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The tweets, they pile!
Soon, my friend. Soon!
STATE-O-FART
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Dear Internet,
I feel so lucky to get to do the things I do. Every day, I come in to work and get to focus all day on things like “could this be zanier?” and “will this reliably cause users to giggle?” I get to learn new things, put them to use, and then share my creations with the world. And they serve coffee 12 feet away from me, and delicious tacos in the parking lot! AND THERE IS A DONUT TRUCK DOWN THE BLOCK!!
One of the really nice things about being me lately is all the help and support I’ve received from other folks out here in the internet and pixel art community. Over the last few weeks, about 30 people have been helping me test PixelPix, and many of them have been sending in bug reports, usability suggestions, and most recently, actual art to include in the app. Josh Grilli from 8WholeBits here on Tumblr sent me these backgrounds last night, and Toni Martin from Pixels Mil sent me a big package of them the other night. My friend Sean Mason here in Austin has also been sending me a steady stream of fantastic little bits and pieces to include. Thanks everyone!
I was posting a bunch of stuff to the Make Pixel Art f*book account last night, and it occurred to me that I have not linked out to my other streams lately. For the most part, I do not repost things from one stream to another, so if you GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL, you might be interested in following me on other sites.
GET READY, I HAVE A LOT OF THESE.
@benbrown on Twitter, @makepixelart on Twitter, @pixelpixapp on Twitter, and @xoxco on Twitter.
I won’t be hurt if you don’t follow me, but I want you to know that I do follow you and I like every single thing you post! I print them all out and bring them to work and put them up on my cubicle wall. I AM NOT LYING ASK KATIE.
One final note for today: I APOLOGIZE for all the typos and misspellings in yesterday’s post. My writing muscles are a bit rusty. Please stick with me.
Kreayshawn vs PixelPix
Dear Internet,
I have very little to report to you. Progress continues on PixelPix. You can see here the beginnings of a homepage for it, where I have cleverly set up a Twitter scraping bot that looks for tweets mentioning PixelPix that contain a photo, and extracts the photo to make an automagic gallery of awesome.
All of the features are done, and now today I am working on the tutorial that will pop up when a new user first opens the app. When that is done, the app will be ready for submission, and the only thing left to do will be to create all the screen shots and promotional graphics for the iTunes store.
I am very happy that things have gone so smoothly. Compared to the three+ months we spent on the iPad app, the iPhone version has gone from prototype to launch-able in about 2 weeks. The return on this smaller investment will hopefully be much larger!
I had drinks last night with Nicholas White, the CEO of Daily Dot, a newspaper about web communities. It was really interesting talking to someone who is making a serious go at running a content site about the web, on the web. We talked about how “game-ification” does not make things into games, how oddly popular My Little Ponies are, and how after 20 years, things stop belonging to a genre and just become “retro cool.”
Do kids know that their cool new thing is our dorky old thing? Do they care? Can they possibly know how ridiculous the concept of “Rarity Pony” is?
We talked about the amazing amount of passion there is on the internet FOR the internet. Beyond the passion people have for their specific sub-genre of nerdiness, people love and care very deeply about the internet itself. It is gratifying to see expressions of this passion beyond the popularity of Facebook. The recent SOPA protests are a good example - speech and action against what would have otherwise been a pretty mundane copyright bill spread through web communities, and reached all the way out to the edges. I saw blog posts by 13-year olds who had otherwise posted nothing but Minecraft screenshots, who were now up in arms about media company lobbyists! It was an incredibly effective campaign, succeeding not only in reaching those edge members of the community, but ultimately quashing the bill itself.
What I think will be very interesting to see is how the net will respond when everyone comes together to speak out against something, only for that something to happen anyway. Reddit and Wikipedia have won this battle, but the forces of capitalism, croneyism and the power structure aren’t going to give up every time because a bunch of blogs go black.
