I made a Penfield Mood Organ as a submission for The 250KB Club. You can find it at penfield.ily.rs.
The Penfield Mood Organ is a fictional device from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K Dick. It uses Penfield artificial brain stimulation to modify the emotions of the user. All the user must do is read the manual to find the proper number, dial it, and then feel exactly as they’ve requested. While I’m writing this, the current tone on my organ is 816. Desire to return to bed.
I love the book and thought making some sort of digital mood organ would be cool enough to be considered a piece of art.
What I’ve ended up with is a single static page that regenerates once-per-hour. Each time it regenerates, the ring number is incremented by one, and a new dial tone is randomised. Currently we’re on number 3868, so roughly half a year since it started ringing (and to that end, half a year late in writing this post).
Ring #3868. Your Penfield Mood Organ wakes you.
816. Desire to return to bed.
The point of the club is to make something interesting, performant, and sustainable in 250KB or less. There’s a ranking of every submitted page in ascending order of size, and a content ratio: what percent of the site is actual content versus extras like styles, scripts, and so on.
I had two aims setting out:
As of writing this, the Penfield Mood Organ is the smallest page on the site and is 100% content, ringing in at around 260 bytes on average. There’s a bit of variance depending on which mood was rung for that particular hour. It’s also the biggest source of traffic to this site which surprised me. I didn’t realise the 250KB club was so popular, but more people go to the Mood Organ from the club and then on to view this blog than anywhere else.
I’d like to see what else I can squeeze into the incredibly small <500 byte limit but I need a good idea. As it stands I don’t think I have anything that justifies the cost of the extra bytes.
I recommend checking the club out. The Penfield’s ranking isn’t particularly impressive when compared against some of the other pages on there: the others are much more featureful and make some really cool use out of the 250KB limit. If somebody could be inspired to make something smaller than the Penfield, that would be really cool. It was some of the 1 kb pages on there that inspired me to make this one, so if I could pass that on to anybody else I’d consider making this a success.
Thanks.