• Wrote a CHIP-8 emulator for Varvara.

• Released the Turye font-editor.
• Released a Cat Clock.

• Rewrote the Uxn assembler to use a single pass.
• Released Busy Doing Nothing in paperback.

• Released Donsol, for Varvara.
• Added a reference manual for the Uxntal opcodes.

• Added guides for the line and rect tool, in Noodle.
• Added interface responsiveness, in Dexe.

• Added d-pad controls, in Orca.

After 16 years of daily journaling and tracking, I am finally stopping. I believe that the problems I was attempting to tackle, such as moodswings and the lack of focus, have been fixed and the data gathered in these recent years reveals nothing new or actionable. A bi-monthly format where I write a few sentences on my recent interests might be more practical.

Let's begin, once again.

I don't know what 2023 has in store, but some of it will be invariably spent tangled up in this.

• Wrote a stack-effect checker for Uxntal.

As I was learning to use the Soroban to do elementary level multiplications, I stumbled on this fantastic article on the use of the Salamis Tablet, which has been fascinating me and occupying my mind at night. There, now it can torment you too.

• Created a calendar program.

I also tried writing a block editor for Uxntal, but failed, I couldn't make up my mind on how to visualize each cell, and in the end, I've decided to drop the idea and went back to reading Takashi Kojima's Advanced Abacus book and toying with my virtual soroban while the snow fell on the boat.

• Created a little virtual abacus.
• Enjoyed discovering DuskOS.

The conference coincided with the first Pacific Northwest Merveilles meetup. There was no better way to end this trip than having the chance of finally meeting, in person, some of the friends with whom I share this online community.

• Presented Weathering Software Winter.

I haven't had time to do much else this month, but I did modify Left to use a variant of the Smalltalk-76 font, which after a handful of tweaks, has quickly turned into my favourite font to program with.

• Implemented TinyBASIC in Uxntal.

This motivated me to take a deep dive in the language, and what better way to grasp a language than to write an implementation.

• Preparing slides for Weathering Software Winter.
• Still doing daily drawings.

I am dedicating each morning to drawing a different scene from the Neauismetica, and will try to keep it up for as long as I have ideas.

• Sown a sleeve for the Playdate, and a Merveilles burgee.
• Updated the Playdate implemenation of Uxn to the latest core.
• Added d-pad controls to the Wireworld playground.

The days are getting shorter, and so is the time that we can spend on the computer, due to our batteries depleting earlier a bit each day. So, I spend my evenings proof-reading the Wiktopher manuscript and reading.

• Added monochromatic modes to Orca, CCCC and Catclock.
• Wrote a little program for the Adafruit Playground.
• Finally gotten around to fixing the calendar page.

It's no wonder that birds don't sing here, lest their songs be invariably drowned by the deafening display of the vacationers broadcasting to the fourth horizon over that they are taking it easy.

• Made Drifblim capable of assembling large files, namely Potato.
• Started poking at building a little sequencer again, oh no.

Despite my unsettled moods, I was able to built myself a cozy little world to work from, the operating system turned out to be extremly useful in looking through my large collection of pcm, chr and icn files.

• Built an operating system.

• Wrote a Thue interpreter, and a tiny desktop calculator.
• Sent artwork to the second issue of Fantomes zine.
• Designed a fresh new bold font for Orca.

• Planted soy at 50°8.549'N 124°56.972'W
• Wrote a macros pre-processor for Drifblim.

• Wrote our keynote for NIME 2022.
• Transcribed notes over to the Permacomputing Wiki.
• Planted wheat, barley and mustard greens at 50°8.409'N 124°56.842'W

• Wrote a linter for Uxntal, and implemented tail-call optimization to uxnasm.
• Planted lentils, mung beans and radishes at 50°8.527'N 124°40.195'W

• Implemented an ornithologics playground.

• Made a little spreadsheet program that fits neatly in a 6kb rom.
• Wrote a HTML5 implementation of UxnVM.

• Wrote a plain X11 implementation of Varvara.
• Created an Uxntal REPL, called Varvara's Bicycle.

• Played a little set for Algorave's 10th anniversary.
• Revamped Orca, Nasu, and Left to support Varvara's new Screen/Auto port.

• Wrote a little single-file Uxntal assembler called Drifblim.

• Implemented J & Y wiring, in the Uxn port of Orca.
• Wrote a version of minesweeper for Varvara.

Finally, brought back incoming links at the bottom of wiki pages. They had been gone since the migration from C, to Uxntal.

After watching an excellent documentary about the Newton, I found myself reading about the various ways to convert hand-written letters into their digital representations, and soon found myself fascinated enough that I just had to invent my own little shorthand calligraphy and interpreter.

• Wrote a daily devlog for December Adventure.
• Revisited the Lispkit book and ecosystem.

• Explored graphical input languages.
• Noodling on an operating system, again.

I've spared a few evenings to implement a Ulz encoder, for which my first attempt was nearly a year ago, and at the time, writing programs in Uxn that involved many nested loops terrified me. So, it felt great to revisit this old problem that stumped me before, and solve it.

Members of the Solresol community and I talked about the lack of useful example sentences in the language, and how the handful of examples out there often include mistakes, so we've put together a revised list of sentences that we could agree on.

• Released the Elmet Brae compilation.
• Implemented the ULZ compressor in Uxntal.

In the evenings, I've been revisiting ternary computers after wondering about string encoding in such a system. I've only implemented the basic scaffolding so far, but I'm hoping to reach a point where it can assemble and run basic TerSCII printing routines.

