1.

polyphonic bombardment, layers of sound on the subway, six directions at some point simulates infinity; on the streets; wind pushing through the alleys, at every break freaking girls’ legs; heat and underground

2.

catch yourself before you slip! at some point zero becomes evident and unavoidable, but until that point exists in my mind it will never manifest. every new day is fractional

3.

a posse of well behaved idealists; an explosion contained. why? my friends from the bay area, seattle, nyc radiate brilliance

4.

the glory of love

5.

never give up

i just stay up all night

The “agent physics” (one moving actor) used in games like Line Rider and Jack Russell can be approximated with a simple rule:

SCALAR internal_energy, internal_energy_falling

VECTOR last_applied

each cycle:

if touching:

internal_energy += internal_energy_falling

internal_energy_falling = 0

internal_energy += <OBJECT.last_movement, downward vector>

last_applied = tangent * internal_energy

apply last_applied

else:

internal_energy_falling += 1

apply last_applied

apply downward vector * internal_energy_falling

done

For this to work, the game tool must be able to trigger on “touching” and compute the tangent (normalized) at the touching point. The point (called the OBJECT) must be aware of its motion last cycle. Finally the environment must support “line occlusion”, where motion over lines is occluded by the normal.

The big deal with linear physics is that it is completely specified by the above rule. So you can change the behavior of gravity and directional forces by simply re-drawing them.

With so many huge problems out there, it feels a little strange to be working on something as low-level as a tablet platform. I see the real value in this work as establishing an open source, universal standard, which feels a decade late. OpenInk aims to operate on both Java and iPhone Cocoa with the same API, which could rally a lot of (the limited amount of) pen development around creating something that will stick with us. An example, which is credit of Nicolas Carranza, is the JPen project itself. I fortuitously came across it a month after its release, and since then it seems artistic developers from all over the world are pitching in to solve an important problem.

“grassroots” cross-platform coding is what makes the Java platform unique. I’m really impressed that I can run an OpenGL, tablet application from my browser.