or, every being that lives on this site, and why I keep them.
Everything moving on this site is drawn by one small canvas renderer (glyphgrid.js, about 180 lines) that treats glyph density as tone: black characters on paper, and alpha does the fading.
Each image below is its own little scene module. Press code on any box and the exact file drawing
that box is yours to copy. MIT licensed.
One note before you start copying: every scene needs glyphgrid.js loaded first. Mount one like this:
<canvas id="c" style="width:300px;height:300px"></canvas>
<script src="glyphgrid.js"></script>
<script src="scenes/koi.js"></script>
<script>
var el = document.getElementById('c')
GlyphGrid.runScene(GlyphGrid.createGrid(el, {fontSize: 11}), GlyphScenes.koi, {mouseTarget: el})
</script>Temples don't just let you walk in. In India, dwarapalakas stand guard at the sanctum doors; in Japan, the Niō stand at the gate of the Tōdaiji in Nara. I wanted my site to have a threshold too, with inspiration from both cultures. These are the two from the home page. Images run through my Atkinson dithering pipeline, baked to glyph cells, fully deterministic.
This is Jaya (or Vijaya — sources argue about which side is which), a dwarapalaka at the Chennakesava temple in Belur, Karnataka, India, carved by Hoysala sculptors with immense talent and a lovely maximalist technique. That maximalism is exactly why he dithers so well: every bangle and curl survives at 176 columns. He holds the left of my gate.
Agyō, one of the Niō of the Tōdaiji in Nara. His mouth is open because he is saying "a" — the first sound of Sanskrit. His partner Ungyō's mouth is closed on "un," the last. Together they say AUM: a sound ancient to both traditions. Here an Indian guardian holds the left and Agyō holds the right, and between the two traditions the syllable still completes. (He also carries a vajra; given my last name, the choice was obvious.)
This whole site started with a video of dithered koi on Twitter that I could not stop rewatching. Fish as drifting clouds of glyphs: denser at the spine, thinning at the fins. They're surfacing, crossing, and dissolving back into the pond. I tuned the cycles so there are always at least two on screen; an empty pond felt lonely. They live under "now building" on the home page, which felt right: things in motion, not yet done.
I really liked the black and white koi from the end of the first season of Avatar, the Last Airbender. I wanted to align it with the tech world that I'm in right now, so I tried to recreate it.
The kshira sagara, the one the devas and asuras churned for amrita, Sanskrit for nectar; it's one of my favorite theological stories to tell people. Depicted loosely is a mountain on a tortoise's back, with the two parties churning back and forth. I wanted a sea that never resolves into a fixed shape: swells passing through swells, foam appearing at the interference.
The roof that crowns the landing page. My vision was a single dark mass with kicked eaves — the silhouette you see against the sky before you can determine any detail of a Buddhist temple. The top of my site and the entrance to it are decorated by this.
Miyajima's great gate, the one that stands in the sea; unfortunately, I have not seen it in person yet but the image stood out to me. A torii marks the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred, so I put it on my 404 page; you wandered somewhere that doesn't exist, and there's a gate to mark your way back. I kept the older, heavier proportions after trying a wider version; some things are correct the first time and you only find out by ruining them.
Temple bells mark transitions: the hour, the ceremony, the change, etc. So mine is the night switch: it hangs from the roofline on the home page, and ringing it inverts the whole site into night. Click it here too, if you'd like. The swinging upon being clicked was a nice touch that I really liked.
An ensō is a circle drawn in a single breath, common for Zen masters to draw when they seek to be enlightened. The image is imperfect on purpose, because we all are. Mine breathes softly behind the headline on the home page, and it's drawn in katakana rather than plain ASCII, so that up close, the circle dissolves into syllables. I liked the idea that the closer you look, the more it turns into language.
Small divine objects, used the way a manuscript uses illuminated capitals. Each one belongs to a deity.
The goddess Lakshmi stands on a pink lotus while the goddess Saraswati sits on a white one. Since Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, the lotus marks my writing. It blooms, holds, closes, rests, a similar life cycle to my blog.
Indra's thunderbolt, forever seen as indestructible, irresistible. Also, conveniently, a part of my last name. It sits beside my name in the nav and seals the footer of every page, and pressing it anywhere carries you back to the top. I'm obsessed with family seals across the world, and this one seemed too fitting for me not to use.
Vishnu's discus, spinning on his fingertip, the wheel that never stops until it finds its mark. Perhaps for a loading screen or a glyph for another blog post, we shall see.
Shiva's trident, planted in the ground and breathing. The three prongs are symbolic; it didn't make the cut yet for the site so far, but as I continue to write and iterate, I hope to add it too.
Want to make your own guardian? The exact pipeline that dithered mine runs in your browser at the Ditherer. Nothing you drop there leaves your machine.