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06

June 2025 🫠

In this issue: slightly melted

View as Webpage

👆 There's a big old waterfall to the left of this view, but the colors, light, and lines here 🤌

Seriously, there is too much light these days. The sun should set by 8:30pm, and I don't want to see it again until 6:30am. School is out for summer (for my kids), it has hit 90ºF too much, and even my dog doesn't want to walk for very long.

ah yes, six months of this

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting more of...whatever this (👆) is. But I finally gathered some thoughts into a blog post, a gif, you know, the usual really. Six more months to go and I'm feeling good about it. I'm definitely still doing more than one of these a week (usually two or three) so it doesn't even feel like a 52 week project. Oops.

FINE, LET'S TALK A.I.

I have a (probably unpopular) opinion that if you make something interesting with AI, you should be required to tell people how and why. So here we go. I'm not a fan of image generation, but I am into learning how to code better. For a few weekends this past month I dove into using Google's Gemini to help me make two different things.

Thing one

It's an ascii art generator! I wanted to take a black and white photo and turn it into a text-based "image" using my latest monospace variable typeface (almost done I swear) Wintyr. I even made a toggle so it will go between using the glyphs for dark values, or light values (which gives very different outputs). And another toggle for using only letters/numbers instead of crazy punctuation. You can layer those to make a neat two color thing (not on the website, you have to copy/paste what the website gives you into your graphics program, in my case, figma). You can play around with it on github.

Thing two

I liked the ascii art but I wanted to have more fun experimenting with the weight value of that new variable monospace font. I set out to have Gemini help me build it in Drawbot, but Drawbot appears to be broken (at least on my apple silicon install). So we (using "we" very loosely here) made it work as a single python script that can be triggered in the command line using terminal! The only two features I wanted: the ability to choose what one character gets use to make the art (so above, I specified just the letter "A") and a toggle (again) between light and dark values. It's not QUITE packaged up and ready to share, but it is a lot of fun. Here is Yoshi in letters A - Z 👇

Thing two

LAST ONE

The weirdest thing about making fonts is stumbling upon them in the wild. Allison found this one, today, on a shirt hanging from a rack on a street in Saugerties, NY. Wild. Font is Blackout, and it's not great.

Also: I have a semi-hidden (just not linked, ironically) page on my website of GOOD LINKS. It's bucketed for people, music interesting stuff, and resources.

Good times. Be well! Let me know what you're up to by just hitting "reply" to this email. Until next time!

✌️Ty

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