449 words I have an idea for a writing system where I just describe the things around me (basically like doing a sketch from life everyday but for writing: "My computer is sitting on a brown, wooden table. The table is covered in tan scratches, mostly in the middle and around the edges. I have a small coffee in a cup on a saucer. The coffee is a shade of tan in-between the colors of the scratches and the table."). I wonder what that interface and presentation should look like? Should I also actually draw the scene, and present the sketch along with the words? That seems like an interesting project but the drawing would make the writing somewhat irrelevant. The ambitious idea of for the observation-write presentation is to use some of the ASCII art experiments I've done, and take a picture of the scene, that then gets rendered using only the letters from the description. I think this is a cool idea, but it might have too many fiddly aspects to start with. More presentation ideas: - Take a picture, threshold it, the writing can only go in the black areas. - Use GPS coordinates to position the writing on a map. - Use something like the concept of a GPS map but more abstract. Something that combines actual geographic space with mental space. - Sometimes I'll write about large stuff, like buildings or skylines, and sometimes small stuff, like the dust on a chair in front of me. Is there some way I can represent that difference in scale in the interface and presentation. - Do something generative combining the time of day I wrote it and the geographic location (to set something like background color). - Track my eyes as I look around, then make a drawing of how my gaze moved as I wrote. Of those, I think something that represents the different scale of the writing sounds the most promising. It has the feel of a presentation conceit with a meaningful connection to the content, where I'd actually be interested in getting a feel for how much I describe small stuff versus large stuff (compared to time of day or location, which for me would be pretty same-y day-to-day). But what is the way to present that that is noticeable but not overwhelming? Something with bigger and smaller font-size is what I first think of. Hard to that do without being really distracting, though. It would be cool to have a 3d interface where the text is positioned in space. And then maybe the closer stuff could actually be writing positioned closer to the viewer. But I also want the entries to be arranged reversed-chronologically, how do I merge those two overlapping organization systems?

by grant