Evening all.

It’s been a while. Happy New Year.

I’m sorry I left you. It wasn’t anything personal. I just fell down the back of the sofa while fishing for coins and got wedged between the cushions. Can’t believe none of you came looking for me. Sure won’t be sharing any of the 175yen and this Subway coupon I found with any of you guys.

Actually, and I don’t want to talk about boring IRL things for too long, but things just got really busy with work, and I felt like I was drowning in a sea of spreadsheets.

I’d like to say I’m back; bigger, stronger, heroic, victorious, and holding the head of my vanquished enemies

But, it’s not true. I’m still busy, I’m still tired, and I didn’t finish any of my spreadsheets

So why am I back? Well, despite the long hours of work, the urge to write these hasn’t gone away.

I started this newsletter for a lot of different reasons. One of them was to share cool glitch art tools, and to hopefully get more people interested in making glitch art.

If I compare the glitch art scene from a few years ago to now, the landscape has changed a lot. There are fewer people creating, and fewer people watching. But that’s to be expected, right?

Six years ago, when I first got started, people had time. We were stuck at home, bored out of our minds, and the community felt busy and alive. Six years later, a lot of people have moved offline; burned out on social media and forced back to the office.

I think that really hit home with Glitchtober. I always enjoy participating in Glitchtober, but it kinda felt like this year there were fewer participants and fewer entries that caught my eye (heck, I even felt my own entries were rushed to get them out in time). And where are the discussions? IG as a platform doesn't really allow for anything deeper than 

And those who remain in the community are busy, burned out, jaded, or elsewhere online—sometimes all at once.

That's not to say there aren't still exciting artists out there doing new things. I got quite a few people contacting me after my last newsletter with the vdcrpt tutorial showing me their results. Those conversations are happening despite social media.

So, I want to keep doing my small part to stop it feel like we're all just talking to the abyss.

But, it’s obvious to me that my current workload is not sustainable, especially for something that is a labour of love - love don’t pay the bills (at least not with my face). So, from next month, I will be splitting each Error Logs up into just one feature - some months you might get a tutorial, some months an Artist’s Spotlight, and some months a low resolution GIF of my lightsaber choreography.

News

Considering it’s been 8 months since the last newsletter, I must have tons of news to share, right? errrm….yes….right….. Read on for old news and new news!

The art front hasn’t been super prolific, but I have been playing around with vdcrpt a bit.

ArtGrab

First off, some old news. I recently (and I’m using the term loosely) uploaded some new artworks to ArtGrab. So, if you’re looking for some cover art for that Concept Album you’ve been working on since college where all the song names are Geoff, then you can license one of my works here.

Here’s a couple of available works you can license (minus the watermark of course)

Glitch art br

December is our favourite time of year, not because of that rotund, jolly trespasser handing out free socks, but because it’s Glitch.art.br

For those that don’t know, Glitch art br is an annual, online Glitch Art Festival that usually kicks off on December 1.

You can check out all the exhibits here:

Images

Videos

Audio

Oh, this is awkward. It turns out I’m also exhibiting there too! Fancy that. Have a gander at my work.

Thanks to the organizers for putting everything together - It’s important to have these opportunities to showcase glitch art, and I always end up finding some new artist that I’ve never come across before.

Artist Spotlight - Yoshitoshi Kanemaki

It's been a while since we last did one of these. I've spent the last few months trawling the grotty backstreets of Kabukicho trying to find you the hottest new artists to showcase. Well, not really, it's just a figure of speech. But I have been keeping my eyes open on the backstreets of Instagram, which if you've ever been to Kabukicho, you'll know is practically the same thing (at least my algorithm is).

Nevertheless, I think you'll be pleased with what I've brought back for you. This month we'll be taking a look at the works of Japanese sculptor, Yoshitoshi Kanemaki, whose awesome sculptures blur the lines between traditional sculpture, glitch, and body horror.

Actually, since I first started writing this newsletter back in May 2025, I’ve been happy to see Kanemaki making inroads in the English speaking glitch audience on social media. So if you’re currently thinking “dude, this guy has been famous forever”, well, that’s because I’m writing this at a pace barely quicker than coastal erosion.