• Improved the Opcode Tests.
• Made a Solresol Translator based on Sidosi.
• Did a few fixes to Uxn5 and Nasu.

I also helped with the implementation of a few devices for the Javascript version of Varvara that a friend of ours use in their classroom, someone also contributed a WASM implementation of the Uxn core, which speeds things up a lot in comparison with the old one I made last year. I've also played with sixels.

• Wrote a song for Elmet Brae EB01.
• Released transcription of Computing And Sustainability.
• Implemented a few missing devices to Uxn5.
• Overjoyed to be back on the water.

• Nothing to show yet, but working on Varvara's new Audio device with Bad Diode.
• The talk for Strange Loop is now available online!
• Enjoyed reading Pauwels' Blumroch L'Admirable once again.

• Translated parts of Wiktopher to Solresol.
• Removed interactive mode to Drifblim.
• Got a Prince Stolas from Lizbeth.

I normally am a really careful planner when it comes to giving these sorts of technical talks, you wouldn't catch me going out the night before.

I had assumed that the train from Seattle would either carry their one vegetarian meal on the menu, or accommodate. After a first day of eating cold bread loaves with margarine, and an altercation with an uncompromising attendant on the second day, I managed to secure myself a "Steamed Russet Potato A-la Tomato Sauce" for the third.

I had also assumed that the venue would carry palatable vegan options, or that I could cook my own. After missing the Strange Loop meal service twice in a row, due to talk scheduling conflicts, I managed to queue long enough to acquire one of the last remaining scoops of an awful vegan soup. I promptly returned to stealing whole fruits from the hotel gym and eating them in my room, which I was content with. The problem that wasn't apparent at first was that eating sweets all day kept me up all night.

Despite these mistakes in preparing properly for the road leading to the talk, I managed to show up on stage on time, give an (hopefully) entertaining presentation at Strange Loop 2023. I'd love to give a sunderly thank to Jack Rusher for the tea that brought my voice back, and Josh Morrow for letting me borrow their laptop and install Uxn on it for the presentation.

• Released slides for the Strange Loop 2023 Talk.
• Added soft-reboot to Varvara.
• I learnt how to cook instant noodles with a clothing iron.

Not previously knowing the language, I have spent the past few days neck-deep in digital archeology excavating some of the language's vanishing documents from the Wayback Machine and transcribing them in a format that will allow me to translate the texts. While I'm at it, I'm planning on translating the Thousand Rooms story, Famimi Remisolla as practice.

• Collected notes into a Solresol, and Solrela, pages.
• Enjoyed exploring the archives of the Sidosi community.

• Wrote a 4kb illustration program, and drew.
• Enjoyed rediscovering the AltaPlana wiki.

While implementing changes to Oquonie, I noticed how many single-purpose labels were used merely to hop over short lengths of code, enough that having ran of ideas for names to called them, I would default to things such as &skip, &continue or even &ok. The solution was to create anonymous labels, and as to be capable of nesting them, I ended up inadvertently adding lambdas to Uxntal which has drastically improve code readability, and as a side effect allowed for the rapid creation of tree data-structures.

• Started versioning Varvara.
• Implemented whole-sprite flipping to Varvara.
• Added makefiles to major uxntal projects.
• Enjoyed playing with Felix Winkelmann's Fleng.

Week after week, I find myself revisiting Drifblim's implementation, and each time I leave convinced that I've succeeded in improving it as much as I ever could, considering the negligible scale of the program, yet more elegant solutions, entirely unimaginable at the time, always become nothing less than obvious, a week later. — The destination that I'm grasping for is getting ever farther at the same rate that I approach it, but for as long as the program decreases in size, and increases in reliability, the chase remains exhilarating.

• Changed how the 0x00 color is handled by Varvara.
• Added a bit of breathing room to Left's interface.
• Enjoyed Nettie's Uxntal Cheatsheet.

We had to negotiate rapids and convert the ideal transit time from tide tables to Daylight Saving Time, which reminded me that I never made time to know when the change occurred in Canada. I am taking a not of it here for next autumn, it begins on the second Sunday of March at 2 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday in November at 2 a.m.

• Created a desktop slide rule toy.
• Implemented a few birds to yo!joy.
• Added an astronomy page.
• Enjoyed using Lynn's Chibicc compiler.

Having no connectivity has helped me focus on writing my talk for Strange Loop 2023.

• Added speaker's notes and pencil mode to Adelie.
• Formatted some of the major roms.
• Redesigned the uxntal arity-checker, some design notes.
• Enjoyed Jenny Odell's Another Kind Of Time conversation.

To continue my research on concatenative language inference, in contrast to the reassembler which creates an intelligible textual representation from a binary file and a symbols file; this time, I've written a reformatter that works from a textual source file and reindents it based on context. An interesting puzzle, considering how few syntaxic structures Uxntal has, lacking explicit notation for loops or even conditionals.

• Found a way to removed the page limit of 32kb for the wiki.
• By popular demand, the docs folder is now browsable.
• Enjoyed playing with Bellinitte's Pinhole renderer.

It's unbelieveable that we can sail up along the coast, find a pretty nook between two mountains that seems inviting, and just live there. When we'll have walked up and down the old trails to our heart's content, maybe we'll keep going. Part of me wonder for how long this will remain possible, it's just too good to last.

• Implemented Dad's Puzzler, in Uxntal.
• Added interface controls to Varvara's Bicycle.
• Illustrated an interpretation of the Merveilles logo.
• Enjoyed Graham Shawcross's Five Finger Exercises.

