Owen Hellum

I saw your keynote at QGCon this weekend! I adored it. Had no idea you played magic :)

Oh sick! I’m here too! I hope I can bump into you at some point

Ah, localization hell. Ive been there haha

New hobby: biking to 70s-era brutalist sports complexes at sunset and just Looking At Them

pale cool colors intermingled with muted bronzes. tall, square labyrinth walls with minute crenelations. a very 20th century Theseus, with oversized northern European longsword, unspools a skein of yarn. a very gentle minotaur peers around a corner. the characters look giant- Theseus hunches over, as if trying to avoid seeing over the walls. there is no ceiling.

a mosaic floor in very warm, saturated blood reds and dull blue-greens, depicting a white floor covered in innumerable food items. fruit rinds (durian?). some sort of green leaf. a crab leg. grape stems. bones. a seashell. a single mouse picks at a nut or fruit of some sort.

Edward Burne-Jones, 'Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth'. i love how the floor is covered with carefully arranged, festive remains of prior labyrinth-goers, interspersed with flowers.

it reminds me of a fresco i love, a 2nd century banquet hall floor rom Aquileia, of the remains of a feast.

A generated replication of an invented past, formed from photo-shoots & movie scenes, lamenting a present whose conditions caused its creation.

It's the narrative of a simulation of a fiction of a memory. Even our ennui is being automated. Baudrillard's head would explode if he lived to see this.

The writing is phenomenal :) the introduction to the Storming of the Bastille alone always gives me chills

Recalling Norman Rockwell's "The Gossips," a slew of computer users share a disc made by a user, each user sharing it with someone else until it ends up in a new machine, beginning the story anew. Artist: Mike Hagel, RUN Magazine Mar/Apr 1991

Pass the word!

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

The first 100% effective HIV prevention drug is approved and going global An epidemic that's been sustained for 44 years might finally be quelled, with the milestone approval of the first HIV drug that offers 100% protection with its twice-yearly injections. It's a landmark...

Well, I'll be damned.

It's royalty free and there's already six, generic manufacturers lined up.

newatlas.com/infectious-d...

Clotheslines :)

Screenshot of a generated apartment building in Unity

Screenshot of a generated tower-like building in Unity

Screenshot of a generated apartment building in Unity

Working on a little building generator plugin for Unity...

Argentina Explore this photo album by Owen Hellum on Flickr!

Tomorrow we return home. It’s been a weird and wonderful trip full of shocks and great views. Check out the full Flickr album for all of my photos over the past 2 weeks: flickr.com/photos/20144...

A tile mural of a smiling woman is affixed high up on the corner of an apartment building

Glassy apartment building balconies fill the corner of a photo otherwise dominated by a clear blue sky. In the centre is a single half moon, barely visible in the daylight

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Day 4 (travel day)

Tall waterfalls tumble over steep cliffs, landing among rising mist and rocks

Black and white photo of a set of old steps leading up into a sunlit leafy tunnel

Iguazu, Argentina, Day 3

An old mossy rope is tied around a leaning treebranch

A square photo of a set of outdoor spiral stairs curling from one corner of the frame to the other

A view looking down over the bridge into muddy rushing water. The rust of the bridge mirrors the brown colouration of the water

High-up view of the Iguazu Falls, a massive cascade of waterfalls. They overflow with muddy water into the lush forest below as steam rises in the air

Iguazu, Argentina, Day 2

Lower view of an enormous metal canopy

Iguazu, Argentina, Day 1 (travel day)

Black and white photo of wooden benches outdoors. Trees grow between the rows

The back of an empty and unhitched yellow trailer

A series of silhouettes and overlapping cutouts on green metal

A black cloth canopy stretches between the boughs of trees. In the background we can see Salta

Salta, Argentina, Day 4

Two people stand far out on a salt flat. In the distance are a range of mountains

A wooden door on a faded adobe wall

Multicoloured hills at Purmamarca are banded with dark and light streaks

A winding mountain road curls down into a valley of cascading hills (I got sooo carsick)

Salta, Argentina, Day 3

A pink colonial-style building, a telecom office building, and a glassy apartment building all poke up into frame

Long exposure looking down onto a street in downtown Salta, with cars and people blurring by

Salta, Argentina, Day 2

A view of Salta and nearby mountains from a gondola above the city

Long exposure of rushing water flowing through various notches in a wall

Salta, Argentina, Day 1 (travel day)

Adventuron is a great text adventure tool. Has some simple scripting required, but has a ton of features that you can take advantage of. It’s easy to learn.

An inside view looking up into the metal canopy of a city market

A construction crane dangles into the frame from above, while another far-off crane and a few buildings reach up from below

A construction worker on a pulley system applies patches to a wall of an adobe building

At sunset, the broad face of a multi-tiered building is blasted by sunlight

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Day 3

A bell tower covered in blue tiles against a cloudy sky

A black cemetery wall covered in visitors’ signatures and Instagram handles

A view through a window, looking down on a yellow-vested security guard standing in a plaza

A photo from below a massive mushroom-looking brutalist library

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Day 2

Neon lights in front of a tex mex restaurant

Black and white photo of an apartment building rising over the trees. A bird is flying by and the building looks like a USB key

Hundreds of stickers and posters are plastered around the dark entrance to a garage

A row of clustered apartment buildings rise over the trees

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Day 1

Hamburtger… :O

A screenshot from the video The Last Of Us Part II depicting two Stalker enemies in a hallway illuminated by a flashlight

When you can see the monster (or are aware of its presence), and the monster can see you, but it chooses not to engage.

Greta Thunberg has been kidnapped by the state of Israel.

"Please make sure to be loud."
- One of the last messages from the crew before being taken hostage after the attack from Israel

RESHARE! REPOST! SPEAK OUT!

RELEASE. THE. CREW.
END. THE. BLOCKADE.
FREE. PALESTINE.

they took a detour to rescue a boat full of migrants yesterday.

this right here should be more popular than the goddamn stuck shipping vessel thing, this should be everyone's page-refreshing major event right now