clarissa
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I watched Clarissa Darling run experiments from her bedroom computer before anyone called it creative coding. When I needed to give this quirky side project a name, I immediately thought of her.
I was teaching myself the terminal, building small tools and vibe coding my way through it. The command line was useful but bare, and I kept thinking about the DOS prompt on my dad's computer in the early 90s, where even a basic command could land you in something colorful and a little absurd. About GeoCities, too, making pages out of raw HTML -- the first time I understood you could build something from words. Now I'm building things from words again, and the feeling is the same.
clarissa is a handmade art project that lives in your terminal and happens to run on Node.
what it does
When you run clarissa, you get figlet ASCII art in a random color scheme, a git summary of whatever repo you're in, your horoscope, and a daily tip. Most of it is unnecessary, but this started as a learning tool, so a few useful things crept in. clarissa's special report -- a nod to the show -- has git stats and tips that turned out sort of motivating. And quit and go chains the terminal commands to pull code and start a dev server, which saves me typing them out every morning.
Installable from npm, runs anywhere Node does.