XXIIVV

2023

It's funny how I can go from being utterly terrified at the onset of a project such as the total rewiring of Pino, to looking back thinking that it wasn't at all as hard as you expected, and having that familiar realization that that twinge of fear is more often about starting than it is about doing the task itself.

As a little gift to ourselves, Rek and I ported Oquonie to Varvara, which somewhat ensures that this little world to remains playable now that the previous builds have begun to have mixed success running on recent operating systems.

Rek and I were invited to do a residency at LEÑA, and we sailed to our dream destination, the breath-taking Princess Louisa Inlet. I had, once again, the opportunity of crossing the US by train, eastward this time, with a bunch of amazing people heading to the last of the Strange Loop conferences. I got a tattoo of my favourite demon, Stolas, by my friend and favourite tattoo artist Lizbeth.

After a short fling with parallel computing, I realized that it was more trouble than it was worth for the scale of projects that interested me. I've added lambdas to Uxntal, which was certainly the single greatest UX improvement to the language since its creation.

This crazy and wonder-full year ended with the publication of Rek's latest novel Wiktopher, and as the year and projects come to an end, we are now turning our gaze back to the horizon for the next year, and our next projects.

For the year of 2023, Maurice Renard's Le Peril Bleu, was my favourite book. Coline Serreau's La Belle Verte was my favourite movie. Cimerion's Contresort was my favourite album.

17Z

2023-12-28 Lisp

I've been taking it easy for the last few days of the year, cooked a lot, walked a lot. I've been re-reading SICP and idly poking at implementing a Lisp system in the style of Varvara. I don't have any specific goal for it beyond exploring low-level symbolic computing, but who knows where these things might lead.

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.

17Y

2023-12-09 Pomparu

Rek's Wiktopher is out! After nearly seven years, it's finally available for anyone to read. It includes a few side projects documented on here, such as a dialect of Solresol, and the game Hako. That's all I've this week, so go read it!

17X

2023-11-20 Ulz Compression & Elmet Brae

The Elmet Brae compilation has been released, and put up on Beldam Records with a beautiful cover by Rostiger, who also made the Varvara Zine.

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.

17W

2023-11-11 Ternary Party

Rek and I are doing a final proof-reading of Wiktopher before release, we're trying to make sure that all of the book's conlang dialogs are consistent with each other. On the topic of conlangs, we've also translated Thousand Rooms in Solresol.

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.

17V

2023-10-25 Back Aboard

After being away since leaving for the train to Strange Loop, we finally made our way back to Pino. It feels great to be back in our things, and to have the mind-space to create again, I was able to write music this week, and it had been a very long time since I last felt like doing so.

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.

17U

2023-10-12 Perma

These past few days, Rek and I were invited to participate in conversations with students, researchers, and radio hosts about sustainable technological practices(Right To Repair, Design for Disassembly, Open Source, etc). We're witnessing a growing interest in software longevity, digital preservation, and the organization of a critical mass of ecofeminist collectives exploring the failability of modern tech, and the development of resilient practices, beyond mere academics.

17T

2023-10-07 Stolas

After taking the train from Seattle to Saint-Louis, I kept on heading East to visit family and friends. I've been feeling a bit of out of sorts in regards to programming, and unmotivated to do any software development. It'll come back to me, but in the meantime I'll be spending my days drawing dailies for the month of October, and catching up with movies and music that came out since we last had access to reliable internet connection.

17S

2023-09-25 Strange Loop Or Die Tryin'

On the eve of the talk, I sit half-awake waiting for my first real meal since leaving Victoria to arrive, it's been two hours, blatter is coming down hard on this very loud, and very understaffed, and only available vegetarian place within walking farness from the hotel. And, my voice is shut, the talk is in a few hours.

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.

17R

2023-09-09 Solresol

Now that the first pass of proof-reading for Wiktopher is behind us, we have begun to look into cleaning up some of the worlding aspects of the book, which include congames, conlangs and even conrecipes. One of Lupin's dialects can be whistled, and as to encode the various poems of the story into pitches, we decided to pick the Solresol constructed language as a suitable candidate.

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.

17Q

2023-08-26 Oekaki

In an attempt to catch up with all of the readings I have had queued in preparation to Strange Loop, I've inadvertently filled my every waking moments with enough dry PLT papers to make myself altogether sick with the topic. I've been so caught up trying to learn about expressiveness, that I momentarily forgot what about it was that I even wanted to express. So, while I recover, I've picked up daily drawing again.

