It could still use a paragraph or two of "why we believe it's important for this particular decentralized private messaging app to exist when there are about six hundred other decentralized private messaging apps out there that nobody but people who care passionately about decentralization are using", though.

(This is not a question that I feel their FAQ addresses, either: https://getsession.org/faq)

It's aleatoric music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music

If you don't want to subscribe to this newsletter to read about this program, https://archive.org/details/analog-computing-magazine-41/pag... is a link to the original article. And here's a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glIV5yulw8

Finding letters regarding it in subsequent issues, is left as an exercise for someone else. :)

This article has now made me intensely envious of the Atari users who got actual assembly code source along with their long strings of hexadecimal type-ins, us c64 kids just got pages and pages of incomprehensible hex in everything except for Transactor.

I then wonder how much recalibration I would have to do when one of them broke and I was poking directly at the screen.

Using a model is posing a live person and/or some objects and setting up lights and painting from that. Artists have done this for years. I've done this. Rockwell did this.

Using photo reference is taking photographs (yours or others') and working from those. I've done this. Rockwell did this too!

Tracing is placing your reference image beneath or over your canvas, and tracing the contours you see in it. Tracing paper, chroma-key, projectors, camera lucidia, tracing the image onto acetate and taping that to your Amiga's monitor to trace it again in DPaint, dropping ref into one layer in Photoshop and working over it in another one, these are all methods of tracing. I've done them all! Rockwell probably did this now and then, with the caveat that a pro's tracing is a very different beast from a beginner's - it's easy for a beginner to just trace the contours with no thought as to how they come together into a 3d shape, and get a drawing that feels dead and lifeless and subtly wrong. Saying someone's work looks like a tracing is kind of an insult.

Rotoscoping is explicitly a process of tracing/referencing a sequence of images to produce a sequence of images rather than a single image. It is related! But this article is entirely discussing the way demoscene artists would reproduce a static image, so roto does not apply here. Rockwell painted static images; he never did this.

(It's certainly possible that Rockwell could have taken single frames of film and had them printed for reference, but that's still not roto. Roto's explicitly an animation process that results in a series of drawings based on your film/video ref.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping

Spaceballs’ State Of The Art and 9 Fingers are a couple of Amiga demoscene productions that relied on rotoscoping.

Here's a dissection of the title screen of Shadow Of The Beast (1989), for instance: https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea... - you can find a ton of video of this game very easily, go have a look.

Magicore is generally a bit zippier than most Amiga games, so many of them were kind of chunky and sluggish when I look back at them. Also the dev notes on using modern compression schemes that use what would be apocalyptic amounts of RAM and CPU by 1990 standards to crunch the data are amusing, but it's not like 1990 me wasn't used to chilling out for a few minutes between levels for a disc load, it was still worlds faster than the horrible load times of the C64 that was my first computer.

The usual term is "cisgender", or "cis" for short.

"Cis" and "Trans" both come from Latin; the former means "the same side of" and the latter means "the other side of". If you are happy to be on the same side of the gender binary as what you were assigned when you were born then you are "cisgender"; if you are unhappy with that state of affairs (regardless of how much work you have put into changing it) then you are "transgender".