Linux application MyPaint has some possibilities: it's just a matter of clicking through the brushes and separating the tacky from the less-tacky. It's fairly intuitive: you choose a background and start noodling. The main brush I'm interested is "blend," which allows modeling from dark to light. Chibi Paint has an excellent "watercolor" brush that can be used for blending. MyPaint's is adequate -- it may be a matter of messing with the speed and opacity settings.
AKA "assembling gratuitous object for 3D printing (with pipe)"
Drawn and modified in a handful of paint programs: Chibi Paint, Microsoft Paint, Linux MyPaint, and GIMP.
Am attempting to wean myself off of Windows, after the last round of outrages from the criminal class in Redmond. Linux Mint is a much better operating system in many respects than Windows 7 through 10 but the creative software is going to take some getting used to. This is not to apologize for the above drawing, it's supposed to be this way.
Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler famously declared: "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." This dictum never got around to Shapeways, a startup dedicated to filling the world with copious amounts of additional objects... via 3D printing. At Shapeways, kids using phones (or adults using laptops) create cartoony objects, a designer can be hired to help implement the project (some kind of Uber sharing/exploitation situation), and then Shapeways 3D-prints the objects to be sold in its online store.
The above sculpture, which actually looks pretty appealing, at least as a jpeg, is the brainchild of EricHo, working with designer Kostika Spaho. The tardigrade is an internet-fan-adored micro-animal that lives in ponds, eating moss. It looks like a space creature (and is in fact so tough it can live for brief periods in space), a comparison emphasized by the artist's placement of it on a futuristic grey pedestal. The "sandstone" textures of the creature and base, as well as the color choices, have a sensual allure. A viewer from the time before 3D printing would greatly like to see this carved by hand, looking much like this, but several times larger than its actual size (5 x 4 x 3 centimeters). It's an outmoded prejudice of wanting to think of a hand, with tools, patiently cutting and smoothing these particular bizarre shapes.
This animated GIF comes from Ken Shirriff's blog. Shirriff used a vintage IBM mainframe computer to compute the cryptographic "hash" functions that are the basis of bitcoin mining:
The IBM 1401 can compute a double SHA-256 hash in 80 seconds. It requires about 3000 Watts of power, roughly the same as an oven or clothes dryer. A basic IBM 1401 system sold for $125,600, which is about a million dollars in 2015 dollars. On the other hand, today you can spend $50 and get a USB stick miner with a custom ASIC integrated circuit. This USB miner performs 3.6 billion hashes per second and uses about 4 watts.
Shirriff's also produced a Mandelbrot image on the mainframe. His photos of the hand-wired guts of the IBM 1401 are fascinating.
This resembles (riffs on?) those "deep dreaming" composite fractal-like photo-drawings everyone was posting a few weeks ago. Some Google programmers came up with a script that makes morphy psychedelic images that supposedly plumb the depths of wide internet (i.e., Google Images) but seem very big on attaching dog's eyes to things. Imagine a universe of Dali-esque monstrosities sprouting hundreds of dog's eyes, or the scene in John Carpenter's The Thing where the husky splits open, saturated in rainbow colors, with extra dog's eyes, and you've pretty much got it. Stage's drawing above captures the suffocating paranoid universe of these eye-vortexes, in a slightly less robotic context, without the rainbow colors.
