John Holdun

Week in Review #11: A little plastic guy

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:15:00 +0000

One of the next things to do for my diorama, and like the main thing to do, is build the characters. I've been debating different techniques and materials and knew I wanted to make use of my 3D printer to fabricate joints for their knees and elbows and hips and shoulders and wrists and necks and ankles and so on. They're basically really articulated actions figures, so I was looking around at the state of the art for this and found this model and just sent it to my printer without thinking too much about it. It was only going to take 90 minutes but I started it just before bed, kind of expecting something would go wrong because I haven't turned the printer on since October. I woke up to this:

Wow! This came right off the print bed like so, in two parts. I needed to snap the head onto the body but everything else was designed to be "print-in-place," meaning there's no assembly required there are some tiny tiny bits of plastic between the moving parts that are designed to break away the first time they're stressed, so after a satisfying series of pop-pop-pops you've just got a little guy. It reminds me of STIKFAS and the figure I had in high school that lived atop the hulking CRT monitor of the family computer.

Seeing how easy this was, I'm thinking I need to seriously think about how much functionality the printer can afford me for this project. I know I don't want any visible 3D-printed parts, but I ought to consider modeling and printing whole armatures for each figure. An alternative I had been considering is using rope or fabric for the joints, like a cloth doll or a marionette, and obviously that would still work, but this technique gives me something precise and repeatable, with a range of motion that is easier to control and limit in realistic ways.

The ratings for the Bigmode Game Jam have been revealed. Here's what people thought of Loose Leaf, my open world rhythm game walking simulator:

Originality: 4.000/5 (#77)
Presentation: 3.368/5 (#275)
Theme: 3.105/5 (#304)
Fun: 2.842/5 (#347)

Very original, not very fun. Considering how long I struggled to land on a satisfying concept and how little time I left to develop that concept into a proper game, this feels very fair! I still want to revisit this game at some point and/or something like it, probably with real 3D graphics. But still programming it from scratch without and engine, that part was too much fun.

I spent more time thinking about my musical performance idea over the weekend and recorded a little song. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it represents a successful experiment in balancing composition and music-playing that I will try to explain forthwith:

I created seven tracks in Ableton Live each with at least two clips: one totally silent, then variations of a rhythm or melody, generally organized from more sparse to busier. Live's Clips are mutually exclusive within a track, so starting one will stop another one that's already playing. Playing a clip on a track doesn't affect clips playing on any other tracks, so different parts of a song can ebb and flow independently. Each clip was set to legato with no quantization, meaning that it can be triggered at any moment and launch immediately, but it'll stay in time with the previously-playing clip—triggering the clip on the third beat of a bar, for example, means the clip will start playing from the third beat of its first bar.

The final important part of this is using a Launchpad, which is a grid of buttons that correspond to the clips in Live. This way I can really quickly skip back and forth between clips on multiple tracks at the same time, writing a song from individual parts on the fly.

The next thing to try is composing these clips on the fly, while the song is playing, so I can transition from one "song" to another seamlessly without knowing what that second song will be until it begins. There are lots of different ways to approach this and I think the easiest option for me might require moving to hardware. I'm particularly thinking about how track mutes work on the Pyramid. (If you're thinking about my stage show and wondering how this applies, imagine that instead of a Launchpad button it's, I don't know, Chuck E. Cheese's nose.)

Yesterday I visited House of Kong, the Gorillaz immersive walkthrough. I was delighted by it; it felt really lush and expensive. The sets were great, and seeing how all the illustrated costumes and props from the Gorillaz universe translated to the real world was fun, but I think they overdid it with the headphones! The whole thing is on-rails and guests are guided from room to room by an apparatus not unlike what you might borrow for a museum audio tour. It sounded very good throughout, but more than any other critique I might have, I wanted more diegetic sound.

There's one really clever part where Murdoc is pacing behind us and we hear him talking but can't see him, because the lights went out but also because we're kneeling at an altar and physically can't turn around. There's a panning effect on the headphones track, and it works, but if his voice was from a speaker in the room—even from a speaker that was moving in the room, back and forth, maybe accompanied by a second speaker closer to the floor playing footsteps—it would have felt so much more real. Overall the experience really teases the idea that the members of the band are just out of sight at all times, but that idea often felt like it was being undercut by the technical choices, and it required a little more suspension of disbelief than I hoped.

