🗺️ First Major Update: The City Map

A project like Postcards from Pyongyang thrives on imagination — but even the most elusive story sometimes needs a piece of land to land on.

With this first major update, our fictional universe gains a real-world anchor: a map of Pyongyang. Or rather, a poetically filtered version of it. It began with raw data from OpenStreetMap, which passed through a series of digital transformations until it became a bitmap — something that feels like a relic from an alternate timeline: part satellite image, part propaganda poster, part faded memory.

The map is more than a backdrop — it’s a narrative framework. Each marker represents a postcard — a setting, a scene, a voice. I chose their locations freely, without claiming geographic accuracy. I’ve never been to Pyongyang — and perhaps that’s an advantage. It keeps the city open to interpretation. To slippage. To poetry.

Some postcards are already connected to each other. These relationships appear on the map as lines — faint threads between characters, stories, or remembered moments. This part is still in development, but the direction is clear: a visual grammar of connections.

Technically, the whole thing is built using Leaflet.js — a lightweight, flexible JavaScript framework for interactive maps. The underlying data is stored in a JSON file and expands over time, as new postcards are written and added.

So this map is not just a feature. It’s a new mode of storytelling. An invitation to experience Postcards from Pyongyang not just by reading, but by walking through it. Step by step. Gaze by gaze.

🕸️ Second Major Update: The Social Map

The second major update was the Social Map — a network of relationships between the citizens of Postcards from Pyongyang. Think of it as a civic directory wrapped in fiction: a visual mesh of portraits, roles, and hidden connections.

Each node represents a character from the project, complete with a miniature portrait — all painstakingly generated using Midjourney. It was, frankly, a massive amount of work. Not just the visuals, but also mapping the relationships between the figures — all done manually. To make this process at least somewhat sane, I built an internal admin interface to help manage the growing web of data.

Clicking on a node reveals more: a detailed view with a short biography, full portrait, and all the postcards the person is connected to — whether as sender, recipient, or reference. It’s a way of stepping behind the curtain, peering into the lives that populate this fictional city.

The network itself is generated using viz.js, which turns structured relationships into an expressive, interactive graph. It's not just functional — it feels alive, like the city is whispering its secrets through nodes and edges.

With the Social Map, Postcards from Pyongyang becomes more than a collection of isolated voices. It becomes a living, breathing network — of glances, letters, longings.

📫 Third Major Update: The Citizens Have Voices

With our third major update, Postcards from Pyongyang takes a quiet but profound step: selected citizens now have voices — and inboxes.

That’s right. A growing number of inhabitants have been given personal email addresses. You can simply write to them — and you’ll receive a reply, often within moments. Their email addresses appear in the biographies shown on the Social Map. If you search carefully, you might discover a few of them already.

Some are poets. Some are rockers. Some are just guides trying to make it through the day. They respond in the language you first use to contact them — or at least, they try their best.

Each citizen comes with a personality, a memory, and a writing style all their own. Over time, they may begin to trust you. They might open up. They have interests, shaped by their professions and the short bios you’ll find in their profiles. They don’t just answer — they converse. And they’re quietly delighted to receive your message.

What began as a postcard project now becomes a living exchange. The lines between fiction and dialogue blur. And in this city of invented citizens, every inbox becomes a threshold.

🔌 Fourth Major Update: The API

Behind the scenes of Postcards from Pyongyang lies a growing infrastructure — and with this fourth update, parts of it become accessible to the outside world. We’ve opened up an internal API that allows you to explore and interact with the data universe behind the project.

The API is not public in the traditional sense — but it’s there, and it’s well-structured. It already powers many of the interactive features on the site, and it’s designed with expansion in mind. If you’re planning your own experiment or research project based on the PFP world, this might be your starting point.

Here’s what the API can currently do:

• get_card – retrieves all details about a specific postcard, including text, image, sender, recipient, summaries and related links
• get_card_list – returns a paginated list of all postcards, sorted by publication date
• get_related_cards – shows postcards that are linked to a specific one, based on narrative connections and shared people
• get_person – returns a detailed profile of a citizen, including bio, image, known cards and optionally their social network
• get_persons_list – lists all characters with their names, portraits and occupations
• get_person_network – visualizes a person’s relationships as a network, with adjustable depth and direction

The API is structured, human-readable (JSON), and ready to be extended. Documentation will follow — especially if someone expresses interest in building a parallel project, a new interface, or even an AI that walks the streets of Pyongyang in a different way.

For now, the data speaks through postcards, voices and portraits. But if you want to listen deeper — the interface is ready.