We're casting off for Desolation Sound in a few days. Most afternoons are spent stocking up Pino with enough food to last us until we make our way back south next autumn. I'm eager to depart.

• Implemented type-inference in Uxntal.
• Resuming work on proof-reading Wiktopher.
• Wrote a falling sand, simulator.
• Enjoyed Conal Elliot on elegance and beauty in computation.

As a side-project, unrelated to threads, I made a pixel-perfect implementation of the classic Macintosh Note Pad application, so I could keep notes throughout the day and that turned out to be a fantastic aid to collecting passing thoughts. While building it, I also had a chance to implement text-wrapping in a project with very few moving parts and better understood how to handle text selection, where the boundary of a selection ends up being before the original anchor, and implemented it in Left.

• Ported the classic Macintosh Note Pad application to Varvara.
• Enjoyed Ramsey Nasser's Causal Islands 2023 talk.

Also, while I consider Beetbug to be a kind of disassembler, I wanted to see if I could build something that would let me go from a source file to an assembled rom, and back again. I figured that being able to recover a project from a rom and its symbols file has important potential in terms of data preservation. To make this possible, I modified the symbols file to include comments, and was able to complete the back and forth I wanted.

This allowed me to experiment with something called structured editing, in which you modifying the underlying structure, symbols and bytecode of a program, and not its structural representation.

• Added an interactive mode to Drifblim.
• Started building a reassembler.
• Added a type port to the Varvara Console device.

I've been diving into Interaction Nets again, and fallen for Sato's Inpla language, the code is a nightmare but I feel that with a bit of work, and a better division between the interpreter and virtual machine, this could turn out to be something very fun.

After watching Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 talk, I went and read Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice and I've been fascinated with it. It goes in details about their approach to the implementations of the Smalltalk VM, and the challenges to getting the ST-80 image to boot on all these platforms.

• Discovering new things in Uxntal.
• Rewrote Bicycle to be a companion application to Left.

I've had a bit of time to kill between rehearsals, and whenever I had a few minutes to myself, I'd pour over the Lisp Machine memos. It occurred to me that the byol-type books really ought to teach about targetting Lisp architectures(or at the very least, something in the vein of SECD abstract machines), instead of implementing Lisp on top of imperative languages, which does a disservice to the entire exercise.

• Preparing slides for our talk at Biosonic.
• Implemented the Hilbert Curve fractal.
• Returned image support to Left.
• Added the Hundred Rabbits splash to Donsol.

I will be staying on Galiano for a week during the Biosonic residency, it has been a while since I've last slept on firm ground.

• Preparing slides for our talk at Biosonic.
• Wrote a faster Uxn core.

• It looks like Oquonie will make its way to the Playdate.
• Played a set at the Lovebyte Party.
• Added a REPL mode to Beetbug.

• Spared some time to fix a handful of issues in Orca.
• Spent nearly every waking moment working on the Oquonie prototype.

Meanwhile, I've also tried to bring potato to a usable state, which means that for it to entirely replace the current launcher, it should be able to assemble and run the assembled rom, a state to which I am inching closer.

• Finally found a use for the 3 unused uxn opcodes.
• Rewrote the javascript REPL implementation.
• Could I possibly port Oquonie, to Uxntal?

I've read Koopman's Stack Machines: The New Wave and it inspired me to experiment with other virtual machine designs, namely that of the NOVIX NC4016. But after two weeks of experiments, I returned to writing Uxntal, partly since I do not feel limited in the realization of my ideas with my current stack, and partly because these sort of systems make for extremely obfuscated assembly languages. That being said, I can't seem to shake the craving to experiment with the Setun-70..

• Chose a new metadata format and implemented it.
• Revamped the mirrors.

How dearly I wish I had time to write more, and if I hadn't left our camera aboard, take some pictures.

• Wrote a daily devlog for December Adventure.
• Enjoyed reading The Secret History.

• Played techno with friends.
• Implemented and documented Vera.
• Added exhaustive rules support to Fractran.
• Enjoyed catching up with recent movies.

I was curious to see whether using creative storytelling to give a talk about computation would resonate with the Handmade attendees, fortunately, based on what echoed late into the night within the halls of the Mediterannean Inn, above tables covered with zines and whiteboards ornate with hastily scribbled rewrite rules, most people got it. I hope that my loveletter to the work of Borges, Conway and Wryl, will be an invitation to explore the space of rewriting, while remaining critical of the trajectory of computing.

• The Diablo Tribute was released!
• Redesigned Left, the font is now bigger!
• Hyped for the Aliceffekt show in Montreal, Dec 6.
• Released A shining palace built upon the sand.
• Enjoyed playing Diablo 2.

These past two weeks have been a throwback to the release of Orca, where the less programmatically inclined started playing with it right away, and those with preconceptions about what programming is, what it should look and work like, found it inscrutable and opaque. To some, the booklet remains near undecipherable. I will try to help bridge that gap with more approachable documentation and examples over the winter.

• Implemented a Pocket Rewriting Playground.
• Released a remix of Solvent.
• Finished Drawtober.
• Enjoyed Virginia Woolfe's Books & Portraits.

For a upcoming event, I wanted to be able to show anyone who might ask a few simple examples of rewriting computation in a way that would not be intrusive during a conversation, so I printed a zine that covers the basics of it, basics that I could foresee myself repeat over again and having a challenging time doing so without visual aids, rewriting being inherently a visual coding paradigm.

