iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The jack-o-lantern is an adaptation of this lego mosaic I made a while ago!

Jack-o-lantern LEGO mosaic on the wall with a spooky spot light beneath

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Finished! As my first double knitting project, I made a couple Halloween coasters (...ghosters?) #pixelart #knitting

Two knit coasters with orange on black patterns.

The left one is two rows of ghosts (similar to in Pac-Man) with a row of bones in between.

The right one is two jack-o-lanterns. At the top and bottom are teeth-like patterns

The coasters were done as double knitting, so they are reversible! Here you see the reverse side which has the same (well, flipped) pattern but black on orange this time

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The other thing I miss: phones with an actual keyboard! This was my first phone years ago. It's gone downhill since then in terms of tactile interfaces.

Photo of an LG enV3 phone that flips open to reveal a texting keyboard

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I do miss my old iPod Nano. A few years ago I got this hi-fi player. And nowadays I'm using it a lot whenever I'm walking around the city! The UI is... okay, but it does have clickwheel, physical buttons and a headphone jack!

Photo of a Surfans F20 media player. It has a clickwheel! And actual buttons!

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Much further down the road, I want to make a more polished version of 2D conformal geometric algebra. You can get some interesting shapes when you add circle inversions to the mix! ptrgags.dev/p5-sketchboo... for an old test in a different repo

Screenshot showing some conformal patterns. double spirals and circles arranged in a way reminiscent of scallops

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Cool to see all your group theory stuff this month! I'm a little frustrated, I've also been working on some symmetry/group theory related things, but life is unusually busy so won't have anything finished for a while. Works-in-progress: ptrgags.dev/pattern/cycl... ptrgags.dev/pattern/dihe...

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

New blog post on my website! ptrgags.dev/update/2026-... The past couple weeks I've been haphazardly porting code from past projects to prepare for new stuff. Math pattern articles, math art, and more! #creativecoding #mathart #symmetry #spirograph

Three grids of white lines on a black background, each one rotated 120 degrees relative to the previous one. There are also solid yellow rectangles overlaid. Each rectangle is aligned to a different grid.

Screenshot of a hypotrochoid animation (Spirograph curve where the small gear is inside the ring)

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oh wait we already have Mime type in an RPG lol

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I also started a Patterns section as a place to document math patterns across art, music, programming, and elsewhere! These articles each include several animations.

Screenshot of the patterns page. There are two thumbnail images for the first two articles. The first one is a set of meshed gears labeled "Gear Tree". The second depicts something like a ruler for musical time, with the label "Musical Meter"

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I've been redesigning my website lately! Now I have a blog section (including an Atom feed). This gives me a place to round up links to the creative things I make all in one place. ptrgags.dev/blog.html

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Finished this cross stitch pattern of coral! I drew the pixel art myself in Aesprite #embroidery

Completed cross stitch project of stylized coral. The coral is red on purple rocks. The background is navy blue with white lines

Printout of the pixel art I drew for the embroidery pattern.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Almost there! Just two more columns of navy blue to go. #crossstitch #embroidery

Coral embroidery pattern, mostly finished. The coral in red, the rocks in purple, and the vertical wavy lines in white are complete. The background navy blue stitches are mostly done, there are just two more columns of half stitches on the left that need to be completed.

A "column" here is measured in blocks of 10 stitches wide

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Wow this looks a lot more fleshed out compared with last week! #embroidery

Photo of the coral cross stitch pattern in progress. The coral shape is now completely visible, though only the rightmost branch is fully cross-stitched.

The purple rocks at the bottom are almost done

The navy background is still in progress.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Similar to what I did with embroidery floss, I started the design process by picking color palettes. This creative constraint helped inspire some of the artworks. For example, purple, teal and white screamed "90s paper cup" to me

Lego tiles, 4 each in 8 different colors (dark turquoise, black, navy blue, bright yellow, orange, maroon, purple, white)

Lego tiles arranged into 2x2 pixel color palettes. Each one of these was used to design one of the 8 mosaics

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

To continue the theme of making my digital creations more tangible, I'm working on some code to export scenes as a PDF printout. Here I made a mini-zine instruction booklet!

Mini zine unfolded. Each of the 8 pages is a different pixel art design.

First row (upside-down due to the way a zine is folded):
90s "Jazz"
Abstract pattern with sine waves and dithering. It kinda looks like something you might knit
Jack-o'-lantern
Platforms over water like you might find in a video game

Second row:
Bloody knife (continuing the Halloween theme)
Stamp depicting a key
An abstract pattern in non-binary colors
An abstract pattern reminiscent of dripping paint

Zine folded as a little trading-card sized booklet

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

And... Finished! I've been rebuilding the lego mosaics for my walls with new patterns. Clearly I'm ready for Halloween and it isn't quite September yet haha

Photo of eight lego mosaics slightly overlapping on a table. At the top, a mini zine shows two of the patterns.

