Seventy-two seasons, and the weather over them

The almanac

Japan's old calendar divides the year into twenty-four solar terms, 二十四節気, and each of those into three — seventy-two microseasons, 七十二候 (kō), about five days apiece, each named for the thing that happens in it: the east wind melts the ice; the bush warbler sings; rotten grass becomes fireflies; the bears go to their dens. The names wagahai uses are the 1874 略本暦 set, the one in use in Japan today.

Each kō gets one drawing of one countable thing — five geese are a composition, "a few geese" is a flock. Where the kō names a state rather than an object (heat, mist, thunder), the drawing is the object that state happens to: for the warm wind arrives, a fan lying down.

The year

春 spring

夏 summer

秋 autumn

冬 winter

The weather

Five words, and nothing finer: clear · cloud · rain · snow · wind. They name art, not a forecast. Drizzle, showers and thunderstorms are all rain; fog is cloud; wind is a dry sky with the wind over its threshold — falling water always wins.

The weather is a second drawing laid over the first: four overlays for the whole year, painted with a dry, pale brush in the upper third of the sheet — which is why every kō leaves its upper third empty. Where the two meet, the darker ink wins. clear is no overlay at all.

It needs location = [lat, lon] in the config, and then once an hour the client asks Open-Meteo for the current weather at those coordinates. That request is the whole of what leaves your machine: a public endpoint, no key, no account, two numbers out and two numbers back. No location, no network, a refused answer — all of those are clear. The corner never says "unknown".

How they were made

Plainly: an image model drew them, against a written style, and most of what it drew was thrown away.

The style is one continuous brush line, in the lineage of the single-stroke ensō, breaking into dry brush where the ink runs out — chosen after a first batch showed that a line beats a wash in this corner, and why: a drawing painted in one ink at one opacity has exactly one tone to spend. A wash is a mid tone, and a mid tone on near-black is nothing. A line loses nothing on the way. Every drawing is judged at 140 pixels wide on a black ground, and nowhere else.

Three candidates per kō. Each is keyed — the paper removed, its photographic falloff flattened first, because the model likes to paint paper as a photograph of paper — then scored against what can be measured (an empty upper third, quiet coverage, no frame, no solid mass), and then looked at. Sixteen of the seventy-two were overridden by eye, mostly for a circle the model had wrapped around the subject. What is stored has no colour and no ground: it is a mask, and the theme supplies the ink — pale on the dark themes, dark on the light ones.

Yours to replace

Twelve of the drawings ride in the client, one a month, so a fresh install still turns through the year. The other sixty arrive as a cache in ~/.local/share/wagahai/ink — the installer fetches it, and a client that reaches its mail over ssh keeps it current from its own host. Anything you put there wins:

• 38.png — that kō (the evening cicada)
• risshuu.png — a whole solar term
• autumn.png — a whole season
• rain.png — a weather overlay

Black ink on white paper, any size, 5 : 4 for preference; the client keys the paper away and paints the rest in your theme. ink = "off" in the config turns the corner off, and a terminal without graphics never reads a file.