• Still drawing new scenes everyday.
• Released a remix of Papercutz.
• Wrote a rewriting zine.
• Enjoyed David Cowley's book on Modern Old English.

It can all wait 'til November.

• Drawing everyday this month.
• Released a remix of Wumpscut.
• Enjoyed seeing everyone's drawtobers.

It has been 4 weeks now, I have vivid dreams in which I reduce the number of steps it takes my fractions to find the Fibonacci sequence, I have written 3 different implementations and sit on enough material for a whole extra talk of its own, or at least enough to bore a whole amphitheater to tears. — Have we lost the plot yet?

• Against my better judgment, wrote more Fractran examples.
• Released remix of SOPHIE.
• Started a rewriting mailing list, say hi!

Six or seven months has been enough to fall so far behind software updates, to miss just enough versions, that even the part of the program that looks for updates doesn't recognize the new server endpoints. As expected, most updated things got worse, a few of them became quite awful, as it typically goes with software. A friend uses necrotic as opposed to bitrot, because bitrot implies things have been left to decay but software necrosis is rotting while being alive and maintained.

• Wrote Conway's Game Of Life in Conway's Fractran.
• Found a mouse-picking bug while doodling with Oekaki, and fixed it.
• Improved the little music player with d6's help.
• A thought for the crew of SV Dakota who lost their home.

Years melt away, no tool-chain moat is ever bridged, programs of every shape and form have been transcended, the dogfood thoroughly consumed. "Blessed!", for the transformation of the damned into doghood is complete.

• Wrote a cyclical self-replicating program.
• Added macro support to Uxnfor and Left.
• Thank you cmus for years of service, it's now time for a change.
• Enjoyed Kristen Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia.

It's time to manifest all these thoughts scribbled in transit. I need to finish up the slides for the upcoming talk, and the music for the upcoming show, and, and time is ebbing!

• Found a neat optimization of the Uxn core.
• Made a few contributions to Kodiak.
• Added macros support to Drifblim.
• Wrote a Fractran runtime and updated notes.

I've also kept busy revising some of the Solresol poetry in Wiktopher. In R. W. Kimmerer's Grammar of Animacy, she says that 70% of words in Potawatomi are verbs, as opposed to English in which only 30% are. Through the lens of an animist language, the hill is less there, than there is occupied at being a hill. She puts it succinctly in "A bay is a noun only if water is dead".

• Corrected Solresol translations in Wiktopher.
• Designed a calligraphy system for Solresol.
• Added Symmetric dictionary to Solrela.
• Reworked tbsp's tea timer.

There are as many days to our bow without connectivity than those that lay between our stern and Prince Rupert, where we were last able to make contact. In these secluded days, I am reminded of a passage from one of Thoreau's journals that reads the inscription on a Swedish inn:

• Progressed toward a Markl prototype.
• Improved Uxnfor to better handle OOP formatting.
• Wrote for Malleable Systems Collective's Fearless Extensibility.
• Took care of many small tasks for the wiki that I had been putting off, such as improving categorizing and removing redundant pages.

For as long as Uxn has been around, I've meant to resume and complete a puzzle game that Rek and I wanted to build after Oquonie, called Markl. During these recent night passages I've spent my watches playing the game out in my head, and arrived to an exciting place with the design. I've started implemented it the moment we reached port.

• Wrote a track for a Diablo tribute cassette.
• Added binary data pasting to Left.
• Enjoyed the haikus from Santoka's teacher Seisensui Ogiwara.

Spend enough time in the esoteric programming circuit and you'll come across the usual suspects: self-generating programs, polyglot programs and quines; but until this week I had never heard of ambigram/palindrome programs, which that can be evaluated from either directions. Naturally, I had to have a go at it, and I've added it to my growing collection of labyrinthine programs.

• Improved the sitemap.
• Added selection tool to Oekaki.
• Added step-by-step evaluation to the Uxntal playground.
• Enjoyed listening to Rek read West With The Night from the companionway.

I occupy the few moments we have between sails by knocking down tasks I had in my notes for a while, like making a disassembler and cleaning up the web emulator enough that I can use it to show programs on wiki pages, like bifurcan and wireworld.

• Added custom brushes to Oekaki and alpha graphics to Adelie.
• Also, made lots of near imperceptible changes to the wiki.
• Enjoyed reading the RA2K race updates.

Abner, who organizes the conference, asked me specifically to explore other ways to live with the attending creatives and developers affected by burnout or the mass layoffs. I've had Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem in mind these past few weeks, it goes:

• Made lots of tiny improvements to Notepad and Oekaki.
• Enjoyed listening to Alcest's L'Envol.

• Started work on Thuesday.
• Enjoying Rek's reading of Andy Weir's The Martian to me at night.
• Is Orca dead?, no, it's just finished.

After exploring Wryl's Modal language further, I decided to write an implementation to better understand how it worked, mechanically. This sparked a renewed interest from the original creator, attracted members of catlang community to explore string rewriting and has given me long and delightful evenings pondering about how to crack various programming problems with it.

• Implemented Modal in ANSI C.
• Wrote Tic-tac-toe in it.
• Returned matching parentheses to Left.
• Enjoyed following progress on Uxn FPGA.

I had been reticent to expanding the Uxntal macro system because of how it creates disjointed fragments of code that couldn't be properly optimized, but after talking to people writing programs in which macros were definitely the right tool for the task, I've decided to rewrite the implementation and make them more robust.

