Build your own floating island

More playing with Claude. The idea is to create a “home” to play and build on, ala sim game (ideally, Godus like) that is based on topography of the physical world.

The pipeline now goes: draw a box over your chosen area – the starting point at the moment is São Miguel island, Azores → fetch real elevation → click a contour ring to set the coastline (doesn’t have to be the actual coastline… rediscover Atlantis 🙂 ) → carve.

An important point is the idea is to be inspired by physical reality, not tied to it. Part of this is the “sculpted, not surveyed” nature of the renders, so it sometimes has artefacts. That’s intentional.

It’s still very buggy, of course, but check it out!

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Testing Claude code

The idea is to have stuff happen in the three.js scene – like rain falling when you click the cloud, and then that updating in the Sankey diagram below that (see the mm increasing). It’s not much yet and meaningless at this point, Sao Miguel is also “sculpted not surveyed” which is an interesting approach I may explore more intentionally, but it’s not bad for about 2 hours of playing over the weekend. Damn, AI is scary.

São Miguel, Azores — stylized elevation, not survey data
Click the cloud to make it rain · Drag to look around · Scroll to zoom
Lagoa do Fogo 50%  /  50% Furnas
No rainfall recorded yet — click the cloud on the São Miguel island scene to make it rain.

MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence

The sentence, drumroll, is:

Any approaches that embrace a  feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.

(OK, it doesn’t talk about how to project addresses that, and what the aim and objectives are. So not really the project in a sentence. But it’s the crux of it.)

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Community engagement using cats as metaphor

This came from a Friday evening casual chat in the OMI group discord, where we were wondering about how to retain members amidst different personalities, while attracting, and more importantly, retaining new members. We spoke about herding cats, and that you don’t herd cats, you throw some tuna where you want them to go – the tuna being the shared vision that people want to be part of.

But this wasn’t the full story, and fuelled by my most recent project iteration (blog forthcoming but this note pad has rough thoughts) and a bit of beer, I thought, it’s not just about tuna. So I shared my cat situation along with how I think this translates to community management. Writing it up sober, I still think it works well. Also adding cat-specific details for posterity.

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Carver Go West

How far can we go and get home on a single charge?

This weekend we decided to “go for a quick drive, and be back around noon to take a nap”. Predictably, it turned into a large-scale adventure of the best sort. In order to test how far the Carver can go and get back home without being charged, we decided to “go West” until the battery hits 60% (more than half left, to give us enough buffer) before turning back home. We were hoping to get to Lomba da Maia to walk to the Praia da Viola, the beach that made us fall in love with the Azores.

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