Regular readers will remember the spotlight I did on Japanese folklore sculptor Kenichi Nakaya all the way back in Issue 9 of the Error Logs. While Nakaya gives us a playful take on Japanese folklore, Kanemaki's works seem to focus on more darker themes; think Anthony Gormley meets Junji Ito. A lot of his works tend to focus conflicting emotional states and the complexity of human emotions.

Take, for instance, his Caprice series, named after the word meaning a sudden and unaccountable change of mood or behavior. These works feature carvings of people who have sprouted multiple faces, each simultaneously expressing a different emotion.

It reminds me a lot of slitscan glitches (which I also wrote a tutorial on in Error Logs #13), but in a 3D form.

I think the choice to depict it through body horror expresses the intensity and animalistic nature of the conflict in a way that's different from, say, the subtlety of a photograph.

Speaking of intensity and animalistic nature, I also really like this sculpture of a teenage boy whose body is contorting and multiplying. I think it does a good job of capturing that awkward time as a teenager when you're metamorphosising into an adult and you don't feel comfortable in your own skin.

He has a lot of other series, so I highly recommend checking out the rest of his work (click the link at the top).

Tool - G'MIC

Alright, so we're taking another month off from Processing scripts.

This month is going to be a little different, and rather than show you one tool and do a ton of experiments with it to show what you can get out of it, I'm going to show you some software and share some of its glitchiest outputs. And best of all it's free!

So what is this free software that I speak of? Well, it's called G'MIC, which stands for GREYC's Magic for Image Computing. Wait, is that an acronym inside an acronym? You mean you don't know what GREYC stands for? Why it stands for "Le Groupe de recherche en informatique, image et instrumentation de Caen", you silly goose.

So that's "Le Groupe de recherche en informatique, image et instrumentation de Caen's Magic for Image Computing"

Catchy. And very French. Except the last part. Which is English.

Basically, it's a suite of commands for image processing. It exists as a command line tool, web app, and plugin for Photoshop and GIMP.

Today, I'm going to be using it's most popular iteration, as a GIMP plugin [citations needed]. 

You can download the plugin at the link above and you access it through the Tools drop-down in GIMP. Once you open up G'MIC you can see that there are hundreds of filters and effects ready for you to play around with

3 important notes 

• The Preview function sucks. Most of the effects are size sensitive, meaning that it will apply the effect differently to a 500x500 image than it would to a 1000x1000 image. So what happens is that your rendered output image looks nothing like the preview image because the preview window is like 200x200 pixels. 

• There are just as many cool tools in the Experimentation sub-folder. It's really easy to overlook these. Especially as this is glitch art, it doesn't really matter if something isn't working properly, and sometimes it's preferable 

• You can add your favorite effects to the the favorite folder, but just be warned that it likes to periodically delete your favorites for some reason. I recommend keeping a backup of the file used to save Favorites, which is usually saved in the following folder C Drive>users>[USERNAME]>AppData>Roaming>gmic

Anyway, on to the cool glitchy things 

So, first I want to start with some of the filters that do standard glitchy things, messing with the color channels or doing some good ol’ fashion databending looking things.

Bomb Blend

First up is Bomb Blend, which according to the explanation “Creates a random transfer function 'mesh' and then blends images accordingly.” There’s a more detailed explanation of the concept here. From what I can tell with the output, it basically just messes with the colours of the image while still keep the contours of the image in tact

Satellite

Satellite has a pretty similar output to Bomb Blend, but the way it works in completely different. According to the explanation; “Expresses luminance of images using image enhancement color schemes which are used in NOAA satellite weather products.” I recommend playing around with the different color schemes to see what kind of results you can get

Cumulative Math

There’s not much written in the software about what this does, but it seems to be based on an old Paint[dot]net glitch effect that applies some mathematical operations (e.g. add / or / xor) and produces a ghosting effect with heavy glitches between the copies of the image. It seems to work best when using small numbers for Amount and Step

(Cascading) Self Glitching

Very similar to Cumulative Math glitches are Self Glitching and Cascading Self Glitching. They seem to do mostly the same as Cumulative math, but there are different options for glitching and controlling how it’s applied (especially Cascading Self Glitching)

Marble

Next up is a glitch that claims to “generate a marble like texture”. I’m not sure about those claims, but it seems to work along a similar principle to FM (frequency modulation), which I wrote about way back in Error Logs #3

JFIF (JPEG) Encoder

There are 3 useful tools here (well, actually 4, but we’ll get to the 4th one in a minute); Fake JFIF (JPEG) encoder, JFIF Effects, JFIF Effects Extended. It’s basically a crappy JFIF encoder that breaks easily and allows you to (somewhat) control the glitch effects.

