Fortune Telling and Creative Pursuits

So, I've been on holiday and getting the itch to do something creative. Something that pulls together all the various skills I've been learning: art, web, games, music, etc. I was inspired ages ago by the Electronic Sweet-N-Fun Fortune Teller (2013) by the incredible Rachel Simone Weil. I saw it in the Texas History Museum while they had the Femicom Museum Exhibit years ago. Simple, delightful to look at, it just had so much charm.

I've been thinking about it ever since, but never really came up with anything that I could do with that thought, until last week. I was practicing drawing using a design that Neoscottie helped me make, and what I made made me really happy.

Look at it. It's adorable! Anyway, I've been spending the past six months or so trying to build a healthier relationship with technology. I hate a lot of what's going on in the industry these days, but I decided that it's not really healthy that it's gotten so bad that I hate being at my laptop or on my phone at all. I'm not going to let tech companies take something I used to enjoy tinkering with, and there's a ton of great tech out there that lets me feel like I'm in control of my life again. Customising my own internet radio station player was so much fun that it gave me the push I needed to come back and consider this idea again.

Holidays are short though, especially when you have kids. And with work and school as busy as it gets, I knew if I didn't finish this before all that got started up again I'd never get it done. I'm a recovering perfectionist and a former video game developer, so I knew I needed to keep this small and just stop as soon as something looked good enough to me. I went with kind of a well-loved but worn-down overall vibe because it just feels really comforting. The idea of lovingly and calmingly taking care of things way past their expiration date in a world that tosses things out at the first minor inconvenience is something I've clung to, for better or worse. (It's certainly got nothing to do with growing up poor and spending your young adulthood in steep debt hahaaaa no sirreeeeee.)

It helped a great deal that I just happened to come across a decently sized stack of what appears to be real horoscope data pulled from who knows where, buried in an abandoned machine learning repo. Taking these and remixing them seemed like the sort of thing generative AI was made for, so I took a bit of a look at it to see if I could use something that was small in scale and ethical, since this is a pretty small dataset by comparison, but I had no luck. I couldn't find anything that didn't call out to a service I had ethical qualms with, and whatever was left felt like buying a chainsaw to cut a block of cheese, so uh. I tossed that idea out.

Instead, I went with the low tech solution, which lends itself to the kind of humor, quirkiness, and unexpected delights that I love: mad libs. I control all the code though, so I didn't just replace a noun or adjective here and there. Some of the pieces of the horoscopes were just kind of odd non-sequitors for example, and I just went and took entire chunks out that could be randomly thrown in. They're randomly generated from a bank of stuff, one I might expand over time.

This is something I wanted to integrate into my daily life, to throw in some fun, the way fortunes are. And there were honestly some really nice fortunes in there, so I left them as is. I think a good horoscope can be interesting, funny, ominous, weirdly specific, or more. I really think it's the emotional variety that they provide that makes us keep coming back to them. I wanted to see if my experience can keep that, but in that stilted way that slightly broken devices do. (And I set it up so that you can install it onto your phone as an app too. Use the Add to Homescreen feature and it should take care of the rest.) Anyway, I hope that anyone that finds this will enjoy it.