Provenance

The Source Foundry

Eight questions, one prompt, one paste back. It builds a ninth source — an institution that has never existed and that nobody else selling this system will ever have.

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The eight questions

1 · What was it An institution, a trade, or a household. Not a person alone. 2 · Where A place with weather and work in it. Invent the name. 3 · What did it keep The thing it gathered, counted or looked after. 4 · When did it begin 5 · How did it end Archives are made by endings. This is the most important answer here. 6 · Whose hands One person who touched everything. Name and job. 7 · What does it look like printed Its stationery, its type, its ruling. 8 · Its emblem One small mark that repeats on everything.

Stuck? start from one of these

Three intakes already answered. Load one, change two or three lines, and it is no longer the same institution. Do not ship one unchanged — every buyer of this Foundry has the same three.

The Register

Two hundred openings. Each one answers the three questions people stall on — what it was, what it kept, how it ended — and leaves the other five to you. That is deliberate: the name, the place, the hands, the paper and the emblem are what make the source yours rather than everybody's.

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Your sources

Browser storage is convenient, not a backup. Export your sources before clearing browser data or moving to another device.

What to do with it

Copy the prompt.
Open a brand new chat. A chat that has been making images will try to make an image out of this.
Paste it and send.
Copy the whole reply, from === PROVENANCE SOURCE === to === END ===.
Come back and paste it into step three.

It will be long. Around six hundred words come back. That is correct — a source is a large object. If the reply stops early, say continue and join the two halves together.

The prompt

Paste the reply

Nothing is installed until it passes. A source that is missing a field will not fail loudly during generation — it will quietly print the word undefined onto a card you were going to sell. That is what this check is for.