_2026-01-23

Welcome to Max's Shenanigans :D

Hi, welcome to my website, I'm Max.
I'm a 17 y/o programmer, artist, and musician.
- I'm a full-stack developer, my programming projects are mainly focused on solving problems or augmenting people in some way.
  - My go-to languages, tools & libraries include python, svelteJS (Including HTML and JS exp) and Linux.
  - I focus on AI research, Web development and gamification, all for the purpose of augmenting myself, and maybe other people I guessss
  - I'm also the puzzle master of my school's cs club.
- My art centers around an expression of emotion (usually excitement) or a fascination.
  - I love expressing complexity in my art.
  - I also sometimes make commentaries on life through my art.
  - And sometimes it's just fun to make art that looks cool!
- I'm a jazz, funk and math rock guitarist.
  - I love how captivating music is, it transports the listeners to the world of the players.
  - I enjoy playing exciting music, although challenging it is rather thrilling.
  - My favourite musicians & bands are Ichika Nito, Polyphia, The 8-bit big band, Luca Seztak and bohemianvoodoo (I could go on forever, there are just too many)
  - I also play piano, ooh and i rly like listening to death jazz If you want to see my code or any of my complex projects, check out github.com/MaxDevv

_2026-02-23

"Un"-Predictable

So in art class, I got into this little kerfuffle with a friend about whether or not you could use AI to predict the "random" numbers people come up with.
- I said you could and they weren't so sure.
So when I got home, I decided to like, prove it.
- I used AI to whip up a quick website that uses Markov chains to predict your next number based on your previous choices.
And with a few tests from me and my friends. We got predicted somewhere between 18-25% of the time, just from Markov chains alone.
- Random chance would be around 11%, so that's already way above what you'd expect.
- Before starting this I actually found this study 2012 study in PLoS ONE by Schulz et al. that found that Markov chains could predict human-generated "random" sequences with up to 27% accuracy, so my results line up pretty well with actual research.
I turned it into a little game so you guys can try it out and I can collect more data for the next, more fun step :D
- You can play it here: maximusadeola.com/projects/unpredictable.
Basically the plan is:
- Once enough people play the game (like 1,000 or 2,000 plays) I want to train a proper AI model on that data.
  - It'd be cool if we could get to smth like 30-50% accuracy, I don't know if that's possible and it'd definately be a lil spooky but it would be a really fun result.
- I predict that as the AI gets more accurate at predicting you, your behavior is gonna change. The numbers you would have picked get altered because you know it's predicting you.
- Meaning I'd actually have to train the model in stages with fresh data after each deployment.
Basically, humans are a lot less random than we think we are :)

_2025-09-08

Animation

So in Art 3, the first topic studied was animation.
- To learn animation, we made 3 separate animations: a stop motion, a practice bouncing ball, and our final animation.
For the stop motion, it was a duo project, so I worked with a friend to recreate Bongo Cat.
- After getting the hang of stop motion animation, we realized we were only halfway through our animation.
- So we just decided to... go crazy with it lol.
After making the stop motion animation, the class moved on to 2D animation using Photoshop.
- We made the very cliché first animation, a bouncing ball.
- Although I didn't expect much from this exercise, it taught me a surprising amount about planning multiple frames ahead, the squash and stretch mechanics, and generally using Photoshop for animation.
For my final animation, we had to make something on mundane activities.
- So I chose cutting a cucumber (mundane, right?).
- I really wanted to replicate the Studio Ghibli-esque feel where they animate food to look so delicious.
- So I focused a lot of my time and effort on the flow of the knife and spent way too long holding an imaginary knife.
- In the end, I was pretty proud of the animation; it captured what I wanted, and I gained a new appreciation for professional animators.

_2025-10-31

Self-Portrait (Art 3)

Every year in Art, we always make a self-portrait.
And every year, I end it with mixed feelings on the portrait. While I don't generally struggle with my representation of forms and accuracy when drawing.
And while I do happen to be the most handsomest bestest looking person to have ever blessed the earth... obviously; when you put those together, I feel I struggle.
So when it came to this art assignment, I really wanted it to be good.
- It was an experimental piece, a two-part piece.
  - For the first part, I needed to make a simple realistic drawing of myself, no biggie (except I picked the corniest reference image).
  - It took a few days, but I was able to complete the self-portrait.
The hard part came with the experimental side.
- I wanted to show a bit of my past and represent my deep dark inner world.
- So I decided to cut up the portrait I had worked so hard on; the goal was to add cracks into the art piece.
- After some experimentation, I came up with a neat technique using Indian ink to have it seep between the "cracks" the way I wanted it.
In the end, it had ended.
- I'm not fully sure how I feel about this piece; it captures what I want, but maybe I don't want to show it.

