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 saw Eric S. Raymond's writing about the open source community and his declaration of the Glider as a hacker emblem in How To Become A Hacker. ("Hacker" being used in the tinkerer sense rather than the malicious vandal sense.) I found it an interesting idea, though I don't think a lot of his writing has held up well over time, and his more recent writing is often that of a bigoted nutjob, so I'm not exactly recommending him.