• Made a Uxn bot, for the Concatenative Discord.
• Implemented some of Mikael Patel's minforth primitives.
• Collected a list of named combinators for stack machines.
• Enjoyed listening to the Tipping Point podcast.

I've spend the idle hours of these past few days improving Left, thinking about concatenative programming and trying to better understand what makes a language concatenative. To try and answer this question, I've asked members of the catlang community to add example programs for the various flavors. One of these examples was the Tak Function which was new to me, and found it to map surprisingly well to stack programming.

• It's just been too nice outside for any more computer musings.
• Enjoyed Henrik Karlsson's Third Chair story.

Whenever I get to reclaim my desk from the pile of tools and materials that took residency on there, I fool around with UTF-8 encoding support in Left. Looking into how diacritics can be appended to other glyphs, I've begun to consider if I couldn't possibly encode the Uxntal Alphabet entirely from pre-existing glyphs within the two-bytes range and use diacritics for modes.

• Made a few improvements to Left's support for UTF-8.
• Rewrote the uxn.js, it now passes the opcode tests.
• Added example programs to the concat wiki.

Someone found an interesting undefined behavior in the assembly of Uxn code, where the nesting of child labels could be implemented in one of two ways, leading to an incompatiblity between assemblers. I've explored this further and found myself pulled me into a concatenative object-oriented programming rabbit-hole.

• Released Potato, added to uxnemu and uxn11 emulators.
• Added Latin Accented support to Left.
• Composed a remix of Sara Landry's Skate.
• Enjoyed reading Bosun Bird's sailing beyond the rapids.

• Added a dark mode to the wiki.
• Dodo soldosisol larelafa solmisimi.
• 𐑒𐑮𐑦𐑱𐑑𐑩𐑛 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑪𐑯𐑕𐑒𐑮𐑰𐑯 𐑒𐑰𐑚𐑹𐑛.
• Composed a remix of Ivoxygen's Destruction.

• Finding my way back.

Until we regain access and release the changes of the last few days, keeping with the spirit of improving the resilience of the tools we use I've taken a moment to write a kind of pocket version of the console emulator and self-hosted assembler as to see how many lines are needed to start from the seed assembler and replicate it. A copy of the pocket emulator, the source for the assembler and its hexadecimal representation have been added to the wiki.

In the meantime, if anyone is looking for a specific file that is currently unavailable, get in touch!

• Revamped the permacomputing page.
• Enjoyed watching the mini series L'Effondrement(2019).
• Thankful for Sourcehut's tireless work on resolving the issue and communication.

But I don't think this is new. It's that ol' familiar cynicism, one we've cycled through before. It usually precedes a moment when people grow tired of poorly made things, and what is done carefully and thoughtfully can once again be appreciated without shame. I'm hopeful that we're about to emerge into a renaissance, and convinced that those who are giving their honest best are just avant-garde.

If despite it all, you put your heart into it.
I'm here for it and thank you!

• Wrote daily devlogs for December Adventure.
• Ported Pinhole to modern Uxntal.
• Wrote a new SDL2 emulator.
• Enjoyed watching Casablanca.

I wonder where all the people that used to write for this corner have gone, if there isn't a shinier corner with avider readers that called them away, or if maybe writing has done its good work onto them so they didn't feel the need to anymore. Well, I'll hope so, it is now the fifth year since I began writing these bi-monthly pamphlets. After this, there will be one more left to pen this year.

• Wrote daily devlogs for December Adventure.
• Added rom export to SunflowerBASIC.
• Implemented a Lisp for Uxn.
• Enjoyed playing The Neverhood.

On saturday, I gave an Orca workshop to a crowd of people, including students from the CIM Lab in Ravensburg, and played some techno in the gorgeous Collini Areal building. I also took this opportunity to meet with local activists fighting for fair wages for artists, get lost in the train system, wander up snowy hills at night and practice my non-existent German.

• Improved Orca's interface.
• Implemented a tug-o-war memory model for Drifblim.
• Did a brief appearance on ORF's Vorarlberg Heute Vom.
• Enjoyed zipping around Austria by train.

Despite constant maintenance and cajoling, my X250 has had difficulty booting lately. I would normally dig deeper into the issue if I had more time, but unfortunately I have imminent appointments to which I simply can't attend without a working computer. To the pleasure of every stage technician to whom I've asked for a VGA to HDMI converter, I have found myself a used T580.

• Improved UF, Uxn5 and m291.
• Wrote a standalone Uxn REPL.
• Increased parity between Orca versions with new tests
• Released an Orca Cheatsheet for the upcoming workshop.
• Enjoyed reading The Outsiders.

Now, don't even get me started on subtraction, get rid of that bloat, add negative numbers if you need to, but do not ever subtract.

• Visited by some very cursed thoughts.
• Added a factorization mode to CCCC.
• Released a song for Merveilles' Hallow(2025).
• Revamped the Paradise documentation.
• Carved a pumpkin of Scavengers Reign's Hollow.
• Enjoyed sitting in the dark listening to Autechre live.

It has been a few years since I last enjoyed the early autumn weather of the east coast. We waste the shortening daylight hours kicking at the dried leaves along the park trails talking about horror movies, ideas for pumpkins and the clever things that kids we've met along the way have said.

• Jumped around a bunch!
• Wrote some strange factorial implementations.
• Reviewed microgrants, with Rek, for Rhizome.
• Fixed a bug with the Calendar rom.
• Enjoyed watching The Substance.

I will try and draw a few dailies before we get caught in the whirlwind of visiting families and friends, I fear that I won't have much time to spare in the next two weeks.

