SHAZAM! Now there is a topic where anyone can post secret-lab-worthy things without having to make their own thread.
May the posting candles be lit and may the posting robes be worn! And may there be posting! 
 
Now to launch immediately into some tripe. ^_^
 
Often, attempting to screenshot a game will give you a corrupted image. 
 

 
You can use these images for neat purposes. This one uses 'Color Dodge' blending mode to make a cityscape-thing:
 

 
I dig it.
 
Now, this glitched data is not only useful for making fucked-up textures and tilesets for games. Its structured-yet-non-linear nature makes it ideal fodder for databending. So, let's turn these harsh, unforgiving pixels into "music"! 
I'm using Audiopaint (an image-to-sound program), and the waveform used as the basis is this one I generated: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/sfx30.wav
The tuning is harmonic and all are 180 seconds long. Nothing changes between iterations except the pic I feed the program.
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
ITERATION #1
 
Here's a 320x240 section from a failed attempt to screenshot Heavy Bullets.
 

 
Audiopaint interprets the lines as oscillators. I tell it to use brightness and saturation for left/right channels respectively.
It sounds like this:
 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/apex0.mp3
 
Yowza! Let's see if we can refine it any.
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
ITERATION #2
 

 
I've set the original image's blending mode to 'Color Dodge' on top of a black background again, then messed with color balance. This one also looks a bit like a cityscape. Sounds like this:
 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/apex1.mp3
 
Much more sparse and pleasing. Different textures shine through with it ALMOST sounding like music at points!
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
ITERATION #3
 

 
I've done gone crazy with gradients'n'shit. The square forms have audible effects on properties of the sound themselves. Let's hear it:
 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/apex2.mp3
 
Huzzah! Weirder, but somehow more structured. The gradient bands play into it as well.
 
There's thousands of ways to have it reinterpret a single image. The main two factors in anything I'd call "success" are having a good Scala .scl file and having a good original waveform to use as the basis. AudioPaint only does sines, so if you wanted squares or ramps or whatever, you'd have to sample a wave yourself. But it's worth it, if only for texture pieces to go in your more ambient songstuff.
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Now for some shape studies:
 

 
This's part an experiment to see how the sizing and spacing of basic shapes alone can be manipulated to make different audio/visual aesthetics. It's also useful for messing with image-to-audio stuff like the above. Even small differences like those spacings can totally alter the look of a tileset or the sound of some databent stuff.
 
Well, this has been amusing, I hope.
 
Feel free to post away! This is like dumbtopic, only SECRET.

WARNING: EXTREME NERDERY AHEAD
 
Like pen-and-paper RPGs? Like Mechwarrior/Battletech? Like knockoff stripped-down clones of their rules with a bunch of dumbassery thrown in? Well YOU'RE IN LUCK!
 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/ARC/flak.txt
 
Version 4 (that one) was written in plaintext. 3 had a fancy website. Oh well.
The main house-rule is the stunt rule: you can powergame, do impossible stunts, etc. all you want, so long as your descriptions make everyone laugh or are sensible/interesting. This system's so easy to run that the GM can play or the players can take turns being the GM in a sort of musical revenge scenario.

Cooooool. Lots goin' on. Those monsters have personality! Curious about what all that stuff does.
 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1566676/ARC/idiocy/50_shades_of_ghey.txt
Here is a "50 Shades of Grey" fanfic that I wrote ages ago and without actually knowing anything about the book or film. Intuition says it's probably accurate.

I used to like making board-game-video-games, especially for the games that require you to track lots of stats and shit. Lately I've been feeling like doing more of it, and found myself in need of card, dice, and Looney Pyramids sprites. So, after much messing about...
 
 
(Moving lots of files borked the images that were here. They were migrated to a fancy high-dollar webpage. This one.)
 
 
Comments/critiques welcome. Thinking of removing the indexes from the numbered cards so the 9s and 10s can look symmetrical.
Use whatcha need if you want, or whatcha want if you need. I'll be doing d20s and a few other dice soonish.

If you use really bland images, you can get minimal ambient stuff pretty easily. I tried that and thought they weren't salty enough for us. Salt. You can lick it off your hand, if you want to.
 
Cheers, E-Z Chips. I have since drawn many more shapes, some are even in layers so it's like some kinda crazy kaleidoscope when you go nudging a layer around with the arrow keys. I made some swatches to test a company's print quality (they make game boards and I'm considering going with them for manufacturing some other project of mine) and hypnotized myself with blending mode shit before I finally seperated the layers into a grid like that.
(By the way, you lied. That story is interesting. Imagine the wear she's putting on the carpet wondering if people out there are getting her email right.)
 
List of amusing dumbfuckery I generated while teaching my bot different ways to make "cocktails"
I like how it evolves over time, first becoming quite sensible and then degenerating into nonsense.
 
 
 
For all readers, here is a feng shui coin. Keep it facing you like this, and it will draw bad energy away from you and deposit it somewhere else on the Internet.
 

I taught my robot to roll Story Time Dice as a means of amusement. From there, it developed into a series of bizarre, juvenile writing-prompts.
 
Like Final Fantasy Tactics? Have way too much money to spend cloning a board-game of it? Follow the development of War of the Knockoffs, and be one with the Zodiac.
 
EDIT: My bot is getting so good at being an idiot, I've made a webpage for it. Like an ideal gas, its retardation will expand to fill the space in which it is contained.

wip "game". it's supposed to be like worlds.com but with an old mac style plus everyone is fake

I found this gamedev journal entry in a hidden rar for the Korean arcade game "Shocking"...
 
"KILL 40 BATS
The bats come in lines and singles and circles... they fly offscreen... they fly at windows and kill themselves in bursting lines. Bloody red spills out all over dragon tree floor. Designed rooms - 40 doors open at flipped switch. Lever does nothing. Button kills you if pressed. Announcer man laughs in joy to see you hurt. KILL THE PINK OCTOPUS! You might kill the wrong octopus. EAT UP WHOLE BONES! GUESS WHERE TO GO! Insert surreptitious genre copies throughout. You're wandering through the forest tree maze complex, you're bursting out of fluffy foothill walls and into rolling grassland country, contains moss stuffed cove, creepers snaking through steeples of acidic grass, mountain slopes sideways, Ciel dream green core complex, giant crab in waterfall... sac of secret seeds... egg and chocolate cache... frog... Cruel points or stings, Mean Manny... Mean Morpu..."
 
 Eugh.... I deleted it.