_2025-10-28

GT Assignment 1 (Art 3)

GT homework assignments are longer and usually more complex pieces made by students who opted for the more challenging GT art.
For this GT homework, I chose the prompt "habit" and wanted to represent the habit of practicing guitar.
- It took quite a while to flesh out my idea, but I wanted to represent how it felt to practice guitar.
- What I was thinking when I practiced felt like this pursuit towards "perfect" playing, so as part of my proposal, I referenced the piece The Portrait of Perfection by...
I took inspiration from that piece and eventually came up with the idea for an almost crystal-like representation of myself playing guitar.
- Using angular lines to develop that texture, I also chose to simplify much of myself in the piece, using only a few lines for seemingly complex parts of my body like the face.
- I used the varying complexity in an attempt to guide the viewer's eyes to what I thought was the most important part of the piece—the hands—where all my focus converged and where the music came from.

_2026-01-15

Clay Pieces (Art 3)

Clay is another medium we've explored every art year; I personally find it very enjoyable to work with.
- It's stupidly intuitive, yet can be so nuanced.
  - You apply pressure and it deforms, yet the way it deforms and the effects of that deformation depend on the amount of pressure, how you apply it, how wet the clay is, etc.
  - There are a billion different variables and so many cool tools that can be used to add texture.
  - Because it's so intuitive, it can be rather easy to figure out cool techniques with it.
This year we were tasked with making 2 functional clay pieces with a certain theme.
- I decided to make stands, specifically a phone stand and two lil feet for my laptop (so my fans can breathe lol).
- The theme I picked was water, specifically waves, and I believe the pieces came out really nicely.
The process of making these clay pieces can be split into two main phases:
- For the first phase, we had to actually plan and make the pieces.
  - I had made a rather ambitious mockup drawing that I thought would be basically impossible; yet, something about how intuitive the clay was made it genuinely possible.
  - It was really cool making this because everything I thought to do kinda just worked.
  - Well, obviously there were a few mistakes here and there, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with the good old restart.
- Clay is an incredibly forgiving medium in the sense you can just squish it and start from scratch.
  - I have this motto that basically goes "If I can't remake this piece, then did I really make it, or was I just lucky" and it helped whenever I was struggling to restart.
Overall I'd rate clay a 9/10 in terms of art media; it was very fun to work with.
Then came phase two, which... also just worked™.
- I wanted to replicate the way real-life waves looked where the texture of the wave and physical size affected the way light moved through it.
- So I had to play around with "mixing" the glaze.
  - Glaze can't really be mixed, yet that somehow made it look even cooler.
  - Complete with highlights on the edges, I tried to keep the thickness of the glaze down so I could maintain the ridges I made in the clay to represent the streaks of the wave.
It was a very fun experience, though I do feel rather lucky with this one.
- If I had tried a different technique or misunderstood how glaze worked, I couldn't really restart the same way you can with clay.
Overall, it was a very fun piece and came out super nice.

_2026-01-20

Visual Journal 6

For Visual Journal 6, we were given a bunch of prompts, but I chose systems.
I wanted to express how cool it was that something could exist and be interconnected and organized, where each part of the system relies on the other, all working in a sort of delicate harmony.
So I chose the ultimate system: a watch.
And as my artist, I chose the designer Jacob Arabo, who designed the amazing Astronomia Solar Zodiac watch, which was what I drew.

_2025-12-21

Visual Journal 5

For this visual journal, I chose the prompt "hands."
I wanted to do something different, though; rather than realistic hands, I wanted to practice drawing cartoonish hands as they have such a distinct style.
So for my reference artist, I chose Ub Iwerks, the artist behind Mickey Mouse and his gloves.
Ignore my terrible drawing of Ub Iwerks

_2025-10-01

Visual Journal 2

For this visual journal, I chose the prompt "faces" and was tasked with drawing multiple small faces in our journal.
So for my artist, I chose Chommang (@chommang_drawing), known for their amazing ability to speed draw and quickly represent poses, faces, and emotions with so much accuracy.
I wanted to study how they worked and practice their technique.