• Started proof-reading the Victoria-Sitka logbook(untitled).
• Found an important optimization to the Uxn core!
• Finalizing rehearsals for AMP Festival on the 11th.
• Enjoyed reading that Books & Portraits for a third time.

Every once in a while, I did have ideas for new songs, but nothing that made it past the drawing board I could tie with the rest of the Neauismetica. Lately, I started to imagine new places to populate Dinaisth with, and the songs and pictures started to come back, so I decided to gather some of those, wake Aliceffekt up again, and put it out!

• Release a new Aliceffekt album, Ver'Iytsl.
• Redesigned Noodle in preparation for Drawtober.
• Improved oscean.tal to be safer from overflows.
• Enjoyed watching Common Side Effects.

But, I resumed working on it the other day, overcome by a kind of creative fever, I finished it, released it as Sunflower BASIC and I haven't been able to put it down since. It's just too fun. Maybe this will appeal to someone's else nihilistic programming sensibilities!

• Wrote a bunch of examples for Sunflower BASIC.
• Released a new Aliceffekt track.
• Added a string operator to Orca.
• Enjoyed watching Scavengers Reign.

Whenever we're not busy playing outside, doing errands or stuffing our faces with wild plums, I spend some of my time translating the lesser known Solresol documents, more specifically Joséphine Sudre's Théorie & Pratique, and incorporating the different families and categories to the En-Sr Translator.

• Released Permacomputing 101 talk.
• Optimized Uxn11's screen drawing.
• Incorporated families and categories to Solrela.
• Enjoyed diving back into Middlemarch.

Midau Wiktopher a Solresol do tam, de tiu miusi, tout'lotau tiu momau. Gajewski lel'lat dauda, fedi sir, fiu mausa, lel ted foul. Saufau か a Japanese fot lel, "sol" a Solresol tout'lotau fa siufou!

Mita, sili'sito mi ril, Thue sili'ses fa lefiu. A sito, mou tiufau fiu mal, mouso lar'tiufau re REPL tiu sefiu.

• Sos a Wiktopher tiu rourau.
• Thue sos a Uxntal tiu tile, e tiufau sefiu.
• Rauro a Drifblim tiu fodau.
• Uxn rirau tiu foul.

We're already a few weeks deep into summer, so I want to look back at how working out aboard actually worked out. Our life aboard has been much too chaotic to allow for any kind of pattern, so I can't say that I've developed anything like a routine, but these are the predictably recurring exercises that I've enjoyed doing every single day:

• Rowing: 10min.
• Dips: 2x10.
• Dead-Hang: 2x60sec.
• Pull Ups: 4x10.
• Hand Grippers: 10x50lb, 10x100lb, 5x150lb.

• Play Polycat in the browser.
• Working on my slides for Critical Signals.
• Made a theme editor.
• Enjoyed Snufkin's Introduction to Uxntal.

I just spent the past few days anchored by Blakely Island, wandering into the woods holding old film cameras with a few friends, which I am now gladly counting Anders among them who spent time with me to go through the motion once again using my own Voightlander and its broken light meter.

Sunny-16 goes something like this: At f-16, with the shutter speed at about roughly the film speed, should turn up a good picture on a sunny clear day. From there, one can work their way down the f-stops, so that at the speed of the film, f-8 would be a cloudy day, f-4 an indoors picture, and so on.

• Haven't been up to much at all these past two weeks.
• But, I've read the Silmarillion, and dear lord-

One of my projects for the next few years is to raise my grip strength enough that I can reliably close down a 70kg hand gripper, so every evening, I pull out a book or a video(solar permitting) and do hand exercises for an hour or so.

• Improved the Neur Playground.
• Added a REPL to the a Orca documentation.
• Wrote a few thoughts about Malleable computing.
• Do Ses Rado lide!

• Expanded documentation on Uxntal Validation.
• Created an interactive Modal Playground.
• Implemented Modal in Uxntal and improved examples.
• Enjoyed re-reading Loeliger's Threaded Interpretive Languages.

We're just about ready to cast off from Victoria for the summer, and today was my last day at the gym. I pushed hard these past few months, and it's beginning to pay off. The back pains I had are gone, I sleep much better, I feel stronger and clothes even fit me better. I gained 10kg, and I'm hoping to reach my ideal weight of 80kg in the next few months. I have plans to work out from aboard Pino, but in practice, I'm not sure how possible, or safe, it'll be..

• Wrote a BNF definition of Uxntal.
• Upcoming show at AMP Festival, Montreal October 11th.
• Released Oquonie on the Playdate Catalogue.
• Played with Lunar Arithmetic.

This week, a pointedly cutting criticism of the Uxn documentation shook me out of the laissez-faire that I had over these few pages and reminded me how letting it go the way I did was a disservice to others, but especially myself, considering that I may be using this tool, possibly for the rest of my life.

Since I couldn't clearly discern what should and shouldn't be there, I've asked for help, and got excellent ideas. With feedback from both new learners and experienced folks, I rewrote most of the documentation, included new examples, expanded tests and added setup instructions for both Uxn, and Varvara.

Looking at the documentation now, I feel like I would very much like to work on writing a book about it, to have a paperback artifact in the style of Henderson's LispKit Manuals. A treatise on the design and implementation of the system from the bottom up, but plastered with drawings.

• Wrote 10 examples for the revamped Uxn REPL.
• Made a graphical version of Drifblim.
• Changed behavior of lowercase jumper operators in Orca.
• Enjoyed Ryan Coogler's Sinners.

