Your Name in Paint

·2 min read·Ethan Ham

A standard deck has 52 cards. The number of distinct shuffles is 52 factorial — roughly 8 × 10⁶⁷. Every time a well-shuffled deck has ever been dealt, the order has almost certainly never existed before and will never exist again. The input space is so large that uniqueness is effectively guaranteed by math, which is fun to think about.

This works the same way. Your string runs through a hash, seeds a PRNG, and drives layered Canvas rendering. Same input always produces the same output, but the space of possible outputs is large enough that you are almost guaranteed to create something unique. So go generate some art with your name, your favorite numbers, a bunch of spaces, whatever. Almost guaranteed to be one of one. Neato.

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What's happening: your text gets hashed to a 32-bit integer via FNV-1a, that integer seeds a mulberry32 PRNG, and that PRNG drives everything — trait selection, star placement, note pitch. The fingerprint below the canvas (0x + 8 hex chars) is the raw hash — a piece ID. Same string, same mode, same ID, always.

PIXELED builds a 24×24 portrait — a face assembled from seeded trait picks: hair, eyes, mouth, and whatever accessories the hash decides to layer on. Same blockiness as CryptoPunks, same logic: a small grid, a lot of combinations.

CONSTELLATION plots 8 to 15 stars on near-black, connects a subset of them into a figure, and names the result from a phoneme library. Reads like a catalog plate, not a poster.

MUSICAL writes a fragment of staff notation — treble clef, a seeded key signature, eight quarter notes placed by the PRNG. It's not playable music. It's what music looks like before it decides what it is.