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Putting My Apartment in a Blender

2026-07-21

I've gotten interested in capturing textures in the real world recently: sidewalks, wallpaper, etc. Basically any flat-ish surface, I'm interested in. Mostly non-natural right now. I don't have much to say about this at the moment except the following:

  1. I have strong gut opinions about textures I like in a home: loop carpet, granite, old bathroom tiles. And a few I don't care for, which I will not dishonor by naming.
  2. They are effective for me at evoking memories, a bit like a smell.
  3. Given that, it's fun/unsettling to take them out of context a bit.

As it happens a roommate is moving out from our apartment, a charmingly dilapidated 60s build, and I thought I would make a little ode to some of its strange textures as a parting gift:

Click the image to refresh, or here for a fullscreen version.

Pretty basic geometric patterns, with minimal overrides to the randomness. Also includes a throwback to one of my old doodles. I think of it as kind of like a palette of the home. I made 300 of these and put them on a cheap digital picture frame, and was pleased with how it came out.

As an aside on procedure, I found working with coding agents on this to be kind of ideal: I had Claude do a bunch of the image conversion/resizing and make me a simple playground where I could tweak parameters (ranges of number of textures used, acceptable angles for the stripes, etc.) for patterns I described. And then when it came time to export a random set or make the single image view above, it was just a matter of locking in those parameters, and Claude spit out the tools. Alas I was left with the unenviable task of actually moving the photos to the frame via their evil app, but such is life as glue.