This week I was happy to take a slight detour away from my lovely real estate ladies to approach a related topic:

our eventual demise.

When starting the data/API assignment, I pretty much immediately knew I wanted to work with some form of mortality data, especially after reading the super inspiring article by Jer Thorp where he mentions creating a website that returns the most recent drone strike victims. I had originally planned to work with some sort of actuarial table data similar to a previous project of mine, the Death Watch, but then I was reading the NYT, and I came across the obituary section.

So now we have this, a sketch that lets you check and see if you’re dead:

I just used the NYT API, though I found what appeared to be a super comprehensive API of all obituaries from all around the country that I really wanted to use, but it cost $750 A MONTH!!! what the hell! Can’t a gal just scan the endless horde of the dead for free?

Anyway, getting the API to work was a whole ordeal, but mainly just because the search query stuff took some getting used to. Then it was just tweaking and fine-tuning, adding features like a different response if no obituary showed up or having a different obit come up on subsequent presses.

editor

full screen

Sorry Chunhan! Hope this doesn’t come off menacing haha, was just testing names I didn’t know would come up or not.