Agrippa Vanities - TIC-80 512 bytes

Released in december at Inércia 2023, started out of boredom in early 2023 from some star polygon algorithm (with thickness) and as a tribute to black metal, the initial sketch which was JavaScript didn't satisfy me enough aesthetically and wasn't animated and i didn't consider a release at first but kept iterating and eventually converted it to LUA (better for compression), the first idea to improve the original sketch was to add some classic demoscene effects related to the theme so i added a fire effect (common for this theme) and later the starfield effect (fire sparkles ?) with a background gradient.

Not a great effort size-wise but i still enjoyed fighting with the packer/code to polish the end result and add content, there is many more size optimizations left though, could perhaps go to 256 bytes with slightly different algorithms (bundled tris ?) or ordering, there is redundant code right now for the smaller pentagram and the fire / starfield / overlay effect could be smaller.

Was silent at first but since it was a black metal tribute... just couldn't ship it without some buzzing noise with code i borrowed from my Chmmr intro and added one week before the party.

Lua code packed with pakettic.

Anecdote : The moon symbol at the center was added as a filler, thought it looked cool and didn't add much bytes, curiously found out a bit later that the moon symbol was also at the center of the pentagram on Man inscribed in a pentagram from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres, i also added ORZ signature as Dotsies for fun, the program without the moon symbol and signature is ~470 bytes.

Forgot to hide the TIC-80 cursor but there is bytes left to do this without any other changes, there is also bits of green on the pentagram outline that i don't like, noticed this much later, it can be fixed easily though.

f=.31415

--{

b={}

c={}

n=f*4

--}

for i=0,3e4 do

 --{

 b[i]=0

 c[i]=.02+math.random()*.1

 --}

end



function q(e,s,m,p)ab

 --{

 line(120+e*math.cos(s),68+e*math.sin(s),120+e*math.cos(m),68+e*math.sin(m),p)


 poke(65455+e,64+e%6)

 --}

end



SCN=function(e) poke(16320,e/4) end



TIC=function()

 cls()

 -- fire seed

 for i=90,269 do

 
b[120+48*math.sin(i/58)//1+(68+48*math.cos(i/58))//1*240]=math.random(8)


 end



 for i=0,5 do

  -- big penta

  for e=-40,40 do

   q(e/8+50,i*n+f,(i+2)*n+f,3-e/20)

  end

  -- chaos lines

  for e=1,120,6 do

   q(e/2,i*n+f,(i+2+e)*n*e/4+f*e/8,12+e/28)

  end

 end



 -- small penta

 for i=0,5 do

  for e=1,29 do

   q(e,i*n+f,(i+2)*n+f,16)

  end

 end



 -- black penta with heavy weight (hiding chaos lines)

 for i=0,5 do

  for e=24,27 do

   q(e,i*n+f,(i+2)*n+f,4-e/13)

  end

 end



 -- penta overlay (sides)

 for y=0,135 do

  for x=70,169 do

   if pix(x,y)>0 and pix(x,y)<2 then

    --{

    pix((x+120)%240,y%136,2)

    pix((x+120)%240,(y+64)%136,2)

    --}

   end

  end

 end



 -- fire

 for i=1,15360 do

  b[i]=(b[i-1]+b[i+240]+b[i+240+1]+b[i+480])*.23

  a=peek4(i)==0 and poke4(i,b[i])

 end



 -- starfield

 for i=0,240,4 do

  z=c[i+3]

  --{

  x=c[i]/z

  y=c[i+1]/z

  c[i+3]=z-c[i+2]

  --}

  z=x*x+y*y/3>.17 and pix(120+x*120,68+y*68,z%5)

  if x>1 or y>1 then

   --{

   c[i]=math.random()*5-2

   c[i+1]=math.random()*5-2

   c[i+3]=4

   --}

  end

 end



 --{

 print("(",118,66,2)

 pix(235,131,2)

 pix(235,135,2)

 pix(237,131,2)

 pix(237,133,2)

 pix(237,134,2)

 pix(239,131,2)

 pix(239,132,2)

 pix(239,134,2)

 pix(239,135,2)

 --}

end

Versions

initial version, didn't like the circles

slightly better animated but still felt it was missing something

Pentagram

The code that construct the thick pentagram geometry, it all started from this :

u=math

l=u.cos

h=u.sin

f=.31415

n=f*4

d=240

g=d/2

function q(e,s,m,p)

line(g+e*l(s),68+e*h(s),g+e*l(m),68+e*h(m),p)

end

TIC=function()

 cls(0)

 for i=0,4 do -- penta

  s=i*n+f

  for e=-40,40 do -- thickness

   q(e/8+50,s,(i+2)*n+f,3-e/20)

  end

 end

end

Starfield

classic demo effect, filtered in my case to only show stars outside of a black disk :

if x*x+y*y/3>0.17 then plot...
end

d=240

c={}

g=d/2

for i=0,504 do

 c[i]=0.02+math.random()*0.1

end

TIC=function()

 cls(0)

 for i=0,500,4 do

  z=c[i+3]

  x=c[i]/z

  y=c[i+1]/z

  c[i+3]=z-c[i+2]

  pix(g+x*g,68+y*68,z%5)

  if x>1 or y>1 then

   c[i]=math.random()*5-2.4

   c[i+1]=math.random()*5-2.4

   c[i+3]=4

  end

 end

end

Fire effect

Another classic demo effect which is related to Poisson's Equation, a directed diffusion (blur) of values across a grid, seed values here are randomly chosen on half of a circle at each frames, the diffusion is done through a lookup of 4 values for every pixels and scaling down the combined values so it goes toward 0 which correspond to the background color.