Another thing on my plate has been to gradually getting rid of Uxnasm.c in favor of the self-hosted one. Before I entirely drop that dependency, I want to be absolutely certain that the bootstrapping process is as robust as I could possibly make it. I'm not 100% happy yet, but uxnasm.c is getting closer to retirement.

• Added a download button to the Uxn REPL.
• Fixed an implementation issue with Proquints.
• Implemented Brainfuck entirely in macros.
• Enjoyed Tadashi Tokieda's A world from a sheet of paper.

• Mesi Ses Sel do sefiu.
• Added opengraph tags to the wiki.
• Put on my new skates.
• And, rushed outside listening to Hideki Naganuma!

I took the opportunity to improve things a bit and made it usable on the NintendoDS. Once I had a working version, I wrote a compiler for flick games to uxn roms, so I could share the results. And then, I started drawing little stories, and then some. How about a #flickjam?

• Implemented a port of Flickgame.
• Redesigned Turye.
• Enjoyed two months sober.

I've ramped things up a notch these past few weeks and dedicated more time to learning about fitness, nutrition, anatomy and getting a bit smarter about the way I work out. This new fascination of mine is teetering close to a full on project, when even on rest days, a sizeable chunk of my waking hours goes into reading about related topics and planning the next day's exercises and meals. I might just keep on pulling on that thread to see where this leads. A nagging voice in my head keeps going on and on about how this might just come in handy in the very near future.

• Made Drifblim faster and smaller.
• Redesigned CCCC and Dexe.
• Wrote some new music.
• Redid the gelcoat on Teapot.
• Enjoyed the return of the cherry blossoms!

• Ah yeah, I also wrote a spreadsheet editor.
• Object-oriented stack machine assembly is such a joy!

I haven't used it for anything serious yet, but already with as little as 150 lines of code it allows me to quickly prototype and evaluate tasks! My plan is to use it as a sort of coordination language.

• Released Oquonie for Playdate!
• Created a little programming language for neural nets.
• And, I also ported it to Uxntal.
• Swiss-French numerals are wonderful!

In any case, the conference organizer apologized for the poor selection of speakers which did not correspond to the expectations of ticket holders, promising to resolve the issue in the following year, and in passing, that free and open source software developers would no longer be welcomed as speakers.

I happened to be present in the chatroom when the apology letter went out and merely questioned whether the choice was really about the lack of low-level talks, and not something else. It did not take long for bigots of all sorts to come out and lament the good old days of the conference and soon the chatroom was ablaze with some pretty vile things against trans people, this went on for hours without intervention, the usual.

What I did not expect was for the conference organizer, who ghosted me for months, to finally break radio silence to slam me for speaking out and partially blaming me for the unraveling of the conference organization, and decided against covering the agreed upon travel stipend. I have since requested for the talk videos to be removed.

The most discernible difference in this new implementation, is that it leans heavily on object-oriented patterns, by favoring methods acting on private values, over pointer arithmetic by function application. The stack is principally used as the communication channel between objects, for example, a text object's buffer is only ever modified through its explicitly defined capabilities, not by a function taking a text pointer. It turns out it limits bugs, it is faster and even often smaller!

• Reimplemented Drifblim, OOP style.
• Added auto-complete and a few other goodies to Left.
• Created a photo sharing website for Hundred Rabbits.
• Enjoyed going back to the gym!

I am not too proud to say I'm wrong when I am, so there, I was, I'll admit it. Against my most cynical reservations, television did turn out to be the university in every home that it promised, and the telephone also did end loneliness.

It worked best of all once we turned it off, went next door, and invited our neighbors over to teach us stuff. Someone always brought food. Hunger, unsurprisingly, was also just a logistics problem, and the logistics were embarrassingly simple. Nothing, not mandatory office playdays, not outlawing aloneness, no sociability programs, was even remotely as effective to bring people together as forcing people to get audio and video working in digital meetings. But first, we had to build it all so we could shut it off.

We stopped buying all of that shit and, more efficiently, started to meet. Self-obviation? Yes, it even lived up to its promise of emancipation, instead of cluttering our lives, it taught us that if we stack it all in a pile and never turn any of it on again, we'll be alright and we'll be safe.

I said it would never work, and I'm getting a lot of I told you sos.
I deserve them.

• Finished proofreading No Bears None!
• Released a zine about interaction nets.
• And yes, you can program with doodles.
• Implemented Symmetric Interaction Combinators.
• Enjoyed meeting folks at the IWP9.

Daniel Quinn put it like this: "If there are still people here in two hundred years, they won't be thinking the way we do, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they'll go on living the way we do, and so there won't be any people here."

This reads, to me at least, as both a reminder that minds can change and an invitation, that if we're paying attention, we can already catch glimpses of a new holistic thinking emerging, one that positions human culture as a participant in a wider ecosystem. Maybe we're collectively holding our breath, just as people did before each renaissance, tending an ear for the sound of something that'll tear the Middle Ages wide open.

The Sibylline Books offer a similar wisdom: We can either willingly learn about the world the better to participate in it, or reach that same knowledge from merely getting caught and swept into its tempers. The knowledge is coming either way, but nobody is ever predicting the future.

• Added signed arithmetic and comments support to Heol.
• Improved the Uxn Playdate Emulator.
• Released a new Oquonie version.
• Enjoyed Kevin Graaf's Computerising Hieroglyphic Scripts.

