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 go over everything that I found noteworthy from the past week. Hope you have a good stay!
Twitter Creator Payout Program
Why do I write so much about Twitter on here? Over the past two years twitter has become my main social media outlet, and although it isn't the best platform for organic growth, it's been good for the type of content that I create.
Besides that, most creative coding, genart, and tech folks are on Twitter - hence, it is (used to be) a great way to connect with people. These days it seems that I'm having much more meaningful interactions over on Mastodon though.
Whereas the bird site finds itself in a constant state of upheaval - hot off the press, we have an announcement regarding a Creator Ads Revenue Sharing Program:
Getting paid for being a creator on Twitter doesn't sound so bad, right? Feels like a step in the right direction. Ah, but hold up, there's a catch - let's have a look at the requirements to be elligible for this revenue sharing program:
Ah, there we have it. You have to pay money to potentially have the chance to make some money from this revenue sharing program. There's some more things about here that aren't immediately evident. For instance, you're not getting for the impressions per se, but rather for ad impressions underneath your tweets. Moreover, only Twitter blue subscribers count towards these ad impressions. If you're familiar with how ad impressions, you'll know that one impression is at most only a couple of cents.
This video by Jon Cartwright summarizes this entire fiasco very well:
this site sucks pic.twitter.com/mCwX6P4h1v
— Jon Cartwright (@JonComms) July 14, 2023
Still, I'm not entirely certain on how things will go with this. Maybe against all odds this will actually work out somehow? Anyway, enough of Twitter now.
Gorilla Discourse Forum
Last week I asked on Twitter if folks would be interested in a forum for the blog. Although there weren't that many votes, the response was overall a bit mixed:
Quick question - would there be interest in a forum section on the blog? For asking questions about code/creative coding/genart related topics?
— Ahmad Moussa || Gorilla Sun (@gorillasu) July 13, 2023
And understandably so, I also have my doubts about the usefulness of such a forum - do we really need another place to discuss code related things? There's already quite a few places where this can be done, my favorite being Raph's birbsnest which is a wonderful little community, then there's like another dozen other discord servers that also revolve around code related things, like the official p5 server, the fxhash server, praystation's server, just to name a few.
Why did I think that the forum would be a neat thing to have? Before I looked into how to set up the discourse I came across this post:
vikaspotluri123
Essentially an integration that provides a single-sign-on SSO solution for Ghost and Discourse, meaning that, if you sign in to the Gorilla Sun Blog you also automatically get logged in to the discourse forum. I think this is really convenient for the user and eliminates the hassle of having to go through a sign up in yet another place. It keeps things in the same space.
Now, unfortunately this is not feasible the way that I have Ghost set up, I'm not self-hosting my Ghost blog, hence I can't easily make the required configurations for this. Should I switch over to self-hosting the blog then? Imo the negatives outweigh the positives - for instance I wouldn't know what I'd be doing and I'd probably break a lot of things, and the associated hosting costs would probably end up a bit higher. I'll probably practice it a little bit in the coming weeks and then reassess how I feel - self-hosting at some point in the distant future seems inevitable.
Although the SSO solution isn't possible, I did however end up spinning up my own discourse instance on a digital ocean droplet, I got enough free credits to have it up for two months now, so let's see how this goes. You can find the forum here:
Sign up a make a post if you feel like it!
Genart Updates
Some updates from the world of genart and creative coding!
NFT Show Europe
IRL highlight of past week was without a doubt the NFT show europe event held in Valencia, I wasn't there physically but I saw that folks had a good time over on Twitter:
One really cool thing that caught my attention was Mekhno's little live minting setup: an ipad + a mini printer for his project a reveure!, check out his profile for some videos of the printer in action:
Also thanks Mekhno for a spot on the allowlist! Here's my iteration, simple but beautiful:
Highlight Launch Announcement
Another contender enters the arena: Highlight, a new generative art platform on Ethereum. I believe that it'll be open access right from the get go, and having had a sneak peek behind the scenes 👀 I have to say, that I'm really impressed by the interface so far:
The first fully open access generative art platform on Ethereum.
— Highlight (@Highlight_xyz) July 13, 2023
Launching 7.26
👇 pic.twitter.com/upLaMWlGPP
I'll most likely cover it more detail in the coming days!
Le Random Chapter 2 of the Genart Timeline
We enter the modern era with Le Random's beautiful timeline page, in addition to a number of new articles that are very worth reading:
Catch up over the weekend ⛱️
— Le Random (@lerandomart) July 14, 2023
🔲 @MonkAntony_tez's Generative Art Timeline: Chapter 2 (The Modern Era)https://t.co/HC8E5myAf3
🔲 @speciesofvalue's "Generations of Verse"https://t.co/YA2mQLxEur
🔲 @verse_works + @harvey_rayner + Le Random's "A Conversation with Harvey… pic.twitter.com/OS6miWUhMB
I particularly enjoyed this post on generative poetry, catching us up on past attempts up to the modern approaches that different artists take:
Interesting Reads
Besides new things I also came across these interesting reads this week.
How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits
Came across this article while scrolling through the comments to a hilarious reddit post:
The article talks about "Busy Beavers", and if that doesn't strike a bell, then we're in the same boat. Essentially, busy beavers are maximally inefficient computer programs that are still fully functional and capable of terminating. What's so interesting about these slow programs? Well, it was discovered that these types of programs actually have some connections to some of the open problems in mathematics. One of the most interesting reads I've come across in a while:
Everything you always wanted to know about Mathematics
An approachable maths book? Blasphemy! Well Brendan W. Sullivan create such a beautiful book, and from the first couple of pages the book already makes you feel gain new insights:
This maths book is trending on Hacker News!
— elvis (@omarsar0) May 25, 2023
I took a quick look and realized how great of a book this is to learn how to think mathematically.
It's 700 pages long and very approachable compared to other maths books. https://t.co/Ra2EtO3ET9 pic.twitter.com/geBx0Zccdo
I'm saving this one for some upcoming long train rides. 🔖
Gorilla Articles
A Recursive Circle Packing Algorithm for Organic Growth
Some weeks ago, I don't remember exactly how, I came across a sketch by Kevin Workman on his page Happy Coding - fantastic site btw you should definitely check it out - in which he creates a mini Bonsai tree with a recursive circle packing procedure. I haven't seen circle packing done in that manner, hence I immediately dug into the code and also made a writeup for it:
Ahmad Moussa
Super happy with how the tutorial turned out, the response over on Twitter was stellar. Haven't had a tweet pop off like that in a while:
3 Generative Artists - Consistency and Momentum
In the second post of the week we continue our 3 generative artists series, we have a look at words of wisdom from Jared Tarbell, Tyler Hobbs and Kwame Bruce aka Studio Yorktown - intermingled with my personal experiences and anecdotes:
Ahmad Moussa
Which artists would you like to see in the next installment? Leave me a comment!
Music for Coding
Another one of those obscure Japanese 70s funk albums: uber funky bass lines, intricate drum patterns, soaring brass melodies and gnarly electric guitar licks to top it off. It's got it all - maybe not very calming but it works quite effectively for turning on the burners when you're coding on a deadline.
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 🌸