Dec 12
preview
Published February 12th 2022
Daily Brief - Friday Edition - TOGGLE Leading Indicator, Literary Contest Winners, and more
The 10 days ahead: TOGGLE Leading Indicator
The TOGGLE Leading Indicator is the aggregated indicator of all TOGGLE insights for stocks in the US market
After correctly pointing to the recent market gyrations, the TLI remains in neutral territory. To learn more about the indicator, watch our Guide to TLI video here and read it here.
Stay tuned for an announcement soon about the TLI coming to the TOGGLE app!
Answer to yesterday’s Literary Contest
📚 Congratulations to the winners of the literary contest, who will get a free Pro license for one year!📚
Published in 2007, The Blade Itself is the first chapter of the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie - a successful British writer originally from Lancaster.
With the character of Logen Ninefingers the author carries on a long-standing tradition in speculative fiction: deconstructing and rewriting Conan the Barbarian.
From Fafhrd (Lankhmar) to Cohen (Discworld) to Karsa (Malazan) to Cnaiur (Second Apocalypse), every major author has taken a jab at rewriting the Barbarian Hero.
A quick peek at TVTropes’ page will give you a sense of the degree of influence that Conan has had on successive writers.
Whereas Conan was larger than life - a hero of myth really - Abercromie’s makes Logen very human.
Logen is scared, self-effacing, and constantly surprised at his own survival. His internal monologue is interspersed by the iconic and often hilarious musing:
“Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he…”
With a remarkable 4.19 stars on 192k ratings in Goodreads, The Blade Itself is considered one of the best works of speculative fiction in the last two decades. If this weekend you feel like speculative fiction, give the book a try.
General Interest - The fall and resurgence of a novel art style
Every week we endeavour to bring you one high quality article post of general interest
Wired magazine is a great tech publication - more so for acknowledging that their predictions almost never come true.
In 2015 Wired published a famous piece that struck a chord with many of its readers - “Pixel Art Is Dying Along With the Games That Made It Cool”.
The word pixel means picture element, and denotes the smallest element on a screen - like the 2532 x 1170 pixels in your iPhone.
Born out of primordial videogames - think Pac Man and Space Invaders - Pixel Art was influenced by limited screen resolution and small colour palettes.
The result was a blocky and colourful aesthetic which dominated the videogame industry for the good part of three decades - until pixels became so small you could not see them.
The 2015 Wired piece quoted Mark Ferrari, an accomplished pixel artist with a hand in classics like Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island.
In the interview, Mike expressed a bleak vision of the future of Pixel Art: “The popular market for pixel art will last as long as the generation who played those [old] games is still running the world”.
Mike’s prediction turned out wrong. Very wrong.
The intervening 7 years saw the rise of high-quality indie video games. Indie producers found powerful visuals in pixels and a generation of new masterpieces were born: Hyper Light Drifter, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Terraria and many more.
A bit like lego blocks, pixel art requires different skills from freehand illustrations and can still deliver a large emotional payload - with lower barriers to entry for beginners.
Take the case of Stardew Valley below. A true magnum opus, the game was created by a single developer who coded the game, wrote the music, and painted the art.
Stardew Valley became a global success and sold 15 million copies.
In a true renaissance of the style, Pixel Art videogames now represent the majority of indie games produced. Time to get some Pixel Art NFTs maybe?
Nyan cat is on sale…just sayin’.
Daily Brief - Friday Edition - TOGGLE Leading Indicator, Literary Contest Winners, and more
