Daily Creativity Thread

[Travis B.]

I do say that I always like your banknotes, doctor shark.

[doctor shark]

I do say that I always like your banknotes, doctor shark.

Thanks! I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things more with all this time off I have, but we'll see...

Obviously, some people have too much free time on their hands... but seriously, those banknotes are really nice, and the Peter Rabbit script is charming.

Hey, now, most of those notes were a function of procrastinating while writing my thesis last year.

[alice]

I have just successfully baked a beautiful little loaf of bread…in my 19 square meter apartment that does not even have a counter (none!), let alone an oven. I put the dough on the bottom of a preheated pot for a minute so it wouldn't drip down, then transferred it onto the steamer trivet from my pressure cooker so it wouldn't burn and let it stay in the pot for half an hour. Came out great.

That looks really tasty. Can I have a bit?

[Travis B.]

(Not today but a few days back) I got an LED driver (that I wrote but based loosely off code written by Matthias Koch, the author of Mecrisp-Stellaris) working for the STM32F407 DISCOVERY board, which has four different-colored user-controllable LEDs on board, and then I made a "blinky" as it is called to blink these LEDs in a circular pattern continually, while still allowing the user to use the REPL simultaneously.

[dewrad]

I made a map.



(The full-sized version is pretty large.)

[Travis B.]

I ported zeptoforth to nRF52832, with no little help from a port of Mecrisp-Stellaris to that chip, even though I do not own an nRF52832 board. The point of this exercise is to enable porting zeptoforth to the nRF52840, which I do own a board for, but which there does not exist a Mecrisp-Stellaris port for to my knowledge.

[Travis B.]

I have released binaries for zeptoforth, for the STM32L476 and STM32F407 DISCOVERY boards, as well as for the yet-untested nRF52832 and nRF52840 ports. These binaries, in the case of the STM32L476 and STM32F407 DISCOVERY ports, also include binaries that include precompiled core Forth code. This will eliminate the need to build zeptoforth, which requires having the arm-none-eabi GNU toolchain installed, as well as to compile the included Forth code, which can be a pain for someone who does not have a terminal such as e4thcom available (e4thcom, which the install process relies upon, is specifically designed for Linux, and getting it to work on non-Linux platforms requires the use of things such as Windows Subsystem for Linux or FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility, which may or may not be compatible in reality).

[Vilike]

I made a map.

I must say, it is impressive. What is the scale?

[Moose-tache]

I made a map.

I must say, it is impressive. What is the scale?

I second this request, both for the scale and the elevation.

[dewrad]

The landmass (called Ixqipo /iʃˈkʷipɔ/) is about 38,393,000 km² - so bigger than Africa but smaller than Asia. Scale-wise, the highest points are in the central massif, at about 6000m above sea level perhaps.

Putting it into a global context:



(Again, here's a bigger version.)

The global map is projected in Winkel III, with Bartholomew's scaling applied.

These are just raw hypsometric maps, which need some more post-processing to be "finalised", but I'm pretty pleased with the process that has generated these. For comparison, the map I started with is this:



(Equirectangular, obv)

[Richard W]

Putting it into a global context:

Is there any tectonics behind it? I couldn't make out any evidence for continental drift, but perhaps that a Terran bias.

[dewrad]

Putting it into a global context:

Is there any tectonics behind it? I couldn't make out any evidence for continental drift, but perhaps that a Terran bias.

There are. As it happens, I started out with a supercontinent and then modelled the tectonics for about 180 million years. The gif below should show this (the modern coastlines have changed a bit since this iteration, but the general plate motions are still correct):

[Travis B.]

Nice. I wonder what software you used to do that modeling, as it looks really neat.

[Ryusenshi]

I've made a program to create images of the Mandelbrot set. Here are a few of them.

mandelbrot.png (173.22 KiB) Viewed 21229 times

lace_bz31.png (233.3 KiB) Viewed 21229 times

hunt_bz25.png (156.96 KiB) Viewed 21229 times

In particular, I think the black and white images came out very well. The whole thing is quite hard on my old laptop, though. I wish I had my desktop with me right now.

[Travis B.]

Nice!

On my part I got the initial coding phase of work on my Cortex-M disassembler for zeptoforth done - now I just need to get the bugs out. It actually fit in just 20K of code, probably because I was aggressive in trying to shrink the code and excluded many instructions not used as part of zeptoforth.

[alice]

PRETTY FRACTALS!!!

[doctor shark]

Was inspired by some work from the clawgrip a while back (did he end up on the latest iteration of the ZBB?), and redid some coins:

This is for the Oshaharan currency, the pyěw (and, yes, the language has its own script). One pyěw is divided into 20 ní̵, and coins here are 1, 3, and 5 ní̵ and 1 pyěw. Officially, the rate is 17 ní̵ per Telemor franc (so about 13 ní̵ per US dollar), but Oshaharan currency is very largely non-convertible, so the black market rates are probably closer to 20-22 pyěw per franc... if you can even get foreign currency*.
*Oshaharu has strict customs and exchange controls, where all foreign currency imported must be immediately converted to local currency before even leaving the border control area, normally in the form of Foreign Exchange Certificates. And exporting the pyěw is a big no-no, with the ability to (re-)convert FECs or pyěw on departure subject to byzantine rules.

[Yalensky]

I took Zompist's advice and bought Townscaper. It's wonderful to get lost in. And everything looks great! It's nearly impossible to make a mistake.

Inspired, I made a northern European Venice (all towns in townscaper end up looking like Venice, since the blank field before constructing anything is open water), screenshotted it, and then spent a while in GIMP labeling and commenting. So here it is: the city of Seegrad (< Ger. See and Slavic -grad). A larger, more legible image may be found here.



I prefer to keep the place and time of Seegrad rather vague to preserve its cartoonish charm. Hence the mix of English, German, and some Slavic elements in the names. It wasn't at all a rigorously naturalistic project. But I'm proud of how it turned out!

I'm now working on a Spanish-themed town.

[Moose-tache]

Yalensky, it looks like Rock, Paper, Shotgun nabbed your image (with credit given) within 24 hours.

[Yalensky]

Yalensky, it looks like Rock, Paper, Shotgun nabbed your image (with credit given) within 24 hours.

And the image beginning the article is my city as well! Though I didn't provide it. I posted the code for the save file on Reddit so others could explore it and that must be how they took their own screenshot. Unfortunately the pic reveals the one falsehood in my map: in Townscaper, the edge of the buildable space is right up at my "Gate of Neptune," so I edited in a longer causeway extending off the edge of the image. The article pic shows how stumpy the causeway is in "real life."