Spending the holidays with family, between eating and sleeping too much, I sometimes sneak in a few moments on the computer to listen to music and tackle a few curiosities, but otherwise, I'm trying to keep off the keyboard.
Back from Seattle, where I had the immense pleasure of sharing a few days with kind, passionate and most of all wonderful individuals, some I had crossed paths with already, others, new faces that I am now looking forward to see once more. Evenings were busied with conversations that felt as easy as picking up where we might have left off despite not having seen each other for years, or even when meeting for the first time.
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.
October came and went, ideas piled up in notebooks, but I kept on drawing. I knew already by the time I had finished the Pocket Rewriting zine that I would make a dynamic implementation of it which, by the way, was very well received despite my not having even had a chance of giving away a single one. I was delighted to see folks print their own copies.
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.
Three weeks! I think that was the longest I went on without writing a single line of code for the past many years, for even during long transits at sea, I find time to sneak some in to answer these questions one ponders while gazing at the horizon. I had other things on my mind this month, slides to finish, dailies to draw, and settling back in our winter life in Victoria. As of yesterday, that streak ended.
For the upcoming Handmade 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.
This is what I should have done last year when between the research for Strange Loop, daily maintenance of active projects, and implementation of new ones, code was what I only ever read or wrote about for weeks on end. By the time winter came, I was fed up with all of it. If everything works according to plan, I'm well on my way to not writing a single line of code this month.
It can all wait 'til November.
I finished my slides but I left in them some gaps to fill with puns, and other miscellanea. There's this one where a whole culture of people is programming entirely by multiplying fractions, y'know what would be ridiculous? If I had actual examples, or even implementations of classic functions to show the attendees. Not only that, how better would my point be made if I built enough documentation to teach people and even wrote games for it.
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?
We are again in familiar waters, with their familiar weather radio voices, tugboats, madronas, lean little swallows, cormorants, banana slugs and extremely bitter IPAs. We wake up and it's still dark out, summer must be slipping away; the sun looks all burnt up, red and angry against the morning haze. The music aboard is changing to an appropriate shoegaze, as if to match the rustling of leaves and wailing of the wind passing through the shrouds.
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.
I always fall within visible range of a technical solution needed to solve some generic software issue tormenting me but ever so far as to not be capable of navigating the tool-chain involved in applying said change to its source, and so it goes, each time this occurs a new software is born to replace it.
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.
We finally emerged from the fog bank that haunts the north of the island, and sailed into the remains of a familiar Desolation Sound summer. The sound of dinghies being pulled up the beach, dry mosses crackling under your feet. Do our legs remember how to walk, where are the fair weather clothes, put away the firewood, the sun is setting, catching up with friends, our time apart has it been years, no, we have just seen you haven't we. How was it up there? Was it fun.
How near to good is what is wild.
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!
The automated weather radio voice drones about the advent of favorable northerly winds that never manifest, so we've resorted to doing short hops, weather permitting, between the safety of one inlet and the next whenever the storm catches its breath, often against tide, oftener against wind. We occupy the disquieting lulls of what feels more like trench warfare than passaging drowned in tea, blankets and the smell of paperbacks.
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".
The inlets we find ourselves anchored in are worlds of their own with inhabitants that, as transitory as some may be, are affairing themselves with happenings that extend to the shores of the lagoon, but no further. A strange new thing has come into the sheltered water and disrupted its hubbub, now everyone looks as if caught in a gasp, at its skyward pointing wing, at its opaque lifelessness. Through the oblong eyes of the vessel, like under a diving bell, we peer back in wonder.
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:
You will find at Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring them with you!
We twice waved farewell to Sitka. A few hours after untying the lines, the engine that normally cycles water through itself to cool down decided that it would not do that anymore. The problem appeared to have gone away after some tinkering, only to return further down the coast, precipitating an emergency arrival in some questionably-sheltered flies-infested inlet hidden past but a few jagged rocks that the ocean breakers have as of yet unsuccessfully softened. We dropped the anchor, slept, slept some more, once our strength returned, we had to seriously take things apart and figure shit out.
A single persimmon
left in the sky;
picked for me.
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.
We have sailed as far north as we are willing to go this year. As the summer weather settles, heading further would mean crossing longer distances with decreasing chances of favorable winds, less sailing and more motoring, which does not appeal to us one bit. We'll head to Sitka before making our way back down to warmer waters and enjoy what remains of the summer free of foul-weather jackets.
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.
Alaskan summer days are long, the sun wakes us up at 4am, and it stays bright until 11pm. By 5am, the batteries are already topped up from solar, if we were very motivated, we could solar-cook every meals each day.
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.
Sitting aboard Pino in the last port in Canada before entering Alaska, thinking about how odd it is to be sailing straight from the south and having to change timezone. We've been moving every day of the past two weeks, making use of the favorable wind to jump from anchorage to anchorage. During these long passages, I try to write the talk for Handmade in my head.
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:
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
We've stowed away our 120v devices, untied the lines and begun our sail north to Alaska! During the next few days, we will sail through the inside passage and out the northern tip of Vancouver Island. As we hop between anchorages, I wonder if a graphical environment running on a naive string rewriting computer possible, or even usable?
Rek and I are completing the remaining projects on our pre-departure list and provisioning for our sail to Alaska. Over the winter, we've strengthened critical parts aboard Pino, replaced experienced pieces of the rigging and simplified the habitat's life-systems — Hopefully, this will all make the journey safer, and dryer.
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.
We are waiting for a few parts that we had machined, to return to us from the local fabricator. While we wait, I spend most of time playing with esolangs, one that has especially interested me lately is Modal, which is a simple string-rewriting scheme similar to Thue, but with the added feature that it allows for variables, and recognizes scope delimiters. It's a brutally simple idea that allows a program to be shaped as to mimic nearly any programing paradigm.
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.
As days are getting warmer, we can begin to tackle some much needed maintenance topside like changing old lines, varnishing the oars and inspecting the rigging. After a whole winter of getting up in the dark to do weight training, I feel it was well worth it as my back pain is gone, I sleep better and feel more overall physically capable. I have a month left of gym membership and plan to make use of it as much as I physically can before its expiration, and our casting off.
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.
We took Pino's chainplates off and while the new ones are being fabricated, we reinforced the area where the chainplate meet the deck. It makes for a momentarily uninhabitable place to live, so I haven't had much headspace to do creative work these past few days, but it will be well worth it considering the places we're hoping to venture into.
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.
Our plans for the summer are coming into focus. It looks like we'll depart early, head as far north as we can make it, and see if the boat and its crew can weather the cold. This ought to give us taste of what we might expect would we decide to make it further into the arctic next year.
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.
Other than doing improvements aboard, it has been a month of playing with conlangs and conscripts. I begun exploring variable length glyphs in Left after adding support for the Lambda(λ) character last month, and went further still by supporting the Shavian alphabet. I had been looking for an alternative alphabet for a while and loved its 48 letters, the symmetries in the glyphs and how easy it was to learn it.
I've originally started looking into virtual machines to build a target to host some games, a handful of tools and my wiki — but instead of stopping once I had done so, I kept pushing further and became obsessed with this programming language design stuff, and along the way, I lost track of why I was even doing it all in the first place. After a two year detour, I look back and I've almost totally ignored my other interests as a digital artist and musician. It's about time I find my way back.
The forge that we use at Hundred Rabbits has been taken down by DDoS attacks and is struggling to come back online, the event reminded us that we ought to also have mirrors and release versions of these source files available elsewhere. I've begun to host copies across our various websites. The builds are still accessible through itch.io.
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!