Some are abstract, some are Halloween themed. One is inspired by the 90s Dixie Cup Jazz pattern.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Progress update on the coral cross stitch pattern! I'm using half-stitches for the first pass, this way the shape appears rapidly. A second pass will turn them into cross stitches. #embroidery

Progress on the coral embroidery project, with the pattern printout on the right.

About a third of the canvas is covered with half stitches

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Amusingly, I also happen to have a pineapple on hand haha Phyllotaxis is such a neat math pattern in nature. Sunflowers, pineapples, petals, etc. These spirals are created from surprisingly simple growth rules! youtu.be/dvvJG6P3K_M is the best animation I've found on the subject

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I've seen several of your videos on Numberphile over the years. The hitomezashi one from several years ago is the one that I keep coming back to. I think because it's such a simple math pattern. It's very easy to implement both in thread and in code. So thank you for the introduction!

Hitomezashi embroidery pattern stitched on Aida cloth

Close up of a blackwork embroidery pattern with different patterns in a square grid. The pattern in the middle is a red and green hitomezashi pattern

Another closeup of an embroidery pattern. In green stitches there's a skewed version of a hitomezashi pattern. The columns are vertical as usual, but the "rows" are stitched at 45 degrees.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

As a creative constraint, I separated my embroidery floss into palettes of 3-4 colors (with varying lightness values). So now the creative prompt is: "choose a random bag and design an embroidery pattern for it". That's more manageable than "huge pile of floss, do something with it"

Embroidery floss skeins divided into small groups.

The same bundles, each in a separate plastic bag

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

The other day I started a new cross-stitch project. I drew this coral pixel art myself in Aesprite, now to put it to fabric!

Start of a cross-stitch project of a pixel art coral, with a chart next to it. The chart uses four colors (white, coral, light purple, and navy blue)

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

wow, @alphachromeyayo.com's point about learning to enjoy the process is helpful! Makes me think of pan flute. It's surprisingly difficult to play compared to other woodwinds! I struggle to get a consistent tone. Yet it's still such a pleasing timbre, so even playing it wrong can be fun!

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

This one reminds me of a project I made some years ago about drawing machines! Such a fun concept to explore ptrgags.dev/drawing-mach...

Screenshot of Drawing Machines project depicting a line that spirals around the surface of a sphere.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Wait, fishy, what are you... OH NO 😱 ...this is a _horror_ game, apparently??

You Win screen showing the hungry fish with blood dripping down its mouth. Plankson is nowhere to be seen 😢

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

including Plankson! totally unrelated to Sheldon. See? he has a mustache.

screenshot of the map with an arrow pointing out where Plankson is (he's tiny)

Pixel art editor showing a closeup of Plankson's glorious 'stache.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This was a fun one! as I followed along I was quickly reskinning things for a nautical theme.

sokoban game from the video, except you're a fish instead of a dog. the grass is seaweed. the cats are squids. the crates are chests. you pick up flashlights to scare off the squid. there are food pellets instead of bones

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The inspiration for this comes from a couple places: - @mixolumia.com's Number Lab cart (bsky.app/profile/mixo...) - The album cover from my improv album REW/FFWD (see ptrgags.dev#/album/rewin...)

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Yes, you can rewind the tape! (the animation is smoother in the actual cartridge. I'm trying out PICO-8's GIF capture feature here. it seems to skip some frames)

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I made a #pico8 animation of a cassette tape! You can find the cartridge on my GitHub here: github.com/ptrgags/pico...

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

As for why I have anaglyph glasses -- sometimes I do stereo photography! The viewer widget on my website does have an anaglyph option. One random example from my website: ptrgags.dev#/stereo-pair...

Screenshot of my website with an anaglyph 3D image of a macro photo of plants in a planter.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Love it! Nice to have something to use these glasses for!!

A pair of 3D anaglyph (red/cyan) glasses

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I, too, have colorful dodecahedra.Yet mine lack the FPS haha (This is to say, your animation is pretty!)

Partial ring of 12-sided dice with colors ranging from purple to blue to green to grey to orange to red.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I took a page out of @jenivievedesign.bsky.social's book. I got a pack of holographic laminate sheets to add some iridescence to my art! I picked a pack with geometric patterns as that best fits my art style. #arttradingcards #aceo

Art trading card doodle in green and yellow with iridescent vertical lines on top where the light hits it. The iridescence comes from the holographic layer

Picture of the doodle in less lighting so you can see the pattern better.

The top left was a polka dot pattern turned into ladybug-like creatures. The top right is a decorative leaf with a... Slug? With three eyes.

The bottom right is a coral-shaped green creature under the sun. The creature has a mustache and has one eyebrow raised.

The bottom left is horizontal stripes with diffusion-limited aggregation patterns that kinda look like roots

Sheet of holographic laminate sheet. The light is angled to show off how it produces iridescent rainbow patterns. This pattern has a grain along the length of the page, kinda like brushed metal

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I saw the back of this cereal box and I just had to make it into Bees Wax fan art 🐝.

Cereal box (Honey Nut Cheerios) where the back has a honeycomb-themed maze game on a hex grid.

