Welcome to the “battle station” part of the studio, please ignore the mess and the chaotic-neutral monitor setup. I want to draw your attention to two things.
On the very far left, with a pile of stuff on top is a laser printer. It’s a very old, capable, cheap, reliable thing, despite being an HP.
In pretty much the middle of the photo is the Bantam Tools NextDraw 8511, which is the one Kitty (my AI PA) is wired up to.
As I mentioned previously, Kitty writes out my morning todo lists on that plotter. It also writes envelopes out for me, as the handwriting Kitty uses is far neater than my own.
In fact, I’ve been getting Kitty to write out, or “print” more and more for me; and honestly it doesn’t make much sense, other than you use the tools you know and I don’t like having to turn all the way around take the stuff off the laser printer and get it connected to the WiFi each time.
When I’ve found myself wanting to print something, like a packing list (for sending out the postcards to the Patreon peoples), I’ve taken to just having Kitty write it out. It’s slower sure, but it’s also super convenient; I often “print” onto A6 index cards or A5 notes, and I can just set it away, get on with something, then grab it from the plotter when I’m done.
Last weekend I decided to finally do something I’ve been meaning to do for ages; a markdown to handwriting tool! It looks like this, which is the same UI I use for writing letters and notes.
Over in the top right corner is where I’d normally write/paste the text I want to be written, but in this instance you can see I’ve got markdown format in there too.
I have headings, bold - which is done by writing over the same word a couple of times - underlining and strikethrough. I haven’t bothered with italic (mainly because I’m convinced that italics in handwriting isn’t really a thing), ir all the rest of the markdown stuff.
Below is the same text being turned into my much worse handwriting.
These aren’t fonts! This is text turned into dynamically created SVG single stroke handwriting specifically to be plotted with a pen in a drawing machine, whatever I type gets converted into proper writing-writing, and in my case full joined-up cursive writing.
You can see the end result of Kitty’s handwriting, and my own bad handwriting down below.
And if you’re curious, here’s a 5min video of both of the notes above being written, which I’m not expecting you to sit through the whole of - although it can be quite mesmerising - just that it’s easier to show a bit than explain.
I wrote more about how this handwriting stuff works all the way back in April 2024, in newsletter #033 - Handwriting & Scripts
I’ve had several ways of doing and automating this over the years, but I’m finally gathering all the variations together to make my life easier, and markdown support (for handwriting, lol) was the last item on my todo list.
I’ve just looked back even further, to Nov 2023, and I can see an almost identical photo of my desk at the start of that newsletter as I have on this one, but that one is a lot clearer and tidier!
📙 #023 - Slow Computing, Kitty Writes
I've been working towards a thing. I'm not sure exactly what that thing is, but I kinda have the shape of it. It also feels like a thing I can explore for the next few years, which is pretty exciting.
“It also feels like a thing I can explore for the next few years” - lol, how prescient!
# NOW IS…
…probably a good time to link to anders hoff’s post: Spline Script, about asemic writing from 2017.
And of course we can’t forget “Letters from my mother” by Vera Molnar.
https://digitalartmuseum.org/molnar/lettersfrommother.html
# BUSINESS HAT ON, A REQUEST
💰 💰 💰
Bit of a long shot this one, but you never know. I’m about to go through a round of raising some seed funding for my ltd company DeepKeep and it involves “decks” and talking to investors (we already have one) and all that stuff - for something that’s actually an extension of Kitty (not the handwriting part, the AI part) - and yeeeeeah, it’s a whole thing.
If you have an experience of this kinda of thing, or know someone who has, who’s willing to chat about things I may need to know, can you drop me a line at dan@deepkeep.org - I can barter/trade you some pen plotted artwork 😁
This is not a request for money, this is a request for how to request money - or just general moral support 😅
Thank you, love you!
💰 💰 💰
# PLOTS & FLOWCHARTS
This month I think I’ve spent more time fine tuning and adjusting my tools to streamline pen plotting, than actual pen plotting. I’m telling myself it’ll pay off in the long-run.
One of those tools, which I’ve written more about over here: Patreon August Update One - Nodes - was all about automating the process of feeding a random seed into the “70s Pop” code, sending the results of that into the Kaleidoscope code, and then in turn to a scaling & placing bit of code.
Despite my dislike of nodes based code, I ended up writing some nodes based code 🙄
Having written the code, and also updating the text-to-writing pipeline, I figured why not turn the nodes themselves into SVGs to plot out.
Which, ummmm, worked surprisingly well. Next step, code that handwrites itself.
That, along with last newsletter’s chatter about printing zines and documenting processes has set me off down a whole new rabbit hole.
Maybe I won’t be happy until I can PEN PLOT ALL THE THINGS.
# THE END
The heatwave is over (I hope), rain has fallen, things have cooled down. I felt comfortable enough to do some more tutorial video recording, so that’s getting back on track now after about six weeks off.
It’s been bad!
The plan was to record all these tutorial videos, and then get back to recording “my own” videos about what I’m up to. But I find myself missing making #Weeknotes and documenting all the other things I’m up-to. I’m also feeling as those the tutorial videos are established enough that I can start to switched back and forth between formats and it’ll be fine. So that’s what I’m going to do.
Probably.
Maybe we’ll find out by the time the next newsletter comes out, on Thursday 3rd September, 2026!
Love you all
Dan
❤️
So glad you finally got some cooler days. Here in SF it's been deliciously gloriously thankfully foggy and breezy for days and days and days. The young obsessed hopefuls in their athleisurewear lined up for their swandives into the AI startup blender pass me on the street complaining about how bad the weather here is and I think "y'all are so dang welcome to go to southern California or Texas or honestly the surface of the sun" but I just keep walking and maybe go get a nice foggy day ice cream cone. I've been grinding trying to get a huge project done of selling all my miniature terrain collection before the school year starts and now that I'm down to very little left 🎉 and tuition is paid 🎉🎉 I've given myself a day off to not work from a list. Very interesting to see how my brain behaves differently on a no-list day! I should try two days off in a row...