Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
In this submission for data.PUNK, I turn to the very early and somewhat debatable origins of Punk by pulling on Little Richard. This may seem like an odd choice to visualize data on U.S. life expectancy-or maybe you could ask the heart to Keep a Knockin?
If there’s anything that justifies a more fluid actual game getting made, it might be this game-and because of the visuals alone. The world is long overdue for a platformer starring Little Richard. Case in point:
The data itself and the game experience is, sadly, nowhere as cool as the teaser image above. Perhaps I should start pre-orders since that tends to be how games work these days-or perhaps a preorder simulator so that we can experience that collective let-down together. It may not be much, but you can dance along the data (without music-which is some sad irony of this entry) and see this health data from an entirely new lens.
This is based on a framework I used to build out this submission on bike data. In the case, I leaned towards a very loud style. This time around I went with a more fun, eclectic vibe.
The settings don’t quite speak to the full picture-as I mentioned, I did not include music in this build. Maybe I’ll fiddle with this down the way. It’s such a great style.
Data
NCHS Death Rates and Life Expectancy at Birth
Source
Found at: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/nchs-death-rates-and-life-expectancy-at-birth
Publisher: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Parent organization: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Direct download used: https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/w9j2-ggv5/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD
What it is
This dataset summarizes U.S. mortality trends by year, race, and sex. It includes average life expectancy in years and age-adjusted death rates. The data.gov record describes the dataset as a National Center for Health Statistics mortality trend dataset covering historical death-rate and life-expectancy measures.
Try it here: https://www.ericrhea.com/gamelab/projects/healthnchs/index.html
Read more here: https://www.ericrhea.com/gamelab/healthnchs.html
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://advisoryhour.substack.com/p/summer-into-ai-eric-week3-submission-629.