On my version the fire effect is behind some other effects so i also needed a conditional to only plot on background areas, different layer ordering could also works perhaps but i also read the framebuffer to show the edges overlay so i don't know how it would work out.

d=240

b={}

g=d/2

for i=0,3e4 do

 b[i]=0

end

cls(0)

TIC=function()

 for i=90,269 do

 
b[g+48*math.sin(i/58)//1+(68+48*math.cos(i/58))//1*d]=math.random(8)
-- half-circle random

 end

 for y=0,64 do

  for x=1,d-1 do

   -- diffusion (note : replaced with poke4 / peek4 +
single loop on the final release)

  
b[x+y*d]=(b[x+y*d-1]+b[x+y*d+d]+b[x+y*d+d+1]+b[x+y*d+d+d])*.235

   -- plot on screen

   pix(x,y,b[x+y*d])

  end

 end

end

Aside : Black metal

Black metal music is something i engaged with as a teenager in the early 2000s (after Rock and Nu metal and before delving into Electronic music and Jazz) with bands such as Dimmu Borgir, Bathory or Arcturus, i was not really interested by the lyrics (i rarely care about lyrics at first) but i guess i was impressed by the seemingly general irreverence, the energy and profane symbolism, all good fuel for teenage rebellion, the moody romanticism was also important to me as i was favoring music with high keyboards emphasis. This period is also when i discovered the demoscene.

Best example of these years was perhaps moody tracks such as For all tid (always likened the drums pattern as some kind of trot), always liked these cheesy preset keyboards intro independently of any metal genres. (dungeon synths which carry these keyboards into full length tracks strangely bore me though with some exceptions such as early Mortiis or Summoning)

The satanic theme wasn't of any interest to me beyond the edginess of it, i didn't care much about it and still don't beyond what is now curiosity, i am pretty much agnostic sometimes leaning to atheism with a Spinoza view, i was never accustomed to any religious ideas whatsoever in my life.

Then i became interested in other type of music, still kept listening to black metal stuff such as Bathory but not so often, i revisited black metal years later after going into trash and death metal first which eventually led to this intro after a happy accident involving the creation of a pentagram with tiny code.

The satanic theme re-framed into a theistic Gnostic / dualist cosmogony (could also fit pantheism) pushed by some black metal bands (eg: Abigor on Time Is The Sulphur In The Veins Of The Saint - An Excursion on Satan's Fragmenting Principle (2010) for example, this interpretation is loosely based on the lyrics but i also heard some of this in Brigitte Fontaine Hermaphrodite song, Coil Blood from the air or even in Jean Genet works), this view devoid of any liturgy nor rituals is something interesting to me, i see it as some sort of extreme spiritual extension (much wider in scope) of the sort of principles that one can find in anarchism (pursuit of personal knowledge, liberation from oppressive forces, high skepticism etc.), all the paradoxes that this theme spawn could fuel and resolve to a sort of mythology / cosmogony with the commonly seen biblical figures (reversed) referring to man (actually all that exist) and whatever system of oppression he (whatever 'he' is here) is currently in (so demiurge is the keeper of that structure ?), in this case the best state is non existence i guess which can be considered one of the higher realm; primal chaos, existence can be seen as an everlasting try (rebellion) to reach that state even if briefly (for those who knows i guess ?), it perhaps always "fall" through though (never ending falls, never works), singularities, the true god is something abstract (fragmented ?) and self referential for anything that exist, it may actually refer to one self across time and fields of possibles, it also means that believing it is actually believing in one self, we are one (which is probably a reference to the first principle which i guess refer to the first law of thermodynamics which state that energy can only be altered, neither created nor destroyed), the Gnosis of the Gnostic (a trail, bottle message) lie in everything that exist (more or less) as some sort of leitmotiv to catch on.

Time may also have a special meaning : Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once. so time would actually be the mechanism by which rebellion, salvation is realized (Gnosis), if everything would happen at once there would be perpetual servitude (immediate and total subjugation to oppressive structures), the illusion of time (?) is a fragmented way to avoid and realize this (through experience ?).

Another interpretation of Gnosticism that i like without the cosmic and mythological bullshit (so metaphorical and allegorical) could be that the demiurge actually represent whatever system of oppression is in exercise for an individual, the material world in this idea represent the structure itself (power structures) and whatever enforcement it does to the individual directly or indirectly, even though it may appear as benevolent it is actually largely ignorant and perhaps completely misguided, filled with false "gods" while the non-material (and unknowledgeable) world is "good" because it stay unrealized, full of possibles, in this view i like to think that the Gnosis is just whatever someone can infer from all the scattered knowledge to go past the "enslavement" and thus approach the non-material world without ever materializing anything from it (because it may shift into oppression), i find this quite funny because it interpret Gnosticism as a distilled disguised criticism of whatever enforce rules over individuals and a pacific way to go past that through introspection, individual knowledge, understanding, criticizing and experiencing, solitary seekers in this framework make sense.

All this is probably farfetched edgy individual interpretation (aka bullshit) though and should be highly questioned and disregarded; just had some quick interpretation fun after listening to some music. I guess that the interesting bits i draw from this is that some of the essence of what is talked on in black metal has close ties with anarchism and its values in some ways (i see some of this in the demoscene as well), rebellion from the status quo, personal freedom, black metal has punk roots so no wonder, it is known there is overlapping ideas there, most of the ideas doesn't draw from organized religions / coercive authority but from earlier forms that existed prior it which were less dogmatic, free form and wilder, such ideas were often severely punished by history through the implementation of heresy and orthodoxy; metal music also draw from all kinds of outsider stories such as witches in Bathory For all those who died which was inspired by a Erica Jong poem, it is outsider music at heart.

A fun (mostly related) essay on Gnosticism in metal : Of chaos and internal fire: the quest for nothingness by lyrical manifestations of re-interpreted Gnostic thought