More Perfect

Two weeks ago I made a million particles hold one fixed flag. This week I let them hold anything you commit to them.

Second submission for Built on Yesterday — and this time “yesterday” is Week 2.

Back then I shipped Perpetual Union: about a million points of light on your GPU, each one its own independent agent with no central control, all springing toward one fixed shape — the flag. Drag across them and they scatter; let go and, with no one giving the order, they re-form. Out of many, one.

It always bugged me that the shape was fixed. A union isn’t the symbol — it’s the thing a bunch of free parts agree to hold together. So I generalized it.

Type a word. The union forms it.

Same half-million sovereign points, same no-conductor physics — but now they’ll hold whatever you give them. Type 1776, WE THE PEOPLE, your own name, and the particles assemble it out of nothing. Tear it apart with your cursor; it finds its way back on its own.

How a word becomes a million targets

The trick is small and kind of satisfying: your text gets drawn to an invisible canvas, and every “ink” pixel of it becomes a target position in a texture. Each particle is assigned one of those pixels and springs toward it — so the letters are literally made of a crowd of independent points, each holding its own spot in the whole. I ease off the turbulence once a word is forming so the letters stay crisp, and swap the flag’s red-white-blue for a warm gold while it holds text. Still one self-contained file, still entirely on your GPU, no libraries.

A nod

Shout to Jake Strait — nobody out-shipped Jake on flags and fireworks and Americana this summer; the man committed to volume. This is me going the other direction with the same raw material: one patriotic particle build, but grown up into something you can put your own words into. Different instincts, same flag.

Try it

• ★ Live (type a word, tear it apart): https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/week-4/more-perfect/

• 💾 Source (one file): https://github.com/myles-mf/summer-into-ai-2026/blob/main/week-4/more-perfect/index.html

• 🗂️ Everything I built for the contest: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/

• Also posted https://merlinforge.com/blog/more-perfect-week-4/

A union that only ever holds one shape is a poster. A union that holds whatever the people commit to it — and re-forms when it’s torn — is closer to the real thing. Thanks Eric, for the last week, and the whole summer.