Gorilla Recap 12

Hey everyone 👋 and hello to all new subscribers that joined since last week! Thanks for signing up and joining along for the ride! This is the weekly Gorilla Recap, a newsletter in which I recap everything that I found noteworthy from the past week. Hope you have a good stay!

This week we start with a bang - humbled to share that my entry for the Web3Writers contest was selected for the first prize!

Twitter more Volatile than Ever

In light of the recent erratic changes on Twitter, that seem to be completely at the whims of Elon's spurs of the moment, there seems to be a second surge of migrations from Twitter to other platforms. Especially with Meta's new threads app slowly rolling out.

I would have liked to give it a try at this point, but unfortunately it isn't available in the EU region yet due to data privacy regulations.

But it seems that an astounding number of people have already joined the new platform:

Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users

But will the users stick around?

The VergeJay Peters and Jon Porter

Meanwhile, I make my return to the pachyderm. The only reason that I stopped posting on Mastodon in recent months, as well as other platforms despite my best efforts sometimes, is because it's just a lot of work. Each platform has some different posting and formatting guidelines which can be a bit time consuming.

Besides that, I would really love to see the actual cage fight between Elon and Zuckerberg, simply because it would be unreal. Seeing how Zuckerberg works out, all of my money is on him:

Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match

The ball is now in Musk’s court.

The Verge

Is this the end of Twitter? Will Zuckerberg figuratively, and literally, deliver the knockout punch?

Genart Updates

And yet again, there's been many new things in the world of generative art!

P5 frameBuffer Released

I've seen Dave mention this a couple of times already, and he has previously also created a framebuffer library specifically for this purpose - but now it's finally part of P5, which is wonderful news. Once I give it a try I'll definitely make a post about it:

1988 Interview with Sonya Rapoport

Sonya Rapoport didn't directly make art with computers but rather used computer printed documents as an artistic medium, she states:

[... ]my work is an aesthetic response triggered by scientific data. The format is computer print-out, a ritualistic symbol of our technological society.

Mark Webster points out this interesting interview with her from 1988 in which she's asked about computer art, her thoughts on it and how it will be regarded in the future:

More of her work can be seen here:

Computer Printout Drawings – Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust

FxHackathon workshops resumes

Two new workshops were held over on the FxHash discord! 'Creative inputs as parametric space' lead by Alejandro, creator of the innovative piece Pensado a Mano, and 'Concept Development. How to Tell a Story' by Anika Meier.

They will soon be available on the FxHackathon page, here:

fxhash — fxhackathon 2023: co-creation interfaces onboarding

Building custom minting interfaces with fx(params)

fx logo

If you feel inclined to participate in the hackathon, you can also find all important information over on that page.

Interesting Reads of the Week

Lessons from the Catastrophic Failure of the Metaverse

It's hilarious that Meta thought this was a good idea, and I'm not sure if Meta actually knew what they were building. What's the actual use-case? It just seemed like an arbitrary mish-mash of VR spaces that you could visit. There was no appeal and no interest and that was reflected in the number of users.

The Nation paints a good picture of how things went down:

Lessons From the Catastrophic Failure of the Metaverse

Did the “creative class” learn anything from buying into a product that was obviously destined to flop?

The NationKate Wagner

Harvey Reiners Quasi Dragon Studies

Harvey Reiner's quasi dragon studies is one of the most interesting generative art projects that makes use of blockchain tech to create something really unique. Essentially, individual iterations of his token don't just exist as unique iterations by themselves, but rather, they can be combined into larger pieces. He goes into the details of this in the write-up:

An Interview with Richard Bourne

Mentioned this one already in previous issues, but now the full conversation is up on the tubes:

It was really invigorating seeing Richard talk about his sketching practice, his excitement about OpenProcessing as a platform, and how it's a way for him to live out this passion. It definitely left a mark on me.

A different kind of indie mobile game

I'm not entirely certain under which category to place this, but I found this really cool and inspiring. I have a sweet spot for minimalist video games with a creative take on a simple concept - and this trailer just hit the sweet spot.

AI Corner

Chat GPT releases it's Code Interpreter

ChatGPT Plus users get access to a new powerful feature: the Code Interpreter. It's basically a tool dedicated to executing code based off of prompts, for instance, you can drop in an excel sheet with some data, and ask it questions about this data. It'll then create the code to compute and provide answers to your questions.

But that's just one example, it has many more use, for example data visualization as well as image processing cases and this article provides a nice run-down:

I'm most likely going to check it out and have a post up about it as well.

Gorilla Articles

Last week I took a little vacation to rest, recharge and also reduce my social media usage a little bit - and I feel incredibly replenished, and excited to get resume work on some articles that are in currently the pipeline!

Even though I took a breather I did work on a post that I think came together really well: an introduction to the Vue framework!

An Introduction to Vue

Vue is an excellent framework for creating intricate and reactive user interfaces, while maintaining a manageable code base. In this article we cover the core concepts and build a minimal app to showcase Vue’s features.

Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

In past issues of the Gorilla Recap I've already mentioned that I had been working on a little tool that will serve as a personal portfolio, and after asking some of the folks over on the birbsnest discord for advice I was pointed towards Vue as being a good solution for this purpose. And after getting into it, it definitely made the code much easier to manage.

That's why I didn't want to lose any time and put together a little introductory guide that summarizes all that I have learned so far. In the post I go over Vue's component based architecture and how the framework makes it easy to put together an intricate interface.

Gorilla Sketches

I only did a little sketching this week, but had an idea of combining hexagonal tilings with hachure patterns - something I haven't tried before. Additionally I wanted to see what it would look like if I filled the space in between the hachures with colors in a gradient like manner, I think there's something worth exploring here:

Not sure where this one is going yet, but it's an interesting exploration.

Besides that I also tried my hand at a skeuomorphic landscape sketch, which still needs some more work before I'll post more about it, but I'll give a sneak-peek here:

Hope to get in a lot of sketching this week though - and that said, I leave with these beautiful words from Bruce:

Music for Coding

Tycho released a new single! And it absolutely slaps! Literally! It's a bit different from his previous stuff, but in a really good and funky way. Give it a listen:

And that's it from me this week again, hope this was a fun read and hope to see you in the next post! If you enjoyed it, consider sharing it with friends and family on your socials that have an interest in this nerdy stuff. Otherwise, consider signing up to get notified whenever there's new content, cheers and happy sketching ~ Gorilla Sun 🌸