. And we have a little bit of a budget and we'd really like to bring a GUEST ARTIST for two or three weeks to work with/alongside our students. I was hoping you guys could RECOMMEND SOME GAME JAM ROCKSTARS. Someone who is experienced and comfortable with producing stuff in jam environments, but any and all accomplished indies and like game creators would be fair game. I'm hoping this someone would be a programmer and be able to speak to the engineering side of games. In this context, artists who program and anyone who can convert their ideas into games on their own but don't consider themselves programmers are fair game. They don't have to be US-based but it would be easier if they were. We were thinking about making it a Unity+Processing+PICO8 focus, with students picking groups and what they want to work in. There will be a theme, prolly something to do with tricentennial of (the colonization of) San Antonio which is this year. The residency would fall sometime end of June, beginning of July. Just collecting names right now, so no one is out of reach. Any leads?
  4. Star Wars Episode 8

    God, so much pedantic negativity! I didn't expect that coming here. I thought the movie was p great, very nicely designed. The structure and pacing and reshuffled familiar setpieces doing new things reminded me of a good Telltale game, which I'll gladly take from the Disney machine. It set fire to the reheated lore pile of the previous five movies, did weird shit with the force and angered a bunch of nerds. These are all good things.
  5. The pin appears as bad Coop's hair tie, definitely near the end, but might be in throughout and we somehow missed it. The camera even lingers on it.
  6. Designer Notes 31: Margaret Robertson

    I really enjoyed this episode! Quality conversation! I only wish Margaret had recorded the convo on her side. The Skype compression really made it a struggle to keep up with. Also is anyone else having dns issues trying to reach lookspring.co.uk?
  7. Fresh Indie Game Compendium Extraordinaire

    Hello thread i started a billion years ago when there was three indie games in the world, how've u been? Anyway, I'm here to plug Date Me Super Senpai It's an inclusive dating sim set in a superhero high school and it was made over the last year in an after-school art program in San Antonio by a bunch of weirdo teens (and myself and two other adults in the capacity of producer/teaching artist). It's our first big video game project in the new media studio. Check it out! https://say-si.itch.io/date-me-super-senpai
  8. As a relatively fresh dad, I've had my share of extreme new feelings at parent-child relationships on tv and film. I'm also not a stranger to the creative process, or killing children as a story device for that matter. And it is not like I have never damned any auteurs on the basis the unredeemableness or irresponsibility of their work (Gaspar Noé can freely go have a gruesome occult death somewhere which also unmakes all his movies, there is no universe in which his work needs to exist). That said, (with all those caveats ) I am not that bothered by Chekhov's kid getting run over. The whole vector of the action with the run-stop-caught-run-stop-caught-run-stop-get run over-caught was stilted with that choice Lynchian foreboding and that choice Lynchian purposeful slow clunkiness. Carl's face carries the whole weird scene, and is probably better than all extra faces there. I couldn't help but think as it was happening how fun it must've been for the kid to shoot his own grody death scene, which prolly made it easier to stomach.
  9. Both coins are dimes, no? Also is the indian dime a real thing?
  10. Hm, I thought this was the same guy but I guess not. So many identical looking white dudes :/
  11. Glad black people exist in The Return.
  12. Heyo! Jake & Chris mention the movie screen of the highway behind the curtain, the glass box tv setup, the purple old-school Caligari world below it all, the ultimate return into a super saturated modern family sitcom—just wanted to explicitly tie all of these themes into a bigger unifying theme so far, namely a journey through motion picture tech. Plus there's the b&w opening with ?????? which doesn't neatly fit into that trajectory but the grading is quite lovely and gets that warm silver gelatin look pat. You never really make this is your angle, but you flirt dangerously close to portraying Lynch as an out-of-touch grampa in matters of technology. Yes, he is angry at phones because the screens are small and a dumb way to see cinema, and he made Inland Empire with the shittiest camera imaginable—but he, in unequivocal words, embraced video over film when it was a ludicrous thing to do and all the serious people still shot on film. Sure he chose the ugly as sin SD because he prolly wanted Inland Empire to look like butt for reasons. I bet the purple room editing in ep3 and the tactless blue filter in ep4 also purposefully read like baby's first art school video projects for reasons I don't really wish to try to excuse... It is weird because his subtlety with special effects is sorta second to none in the industry. Eraserhead and Dune to this day look amazing. In '95 he used the original Lumière brothers camera to shoot Premonitions Following an Evil Deed—which I seem to recall reading somewhere was done in a single take. He is very aware of everything at his disposal and he chooses to use video effects over mainline CG. And true, all his computer interfaces we've seen look weird and out of time, but he also produced video content for the internet years before youtube and broadband penetration made that a sane proposition... so like he knows what's up. He just has nuanced opinions. Anyway, damn good pods. And hot. That Lumière camera thing for those who've not seen it:
  13. Twine Recommendations

    I ended up sharing these with the class: Hero Room (had it in a folder attached with the list) Star Court (ditto) Queer Pirate Plane Uncle Who Works for Nintendo »——-?——-> King of Bees in Fantasyland Horse Master Assimilagent climbing 208 feet up the ruin wall Mythics There was some snickering over adult words from the 6th graders and some serious themes snuck through (had to include Horse Master nnnggh). In retrospect that may have given some of them already predisposed to wiseassery and sabotage implicit permission to go a little crazy with "mature" themes. There was a lot of weirdly inept, cartoony racism in their stories which the ones I pointed this out to, recognized and either worked out of the stories or didn't repeat for the second one. So two prompts for the projects I settled on were Tea Party and Heist. Check out hive dot saysi dot org (a bit apprehensive about spiders indexing the url against its robots.txt wishes what with lists o names o students and all so manually un-dumb link plz) I had to censor two games by one kid from the Official Published List Shown To General Public, even though kids voted to put both of them on the top of the list with an overwhelming margin. I'm gonna use this as a lesson in institutional censorship and how it works and why it happens and how to anticipate it and how to play ball. Also how to be more subversive. How to pick a venue for one's voice/themes/work. If anyone is curious about the censored games, I'll PM you a link.