Now that I think about it, I don't think there was a single moving effect in the whole thing. Lots of light cues and videos, and the sync was pretty perfect as far as I could tell, but no motorized props or anything. So what I'm suggesting would have been a huge departure, not to mention that speakers require soundproofing and most of the walls between rooms were just curtains, but what's my $49.50 for if not some precarious mechanical contraptions?

Another lasting effect of the show was the smell. I think maybe three of the scenes had a unique scent in them, and by the end they all kind of mixed together on my hair and skin and clothes into something I can only describe as haunted house. It made me nostalgic for Halloween Horror Nights and reminded me that I gotta get a ticket for Fan Fest Nights which is about a month away!

We're going to New York City, New York for one week starting Monday and have lots of theater lined up. Everything we've already booked is actually happening after next week's blog post so you'll hear about it in two weeks, but I will surely have already spent a day at The Met so I can tell you about that, maybe. The temperature in LA as I write this is 93°F; the temperature in NYC is 32°F. Uh oh!

Week in Review #10: Causing a Scene

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:19:00 +0000

I was going to make a joke in this week's Week in Review about it being Friday but I ended up not even writing this until Friday so it's not a joke anymore. It's real life.

The new Gaming PC is kinda cool, I got to play PEAK as foretold and had a good time! I'll do it some more! I am sorry to see that the Windows/PC ecosystem has not really improved in the twenty years since I've engaged with it and in many ways has gotten worse. Why are all the Windows card games now bundled into one program with microtransactions? Why would I want to log in to Minesweeper with my Xbox account? What have you done?

As far what I've done, here's the latest render of my 3D model:

As a reminder (or for the first time if I didn't adequately describe this before), this will be an animated diorama that sits in my front yard for a few weeks after I build it. It's designed as part of a larger story but I want to present it on its own as a kind of still life, like a living genre painting.

I made this in Blender using a couple free models, namely this human and this dog. I started modeling a human myself and it wasn't going well and that's not really the point of this exercise. The real characters will be a little more interesting and unique and I'll sculpt them by hand.

I'm going to continue to fuss with this model a while, take some virtual reference photos of it in the yard to confirm what size it should be, and then start fabricating! I'm scared of that part but I think it will be fun. (I was scared of this part too and it's been really fun.)

Do you remember my idea for a new show? I mentioned it in my very first Week in Review, nine long weeks ago. I have nothing new to share about it but I haven't stopped thinking about it. This week I pitched it to the Elysian Theater's Spaghetti Festival! I don't expect anything to come of that, it's just not enough of an idea to really be viable yet, but thinking through it enough to explain it on the form got me excited about the concept again. I really really love the Elysian Theater and I feel so lucky to live near it!

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:43:00 +0000

Dog walking around outside alone: Oh no! Lost dog! Come here buddy, do you have tags? Let me call your owner

Cat walking around outside alone: That’s an Outside Cat

Week in Review #9: The One Where Not Much Happened

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:59:00 +0000

A few assorted thoughts from this week! That's all we can ask for.

I was planning to do some 3D modeling this past weekend as mentioned in last week's week in review but that simply didn't happen. We saw Sirāt on Saturday afternoon which was very good but also bummed me the hell out for the next couple days! I still want to work on that project, I just haven't yet.
Some of my friends were playing PEAK the other day and I got FOMO so I ordered a gaming PC lol. I'd been thinking about getting a Steam Deck for a long time, but I really don't have any interest in the handheld part of it, and a refurbished desktop Windows computer with similar specs was cheaper, so I just bought one. I never want to think about graphics cards or RAM or whatever (I have been a Mac user for almost 20 years) but I like the idea that I could theoretically upgrade this in the future as well. I don't really have any interest in any cutting-edge games but I'm excited to finally make time for like A Short Hike and Return of the Obra Dinn and uhhh Half-Life.
I also bought a "string trimmer," more commonly known as a weed whacker [By Whom?]. We hired some landscapers to xeriscape our front and back yards a few years ago but the weeds still come in and they've frankly been out of control! I finally realized that a basic corded-electric weed whacker was $30 at Harbor Freight. My arms are really tired.
I've seen the guitarist Dave Harrington perform with a few different combos over the last couple years, mostly at Club Tee Gee and mostly with bassist Billy Mohler and drummer Jay Bellerose. They have one official release together which you can listen to if you want and I frankly think you should. They call their music "jazz" and who am I to say it's not but it was not at all what I expected the first time I heard it. They improvise every time and there's not a ton of song structure as a result, it's more about call and response and trying things and expanding things and…yeah that's jazz, baby. Anyway, this trio was booked to play on Monday night but Dave was sick, so saxophonist Ben Spokes sat in, and it was a revelation. Dave is great and I love the stuff his does with his millions of effects pedals, but hearing just a plain saxophone making every kind of sound it can make was such a joy. I had previously assumed that a sax-bass-drums trio just wasn't enough for a satisfyingly full sound, particularly after hearing this exact combination played by different people a few weeks earlier and feeling like it didn't really hit. I'm sure there are already lots and lots of examples out there that squarely proved me wrong, but it was so so cool to hear one live and up close.
Focusing in on the way the bass parts worked in the aforementioned performance gave me a new idea for performing electronic music, or at least an idea that I haven't tried before: Writing a couple short looping sequences and swapping between them or layering them on the fly, so I can add fills or variations without having to actually play them live, but I still get to make those in-the-moment choices. It's something I can probably do continuously with one hand over the course of a tune without too much physical or mental dexterity, leaving my other hand to play a melody. This technique would surely work for percussion too. I've also been thinking about all the varieties of timbres one can get out of a wind instrument and am again/continuously/always thinking about how one can approximate that expression with electronic music. MIDI breath controllers exist, but one answer might be using my voice as a modulation source, sort of like a vocoder but even more abstract. Maybe.
Eleventy is now Build Awesome and is teasing some kind of forthcoming live editing and publishing platform. I've written about how my platform compares to Eleventy, and one of the big differences I tout is that I offer a nice in-browser editing experience. Their approach seems totally different and I'll be watching it very closely.