See, I told ya, here they are again. And they've brought trinkets, cameras, efficiency and other diseases that rot the mind and body. "You're going to be left-". That arrow shut him up good, we didn't let him finish, yes! That's what we want, please leave us behind. Back to the treeline.

Are you fucking kidding me, "-going to be left behind" these god damn missionaries. Yes, please! Only you won't let us. More arrows.

• Implemented a few birds in Heol.
• Created a bestiary of multiset combinators.
• Made a procedural letter for Ink & Switch's Tenfold.
• Enjoyed preparing Pino for cast-off.

Regardless, as I was clumsily trailing Peano's footsteps, I came across this video, giving me the idea to try and translate some of the Rejoice examples into Peano's language, as a kind of.. homage? Zoom forward a few days, a hundred hours of Latin youtube, nearly breaking Arch installing Latin dictionaries, I might have lost the plot..

• Implemented Rejoice.
• Released a new version of Oquonie.
• Translated Rejoice into Latino Sine Flexione.
• Enjoyed seeing HEALTH live.

Not an injection of energy, a constraint on what histories are allowed, a pressure that filters the trajectories that can lead to this moment. There has to be a sequence of events that leads to the arrangement of me now. Perhaps this is the only history that survives the constraint of a wish I would one day impose: that I be well.

If so, thanks.

• Made a new version of Donsol.
• Wrote new emulators for the m5 stack and Playdate.
• Did 100 pull ups on March 22nd.
• Enjoyed playing Stephen's Teapot.

I wonder whether any among them is haunted. Prime factorization feels ancient and inevitable, doesn't it. A passerby, peering through our window, would find equally nothing. Every positive integer is already a multiset and has always been one, it was all just waiting to be interpreted that way. Someone at a desk, balancing a pencil, putting it down to type something, erasing it, nothing to betray my visitation. Something so minimal has no right to be that powerful, it feels almost geological.

There's something unsettling about it in the best way, the feeling that numbers were always secretly a computational substrate, putting on a thick sweater, water to boil, they wouldn't know how much I'm haunted.

• Finished the initial proof-reading of No Bears None(TBA).
• Made some slides for Library Futures next week.
• Added constructions to the wireworld page.
• Wrote the first page of a novel.

I see Forth thrown left and right around permacomputing circles on vague notions of efficiency, but I think what lies beneath these intuitions is that classical logic assumes infinite copyability. Which is unrealistic for memory, energy and just about any physical system. In concatenative languages, bindings are fuel, if you want two copies, you must duplicate, this conservation law aligns logic with a finite natural world. Duplication and erasure are explicit instructions that classical logic hides.

Programming languages typically hide duplication and lifetimes, or tack helpers on top as an afterthought. Values duplicate freely, things exist everywhere at once, names abstract away placement, this may activate one's linguistic brain but it keeps the spatial system asleep. My experience with concatenative languages has had less to do with fussing with symbols and more to do with weaving. On this loom, things exist in space on a braid, over time. If I had to guess, I'd say that probably triggers the same part of the brain that tracks physical objects.

And that's the unique bit about catlangs.

• Added support for uf3 in Turye.
• Made a volume control widget for pulseAudio.
• Created a timeline with some historical events.
• Enjoyed watching La Bataille d'Alger.

It does my mood something good to sit among peers who are singularly focused on researching how to make the craft of computing more approachable, robust and playful. The activity of hand-crafting software seems unfortunately a rather radical and rebellious practice right now. But a sort of push back, or at least, willingness to challenge the prevailing narrative recurred in nearly every session I attended, at times lasting late into the night.

I especially enjoyed geeking out about Smalltalk & Self with Dan Ingalls, playtesting Lilith Duncan's game, reciting Ivan Reese's interminable list of four-letters words, sharing a day with folks from Merveilles whom I had been meaning to meet in person for the longest time, finding a zipline and calisthenics park among the olive trees and stuffing my face with bread.

It wasn't all good news tho, I experienced sopa de ajo blanco for the first(and last) time, and even after days of learning to operate these European light switches where the button is pressed down to light things up, I only ever managed the rocker correctly half the time.

• Redrew some of Left's glyphs.
• Created libraries for standard Uxntal routines.
• Improved CCCC's modal buttons, added reduce fraction button.
• Implemented a SUBLEQ interpreter capable of running Forth-83.
• Enjoyed wandering the cobblestone streets of Chinchón.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to, most nights my laptop is stowed away to make room for the sewing machine on the nav table. It all began when the store that made the patrol cap that Rek and I wear stopped carrying it. The seams of the old worn-out cap were cut, new 14oz canvas was bought and the cap was cloned, twice! I enjoyed the process so much, I made a new messenger backpack, fixed ripped panels on my winter jacket, sewn tartan wool arm warmers and some other things. At one point, I realized that I was wearing six items of clothing I had made or mended.

• Created an Instagram account.
• Drawn dailies during Goblin Week.
• Implemented Soundex.
• Wrote a page for the backpack.
• Enjoyed playing squash on rainy days.

In 2026, the era of gradients and extrusion blendings has long passed, minimalism reigns supreme, logos are reduced to simple black shapes with not a single line that couldn't be justified to a board-meeting. So, I felt the urge to move away from all that, and get something closer to the works I do today, and at the same time, find a way to express my love for cursive and analog practices.

In other words, the change was to go from a logo that can be written in a single stroke by a computer, to one that can be written in a single stroke by a person.

• Started a new version of Donsol.
• Created a live playground for Neur.
• Added volume controls to m291.
• Enjoyed Aer Vacuum's Snake In Orca.