So, this whole ‘triangl influencer’ thing, it kinda just popped into my head one afternoon. I was looking at some of those network graphs, you know, the usual dots and lines, and I thought, man, this is so boring. How can you actually feel the influence spreading? It just looked static and, well, uninspired.
And triangles, they’re just so… strong. Basic. Foundational. I figured they’d be a good starting point, and honestly, anything else felt wrong for this particular idea. I wanted something with a bit of oomph, visually speaking.
My first crack at it was super simple. Too simple, really. Just drawing a bunch of triangles on a screen. Maybe color one red for the ‘influencer’ and the others blue. Pretty standard stuff, right? But it felt dead. Like, completely static. And influence, as we all know, isn’t static; it moves, it changes things, it has a ripple effect.
That got me thinking. What if the triangles could react? Like, if one main triangle ‘shouts,’ the ones nearby ‘hear’ it and maybe pulse a bit, or their color intensity changes. That seemed more like it. I wanted some dynamism.
I spent a whole weekend just fiddling with code, trying different things to make them feel ‘alive’. I tried stuff like:
- Making them grow or shrink when ‘influenced’.
- Having them spin a little, just a subtle rotation.
- Changing their brightness or saturation.
Some of it looked pretty wild, almost like a chaotic disco party for shapes. Definitely not what I was going for. I wanted to show influence, not induce a seizure.
The really tricky part, the bit that had me scratching my head for a while, was defining what ‘influence’ actually meant in this little visual world I was building. Was it just about how close they were? Or did they need to be explicitly ‘connected’ somehow, like an invisible string pulling them?
I eventually decided to go with a sort of ripple effect. The idea was you’d pick an ‘influencer’ triangle, and it would send out this conceptual pulse. Any triangle hit by that pulse would then get ‘activated’ and could, in turn, influence its own neighbors. A chain reaction, basically.
Getting the logic for that pulse and the subsequent chain reaction to work smoothly, well, that took some doing. There was a lot of coffee involved, and plenty of staring at my screen, wondering why the code was stubbornly refusing to do what I wanted. You know how it is. I remember this one bug where instead of a nice, gentle ripple, all the triangles just suddenly exploded in size all at once. My cat, who was sleeping nearby, was not amused.
But eventually, after a fair bit of trial and error, mostly error, I got it smoothed out. Now, you can click on any triangle, and it becomes the source of influence. It sends out this subtle visual cue – nothing too flashy – and you can actually see this wave of ‘awareness’ or ‘activation’ spread through the whole network of triangles. It’s quite satisfying to watch.
The ‘influenced’ triangles don’t just change once and then sit there. I made it so they kind of ‘echo’ the influence for a short period. Maybe they glow a little brighter, or their edges shimmer for a moment before they settle back down. It gives it a more organic feel, I think.
It’s not like this thing is predicting stock markets or revolutionizing data science, you know? It’s more of an art piece, really. A way to visualize an abstract concept like influence in a tangible, or at least visible, way. I kept the tech pretty straightforward; I used some pretty basic drawing tools for it. My goal wasn’t to get bogged down in complex libraries or frameworks. The idea was to keep it simple and see where the core concept itself would take me.
The heart of it is just a loop that updates the state of each triangle – its color, maybe its size, a little animation flag here and there – based on its neighbors and this ‘influence’ wave that passes through. Simple mechanics, but the emerging behavior is what’s interesting.
So, right now, what I’ve got is this interactive canvas of triangles. You can sort of ‘poke’ it by clicking, and then you just watch the influence spread out. It’s quite mesmerizing, actually. You start to see these little patterns and flows emerging that I didn’t explicitly code in. It’s like one of those little desktop sand garden toys, but it’s all digital triangles and invisible forces shaping them.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, especially for what started as just a random weekend project. It’s a simple little thing, but I feel it captures that essence of something spreading, of one element affecting another in a visible way. It does what I set out for it to do.
Maybe next I’ll try to make it so the triangles can actually push each other around physically, or perhaps they could form larger, more complex structures based on how much ‘influence’ they’ve accumulated over time. Who knows? That’s the real fun of these little personal experiments, right? You just follow where the idea leads.