Glued to it is a few pieces of colored cardstock that mimic the honeycomb pieces from the Bees Wax game. This includes a couple little bees (complete with tracing paper for translucent wings)

Above it is a hand-lettered title: "Bees Wax: Cardboard Edition".

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Definitely! I took the space shooter concept and reimagined it as a pen-plotter apparatus!

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

That's fun to watch! Took a brief glance at the code. One thing I noticed is that you're effectively doing abs(sin()) to make a simple bouncing motion. That's clever!

Screenshot of Desmos graphing calculator showing a plot of the absolute value of sine of x.

The troughs of a usual sine wave are folded over the x-axis. This looks like a sequence of bumps which meet at sharp corners whenever sind of x is zero.

If you interpret the graph as an animation curve, it's kinda like a ball bouncing up and down, always returning to the same height.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

aaaanyway, what is this cartridge you ask? in the tutorial video I noticed you had a more in-depth version of the cheat sheet than the one I used before! and that's how I learned about pattern fills in Pico-8 (via the fillp() function) So I had some fun with pattern fills and animation!

screenshot of the cartridge running in Pico-8. A circle with a dashed line pattern over a striped background.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

*sigh* nope, Bluesky seems to convert the image to webp, and it seems this changes the colors enough to corrupt it. I converted the webp to PNG just to check (webp does support lossless encoding... but maybe Bluesky isn't using it). bummer.

pico-8 console showing an error message indicating that my experiment didn't work

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Experiment time! exporting a Pico-8 cartridge I made in .p8.png format to see how shareable they are here on Bluesky I'm curious if this will work, or will Bluesky post-process the image and potentially corrupt it... I'll report my findings in a moment

Pico-8 PNG cartridge of a circle decorated with an animated pattern fill.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I've done all sorts of programming projects, but the most relevant here is 2D math art and animation in p5.js (see ptrgags.dev/p5-sketchbook/) I love both p5 and pico-8's APIs for their simplicity. No headaches setting up rendering pipelines, just setup() and draw().

screenshot from an animation I made. it's a number of geometric shapes arranged in something like a comic book layout with irregularly shaped panels.

screenshot of an animation of a plant that branches in a maze-like pattern

screenshot of an optical illusion (variation on the Penrose triangle)

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I'm trying to find a way to store my embroidery projects (including future ones I make) in a way that I'll actually view and enjoy them... Any ideas? My first thought is something along the lines of a 3-ring binder but smaller. Not sure how to mount these as "pages" though. #crossstitch #blackwork

Eight cross stitch and blackwork embroidery patches. All 50x70 squares (except the bottom right one we don't talk about that...)

The fabric is not all the same count, but the largest plastic canvas one would fit in a 4x6 inch rectangle

Older embroidery patches. 2-3 inch squares

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Latest sketch: a screen scrambler!🍳 I'm using some offscreen buffers to copy and paste chunks of pixels. There's a feedback loop - the cursor can select previously pasted tiles! Live version: ptrgags.dev/p5-sketchboo... #p5js #processing #animation #creativecoding

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

I started this by sketching out the structure I wanted:

Index card that shows the prompt I made for myself.

On the left, pen colors. A=blue, B=magenta, C=black

On the right, the layout. Three squares marked C/A, A/B, B/C. Lines connect the three squares of the layout together (with some arrows on the ends to indicate looping)

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Yesterday I finished making this unusual clock. It lets you set what hour you wake up/go to sleep. Then you can see what proportion of the day has elapsed so far in a visual way. Live version: ptrgags.dev/p5-sketchboo... #p5js #clock #creativecoding

$Screenshot of my Waking Hours Clock demo. It's a 24 hour clock dial (with just an hour hand). It is divided into two portions. a large orange arc for waking hours, and a smaller purple arc for sleeping hours. There are white numbers outside the circle from 0 (midnight) to 23 (11:00 PM). Another set of blue fractions inside the circle indicate proportions of daytime/nighttime.$

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This clicked once I juxtaposed this with some of your previous images. The warped square is a tile, then you add scaled copies both in the gap and outside. In this particular case, the tile corners are between the circles

Diagram of parastichies from your previous post with annotations.

Another pink warped square is drawn inside the hole

The blue circles indicate the tile corner

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Ooh these look nice! Nice color palettes.vibrant without looking harsh. It's reminding me of this p5.js sketch I made a couple years ago. ptrgags.dev/p5-sketchboo... There's quite a few links on the page to other interesting resources on phyllotaxis!

Screenshot of the Infinite Sunflower animation linked above.

It's a stylized spiral of petal shapes, colored in yellow, orange and brown like a sunflower.

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I saw this thread the other day. Since I have a train trip tomorrow, I thought I'd do the same! I picked up a couple ACY albums on Bandcamp to add to my media player.

Surfans F20 Hi-Fi media player playing a track from All Aboard by ACY

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Peter Gagliardi @ptrgags.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

*looks up Stentor* ah, the name checks out

Image results for Stentor. It has a long narrow body with a flared end like a trumpet

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