📙 #041 - Videos, more brushes, waning power, Rodeo and essays with AI.
As usual there should be an audio version of this newsletter, somewhere up or down there depending on where you view this. Also a heart if you wanna hit that cause it pleases the substack monster. The ill-judged video version is here:
# OLD STUDIO SALE UPDATE
Ahahahahahahahahahaha, no 😭
# PEN PLOTTER BRUSH HEIGHT
This has blown up a little since the last newsletter, when I posted more brush-drawn photos on Instagram. So I've updated the code a little bit and added a couple more examples to a GitHub thing over here: https://github.com/revdancatt/brush-height-examples
I also made a whole long-ass video about it, which you can find right here:
I'm never quite sure what to do with these videos because I know there's a trend towards shorter, snappier videos. I often find myself going, "Yes, but get to the point" when I'm trying to learn something. And I suspect this video could have been, "Yeah, you can set the brush height throughout a plot by using Python and changing these two values, done," and maybe it should have been that.
But I also like watching videos where someone works through a problem so I can understand why they reached the solution they did, even if I decide I would have done it differently.
Plus, pen plotter artists are relatively tolerant of longer videos. I suspect this is because pen plots can take a long time to complete, and we're pretty happy to watch the machine draw for chunks of time, so we may as well watch something while it's drawing 😁
The plan is to finally write my blog post about the handwriting code and make a video about it. Then, I can show how to combine handwriting with brush pen + height to give us line thickness.
Realistically, though, it's still taking me a couple of weeks to make one video, so let's all set our expectations low!
# A HANDY BLOG POST ABOUT PRICING ART
This is good; the Dark Art of Pricing: https://www.jessicahische.is/thinkingthoughtsaboutpricing
# SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATE
I did it. I gave up Twitter, Threads, and all the others, but not Instagram (which remains firmly on the "Following" tab, not the "For You" tab).
It's only been a couple of weeks, but I suspect the two main outcomes are feeling happier and less engagement with my YouTube videos and this newsletter.
Kitty would often tweet out links to the most recent newsletter, YT video and older "evergreen" videos. Now that's not happening. I'm sure there are people missing out on those things (lol, "missing out"). So, sure, yes, perhaps my "reach" is less now, but fuck it, totally worth it.
By which, I mean "worth it to me" who's in the fortunate position of not having to care that much about reach and engagement because, according to this graph from Paula Scher, I'm in my POWER decade.
Sadly, I couldn't find an online version of this graph anywhere, so I snagged a screenshot from her talk on…
Thank you, Tom, for pointing me in the right direction.
# RODEO
Like a bad habit, I picked up a new image-based social media platform, RODEO.CLUB—which is all very Web3, and therefore incredibly niche, and completely unusable by the vast majority of people. You have to connect your Web3 wallet to the thingy, then convert some made-up numbers into identical and yet somehow different identical numbers that go up and down at a slower rate than the first lot of numbers.
Anyway, the short is this: a LONG TIME AGO, there was a proposal for you to have to buy a digital stamp to send an email. The stamp price would be ridiculously small and negligible for sending a reasonable amount of email, but it would be annoying enough to prevent sending unsolicited spam.
It was a bad idea, but the intention wasn't bad.
So, with Rodeo, once you've converted some real money into fake internet Web3 numbers, this is how it goes down, and I'm going to use UK pounds for this conversion.
Posting an image costs you £0.01
Unlocking the ability to comment on someone else’s image costs you £0.20
The poster gets half of that £0.20; the platform receives the other half.
There are no likes, hearts, or favourites, spam is (currently) non-existent, my feed is only full of what my friends are doing, and there are no adverts.
I'm finding it very chill and low-stress (and beautiful), so of course, at some point, it'll all be ruined, but for this small moment in time, I'm enjoying it.
They call themselves a "social media" platform, and I'm having fun posting whatever I feel like, but mostly it's people posting their art, even though it's not called a "just share your art" platform.
(When you unlock the ability to comment, you’re also buying a copy of the image, yes it’s NFTs under the hood, but I’m looking at it from a slightly different direction)
# I MADE A SPIRAL
https://github.com/revdancatt/brush-height-examples/blob/main/spiral.js
# ESSAY ABOUT GENERATIVE ART IN PRINT
For reasons, I'm writing a short, 1,200-ish-word essay about my thoughts on generative art and print. I made a very quick draft and then, of course, asked Kitty (my AI PA) for opinions.
I've posted the first draft, with Kitty's annotations, to my website here if you're interested: https://revdancatt.com/kitty/annotated/generative-art-and-print/
Now, I'm not at all interested in getting AI to write things for me (but I can understand why that's useful to people), but what I do like is seeing how AI can be used to help me think about the essay further.
In addition to Kitty's normal (random) personality (this one happened to be Sassy, although the suggestions aren't particularly; it just seems to make Kitty more assertive) and role as a studio admin helper, the prompt now tells Kitty they're a super editor—along with the usual weeks' worth of Q&As we've gone through. It's cheaper to throw more at it now, so I may as well.
Then, I dropped the essay into the "review this" folder and asked Kitty to look it over. What I posted above is what I got back.
If I take any of the advice, it is a different matter, as I'm pretty opinionated!
# THE END
Having given up social media and not really enjoying how Instagram presents images one at a time, I've added a couple of "galleries" to my website. Sometimes, I just want to show a bunch of photos together to give them some context.
It was a "fun" afternoon spent elbow-deep in CSS code and Javascript to make that work, and I'm using the word "work" very loosely there.
I have more thoughts about this, but I figured as I'd just done it, I'd drop it in here as an update. Once again, I'm super grateful it's something I can build myself to scratch my own itch. Just building things seems to be both simpler and more complex than ever. I swear it wasn't supposed to be this way.
Tell me your favourite brush pens, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks. The next newsletter should be out on August 20th.
Love you all
Dan
❤️