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Mishmash #19 | Generative Web Games | Quality vs. Quantity | Acoustic Guitar Favorites

Published almost 3 years ago • 2 min read

Happy Monday!

I hope your week is off to a great start!

And, without further ado, let's jump into this week's edition of the Mishmash!

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Generative Web Games

Lately, I have stumbled into the realm of generative art and am currently experimenting with code to create artwork. While doing some digging on the internet, I came across these really neat minimalistic games built for the web browser, and both use randomly generated maps.

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Quality Vs. Quantity

I recently finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear; In the book, he talks about an experiment that a photography professor uses in his class that summarizes this whole quality vs. quantity debate.
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Here's a paraphrase of the story.

Jerry Uelsmann, a photography professor at the University of Florida, divided his students up into two groups on the first day of class.
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The first group of students was in the "quantity" group, where they would be graded based on the amount of work they produced. Therefore, 100 photos would receive an A, 90 photos a B, 80 photos a C, and so on.
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The second group of students was in the "quality" group, where they would be graded solely on the excellence of their work. So students needed to submit only one photo, but the image had to be of the highest quality to receive an A.
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During the semester, the professor observed that the students in the quantity group spent a lot of their time experimenting, exploring, testing different composition and lighting techniques, and learning from countless mistakes.On the other hand, the quality group sat around and focused on what was to be the perfect photo.
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Finally, at the end of the semester, all the students from both groups submitted their work to the teacher. After going through the photos from both groups, the professor concluded that the students from the quantity group had the best photos, while the quality group submitted only mediocre images.

This story captures the essence of the power of quantity. It's about doing a lot of exploring, experimenting, testing, failing, and quality will be a result. Being a struggling perfectionist, this was a nice reminder that consistent small progress every day is sometimes the most crucial piece to development.

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Acoustic Guitar Favorites

I have been on a big acoustic guitar kick lately. So I dug up some old favorites that I wanted to share with you all.

​Rylynn - Andy McKee​

This track is off his Art of Motion Album with I love just putting on repeat while I work. I have been listening to this album over the past ten years. Andy uses some unique guitar tunings and the phenomenal sound he can get from a guitar.

​Ocean - John Butler​

This track is really special. Every version of the song you hear over the year changes, develops, and grows. This song also inspired me to get a 12-string guitar (technically, 11 string, since he took out one of the higher octave strings to pitch bend).

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🤔 Quote, I've Been Pondering

"The purpose of learning isn't to affirm our beliefs; it's to evolve our beliefs."

- Adam Grant, in the book Think Again.

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And that’s it for the Monday Mishmash! Thank you for reading and see you next week for the upcoming edition! As always, if you enjoyed this, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. (They can sign up at this link or feel free to share this email.

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Thanks and have a great week!

-Ryan

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Hi, I’m a creator

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