Josh "cortex" Millard @joshmillard@mastodon.social

let's see what's in the ol' video game patch notes...

"slightly increased the sound volume of the character suffocation sound effects"

Red Concentric Squares With Excisions
oil on canvas, 24”x24"

http://art.joshmillard.com/2019/01/16/red-concentric-squares-with-excisions/

does this Xerox PARC joy

that tingling at the back of your neck when you feel like maybe you have already made this joke some time in the last ten years but forgotten about it because it's not strong enough to be memorable

Black Mirror episode where editorial cartoons no longer rely universally on an aesthetic tradition of bizarre caricature and lampshade-hanging text labels, and editorial cartoonists are forced to navigate a dystopian hellscape where their work has to have actual content

Y Kent Clark Read

American Laying In Bed Staring At The Ceiling Simulator

Red Stripes With Excisions At Two Frequencies
oil on canvas, 24”x24"

http://art.joshmillard.com/2019/01/15/red-stripes-with-excisions-at-two-frequencies/

I hope this email finds you down a well

Red Squares With Permuted Excisions
oil on canvas, 24”x24”

http://art.joshmillard.com/2019/01/14/red-squares-with-permuted-excisions/

Wacław Szpakowski's stuff was so so good. Made a MeFi post about it.

https://www.metafilter.com/178755/Space-filling-curves-the-hard-way

Trying to figure out how to research "is the book better than the movie" re: Bird Box in a way that wouldn't spoil the betterness of the book in the process of getting an answer and realizing it may be impossible to pull that off and I should just read the other books I'm already planning to read.

Or are birds just too stupid to know how to commit suicide? Or can they just not conceptualize self-harm in the right way? And is the distinction between suicidal typical human and joyful culty atypical human strictly binary, or are there people who Look At The Thing and are like "well I don't want to stab myself in the chest but I also don't really want to join a cult, I guess I'll go start a farm somewhere by myself"? And are the cultists organized, or just Mad Maxin'?

Like, birds don't like it; they also don't apparently kill themselves. Can they see it? Is it psychoactive for them but just not the way it is for humans? *Is* it psychoactive, or is it operating on some metaphysical level, with the change in the eyes just a physical manifestation of curdling the soul? Do birds not have souls? Or just bird souls, which are different? What about dogs? Cats? Horses? The film mentions horses a dozen times and we never see a fucking horse.

The thing I'm least surprised to be disappointed with is not finding out more details about the entities/phenomenon/whatever. Not giving up details on the terrible mysterious thing is a legit choice. I just wanted to know more, and the slightly-more we get late on with seeing trees being invisibly trampled wasn't interesting, it was just Lost all over again.

I don't need to SEE this unseeable thing, but I'd love to have learned more about how it affects the world.

Also not really a fan of: hey it doesn't kill CRAZY people because they're CRAZY I guess, look out because Arkham Asylum's on the loose and they want you to see their elder god. Film didn't unambiguously elaborate on the idea that it was specifically and only mentally ill people who got culty instead of suicidal, but it dangled that tidbit in passing and sure didn't spend any time walking it back afterward.

Of which Magical Blind People at the end is the flip side.

It was okay! It was okay. Dig a spooky premise, tension was pretty good, little twists in the story weren't bad. I did not, ironically, really connect in a convincing way with Mallory's film-long voyage toward human connection and embracing her motherhood; that all felt both ham-handed throughout the bulk of the film and tied up wayyyy too neatly and suddenly at the end, like all that trauma and dysfunction just needed some nice foliage to POOF melt away.

y-you uh wouldn't know her, she's...she's from another country, and--

"oh yeah, where's she from then"

she, she's from--

*glances around at boxes of old C compiler software*

Borland!

He was like a radio talk show psychiatrist forever chasing tossed salad and scrambled eggs up the street. If he ever actually caught them, he wouldn't know what to do with them.