I thought this one was going to be short, oops. See you next time!

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 07:08:00 +0000

I like the bits in this season of Summer House where Bailey and Levi are chatting amongst themselves about what everyone else is up to. It’s like Rosencrantz and Guildernstern in the Hamptons.

Week in Review #8: Rotating 3D shapes in my mind

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:32:00 +0000

Hello. Mexico City was fun! We had a lovely time at the wedding, met some very interesting people, danced to a lot of reggaeton, and had some absolutely fantastic food. I was surprised by how many amazing restaurants there are in Mexico City the first time I visited. I've had some of the best seafood of my life there! We got to eat at Masala Y Maiz for the first time this time, and also made our regular visit to Entremar, the sister restaurant to Contramar that has mostly the same menu and is much easier to get into. Yum yum yum. I felt the most confident I probably ever have speaking in Spanish, and maybe felt even more compelled to do so than usual because there seems to be a huge increase in white people in Mexico City in the last couple years. I am obviously part of that, but I want to be the least possible part of that I can be to be honest!

Since coming home, and frankly a little before the trip as well, I've been in kind of a funk, and I think it's because I don't have a big project in progress. Last night I took a long walk and started really thinking about my next installation. I alluded to this a couple weeks ago, but it's an animatronic scene that will sit in the front yard for a couple weeks. Like a mini version of what I do at Halloween, but not tied to any particular holiday.

The story I have in mind is one I started developing in a Third Rail workshop two years ago, about a small town that's coming together to put on a big wedding and a kid who wants to help but doesn't know how. The version I designed in the workshop was interactive and immersive, and I'd like to realize that someday, but for now I'm just exploring the themes and art design.

Physically, it'll be inspired by a paper theater, lots of layers and depth, but the characters will move, and there will be lights and sound. I'm imagining a "stage" that's about four feet wide, three feet tall, and maybe two feet deep. I'm not sure exactly, though, so the next thing is to design this pretty carefully on the computer, then see what I'm working with. I'll create a full-scale cardboard prototype like I did for Bobby's Birthday to make sure I'm moving the right direction, but before that I'm planning to plop the 3D model in the yard with AR.

iPhone has AR features built in—you might have used it before to see what an IKEA dresser looks like in your bedroom or something—and I found an open-source iOS app that will allow me to load up an arbitrary model and look at it superimposed over a live camera feed, so I can walk around and check it out from various angle. This way I can confirm that the dimensions I'm planning will actually fit in the spot in the yard I have in mind and adjust as needed before committing to any materials.

One thing I can't accurately picture is how thick the borders of the interior layers will need to be so that the sightlines from the sidewalk can't see straight through the side of the stage. Not sure I described that in a way that makes sense. It will be clearer when I have some stuff finished to look at. Maybe next week!

