Earth
Where the observations are made from.
This is a daily log kept through 2026, written from Cambridge, UK.
Why it looks like this
A log only works if it gets written on the seventh month as reliably as the first, so this one is built to be worth opening. Each day is a planet whose sprite is derived from a hash of its date — the same date always produces the same world, and no sprite is ever drawn by hand. Watching a month fill in is the point.
The metaphor stops at the door of an entry. Pages you navigate are a pixel galaxy; pages you read are quiet, narrow and text-first, in the same palette.
What drives a planet
Nothing is drawn by hand. Every day’s world is generated from that day’s own data, so the same entry always produces the same planet.
| Planet property | Driven by |
|---|---|
| Surface pattern / terrain | Hash of the date — unique but stable |
| Diameter | Hours worked, in six buckets |
| Colour | The projects worked that day, blended by hours |
| Terrain type — ice, rock, ocean, lava, gas, forest | Dominant category that day |
| Number of moons | Extra projects beyond the first |
| Ring | A milestone day |
| Passing comet | An idea was recorded |
| Asteroid debris, no planet | No entry that day |
| Name | A real star, exoplanet or moon, picked from the date |
Colour and terrain are deliberately separate: colour says what you worked on, terrain says how. Two days of writing on different projects look different; two days on the same project in different modes look related but not identical.
3D planet textures
The optional 3D galaxy uses sphere maps by Solar System Scope, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The texture images are included unchanged. They are visual reconstructions based on NASA elevation and imagery data; colours have been adjusted by their original publisher.
In the 3D view, the astronomical texture supplies the planet’s natural surface. An Earth texture is used only for a record explicitly named Earth; otherwise the maps act as material references for a world class, not as a claim that the record is a second Earth, Mars, or Jupiter. Project colours are intentionally kept off the 3D bodies: a day with additional projects gains natural-looking satellites, while the project names remain available in the selected-day panel.
The lightweight realism pass reuses those same maps for rocky relief, lights each system primarily from its own star, and adds only a thin atmospheric limb to bodies that need one. The viewer loads just the texture families used by the current archive, rather than downloading the complete planet library every time.
How it is kept
| Idea | Here |
|---|---|
| Day | Planet |
| Month | Stellar system |
| Year | Galaxy |
| Project | Constellation |
| Group of projects | Constellation family |
| Idea | Comet |
| Milestone | Supernova |
Entries live in log/, one file per day, each carrying a sessions: list of projects and hours — a day usually touches more than one. Projects live in projects.yml under stable slugs, so they can be regrouped at any time without rewriting history. Everything else on this site is generated from those two things by scripts/build.py.