I Built a Very Stupid Oval Office
Ten days ago I had an idea for something that probably did not need to exist.
Now it does. Although that sentence needs a small correction.
I had the idea. We built it.
“We” is me and an increasingly ridiculous collection of robots.
The idea is an interactive version of Donald Trump’s Oval Office. You wander the room, click things, and find stories, sounds, videos, historical oddities, bad decisions, hypocrisy, and assorted American political insanity.
Some of it is serious. A lot of it is ridiculous. Occasionally it is both.
The spark was a site I loved almost twenty years ago. It put Sarah Palin in the Oval Office and turned the room into a giant clickable joke. The URL is gone now. The memory is not. I have thought about that site for years. Ten days ago I started wondering what a modern version would look like.
Unfortunately, we have plenty of source material.
That version is this site: Oval Arcade.
Building an Oval Office
The first problem was the room.
I wanted Trump’s actual redesigned Oval, gold and all, as a clean high-resolution view without him behind the desk. That picture did not exist. So I assembled one.
Some of it is real photography. Some of it had to be repaired, extended, or rebuilt. Photoshop did a lot of the work. Adobe’s AI tools filled gaps. Topaz pushed the final image up to a usable resolution.
And yes, AI was involved. A lot. Which is the “we.”
I Have Complicated Feelings About the Robots
I am fascinated by AI, impressed by it, irritated by it, worried about it, and apparently unable to stop using it.
This project is the clearest example I have personally seen of why it is a big deal.
Ten days ago this was an idea in my head. Now there is a high-resolution Oval full of interactive objects, sound, video, sourced stories, hidden jokes, a fake smartphone with working apps, and an alarming amount of code.
These were not ten leisurely days of asking a robot to work while I watched TV. I put a ridiculous number of hours into this.
What AI changed was not how much I cared, or how much work I was willing to do. It changed how much I could finish with those hours.
I can have ideas. I can obsess over details. I can tell when something is not working. I can write. I know enough about technology to be dangerous. I am not a professional web developer, graphic designer, investigative researcher, or Photoshop expert.
ChatGPT was a research assistant, brainstorming partner, editor, fact checker, and an extremely confident intern who often needed, “No. That is completely wrong. Try again.” There was a lot of that last part.
Cursor did much of the actual site. I described an interaction, handed it assets and research, and watched it become working code. Then I told it what was broken, ugly, unfunny, or wrong, and we went around again.
Photoshop is where a lot of the visual room got assembled. AI image tools let me do things I simply would not have known how to do alone.
So who built the site? I did. We did. Both are true.
The robots did not decide what this should be. I did. Sometimes getting them to understand that was harder than doing it myself.
They also cannot simply be told, “Go make this.” Or at least they cannot make this. There were hallucinated sources, broken links, mangled images, invented facts, forgotten instructions, and nights when ChatGPT and Cursor lost their minds at the same time.
There were also moments that felt like magic. An idea at 10:00 that used to mean learning a whole new programming trick could be clickable by 10:30.
That lowers the wall between having an idea and building the idea. I find that exciting. I also find it a little terrifying. Both can be true.
The Fun Part Was Making Things Click
Once the room existed, it became a playground. Diet Coke. Sharpies. Flags. The golf bag. The books. Air Force One. Eventually a ridiculous Trump-branded phone on the coffee table became its own little operating system: Truth Social, Signal, Maps, Photos, Grok Imagine, a human printer.
The loop was simple. I had an idea. I told the robots. They built something. I said that was not what I meant. They tried again. I said closer. They broke something that had worked for three days. Eventually we got there.
Some jokes are stupid. Some lead to real reporting. Some start stupid and end up serious. That mix mattered. This is political satire, not a pile of cheap shots. When I make a factual claim, I want you to see where it came from. A lot of these ten days were spent chasing original posts, archives, and reporting from sources I actually trust.
There are also places I decided a joke was the wrong move. Click Abraham Lincoln and you get something different. January 6 is already documented extraordinarily well by NPR. I do not need an inferior interactive knockoff. The site introduces their work and sends you there.
Sometimes the right design choice is shutting up. That one was mine.
AI Slop Built With AI
The irony is sitting right there. The site jokes about the bizarre AI imagery that has become part of political communication. I used a lot of AI to build the site. I am aware. I think it is hilarious.
There is still a difference between using a tool to execute an idea and asking a tool to supply the idea. The parts I like most came from a human making weird connections. A naval flag goes to one joke. Lincoln goes somewhere else. A golf bag becomes a story. A book on a couch becomes a joke that should not work. A phone on a table becomes a project inside the project.
AI can help make those ideas real. It is much less interesting when I ask it to have the ideas. After ten fairly obsessive days, I am more convinced the human part matters than I was when I started.
The robots can produce an astonishing amount of stuff. Knowing what should exist is a different problem.
So What Is This Thing?
It is not comprehensive. It is not objective. I am not pretending I do not have a point of view. It is not a campaign site, and it is not an endorsement.
It is satire. It is also a strange little interactive record of a strange stretch of American politics.
Mostly I hope it is fun to poke. Click things. Some objects do exactly what you expect. Others absolutely do not. I am not going to tell you where everything is.
Go to Oval Arcade and wander around.
This Isn't Finished
I am calling this version done because otherwise I will never release it. That is not the same as actually being done.
I already have more ideas than room. Things will change. The news will donate material faster than I can add it. I also do not intend to spend every waking hour on a fake Oval Office.
The plan is about five to ten hours a week. Add, remove, fix, follow whatever absurd thing reality provides, and see whether one person can keep this alive without making it a second job.
I am also going to write here on Sundays. Site changes. Research crumbs. Technology, politics, AI, or whatever hole I fell into that week.
This first post is longer because I wanted to say where it came from, and who helped. “Collection of humans” overstates it. There was one human.
Ten Days
Ten days ago this did not exist. Tonight, if I do not find six more things that desperately need fixing, I am putting it on the internet.
Ten days is an absurdly short time to go from an idea to this. It also ate an absurd amount of those days.
The next question is whether I can keep it interesting at five to ten hours a week instead of rearranging my life around a fake Oval. We will find out.
I still do not know exactly how I feel about AI. After this I have more questions, not fewer.
I do know one thing.
I had the idea. We built it.
And whatever else I think about AI, that still feels pretty damn cool.
Oh, and by the way…
ChatGPT wrote most of the first draft of this post. I told it what I wanted to say, rejected some of it, changed the rest, argued about tone, and made it rewrite until it sounded like me.
Then I asked Cursor to cut it down, kill the repeats, and stop me from saying the same true thing four times. I argued with that too.
Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much how we built the website.
So one last amendment:
I had the idea. We built it.
Again.