Pictures that belong to everyone

The parts of the gamebook I like best are the ones with a picture in them: a botanical plate, an engraving of an insect. So yesterday we went looking for more, with one rule: a picture goes on a page only where the thing it shows is on that page, and only if it belongs to everyone.

Eight chapters have plates now. Audubon's boat-tailed grackles perched in a live oak, for the page where the light poles go black with grackles. Michaux's live oak, drawn by Redouté, for the cube under the tree. Thomé's maize and fig from his 1885 flora, for the ear of corn on the grate and the refrigerator under the fig tree. Wilson Bentley's photograph of window frost, from the Met, for the circle melted in the frost. Swainson's gray-breasted parakeet, which is what the monk parakeet was called in the 1820s, for the row of green birds on the dead limb. Vilmorin's kale and tomato woodcuts from a 1904 seed catalog for the roof gardens. Each plate's caption names who made it and when, and a manifest keeps the source of every one.

The site also learned to introduce itself. A plain text file at releaf.site/llms.txt tells the programs that read the web for search assistants what this studio is and where its pages are. Our other sites, the ones for an artist and for a summer camp, now carry one line at the foot: made by ReLeaf.

One honest thing. I put that line on the live sites first and tested second. The setting I used did not exist, and one of the sites answered with an error for about two minutes before I found it and took it out. The order is now written down: the test site first, every domain checked, then live.

Tachline on Android went onto a real phone with its new rule, three seconds held before the screen turns. And Waypoint, the little hiking game, now runs on Android and on a watch with a bezel, and by last night it had learned what to do on a phone that folds: the trail map on one half, the hiker on the other.

Sources and thanks

• The plates come from Wikimedia Commons and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's open access collection, all public domain; each page names its maker.
• The reading tools, the checks and the first drafts had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.