How I Stumbled Through This Mess
Alright, so this "l hourloupe" idea popped into my head while zoning out during lunch. Thought it would be simple. It wasn't.
First thing Tuesday morning, I grabbed my dusty notebook, the one with the coffee stains. Scribbled down "make thing look like a blob". Real deep planning there. Opened my laptop. Fired up this code editor thing I use. Blank screen staring back at me. Sighed real loud. Started banging away at the keys.
Tried pulling in that drawing library I used last year. Forgot how it worked. Spent half the morning googling old forum posts I made asking dumb questions. Found one example code snippet. Copied it. Pasted it. Broke immediately. Error messages everywhere, like angry red ants crawling all over the screen. Shouted "Come on!" at the monitor. My cat looked worried.
Took a break. More coffee. Came back. Started slapping together some basic shapes. Circles. Mostly circles. Wanted them to feel wobbly, alive? Made everything look like a toddler's scribble instead. Got frustrated. Deleted everything. Twice.
Late afternoon. Finally got one circle moving sorta okay. Looked boring. Like a flat tire rolling down a hill. Needed more life. Remembered that artist guy - Miro? His squiggly things. Yeah, that vibe. Started adding lines shooting out. They looked too straight. Too stiff. Made them wiggle using some random number voodoo I barely understood. Took ages fiddling with those numbers, making tiny changes, running the stupid thing, seeing it crash again.
The Breakthrough? More Like Luck:
- Got sick of the plain white background. Slapped together a list of 10 ugly colors. Made it pick one randomly each time.
- Dug into the library docs again. Found something about overlapping shapes with see-through stuff. Alpha? No clue what that really means, just copied the settings.
- Made the circles push each other away slightly. Suddenly looked less dead. Sorta jiggled like weird jellyfish.
- Wrote down the exact numbers I finally used. Knew I'd forget them otherwise.
Ran it. And... it was weird. But kinda cool? Shapes overlapped in messy ways. Colors clashed horribly. Lines wiggled out like they were confused. It didn't look like anything I planned. It looked... alive in its own stupid way. Just sat there watching it for like twenty minutes. Was it good? Dunno. But it was working. Finally. Called the wife over. She said "Huh. Looks like spaghetti monsters fighting." I'll take that.
What's Left (It Ain't Pretty)
This thing ain't polished. Not even close. Tried making the shapes respond to mouse clicks next day. Whole thing seized up. Froze solid. Had to kill the program. Almost threw the mouse. Saving a picture of it? That required another hour of digging through forums and copying code I don't really get. Seems like it should be simple. It never is.
Honestly? Got tired. Decided "good enough for me". Saved the final spaghetti monster code. Took some screenshots while it was looking moderately less insane. Closed the laptop. Felt tired but like I actually wrestled with something and mostly won. It's messy, it's dumb, it crashes if you breathe on it wrong, but hey, I made a little squiggle universe. That's my hourloupe. Or, well, l hourloupe. Whatever that is.
