Following hot on the heels of my previous post about cassette tapes, I’ve been working hard on producing more music with them.

I recently bought myself an old audio cassette player; a PYE D6600 35P Automatic Data Recorder. This model is from the early 1980s (1981 to be precise I think) and it was intended for use with home computers and for recording spoken words. The model was produced by Phillips and Magnavox too, and is pretty much identical across all three manufacturers as a kind of attempt at standardisation. Phillips’ incarnations of the MSX home computer standard were often built in a way that made it easy to connect.

I did a bunch of stuff today. But for some reason, I’m mostly just quietly proud of this 1-bit-per-pixel PNG of a monster energy can I made. It just looks kind of inviting - which is how I feel about pretty much all 1bpp images. I don’t know why, but dithered black and white images just make me feel welcome.

I’m thirty years old. Three decades! Thirty orbits around the Sun on this big ol’ beautiful ball of dirt, rocks, and water. And you know what? It feels great.

Imagine the following scenario: one day, you’re using your computer as you would on any other day. Then, on impulse, you happen to take a look inside the case. Instead of some neatly (or not-so-neatly) organised disk drives, there are just a bunch of photographs. Illegible colourful scrawls of pixelated dust fill every inch of them, each a kaleidoscope, magnificent as much in their beauty as in their complexity. Instinctively you watch carefully as you create a new file and save it to the desktop, pleased to discover that as you expected, the spattered colours shift and change along with the flow of new data. It is this world that I wish to bring to you today.