A Curio of Daily Sketches

Issue 26 — 31 entries, no AI invited

GENUARY

— vingt-six —

A monthlong creative-coding ritual. Thirty-one prompts. Thirty-one tiny invocations rendered live in your browser. Light a lantern, scroll slowly.

enter

Welcome, welcome — pull up a cushion, breathe in the cinnamon smoke, and ignore the ghost rummaging around the back of the kitchen. Genuary is the annual month-long generative-art challenge where coders treat thirty-one prompts as little altars and try to summon something onto the screen before midnight. This here is my offering: a hand-coded hub that holds every sketch I built across the month, presented with a touch too much ceremony.

Each card below opens a self-contained p5.js sketch you can rerun, mutate, and export to PNG, SVG, or DXF (yes, even the silly ones). The chatbot at the bottom of the page is a strictly rule-based RiveScript oracle — no large language models, no cloud, just patterns. Ask it about a specific day, the tooling, or who wrote which prompt; it will answer with the slightly haunted patience of a fortune-teller whose script has been sitting on the shelf too long.

The aesthetic is borrowed from temple posters, midnight festivals, and the general energy of a lantern swinging in a draft. None of it is decorative for its own sake — the goal is for the whole hub to feel like a single, slightly mischievous object you'd want to keep open in a tab and revisit. Stay a while.

aside :: if you see a butterfly land on a card you weren't planning to click, take that as a sign. (Or don't. The butterflies have no opinions.)

THE PROMPTS // thirty-one daily summonings

Open any card to run that day's sketch. Each one is its own world with its own controls; some are gentle, some are loud, one is technically a quine.

01

One color, one shape.

prompt by Piero

02

Twelve principles of animation.

prompt by Anna Lucia

03

Fibonacci forever.

prompt by PaoloCurtoni

04

Lowres.

prompt by Manuel Larino

05

Write "Genuary". Avoid using a font.

prompt by Piero

06

Lights on/off.

prompt by George Henry Rowe

07

Boolean algebra.

prompt by PaoloCurtoni

08

A City. A generative metropolis.

prompt by PaoloCurtoni

09

Crazy automaton. Wild cellular rules.

prompt by PaoloCurtoni

10

Polar coordinates.

prompt by Sophia (fractal kitty)

11

Quine.

prompt by Manuel Larino

12

Boxes only.

prompt by Stranger in the Q

13

Self portrait.

prompt by Jos Vromans

14

Everything fits perfectly.

prompt by Roni

15

Invisible object, shadows only.

prompt by P1xelboy

16

Order and disorder.

prompt by Ivan Dianov

17

Wallpaper group.

prompt by Ivan Dianov

18

Unexpected path.

prompt by Baret LaVida

19

16x16.

prompt by Jos Vromans

20

One line.

prompt by Jos Vromans

21

Bauhaus Poster.

prompt by Piero

22

Pen plotter ready.

prompt by Sophia (fractal kitty)

23

Transparency.

prompt by PaoloCurtoni

24

Perfectionist's nightmare.

prompt by Sophia (fractal kitty)

25

Organic geometry.

prompt by Manuel Larino

26

Recursive grids.

prompt by Piero

27

Lifeform.

prompt by Manuel Larino

28

No libraries, no canvas — HTML only.

prompt by Piero

29

Genetic evolution and mutation.

prompt by Monokai

30

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

prompt by Bart Simons

31

GLSL day — artwork in shaders.

prompt by Piero

WILDEST CONJURATIONS

If you only have time for four, these are the ones that surprised me most while I was building them. They are not the cleanest or the most "finished" — they are the ones where the sketch did something I didn't quite ask for.

THE ENGINE

Everything sits on top of a small homegrown framework around p5.js. It handles the per-day navigation bar, exports, and a few utility traces. Code lives next to each sketch — open the folder, read the file, change the file.

  • stack p5.js + custom engine.js
  • exports PNG · SVG · DXF (per sketch)
  • chatbot RiveScript, rule-based
  • ai used none — patterns only
  • run open index.html in any live server

the oracle :: rule-based, slightly haunted

Guide Bot of the House

A small RiveScript oracle. Ask it about a day, the engine, the stack, or who wrote which prompt. It will answer — politely, and without summoning anything from a cloud.

RiveScript p5.js no AI

try: day 07who made day 21what techhow do exports work