Rectangles began with a simple observation. The modern media landscape is full of interesting things, but they tend to live on separate islands.
Films live on one site, books somewhere else, music on another platform, and podcasts scattered across the internet.
Finding connections between them often meant opening many tabs and hoping you remembered what you were looking for. So we wondered if there might be a better way.
Everything we encounter today arrives inside rectangles — film frames, book covers, album tiles, podcast players, game cartridges.
Not all rectangles are the same. But sometimes the taste behind them is.
A film might share its sensibility with a novel written decades earlier. A podcast might point toward a piece of music you hadn't considered. A game might echo themes from a book you half-remembered. Rectangles attempts to map those connections.
The system looks at themes, creators, ideas, moods, and storytelling patterns to surface interesting paths between different media worlds. You can ask it about anything — a topic, a mood, a specific title, a genre you can't quite name.
Sometimes the connections it surfaces are obvious. Sometimes they reveal something you might never have discovered on your own. Which is really the point.
Good taste is one of life's quieter pleasures. Rectangles simply tries to make it a little easier to explore.
a small note about data
Rectangles gathers information from several public data sources and APIs across movies, books, music, podcasts, and games. Most of the time they are wonderfully accurate. Occasionally they are not.
AI systems also have a habit of being confidently wrong from time to time. We try to keep things tidy, but if something looks strange or slightly inaccurate, there is a reasonable chance the data wandered in from somewhere unexpected.
In other words: enjoy the map, but navigate with common sense.