Seed Garden

Why?

Seed Garden started for a very serious reason. I wanted my GitHub contribution graph to stay green. I wanted to do that in an honest way that didn't generate litter or junk commits, and I kept thinking about interesting ways to create things from daily automation. I built something simple and then I kept getting more and more ideas for this automation thing and it took on a life of its own. Every day a seed is generated from a collection of deterministic inputs, or semi-deterministic at least. The current date, the previous state of the garden, the phase of the moon, atmospheric conditions at a site chosen by that moon phase (based on arbitrary but somewhat vibey correspondences), and eventually probably a bunch of other strange signals as I choose to incorporate them. The same inputs always produce the same output, there's no hidden randomness.

That idea just absolutely fascinates me!

Often we treat random as a thing unto itself but if you trace any random event backwards you find the chain of causes. Roll a die and the outcome will depend on your hand, the air, physics, the table, the die itself, and tensors and tensors of other variables, some that we can't even consciously observe or understand maybe! BUT as far as we know if we rewind time back, you'll roll the same thing every time given the same inputs. Computers are even more deterministic, but from those deterministic systems we get behavior that feels surprising, alive and meaningful.

That, the thing I just said, is why I think the I Ching is one of the coolest things ever invented by humans.

You can view it as philosophy, divination, poetry or even an ancient computer. It provides a framework for reflection. The value isn't in predicting the future (though some will try, and often find the result to be very accurate after they attribute the output to the thing that happened to them). The value is in providing a lens that we can look through to examine the present in a different light, put a pin in that cause I get back to it.

This person has AI psychosis or something, I should go DoorDash Chick-fil-A for breakfast.

WORLDROOT applied the same idea. I love Conway's Game of Life. Cellular automata are so simple, and yet they are Turing complete. You can build Linux in Conway's Game of Life. I think someone successful did build Conway's Game of Life in Conway's Game of Life. Worldroot is different, it's more complex but at the same time less complex. Every bloom, patch of rot, surviving tree and wanderer is influenced from what came before. Like history, the current state is constrained by the states that preceded it. Behavior emerges from simple rules and from that, we can gain meaning. Or just look at some cool ASCII art!

Chaos magick, a scary sounding concept that is dear to my heart, is influential to this project as well. Perhaps not in the way people expect. Chaos magick treats belief systems as tools that can be adapted, discarded, and recombined. It was a chaos magician in New Jersey that taught me the I Ching, and gave me a femur bone and some coins to divine the infinite. Robert Anton Wilson describes this belief-shifting lens thing (remember that pin you put in 'it'? This is the 'it') as "changing reality tunnels". The same event can be viewed through many lenses, each revealing different aspects of the thing being observed.

So that's the pipeline. GitHub Actions -> Python Generator -> garden.json -> Site Generator -> Random that isn't random -> Determinism -> Lens for you to examine your reality with.

If you take anything from this, it's that you can and should make something weird yourself. You can take the source of this and make your own. Change the words, change the colors, fiddle with it. It's GPLv3 so it's yours! For the love of god make your website more interesting, that's all I ask.