📙 #017 Very Bad, Not Good Poetry

Never trust an AI Kitty!

# AxiDraw Sale

I don't get any commission, I'm not sponsored, and there's no affiliate link here; all that aside, I did notice that Evil Mad Scientist is having a Labour Day sale, whatever that is.

15% off all the stuff, so if you've been thinking about getting a plotter, now's the time. If you already have one, perhaps a few servos or bits and bobs may take your fancy.

https://twitter.com/EMSL/status/1698753265985626308

Incase that tweet doesn’t embed, the shop is here: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/ and the code “LABOR” is good upto Sunday 10th Sept!

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# AxiControl

Cadin, over on the PlotterArt Reddit group posted his Mac GUI interface to AxiDraw's command line tool for those who want to avoid using InkScape.

Once you've installed it, you can drag an SVG onto it, and it'll handle the rest; it has some nice pause/resume stuff going on.

I've not tried it yet, but I love seeing tools like this pop up: AxiControl

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# Shop update

Now that things have settled down in the studio a bit, I'm going to try and start putting things into the shop again. I took some photos the other day and instantly got annoyed at Shopify's backend UI and how clunky it is.

I'd previously written a tool that streamlines some of this, allowing me to pick pens and paper from dropdowns. It helped me write the descriptions for the shop and the captions I'd post on Instagram, the ones that went...

⏳ 4m 29s
📏 2.82m
🖋 TWSBI eco @twsbi
🎨 Noodlers Bulletproof Ink Heart of Darkness @noodlersink
📄 Handmade paper @potsandpaperbysteph
📷 Sony Alpha 6600
🤖 AxiDraw SE/A1 pen plotter
💻 Javascript SVG @revdancatt

I added those as the comments were always like, "What pen/paper is this?".

It turns out that those questions were pretty good engagement for the algorithm, and when you tell people the answer in the caption, those questions go away. So I guess the lesson we all learn from this is, um, be less helpful?

Anyway, now that I'm bringing all my tools, utilities and bits and bobs under the "Kitty AI PA" umbrella (good umbrella, not Resident Evil Umbrella Corp umbrella), the "I'll just upload these to the shop" has become "I'll just rewrite all this code so that Kitty can upload these to the shop".

I'm pretty sure I'm not saving any time here, but I'm hoping future-me will thank current-me for putting the effort in at some point.

I aim to have everything up just in time for the next newsletter (two weeks 🤞🍀), so you'll all be the first to know before I let Kitty tell the rest of Twitter/X.

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# Terrible Poetry & Machine Handwriting

Still in the realm of Kitty (AI PA) but also pen plotting, due to a series of very bad decisions involving using Kitty as part of my project management of, well, Kitty, somehow Kitty writing poetry for the back of the postcards I send off with orders got added to the to-do list.

This came about because my video about "Machine Handwriting" on YouTube is the source of many emails asking me for more information. I've had "Research Quantum Enterprises' single-stroke handwriting font" on my list of tasks for ages.

Of course, Kitty knows both of these things, along with my past task of "cut up plots into cards," so when I tweaked some code that got Kitty (via gpt-4) to summarise the past couple of weeks to make suggestions instead, this poetry thing popped up.

Who am I to deny Kitty this creative outlet, even though, as mentioned before, the poetry is bloody awful.

So, two things...

One, the next video is going to be about what the hell Kitty is and how Kitty is helping me do daily journaling and making my "good morning" tweets for me.

For those who are code-inclined, I've put a cut-down version of Kitty on GitHub: https://github.com/revdancatt/basic-kitty-journaling - mainly so I can refer to that code in the video; you'll need Nodejs to run it.

Two, the short answer to "Can I use the fonts from Quantum Enterprises in my code?" is no, not easily. It's an "I have to do this in InkScape using the Hershey Text extension" thing rather than a "Whooo, handwriting in my generative art" thing.

However, having had a poke around at the .svg file you get when you buy a font, I'm pretty confident that it's possible to wrangle it with a bit of work, which will be in a follow-up video if you want to wait to see how that turns out.

It's more work than I was hoping for, but definitely not impossible, which is nice.

So all those gallery installation projects of AI sending prose to a machine to write using a fountain pen, thus questioning what is even real, are go!

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# Digital NFT Land

I finally made a video about my FALLiNGWATER project...

...I swore I'd make a video for each project. I've been terrible at scheduling the time to do that as part of the project itself. Ending up in a situation where I've made projects faster than I can document them.

Bad!

I'm going through them one by one, updating the code, putting it onto GitHub so it's public (in case anyone wants to somehow learn from it, lol) and adding the projects to my webpage.

Good!

So far, the first five are now public on GitHub:

⚖️ Concord
A Slight Case of Overbombing
Hexagones - Art for Bots
Hexagones - Art for Bots for Humans
a strange and desolate place

These are also listed on my website here: https://revdancatt.com/RCS on a page that runs the code, as well as links to the high-res outputs and github code.

The aim is to get everything up and running and all the code on GitHub as an act of archiving, documentation and preservation.

It's also annoyingly time-consuming, but I hope it's ultimately worthwhile.

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# The End

This seems like an excellent place to call it. It's blisteringly hot here in the UK, and the studio has no air conditioning.

I may melt.

Love you all

Dan ❤️