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 23:30:00 +0000

Rusty's latest is fantastic: Today in Tabs - A.I. Isn't People

Week in Review #7: Posting on LinkedIn

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:53:00 +0000

Yeah I don't know, I thought it would be funny to start posting on LinkedIn. I have had Very Strong Opinions about web development since I started working in this industry, and I've historically gotten a lot of energy out of sharing these opinions with my colleagues, but I realized that I can get that same kind of hit from the professional social network. I find the tone of the average LinkedIn post insipid and detestable, and the general enthusiasm for AI over there bums me out so much, but maybe I can offer an alternative by just talking about how I feel and being kind of normal? And if it raises my status as an authority on crafting meaningful and thoughtful experiences on the web, that would also be cool.

I've made two posts so far, both specifically trying to be a little provocative while also saying something that I think is important and under-discussed in the industry. In both cases, the process of writing lead me to a conclusion I didn't expect to find, so this experiment might not be as disposable as I first expected. My first post got some surprisingly good feedback and I just posted my second a few minutes ago. I also just noticed that LinkedIn added an awful AI-generated "title" to my first post that is only visible while logged out lol, what a piece of shit

I finally published my photos from Japan which you might have already seen, and I'm also working on a big list of every project I've ever worked on which you probably haven't seen yet! I won't link to it from anywhere but here until it's a little more complete. Deciding on thumbnails for all these things is really hard, especially when so many of them are just text! I have used the term "Game" to define things that definitely aren't games because I don't think that, like, "Net art" as a category is going to be useful to anyone.

While collecting stuff for my Projects list, I scrolled alllllll the way back through my Tumblr. There's a lot of garbage in there crystalizing perhaps the most obnoxious phase of my life thus far, but I found a couple interesting things that I've been migrating over to my website. "Checking in to anything" still carries some intrigue for me, sixteen years later.

This weekend we are headed to Mexico City for a wedding and I need to practice my Spanish before we leave. Sometimes I have entire conversations in my head in what I think is accurate Spanish, but I always get too nervous to really try it out loud.

Photos of Japan, December 2025

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:10:00 +0000

We spent some time in Japan a couple months ago. It was our second trip and we are already planning our third. Here's an imperfect travelogue in five parts so you can relive it with us.

These were all taken with a Camp Snap camera, which I've written about before. They all use the Kino filter.

There are some captions throughout but I didn't add alt text to these photos. I know that means that some people won't be able to enjoy them. I am sorry!

Week in Review #6: Choosing a new project

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:03:00 +0000

I mentioned this in another post but my game is finished! It's been getting good feedback in the jam and I'm pretty happy with it. I am probably going to wait a while to work on another game-like thing but I have some ideas I want to play with. This week I re-read the docs for Ink, which I have not used but seems a lot more powerful than the interactive fiction language I concocted for some of my own IF experiments many years ago.

This week I found ThemeParks.wiki, a great public API that aggregates ride wait times and performance schedules from basically every theme and amusement park that publishes them. There's a fairly comprehensive web interface on there that makes all the data human-readable, but it's a touch programmatic and cumbersome, so I spent a day making my own version, creatively called Theme Park Times. I spend a lot of time every day looking at the wait times at Disneyland and dreaming that I'm riding a boat past some pirates, and probably once a month I take the short drive to Universal Studios Hollywood to like see some dinosaurs in the afternoon, so I'm already very familiar with all this information, but now I have a little more control over how I look at it.

DJing over the weekend went well! I didn't bring my little numpad to play samples, there was plenty to think about without it. If you want to know what DJing is like, it's like this:

Around 1:30am, a group of young women appeared in front of the booth. One of them asked me to play "2000s." I vaguely accepted the request, bemused by the possibility of what this person who definitely wasn't alive in the year 2000 could have meant. She walked back over to her friends to take photos. I started scrolling through my collection to find something they might recognize as "2000s music" and started playing the next song that I already had queued up. Her friend walks over as she recognizes that a new song has started, smiles at me, and holds up her phone. It says "SKIP." I smile and shrug and do not skip the song because that is a wild thing to ask. They leave shortly after. That's DJing!

Now that the gig is over and the game jam is done, I need to decide what other extracurricular thing I'd like to do. My next big-ish project is probably a small-ish diorama to set in the yard, a mini version of one of my big Halloween displays for a different season. Before that I think it's time to tidy up this website and document a couple things I've finished in the last couple years! I've always struggled to categorize my work and the lines keep getting blurrier, so I would like to just arrange everything I've done into a chronological list of "projects," not unlike Casey's website. Sort of a portfolio, sort of a digital garden. Could be nice!