New Possibilities

A lot of possibilities have started to come into view. First, at the Seoul Design Startup Center I feel like I've gotten fairly close with a senior artist, which is nice. They even bought me fried chicken. It seems like all sorts of synergy could come out of networks like this, and the same probably goes for the other incubating programs. The problem is that now I have to get close to people, hm… it'll work out, I guess. Also, Simone built an MQTT server and developed a good chunk of the features I needed before sending them over, which is fantastic. Integrating it all quickly isn't easy, but thanks to that, good features keep appearing. And I've ended up fixing problems I'd left sitting out of laziness, too. Feeling that someone cares about the project and wants to contribute to it, I find myself moving faster in return.

On the pattern side, a great many possibilities opened up too. The simple prompt I'd put together a few months back was starting to show its limits. Every pattern I made felt similar, and it wasn't fun. I'd even thought this was a serious problem. So I figured I needed new prompts, a new methodology for generating patterns, and I made a kind of pattern map. It's a sort of adventure map, built from researching the fields that generate graphics with code. I marked points across it and set up a corresponding prompt at each one. Using those prompts, patterns I'd never even conceived of started coming out. Chaos, social rules, probability-based, and so on… really interesting results started appearing.

It isn't all rosy, of course. Of the prompts I set up, it feels like only about 20% yield meaningful results, and even among those, some have logic too heavy to run on an ESP32. Still, filling in the map bit by bit, I can produce plenty of good cases, and if I keep organizing them and improving from there, I figure something will come of it. Here I'm hoping other people will research alongside me. It's simply too much volume for one person, which honestly makes it hard. But setting things up so others can do it and leave records easily is its own job, so when I'll get it organized and shared, I don't know. Right now it's public but effectively a feature only I use.

Crowd Supply has a lot of projects to manage, so it's true that Patternflow's launch prep is being delayed. It's been pushed back a week now and it's frustrating, but maybe it's actually fortunate. As I wrote before, there was so much to attend to that doing both at once would have been hard. Well, if you're honest, it's that time opened up and I went looking for something to do, but thinking of it this way feels better. Launching doesn't make things happen instantly anyway. There's CE certification to handle too… and that I still don't understand. I've sent quote requests and emails to several places and still haven't gotten a reply with any real information. It's been over five days on that too. Maybe they're just ignoring me because I haven't registered a business yet. Should I just register? I'm going to eventually, and the reason I'd been putting it off, the Modu-ui Changeop program, has effectively become moot since it overlaps with another program. Let me wait a little longer.

Lately I can really feel my memory getting worse. Probably because I've been keeping my diary sloppily. Or was my memory good because I kept the diary diligently? Maybe this is just the default. Remembering things is nice, so I'm putting effort back into the diary. I also restarted the exercise I'd paused because it was murderously hot. Ten days off, maybe, and going for a run yesterday I tired out fast. Still, the air has cooled a lot, so it felt good. Today too the sun was hot but the air was cool, so I biked to the park. Lay in the pavilion killing time for a bit, walked around, and came back, and there was one funny thing. There was a strange-looking fruit, so I looked it up, and the name turned out to be kkuji. It's called a kkuji tree. Which in Korean happens to sound exactly like the slang for shabby, half-baked. Probably won't land if you're not Korean. Shame. Apparently it's edible and used a lot in medicine, but it wasn't especially tasty.

I've been saying this for a while, but I'd love for Patternflow to be recognized in academia too. So I keep checking back on a competition I applied to in the past. I know that if the result is good it'll come by email separately, and still I keep dropping by the website just in case. It probably won't happen. Because I applied very early on, so the copy and materials introducing the project are pretty kkuji. The image especially is just a screenshot of one Instagram reel, so compared to the image quality of past winners, it simply looks like no effort. Even so, on the off chance, I keep checking. Later I'll just apply to Ars Electronica and places like that, all of them. By then, I'd hope the launch is successfully done and there's at least one fun, sort of artistic project connecting people around the world. I hope so.