{"id":837,"date":"2020-10-07T15:48:30","date_gmt":"2020-10-07T15:48:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/?p=837"},"modified":"2020-10-07T15:48:30","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T15:48:30","slug":"inspired-to-make-something-that-makes-inspiration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/07\/inspired-to-make-something-that-makes-inspiration\/","title":{"rendered":"Inspired to make something that makes inspiration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>During <a href=\"https:\/\/roguelike.club\/event2020.html\">Roguelike Celebration 2020<\/a>, I heard a talk by <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/clarissaAdjoint\">Clarissa Littler<\/a> about a generator they created to help them write poetry.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/y1rgDM768-I?t=2716\" width=\"794\" height=\"447\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Skip to 45:16 to see Clarissa&#8217;s 10-minute talk.<\/p>\n<p>I make generators that generate complete, ready-to-use artifacts, but Clarissa&#8217;s generator only creates rules and constraints for a poem that Clarissa has to write. A completely different paradigm!<\/p>\n<p>The pandemic destroyed my normal artistic outlet of traveling the country and photographing people at large events. I&#8217;ve barely taken any photos in 2020. How can I continue this practice which I love so much with none of my usual events? Many photographers have a discipline of taking a photo every day on sites like <a href=\"https:\/\/tookapic.com\/\">Tookapic<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/365project.org\/\">365 project<\/a>.\u00a0 But getting ideas for interesting photos every day without fail is a constant challenge.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s bring it all together<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>a generator of ideas, not artifacts<\/li>\n<li>a reason to take photos every day<\/li>\n<li>ideas for photos when I don&#8217;t have any<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The solution is a system that tells me what sort of photograph to create each day!<\/p>\n<p>I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.galaxykate.com\/\">Kate Compton<\/a>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tracery.io\/\">Tracery<\/a> for lots of generators because it&#8217;s easy to write lists of options and let Tracery pick from them. So I can write down all possible subjects, all possible lighting conditions, all possible compositions, and be done. That generator would be completely generic, and I have a style developed over many years. I want photographs that I like, not all possible photographs.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-840\" src=\"http:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/photos-by-others.png\" alt=\"a screenshot of a file manager, show 200GB of images in a folder named &quot;Photos by others&quot;\" width=\"412\" height=\"186\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/photos-by-others.png 412w, https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/photos-by-others-300x135.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 412px) 100vw, 412px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been downloading photos that fit my style for years! I looked through by photographer, and wrote down what I liked about each one. After I had a big list, I split it into categories: mood, people, light, composition, environment, and other. I love people and photographs of people, so I had a lot of &#8220;people&#8221; features that were unsafe to recreate during a pandemic, so I created a list of other subjects that I could more easily acquire. The Tracery grammar picks one to three lists, and picks one option from each. Sometimes an option is negated, just to mix things up.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cheapbotsdonequick.com\/\">CheapBotsDoneQuick<\/a> is a service that hosts Twitter bots that generate their Tweets with Tracery grammars. This is a good fit for getting persistent daily suggestions. I could even reply to the bot with the photos I take based on its suggestion.\u00a0 I had to create and verify a new Twitter account. Twitter&#8217;s account creation pipeline doesn&#8217;t let me pick my @. I have to edit my profile and change it from some auto-generated nonsense in a separate step. I don&#8217;t like that!<\/p>\n<p>The final step was to go through each feature and assign an emoji! It&#8217;s so cute when bots use emoji, and I want using this bot to be a pleasant experience. These tweets aren&#8217;t assignments. They are opportunities for me to go out and create art! The emoji also function as bullets for a bulleted list of features.<\/p>\n<p>The resulting inspiration generator, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/photo_inspo\">@photo_inspo<\/a>, is online, tweeting a set of constraints every 6 hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During Roguelike Celebration 2020, I heard a talk by Clarissa Littler about a generator they created to help them write poetry. Skip to 45:16 to see Clarissa&#8217;s 10-minute talk. I make generators that generate complete, ready-to-use artifacts, but Clarissa&#8217;s generator only creates rules and constraints for a poem that Clarissa has to write. A completely &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/07\/inspired-to-make-something-that-makes-inspiration\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Inspired to make something that makes inspiration&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cliffnordman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}