Art

This is some art I commissioned of my avatar. My avatar design is inspired by the fictional Protogen species. It's not something from a show or anything like that. To me, protogens are just a neat avatar aesthetic.

My avatar design includes a Glider from Conway's Game of Life. I'm fascinated by the ingenuity necessary to make machines in Life and other turing tarpits, and I'm fascinated by artificial life experiments such as Life and Gridworld.

My fascination with the Glider originally started when I was a kid in the early 2000s and read some of Eric S. Raymond's writing about the open source community like How To Become A Hacker, in which he deems the Glider a hacker emblem. ("Hacker" being used in the tinkerer sense rather than the malicious vandal sense.) It's interesting returning to that page decades later now, as parts of it have held up and parts of are pretty dated. ESR himself has not held up though. His more recent writing is like that of a bigoted nutjob.