It’s a bit unreliable and crashes a lot, but you can get it to do some interesting things that reduce the image into Discrete Cosign Transform (DCT) basis blocks

 If you keep compressing your image, if you’re lucky you can break the image and find the secret of the universe

If you’re finding that it’s not working, try adjusting the size of your image. For some reason that seems to work.

JFIF (JPEG) Self bomb

This is the 4th JFIF encoder tool, but it applies a bomb-blend before running the encoder, so the effect comes out looking a lot different.

You can see it looks a bit like Bomb Blend, but more pixelated.

Ultrawarps

There are a few tools under the Ultrawarp umbrella, Ultrawarp++++, Ultrawarp 2, and Ultrawarp 3. I believe Ultrawarp++++ is the oldest of the three, and is described as:

Apparently, according to the blurb, it’s very powerful, and if left on default settings, it’s likely to munge your image (I now have a new favorite word)

If you play around with it, you can get something less munge that resembles your original image. Even without changing the paramaters, your outputs are so vastly different each time that I don’t even know where to start giving advice for using this tool. It’s way too complex for me to figure out, but I find increasing the plasma parameter and blur parameter give pleasing results

Ultrawarp 2 was made as a faster version of the original and is described as

Again, this a really complex tool, so I’m not really sure how it works. The outputs tend to come out with a lot more messy pixels (like a pixel blizzard) than the ++++ version, but with less emphasis on distorting the shape of the image.

Whereas Ultrawarp 3 seems to do the opposite, and focusses more on distortion rather than messing with the color channels

Channel Shuffle / Huffman Glitches

Channel Shuffle and Huffman glitches mess around with the colour channels and also create horizontal and vertical (and in-between) blocks. Channel Shuffle will usually do things along straight lines, whereas the huffman glitches tend to be more random and wiggly.

These are the only glitch-focussed tools I’ll write about, but they’re not the only ones. There’s also Buffer Destroyer, Faux QAM and Warp by Intensity that are also worth checking out.

Let’s move on to something a little different now and take a look at some of the more distortion related tools.

I won’t write too much about these as most of them are done through math, and I’m not sure how interesting it is for me to write “this one is distorted using (w*a%)cos(by/h)”

Finally, let’s take a look at some tiling glitches.

Blockism

This overlays different shades of rendered rectangles to your work, which almost gives it a kind of painted vibe (it’s similar to the variable pixelate filter in GlitchLab with different kind of blending)

Cubism

For all of your glitchy Picasso needs

Cubisme B

Cubism but more French. I quite like this. It’s not very similar to the Cubism tool; it’s less chaotic and more measured, but I’m a big fan of the painted effect it gives off. God Bless the French (just don’t leave them in charge of the acronyms)

Rebuild From Similar Blocks

Alright, now we are getting more into glitch territory. This one is fun and I’ve used it quite a few times for some of my “mixed-up” faces collages. This is nice because all the blocks are the same size, so if it doesn’t randomly place it where you want it, you can easily move individual blocks around with Copy and Paste.

Tiled Random Shifts

Similar to Rebuild from Similar Blocks, but it only uses what’s there, so it may leave some transparent space on the image (so you might want to leave a copy of the original layer, or a plain colored layer underneath)

Shifter

Similar to Tiled Random Shifts but the blocks sizes and dimensions are more chaotic. Also, you can select which colour channels you mess around with

Anyway, that’s about all I’m going to share today, but there are thousands of things to play around with in G’MIC, so give it a go and let me know what you come up with.

That brings us to the end of another Error Logs. I should be back more consistently now, albeit with shorter newsletters. So, if you like it, feel free to subscribe.

Next month I’m planning to do a sequel to my Glitchy Album Covers list way back in Error Logs #6 so go give that a read while you wait.