I took today as a studio day and was finally able to finish the first iteration of my word particle system! It now takes in typed words and gives them attraction or repulsion forces to each other based on how ‘close’ they are to each other using Levenshtein distance. Nothing too fancy, but I really enjoyed hacking a particle system to make this. There were a lot of little unexpected things that I learned while doing it: dealing with TrueTypeFonts, performance improvements by loading the font to a pointer rather than one time for each word particle, and much more. I’m still having some performance issues with loading in a bunch of words at once, but I’ll play around with it a little more and then ask Zach for some help.

We then spent some time planning for Silent Barn with Taeyoon. I am helping Lauren with Rachel and Yuki on an LED throwie table. We’re helping the kids make LED pins with felt. We talked a little about logistics, materials, and what we want to get out of it. I’m mostly excited about making things with my hands again and getting to know a few of the kids. Lauren is going to bring some embroidery thread and other materials tomorrow so we can make some pretty cool examples for inspiration so I’m really excited for that!

Later on, Taeyoon went and got some food for us to share and we all just chilled and talked about education. It was a super nice way to decompress after a long studio day and spend some quality time with everyone. Rachel was even awarded an honorary non-degree (because she doesn’t need a masters in order to feel accomplished) by Casey.