Small Joys and Crazy Beautiful Skies

The last fortnight has been a bit of a blur. It’s still stupidly hot here in the UK, and I started work on a “weekend project” that I am now two weeks into.

I am building a tool that generates skies for 3D games. The idea is that I can instantly create a sky with a single command, rather than making a new image for every game or level. It’s looking good, but it has also become wildly overengineered. So now I am stripping it back and trying to find the simple idea buried underneath. You can see some screenshots of my progress on Bluesky if you’re interested.

This weekend was also Pokémon Go Fest in the UK, alongside a pre-release event for the next Pokémon card set. Consequently, I spent most of it playing Pokémon, chasing Pokémon around town, and talking to my son about Pokémon. It was busy, but we had a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, interesting things online have felt unusually scarce. Perhaps everyone is distracted by the World Cup, the weather, or whatever is happening in politics at the moment. More likely, it has simply been a quiet couple of weeks.

Still, it made me think about the last issue, where I wrote about social media swallowing more of the internet. When fewer people make and share things on their own sites, perhaps there really is less interesting stuff to stumble across. Or perhaps I’m reading far too much into a quiet fortnight.

However, looking back over the things I did save, I noticed a theme. Between making imaginary skies, chasing Pokémon, experimenting with digital paint, and looking at our planet from space, there have been plenty of small moments of joy.

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Inkfield

Inkfield is a painting app that mimics real-world media. It records every stroke, pause, and gesture as you draw, allowing the entire process to be replayed later. The canvas is built with WebGL and p5.js, while the strokes are stored as JSON.

As a developer, I find the brushes amazing. The fact that they are vector-based, animatable, and reproducible is a brilliant feat. They change and evolve as you draw, while optional animations can play on top of and around them. It’s all very clever!

There are lots of options to play with, and it’s not always clear what each one will change. However, that makes it well suited to experimentation.

I also like that there’s a public gallery of drawings. There aren’t many artworks that look like “something”. Instead, they are mostly patterns and abstract shapes. However, it’s fun to see what people have made and watch their strokes being replayed.

Sharing creations as JSON has become central to many of the Brush Ninja apps, so several of them now work in a similar way. It allows people to share editable creations without requiring me to store everything on a server.

I mostly found myself experimenting with the brushes and watching unexpected patterns emerge. There’s something pleasing about creating without needing to make anything in particular. The best way to understand it is simply to try it yourself.

Try Inkfield

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ISS: “Crazy Beautiful!”

Seán Doran transformed more than 5,000 photographs taken aboard the International Space Station into this stunning film of the Aurora Australis. The images were carefully restored, enhanced, and interpolated to recreate the ISS orbiting Earth in smooth, four-times-real-time footage.

Each photo was cleaned up to remove dust, bright pixels, and marks on the space station’s windows. Seán then adjusted the colours and lighting before generating thousands of extra frames to turn the photographs into a smooth video.

Watch the video

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Sparked Discoveries

Here are a few more joyful and interesting corners of the web I stumbled across recently:

Happy Map

Happy Map is a project that creates a fictional map of the reasons people are happy, grouped by type. The data comes from a 2017 study, and the project aims to show that small things can make a big difference to our happiness. The map is interactive, so you can explore its different areas and discover why people are happy.

In Every Language

This project looks at Wikipedia pages for the same topic in different languages and collects the main images they use. I have linked to happiness, but you can explore almost any topic you like.

It’s a fascinating way to see how different cultures and languages represent the same concept. One of my favourites is the page for toilet, which contains lots of different toilets and a few amusing selections, including the Bulgarian one.

I also like food-based topics such as breakfast and cake. Partly because I like food, but also because they show how differently cultures can represent the same thing.

Procreate Downloads

Procreate is a popular drawing app for the iPad, which also features drawing playback. It supports custom brushes and textures, and this official download page contains all sorts of free resources to use in the app. There are brushes, textures, colour palettes, and more.