Fontomas is back online with ten new typefaces, free to download and use. I'm especially fond of Swisz.

The Alphabet Synthesis Machine allows you to evolve a set of characters and download the result as a TrueType font. One of many great works by Golan Levin.

Cafun is a nice Java program for doing cellular automata simulations. While slower and less featured than MCell, it's significantly easier to use. It also supports graphic filters for output.

Boppers is an artificial life application I vaguely remember running on my first computer . . . it came out in 1993. It runs so quickly on a modern machine that all meaning is lost; today it looks like a great piece of dynamic art.

I've been playing NetHack for about six years, and this morning I beat it for the first time. I made over 100000 moves. I don't think I'll ever play it again.

When I was at UIUC, Square Lake was the student paper's best comic strip. It recently stopped running in that paper, and now has its own web page.

Old favorites:

• Pirate Tot
• Vickie Melts
• Super Turbo GCM
• Pac Sun

Art Crime: A Journal of Modern Iconoclasm reports instances of art defacement that are intended as conceptual art. While I don't respect these acts as any form of art, someone was going to pee on Duchamp's La Fontaine eventually.

The "walking forest machine" (picture) is a six-legged, walking harvester vehicle built by a Finnish subsidiary of John Deere. (via Robotory)

I was thinking today about mobile sculptures, and how they all seem upside-down to me. I realized that someone could design a mobile build with buoyant materials, to be displayed in a large water tank 'right' side up.

The problems with this idea are endless: pre-existing tanks hold fish who might get tangled in art-junk, empty tanks have no currents and thus no motion, I don't know anything about sculpture, etcetera. It's still interesting to visualize.

Organic Flowers. I can't tell if these works are generated systematically or randomly, but I love them all the same. This is far beyond what I've dreamt of doing with my L-System project. (via DiK)

Fontalicious is a type foundry with some colorful design and lots of fonts, some for free and others for sale. Dokyo is a nice free one to try.

Last Sunday I drove nine hours to spend five hours at the graduation party of an old friend, whom I parted ways with on bad terms over three years ago. It was worth it: forgiveness all around. I hadn't seen some of the others guests in over five years. Worth every minute of pop radio I suffered in the car.

sweetcode is a weblog that notes great free software, from experimental multimedia to technical tools.

Above is very first output from an L-System implementation I finished programming last night. I've written an implementation before (May 20, 27), but this is the first one I've designed well. A single object handles string expansion, and has a function that will execute the string using an array of function pointers. That means that the drawing/interpretation part can be handled by a separate object or even multiple objects. I could, for example, write a drawing object and a sound tracking object and combine their outputs into a movie of a growing L-System with simultaneous visual and audio interpretations.