🥺Video Art Frames, All melodies are now public domain, and Create your own game

Yup - more games to keep you up at night

Greetings from the lovely land of Tennessee!

Let me tell you - last week was crazy.

Nashville and some of the surrounding counties have been devastated by a horrible tornado. Many have lost their homes, jobs, and over 20 people have lost their lives. Thankfully, Nashville has been banding together to help those affected. Dozens of businesses and thousands of volunteers have been working over the past week to help restore affected communities. Keep the Nashville area in your prayers!

Also - Tennessee got its first Coronavirus case. A lot of people are panic buying and freaking out here. Yes - Coronavirus is scary and no one wants to catch it. However, isn’t life itself pretty scary? We never know when our hearts, brains, or other essential organs will stop working, much less brake failures, a falling tree, choking on food, or other possible tragic accidents.

It’s something worth thinking about as you think about your response to the Coronavirus.

Well - let’s get down to the news, shall we?

🖼 Hang a Video Art Frame

Permanent art and video have never quite figured out how to properly work together. When we think of the word “video,” we tend to associate fleeting transient images. One clip plays - then another begins.

Well, Infinite Objects is out to change that with permanent video picture frames.

That’s right - Video picture frames. Here’s an image from their site.

Essentially, you pick out a video, send it to this company - and they create a permanent video picture frame that plays this video and only this video.

Forever - until you unplug it and let the battery run out.

Pretty interesting, right? Here’s their vision for Infinite Objects

An Infinite Object is a looping video in a permanent display that you can't update. There are no buttons, no connectivity, and no app. We are turning digital video into physical, collectible objects. We call them Video Prints. Source

Fascinating! It’s a really interesting approach to adding value to your audience if you are an artist. Say you create a looping video and order ten of these. You then delete your copy and say you only have ten publicly available copies ever of this unique art piece. Boom. Instant money maker with the “unique” promise - especially if you have a loyal audience.

If you’re an artist or you have a video you reallly love, I definitely recommend checking this out!

🎵 All Melodies are Public Domain . . . Kinda

Yeah . . . When I found this article, it kinda made my head spin a little bit. In a nutshell - this is how the theory goes.

Artists/programmers Riehl and Rubin want to stop the ridiculous copyright debates about “infringing melodies.” We see artists sue each other over “musical similarities” in particular melodies - and they want to put a stop to it.

To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers. source

They released literally ALL the possible melodies under a Creative Commons 0 license - which essentially means that anyone can use them for anything, without fear of legal blowback. Whether or not this will have any legal weight remains to be seen, but it’s a pretty novel idea!

Conversely - what if someone tried to copyright every melody in existence using this method? Would legal courts hold up this “trolls” claim?

It’s a fascinating idea to think about in a world of AI and algorithms.

If you need some new melodies, I recommend checking out the Internet Archives page. You can find them all at the link! It is a 600 Gig download though . . .

😁 Build your own game - Soon!

Building your own videogame. Seemed like an impossible task up until the rise of Minecraft, Fortnite creative mode, Gary’s Mod, Little Big Planet . . .

Yeah - there’s been a lot of “game making games.”

However - there’s a new one on the horizon, and it could be a game-changer! 😃

Manticore Games is creating a system called Core that will allow people to rapidly prototype videogames. Here’s an explanation from Andrew Webster on Verge.

Core is essentially split into two halves, each focused on a different part of the equation: the creators and the players. For creators, Core is a PC-based game creation tool built on top of Unreal Engine, Epic’s wildly popular game engine. The crux of Core is that it’s both fast and easy to use. During a demo, I watched as Maynard set up a basic desert map, complete with ruined buildings and simple third-person shooter gameplay, in a matter of minutes. With a single click, he was then able to publish it to Core’s website in seconds. What makes the process so quick is that Core provides many of the more time-consuming aspects of game development. You create a game using a large collection of premade assets and then fit them together how you want. Even things like game logic — deciding whether you want a battle royale shooter or a team-based one — are simply chosen from a drop-down menu. I didn’t use the tool, but while watching it in action, it appeared fairly intuitive and shockingly fast. At no point did I see a single line of code . . . source

Sounds pretty revolutionary to me! I would love to see how easy it is to create games on this platform. Will it be a transformative new medium for game creation, or will it be the next Spore?

Only time will tell!

Want to sign up for Alpha access?

Click on the link to check it out!

🐙The Land of Random

Crazy and useful links! Everyone wants them, but only a few ask. Well, here’s your dose for the week.

😺 Funny Japanese Cartoon Cats

These cats are hilarious. Most of their adventures include fire, explosions, and other hilarious escapades - all in 5 to 30 seconds!

👩‍💻Start learning Python courtesy of the NSA

Ever wanted to learn Python? It’s an incredibly useful coding language. Well, courtesy of the Freedom of Information act, you can now use the NSA’s training guide on Python.

Check it out on the Internet Archive database!

🎮 The game where everything is a weapon

I found this neat little project on Imgur. It’s a game where everything is a weapon, including furniture, debris, and other characters! It looks like a fun multiplayer party game. The game is still in development, but you can check out the footage and sign up for the mailing list at the link!

🥛 Rebranding the lowly milk bottle

You wander over to the milk section at the grocery store and survey your options. Regular milk, fancy milk, milk in a glass jar, Fairlife Zombie milk. However, would you be more likely to buy milk if it had a pretty cool packaging? That’s the idea behind Unblackit, a brand new bottled milk. It’s really cool! Read more about it at the link. Heck, I barely drink milk anymore, but I would buy this in a heartbeat.