About
遇 (Yu, "encounter") — English name Serendip — is a quiet place to encounter classical Chinese poetry.
There is no search, no feed, no notification. When you open it, one couplet is chosen for this very moment from tens of thousands of Tang and Song poems. Which line you meet is half up to heaven.
Encounters are scarce by design — when a day's are spent, the book closes until tomorrow. Every poem you have met is kept in a scroll of past encounters.
Product & business
The web version at poem.sometime.day is free, with no ads, no accounts and no tracking. The Android app is free and complete, and works entirely on the device — the corpus, the choosing and your encounters all live on the phone; it sends nothing to our servers. Revenue comes from a single one-time in-app purchase that unlocks the home-screen widget, the live wallpaper and the export of one's encounters as a long image or a printable handscroll.
Sources & credits
Poetry corpus from the open-source chinese-poetry project (MIT, Copyright (c) 2016 JackeyGao). Weather data by MET Norway (CC BY 4.0). Typeface: Huiwen Mincho by Terry Wang (free for commercial use). The seal 遇 is drawn by hand after the small-seal form in the Shuowen Jiezi, released under CC0.