Well, this is delightful. Something interesting I've observed here... for most people this is very claming (like me). However for a small percentage of people it seems to induce anxiety because they can't understand why it exists or what it is for.
It’s like art generally. Many people go mad about art. Some performance somewhere that is not immediatly about productivity is like the biggest provocation. Not everything makes sense on that axis. People are beyond simple cost/benefit analysis. All of nature really.
No anxiety, just wondering if, since it is on HN and highly upvoted, I'm missing something. That's what you get if you go to the website first and only then read the comments :)
The latter is a weird reaction. Do such people look at a beautiful park and say "How awful! It isn't USEFUL! AHHHHH!!!"
Burn all the landscape paintings, why don't you. And why stop there. Burn all the landscapes!
What an bizarre and narrow mindset.
Maybe the purpose is beauty? Pleasure? Contemplation? Maybe a little fun? It's like this person has some specific end in mind that they happen to care about, and anything that isn't it must be pointless.
I am part of the second group.
Wouldn't even call it anxiety, but just some sort of "light disgust" feeling.
Ok I guess it's cool, but you can't do anything useful with it. You can't even draw something meaningful with it like the domain says.
I totally understand the pseudo-autistic disgust/anger at inaccurate statements. I imagine a lot of us programmers are very sensitive to them in a discipline where small inaccuracies can have big consequences and I myself am easily irked by this type of thing.
However, sometimes the inaccuracy stems from poor communication (or deliberate lying) on behalf of the communicator, but sometimes it comes from gaps in our own understanding or perspective.
Is this just a silly, shallow little thing, or have you fundamentally missed some key point?
I don't have the answer, but I think that's one of the fun parts of engaging with anyone's random creative output like this. There's always a small chance it could teach us something we didn't know before.
E.g. it made me re-evaluate what "drawing" really is. Especially in a digital context.
Is it a question of fidelity? At what point does altering individual elements (whether pixels on a screen or icons in a grid) in order to represent a larger picture become "drawing". i.e. if the pictures were much smaller and closer together would it feel like drawing?
Is it a question of uniformity of media? i.e. would this feel more like drawing if instead of pictures it was just coloured blocks?
Yep if you have a good therapist they’ll help you learn and recognize to try and ignore that feeling in certain contexts like this! Of course it’s super nuanced person to person.
Took a look under the hood, it's p5js sketch. I use it for introductory programming course.
p5.js is a JavaScript library for creative coding, with a focus on making coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, beginners, and anyone else! p5.js is free and open-source because we believe software, and the tools to learn it, should be accessible to everyone.
Took me a while to fill it all. Nothing exciting happens. If ideas for developing it further are welcome: Make them bees fly to flowers, spiders web their nets, rabbits hunt down carrots etc, sun flowers turning and pointing towards the sun...
Shaders to make flowers sway in the wind and why not randomly turn the mouse pointer into a water can? An "ouch" sound effect when you hit a cactus.
Just to add for anyone looking at that link - this guy seems to be an artist who combines technology and nature and senses. He has a ton of really interesting stuff to click through on this website.
It's interesting (to me) in this specific example because it generates a favicon using SVG + emoji. I wasn't aware that could be done. Favicons can't be simple enoji/text, they have to be an image.
the grid is made up of <p> fields, I thought you just could replace the sqiggly line (background) with an emoji/text using the right font etc instead of svg/emoji
Do the adjacent tiles affect the likelihood of getting certain creatures? First paint had no creatures, then I started getting ants, rats, doves, spiders, hedgehogs, and now my first bumblebee and rabbit.
A region of clovers seems to increase four-leaves clovers.
Edit - ok I guess not, after looking through the code. Still, getting the lion was pretty amazing.
The audio doesn’t seem to change depending on which area you interact in.
The images will cycle, but also give you a random image which you can’t bring back in one cycle of repeating images. I got spider, ant, hedgehog, ladybug, blue butterfly… but no more than twice.
I guess I started looking for intentional patterns. Then I started trying to make patterns (areas of same image). I had a little spark of ‘joy’ when I got a new image, and disappointment when I cycled it away because I was tapping too quickly.
I toyed with this until I didn’t find any more surprises and got bored. Which I feel is just fine.
I read there’s a lion and a snake. Not enough to make me want to play now, but it’s interesting there might be more patterns I did not discover.
The sound is a randomly-selected C, D, E, or G note. Emoji are also selected from a random pool of plants and creatures. There is no way to control this which is a part of the point and fun of the project
I touch a spot and something appears at random. I touch the same spot again and it's replaced by something random. I don't think there is a way to chose what to place in a given spot or to empty it so I don't see the purpose of the game (is it a game?)
Anyway it's OK as first prototype. Just add a menu to choose plants from and it's done.
I gave it a try on desktop. I don't know if it's much better or much worse. Probably it's just an art installation, we take what it is. BTW there was no sound on mobile.
const event = new Event("mousedown")
const pArr = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("p"))
function switchSymbol(target) {
target.dispatchEvent(event);
}
function switchUntil(target, until) {
while (target.innerText !== until) {
switchSymbol(target);
}
}
for (const p of pArr) {
switchUntil(p, "")
}
Change the second argument of switchUntil to the emoji you want. HN doesn't allow emojis
Little toys like this are the spirit of the web. I'd never go through the rigamarole of downloading and deleting an app to fiddle with this for two minutes, but I sure as heck will click a link.
The concept is funny, but actually playing it is very frustrating. It's a perfect example of a game where the difficulty comes from poor controls. (Though it appears to be intentional in this case.)
If you’re not used to using regular design tools, I recommend using a spreadsheet like a low-res bitmap to make a map. It’s as simple or complex as you want it to be, short of making a 3d or writing a real application—- from painting cells with fill colors to scripting.
If you’re looking for something more visual, have a dedicated video card, and don’t mind going down a bit of a rabbit hole, do it unreal engine with the bazillion existing free assets. It’s one of the simpler 3D environments to learn to navigate and you can just drag and drop stuff from the free assets. I don’t know that I’ve seen another complex application that’s embraced the “batteries included” concept any more thoroughly. Of course, you can go as deep as you want, but I’ll bet you could get very pretty version up and running in an afternoon.
It's a better use of time than reading comments about the approval of bitcoin ETFs. Same level of productivity (zero) but didn't leave me feeling angry.
