@tinyspires

January 9, 2017 7:56 AM

Tiny Spires is a Twitterbot that generates castles in the style of Mary Blair's it's a small world art.
posted by Elementary Penguin (8 comments total)

and there are still eggs arguing with it about politics
posted by beerperson at 7:59 AM on January 9, 2017 [9 favorites]

I'm having some bad anxiety today -- not for any real reason, just because. But these are beautiful and incredibly soothing and are pinging my synesthesia in a good way. They're a good visual ASMR for me.
posted by darksong at 8:30 AM on January 9, 2017

I like this a lot. I also looked at how it works under the hood and it's very clever and elegant - uses a random generative grammar to emit HTML/CSS code to draw the castles. It's definitely pinging the "Ooh, I should play with that" bits of my brain.
posted by parm at 8:59 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've been looking for new wall art.

BINGO.
posted by Katemonkey at 9:30 AM on January 9, 2017

Oh neat, this was done with Tracery, a text generation system that uses a simple grammar to create randomized text. Only instead of creating English stories it generates SVG markup which renders into the graphics you see. Source code is here. Super cool! It was made by @AmandaGlosson.

I can't figure out what's rendering the generated SVG into PNG. Is that a Tracery feature? A couple of other SVG examples: @dust.exe, @softlandscapes.

To my shame I had no idea who Mary Blair was. Here's a good short article on her. And here's a Google image search.
posted by Nelson at 12:20 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

Hi team, I'm the person who made Tiny Spires. Thanks for the great links and write-up, Nelson!

I'm very very happy that y'all are finding it soothing and that it's perhaps inspiring some to dig into playing with bots too! I plan on writing up a bit of my process in making this bot and hopefully a little how-to guide to get started with cheapbotsdonequick.com and Tracery.

I'm happy to answer any questions or help anyone get started with poking at generating SVGs! (SVGs are soooo powerful!)

<3 <3 <3
posted by amandaglosson at 2:23 PM on January 9, 2017 [14 favorites]

I can't figure out what's rendering the generated SVG into PNG

That's CBDQ doing that. I haven't looked that closely at the part of it that's doing that, but it's probably on v21's GitHub. Usually, it involves rendering the SVG via a headless browser like PhantomJS.
posted by ignignokt at 5:42 PM on January 9, 2017

Oh! I saw that question and replied on Twitter but not here:

I believe the part that's turning the SVG into a PNG is svg2png
posted by amandaglosson at 6:16 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]