## Meta
Reminder: this site is an [[111|iterative experiment]], so let's ~~put on the janitor hat~~ welcome the <span style='font-family:cursive'>mysterious foreign duck</span>:
![[foreign-duck.webp]]
## This week's summary
The 200 year old (!) magnolia tree in my neighbour's garden is blossoming. It's sunny, warm, beautiful. It's been really, *really* hard to stay inside, but at the same time I felt much more productive this week. Getting out of the house helped me get out of my head and everything feels just lighter.
### Past week
Lesson 01: After almost 100 days of writing here (almost) daily I've learned that the best way to guarantee that **I won't** write about something is to add it to a writing prompt for the next week.
Lesson 02: What works instead (demonstrated by the content shared this week):
- responding to a question sent by a stranger via email → [[Spikes]]
- revisiting an old piece of work or expanding on a conversation I had when walking Mango ([[Tip of the Tongue and Handmade Software]])
- sharing something I found funny ([[Jeremy Bent-ham]])
- documenting something I learned about ([[Talk to the Blog]])
![[tip-of-the-tongue.webp]]
I'm still organising this knowledge in my mind and I'll post something more useful/actionable once we have reached 111 days. The **fun** part is sharing something useful by *exploring* it with the reader. The **difficult** part is to making those evergreen notes feel polished and accessible.
### Next week
If something doesn't work, change it. But don't fix what's not broken — instead crank it up to 11 and keep pushing it til it breaks! That's my plan for this week: prioritise talking to people, responding to questions, spinning out little (incl. "boring") prototypes and write about them as I go.
#### What I'm playing with at the moment:
- Tools for [[Expressive Writing]]:
1. analysis/feedback using ML
2. using Ensō as an Expressive Writing tool (related resources: [[Using Writing to Process Your Emotions]], [[Summarise My Weekly Notes (With Llamas)]])
- Messing with smaller realtime projects:
- collaborative doodles with [Partykit](https://www.partykit.io), OR
- analytics GUIs with Elixir + Phoenix
## Favourite project
![[orb-farm.webp]]
[Orb.Farm](https://orb.farm) — a tiny virtual ecosystem, filled wit creates that live, grow, interact and die. If you want to learn how to build your own, check out this recent [Coding Train](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4u7Zy_b868) tutorial. This project was created by the author of [sandspiel.club](https://sandspiel.club). ^509a5d
Related: [[Sandboxes, Games, and Play]]
![[hypercard-gui.webp]]
[Graphical User Interface Gallery](http://toastytech.com/guis/) — inspired by a conversation with a new Say Hi friend, I started digging through a list of old GUI galleries and stumbled upon this catalog.
[Damn Small Linux 2024](https://www.damnsmalllinux.org) — I don't use Linux much nowadays, but DSL was one of my favourite distros back in the day. I used to run the previous version of it on a my grandpa of computer (60MHz, 8MB RAM) in the early 2000s. I remember it was so responsive I felt like the context menus would appear on the screen *before* I clicked!
## Favourite site
[BorisTheBrave.Com](https://www.boristhebrave.com) — Boris is a developer writing about procedural generation and game design. I spent an entire morning reading up his tutorials on tiling algorithms.
![[little-alchemy.webp]]
[Little Alchemy 2](https://littlealchemy2.com) — a crafting game with an aesthetic reminiscent of the early 2010s Flash games. I'm sharing this since everyone's talking about [Infinite Craft](https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/) anyway.
## Favourite piece of tech
[LLaVA-1.6: Improved reasoning, OCR, and world knowledge | LLaVA](https://llava-vl.github.io/blog/2024-01-30-llava-1-6/) — LLaVA is a multimodal language model I briefly mentioned in [[Summarise My Weekly Notes (With Llamas)]]. This version claims to surpass Gemini Pro (a commercial model), which makes it even more exciting given its current use cases, such as allowing blind or visually-impaired people to interact with images by auto-captioning them ([source](https://2mb.codes/~cmb/ollama-bot/)).
[CoronaFaceImpact](https://v-fonts.com/fonts/coronafaceimpact) — a variable font supporting only one character (you).
## Interesting articles
[Classification of Tilesets – BorisTheBrave.Com](https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/11/14/classification-of-tilesets/) — an article I wish I had read before I played with tilesets in my games for the first time.
![[dwarf-fortress-drawn.webp]]
[Dorf Fort](https://www.androidarts.com/df/dorf.htm) — illustrations of the characters and creatures from Dwarf Fortress.
[In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox @ tonsky.me](https://tonsky.me/blog/checkbox/) — a visual history of the humble check box, created by the author of [Grumpy Website](https://grumpy.website).
[jh3yy (birdsite)](https://twitter.com/jh3yy) — a creative coder messing with CSS and modern Web tech. I like the balance between theory and application in his [threads](https://twitter.com/jh3yy/status/1748283435435835684). (I wish he kept his mastodon profile up to date.)
[Around the World in Eighty Lies | The Walrus](https://thewalrus.ca/around-the-world-in-eighty-lies/) — "How a writer fabricated a series of stories for Atlas Obscura".
## Things I wrote last week that people liked
- [[Jeremy Bent-ham]]
- [[Tip of the Tongue and Handmade Software]]
Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!
P.S. If you liked Orb Farm, you might enjoy [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woSFGeMpoxI) or the scaled-up version, [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7z8sm5UaM).
![[footer-beetles-tiny-cinema.webp]]