You're reading (or listening to) another weekly episode of the...
🐸 TODEPOND PONDCAST 🐸
I wrote (and recorded) this one a long time ago. This is the infamous...
🚨 EMERGENCY EPISODE 🚨
It's something that I've had up my sleeve for a while. In the unlikely event that I don't have time to produce a weekly update, this is my backup. So if you're listening to this, then something has gone wrong. Also, hello from the past! How's the future? Is twitter still called twitter?
Anyway, I'm sure I have a really good excuse as to why I can't make it this week. The reason for this lapse will be inserted here:
I'M ON HOLIDAY UP IN THE MOUNTAINS
With that explanation out the way, let's begin.
Paint
Imagine this: You have a bucket of paint.
You can use it to draw stuff on your screen. Try it out!
As you drag your brush, it uses paint from the bucket. The paint gets used up bit-by-bit. If you use enough, the paint will run out. And the bucket will be empty.
Special paint
You can fill your bucket with different types of paint.
Blue paint, red paint, green paint. And mixtures of all three.
Some paints are special. You can pick a paint that changes colour as it runs out. When your bucket is full, it's blue. When your bucket is empty, it's green. And in between, it blends from one to the other.
Some paints cycle through all sorts of different colours. One switches back-and-forth between red and white. One cycles through a rainbow pattern.
It's fun trying out all of these special paints!
Pipes
Up until now, you've painted with a brush. But you can also use pipes.
Draw a pipe along the screen and let your paint flow through it. Similar to brushing, the flow leaves a trail of paint along its path. It can split, join, and loop around. Make any pipe pattern you want!
Try sending different types of paint along your pipes! Test out different colours and combos.
Or change your paint *after* it has flowed through. Watch how it changes like magic as you tweak its colours. Pause, reverse, and replay time. See your paint flow at any speed you want. Figure out how it all works.
Special pipes
You can place down different types of pipe.
Most pipes use up your paint supply. But some pipes do the reverse. They somehow increase your supply when paint flows through. Not sure how that works! But it does.
Some other pipes combine two paint streams together, adding, mixing, or blocking their flow. There are many more types of special pipe to try out. Give them a go! You can see how they work just by putting some paint through them.
Hmm...
There are a couple of pipes that seem to do nothing. No paint flows out of them. Let's just call them "x" and "y" for now... We'll get back to them later.
Screens
Zoom out. Zoom out really far!
Look!
Can you see all the different screens?
All this time, you were just painting onto one single screen. But there's a whole grid of them. 100 screens wide. 100 screens high. And every screen seems to have its own bucket supply.
Let's zoom into a different screen...
Weird! This screen has the exact same pipes and paint as our first screen. And all the pipes work the exact same way!
Except for those pipes that did nothing before ("x" and "y"). Well, now there's some paint flowing out of them!
Let's zoom to some other screens...
Ok, it seems like... More paint flows out of "y" if you're higher up. And less if you're lower down. The "x" pipe flows more on the right, and less on the left.
Picture
I just had a thought!
Its hard to see your pipes when you're zoomed out. So let's draw some really fat pipes. When you zoom out far, you can barely see your little pipes. But you can clearly see the fat ones.
Now, each screen acts as a "pixel" to create a bigger picture. Let's fill them all with blue paint. Great. We've got a blue screen!
But wait, we can use those special "x" and "y" pipes to make each screen show something a bit different. We can make a smooth blend from top-to-bottom, or left-to-right.
If we combine pipes in a more complex way, we can make all sorts of things. A dotty pattern. Zigzag lines. Or even...
We can even make a fractal.
We can make the Mandelbot Set.
What a wonderful bucket this is!
The bucket of fractals: 🪣 Fractal bucket
Video
Maybe it's hard to imagine what I've described. Words might not do it justice. I hope I can make a video for it one day.
It's something I've been thinking about for a very long time. It's inspired by many many things, including Hest, Turing Paint, Max Bittker's drawing thing, Cable world.
3+ syllable words used: "emergency", "episode", "wonderful", "video"
Thank you for reading through this idea! And welcome to all the new people this week. Thanks for all your help!
Days since tode fell asleep: 257
Days since bot went missing: 222
TODEPOND PONDCAST: Fractal bucket