MAINLINE

Digital consciousness stream. Matrix aesthetic · THX-1138 hue.

A full-screen terminal news ticker that renders live global headlines in large OTF-font block characters with a white-hot → deep green gradient. Headlines auto-translate into the native script of their subject region. Ambient mic input warps the glitch rate in real time. A --poetry mode replaces the feed with public-domain literary passages.

Run

python3 mainline.py            # news stream
python3 mainline.py --poetry   # literary consciousness mode
python3 mainline.py -p         # same

First run bootstraps a local .mainline_venv/ and installs deps (feedparser, Pillow, sounddevice, numpy). Subsequent runs start immediately.

Config

At the top of mainline.py:

Constant	Default	What it does
`HEADLINE_LIMIT`	`1000`	Total headlines per session
`MIC_THRESHOLD_DB`	`50`	dB floor above which glitches spike
`_FONT_PATH`	hardcoded path	Path to your OTF/TTF display font
`_FONT_SZ`	`60`	Font render size (affects block density)
`_RENDER_H`	`8`	Terminal rows per headline line

Font: _FONT_PATH is hardcoded to a local path. Update it to point to whatever display font you want — anything with strong contrast and wide letterforms works well.

How it works

Feeds are fetched and filtered on startup (sports and vapid content stripped)
Headlines are rasterized via Pillow into half-block characters (▀▄█ ) at the configured font size
A left-to-right ANSI gradient colors each character: white-hot leading edge trails off to near-black
Subject-region detection runs a regex pass on each headline; matches trigger a Google Translate call and font swap to the appropriate script (CJK, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.) using macOS system fonts
The mic stream runs in a background thread, feeding RMS dB into the glitch probability calculation each frame
The viewport scrolls through a virtual canvas of pre-rendered blocks; fade zones at top and bottom dissolve characters probabilistically

Feeds

~25 sources across four categories: Science & Technology, Economics & Business, World & Politics, Culture & Ideas. Add or swap in FEEDS.

Poetry mode pulls from Project Gutenberg: Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson.

Ideas / Future

Performance

Concurrent feed fetching — startup currently blocks sequentially on ~25 HTTP requests; concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor would cut load time to the slowest single feed
Background refresh — re-fetch feeds in a daemon thread so a long session stays current without restart
Translation pre-fetch — run translate calls concurrently during the boot sequence rather than on first render

Graphics

Matrix rain underlay — katakana column rain rendered at low opacity beneath the scrolling blocks as a background layer
Animated gradient — shift the white-hot leading edge left/right each frame for a pulse/comet effect
CRT simulation — subtle dim scanlines every N rows, occasional brightness ripple across the full screen
Sixel / iTerm2 inline images — bypass half-blocks entirely and stream actual bitmap frames for true resolution; would require a capable terminal
Parallax secondary column — a second, dimmer, faster-scrolling stream of ambient text at reduced opacity on one side

Cyberpunk Vibes

Keyword watch list — highlight or strobe any headline matching tracked terms (names, topics, tickers)
Breaking interrupt — full-screen flash + synthesized blip when a high-priority keyword hits
Live data overlay — secondary ticker strip at screen edge: BTC price, ISS position, geomagnetic index
Theme switcher — --amber (phosphor), --ice (electric cyan), --red (alert state) palette modes via CLI flag
Persona modes — --surveillance, --oracle, --underground as feed presets with matching color themes and boot copy
Synthesized audio — short static bursts tied to glitch events, independent of mic input

macOS only (system font paths hardcoded). Python 3.9+.

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