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About Me
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Maddie Lim (she/her) is a Filipino-Australian composer and reverse engineer. Her music is fun and sparkly, incorporating elements of digital fusion inspired by pop music and video games. You can hear her music in the cartoon series OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes and in the upcoming video game Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution.
She is passionate about the intersection between music, visual art, and technology. She enjoys using her multidisciplinary skills to visualize concepts in imaginative ways, explore new kinds of creative software, and create interactive experiences.
This along with her reverse engineering and her love for interacting with, working with, and learning about people, leads her to imagine a world where the abstractions established for computing and digital technology over the past few decades are broken down, re-evaluated, and redesigned by people from many backgrounds and walks of life, to address the daily needs of the current day.
🌸 Make Things, Break Things 🌸
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What is this blog for? 🤔
Read About Me to learn more about me to get a sense for what I might write about :)
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Light Mode and New Font!
Added a light mode setting to the blog. By default, the blog should adapt to your system setting unless you explicitly change the theme (using the switcher button on the top right of the page). While the dark theme is heavily inspired by the Synthwave x Fluoromachine theme, the light theme is my own experimental pink theme. It turns out I actually prefer lighter themes when it comes to longer form reading!
You'll notice I've also changed the site font! The new font is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, which is from the same family of fonts as Atkinson Hyperlegible, used by, the now defunct, cohost (RIP).
Given this site's layout has been heavily inspired by cohost, I thought it might make sense to adopt a similar font to increase familiarity. I've also been recently inspired by pillbug, a web-based GoToSocial/Mastodon client that tries to closely match cohost in functionality. If you're a Fediverse user, I'd definitely recommend checking it out!
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Previously the site used Lexend a font I accidentally stumbled upon one day while looking for another one. As you can guess by the name, the intention of the design is much the same and continues to be a font that I am pretty fond of.
So here's hoping you have an enjoyable reading experience!
—Maddie ✨
“intersections” Listening Exhibit @ bubblesort shop!
Happy Friday!
I'm excited and very honoured to be able to announce that I will be a guest at Amy Wibowo's (@sailorhg) very own bubblesort shop in Hayes Valley on Sunday, March 16th (1pm–6pm). We will be running a listening exhibit of the “intersections” album where you'll be able to listen to the album in its entirety along with accompanying visuals. The album and comic will also be available for purchase!
The album will be playing all day! If you happen to be in the SF Bay Area, come along at anytime while the shop is open!
More details in the linked thread!
Have an amazing weekend and I hope to see you there!!
—Maddie ✨
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intersections – Happy Bandcamp Friday
As you’ve moved through life, you’ve traversed through many paths, crossroads, challenges, and adventures. “intersections” is about celebrating those experiences and accepting yourself, fully as you are. Where will the roads lead you this time?
Last year I released my album, “intersections”, through Infloresce Records, featuring album art and a comic by Amy Wibowo aka sailorhg, whose work you may recognise from Bubblesort Zines!
The album is available for purchase on Bandcamp and includes a digital copy of the comic as well as a transcript!
We held an exhibition at && Gallery in Los Angeles where panels from the comic were arranged on the wall on frames lined with programmable LEDs and a room with programmable light bulbs which were synchronized to the music using MIDI.
Amy and I are both incredibly passionate about the intersection of art and technology and I am very honoured to have collaborated with her for this album and art exhibit!
For the Infloresce release premiere we faithfully recreated the art show virtually so that we could share the experience with the rest of the world!
I also had the honour of being able to feature performances from guitarist Zantilla, violinist and violist Michaela Nachtigall, bassist miles morkri, drummer Brian Burwell, and vocalist Laura Serafine who were all a joy to work with.
Whether you listen to the album and follow along with the comic, or experience it through the virtual show, I hope that you can enjoy the music and art, and that you might find something in the journey that resonates with your own.
Thank you for your support!
Perseids 🌠
I posted my song “Perseids 🌠” on SoundCloud! This was featured yesterday during the Snowdrop Festival held by Infloresce Records!
See below and have a listen :)
—Maddie ✨
Chip’s Challenge and an early childhood journey through cryptography
I put Chips Challenge on my list of games that spark joy, partially because it was that game that I had the first conscious memory of doing any type of reverse engineering. I was 8 years old, and at that time was using Windows 3.1.
In lieu of a save system, each level in the game had a 4 letter password you could use to skip to that level. And I wanted the passwords to all the levels. And so I thought they must be in the computer somewhere, right?2
So I opened the EXE file or whatever file the data for the levels happened to be, in Wordpad. Yes, Wordpad. lol. And then I scrolled through, saw level names, and saw what should have been the passwords along with it, except, the letters were all different.
As I was trying to figure this out my childhood friend was there and I would be talking out loud my thought process (I'm pretty sure he thought I was weird at that point). We already had a list of passwords for certain levels we wrote down as we progressed. So I compared this list, with the passwords we found in Wordpad and I insisted that there must be a correlation (or however an 8 year old would describe that concept) here.
Looking across the passwords, I would eventually observe that the letters would be in the same position but with a different letter. So I deduced "It must be a secret code!" and then started writing down what letter mapped to what until we had everything in the alphabet.
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To test it out, we went all the way bottom to find the last level: 149, and try our little decoder sheet on it… which worked out to be "DIGW". We entered that in and boom. [insert 8yo expression of mind being completely blown] (and at this point, my friend probably thought I was really cool, hopeful thinking lol).
To me that would spark basically the rest of my reverse engineering path, stories for another day, and a basis of how I learn and solve problems today.
A while back, Aivi, gifted me this zine by Amy Wibowo.
https://shop.bubblesort.io/products/secret-messages-zine
It's an amazing, very cute, and very accessible to anyone, take on the subject of cryptography I highly recommend. It brought me way back to those formative days in my childhood and I learned even more about the history of the practice predating computers, earlier in human history. Amy does a really great job of showing this in her educational zines!
- Yes, I do have an archive, but still.
- This would become a common theme. e.g.,
- "The level data must be in the ROM right? It probably looks like \[x, y, object number]? What if we try these hex search patterns?"
- "The music must be in the SPC file right? These are the notes of this song and we can assign a number for each semitone, but we don't know what notes they map to in the game. We could try a relative hex search? Is that a thing?".
Beat saber, VRChat
I miss Beat Saber and I miss world hopping in VRChat. I haven't touched my PC in like a year, and I need to move my lighthouses around so I can use my Valve Index again. And my Quest 2's right controller is busted because a battery leaked in it (which costs quite a bit to replace 😢). I also have to clear out my play space which is currently full of large plastic tubs of crap I need to sort through.
Anyway here's some Beat Saber vtuber stuff from the early pandemic when I was inspired by other Beat Saber channels like makeUmove and omotea.
⚠️ Content Warning: video with flashing lights
Happy 15 years to Super Mario Galaxy ✨
Super Mario Galaxy, originally released in November 2007 on the Nintendo Wii, was a game that touched me and many others. For me, it also had a significant influence on my music.
In following year, I had put together several NES style covers of some songs from Super Mario Galaxy. Back then, I had the very ambitious goal to make NES arrangements of every single song in the game. I didn't get much further than these songs (and one WIP song I found in my Dropbox recently).
14 years later I know better than to think this is a reasonable goal right now lol. But this year, I had the idea of doing more NES style arrangements for the rest of the major songs from the game to release this month in order to celebrate it's 15 year anniversary.
Unfortunately, I did not meet such goal, and so I will delegate that to Maddie 5 years in the future when the game turns 20. (and I turn 40 😵)
For now, I will just share the covers I did from 2008!
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