17P

2023-08-06 Lambdas

The first pass of review for Wiktopher is done! Rek and I have been working toward this milestone for months.

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.

17O

2023-07-28 Maintenance All The Things

We are anchored in Von Donop, and I'm taking some time away from working on the talk to finish proof-reading Wiktopher.

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.

17N

2023-07-12 Uxntal Presentation

I've done little else this week other than proof-reading Rek's Wiktopher manuscript, but I did have this idea, while working on program verification, that I might like to realize in the fall. A system like Smalltalk's definition of interfaces for message passing, in which a message must find a match in the listening object's methods dictionary, might help improve Uxntal's expressiveness and be realized entirely with syntax already understood by the assembler.

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.

17M

2023-06-18 Princess Louisa

Ever since we sailed back to Canada, from Japan, friends have told us to make the trip through Jervis Inlet to Princess Louisa Inlet. After making our way there this week, and hiking up and down its cliffsides, I can confirm that it does indeed live up to its fame, it is absolutely breathtaking.

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

17L

2023-06-16 Context Inference

We're on our way north, anchored in Telegraph harbor. We've preserved enough food to get us through the summer, and stocked the shelves with books to last us as long. I was especially merry about finding a copy of Carroll's Sylvie & Bruno, and Golding's Lord Of The Flies, to carry along with us.

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.

17K

2023-05-28 Road to Strange Loop

I've submitted a talk about permacomputing to Strange Loop 2023 and it has been accepted. This summer, as we sail north, I'll be collating my notes on the overlaps between permaculture and situated software design practices — And, hopefully, have a substantial presentation by September.

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.

17J

2023-05-12 Type Inference

For a few weeks now, I've been sketching the basis for a type inference system for Uxntal. I first came across a stack-effect validator when writing Factor, and I've been meaning to make my own since after reading Rob Kleffner's talk notes. Prior to this project, I had a sense of what the sundry constructions were, but writing a type-checker drew clearer lines between all these different patterns.

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.

17I

2023-05-01 Concurrency All The Things

I recently watched David Ungar's Everything You Know About Parallel Programming Is Wrong talk, which lead me to read Tony Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, after which I felt inspired to consider parallel computing once more, and soon found myself taking a detour to play with the OCCAM programming language, and revisit threads in Uxn.

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.

17H

2023-04-22 Structured Editing

These past few months, I've explored playful things to do with programming that might not directly serve a purpose, or at least, one wouldn't come across them without seeking them out specifically, and I've collected some of those seemingly useless, ideas into a talk and submitted it to the Strange Loop conference happening in September.

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.

17G

2023-04-05 Interaction Nets & Oquonie

The past two weeks have flown by, between finishing Oquonie and preparing Pino for the summer, each day I fall into bed completely exhausted. But the game is nearly finished now, there are fewer and fewer bugs, and most of my time is spent doing optimization.

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.

17F

2023-03-13 Residency at Biosonic

Spent the week at the LEÑA residency collaborating with audio-visual artists. They call it a retreat, but really, I returned from Galiano more exhausted than when I left. It was well worth it tho, as I rarely allow myself to play music for more than an hour or two at a time.

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.

17E

2023-03-03 Preparing for Biosonic

I've been progressing on Oquonie, implementing sounds and making sure that it runs as smoothly as possible on as many different platforms as I can. This meant revisiting a lot of the implementation details. The month has flown by, but it has been a lot of fun learning about optimization.

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.

17D

2023-02-24 Oquonie is nearly ready

The weather has been absolute garbage and so has been a great help in advancing the Oquonie port. Not only is the project pushing Uxn further than it previously ventured, but it is equally pushing the tools used in its creation. The building of the game has had me do some significant improvements to Drifblim, Uxnlin, and Left.

17C

2023-02-07 Oquonie is happening!

After putting together a demo of what a Varvara implementation of Oquonie could look like, Rekka and I decided to officially port it. It's a lot of fun to revisit this strange universe. I hope that we can bring the essence of the original into the redux version.

17B

2023-01-20 Function Stacks

I've been reading about reversible computing and put together a playground that allows me to experiment with the ideas of psi-lisp. This whole business of time reversible logic feels like visiting an old friend.

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.

17A

2023-01-08 Pino Rewiring

Since the new year began, we have spent every waking hour rewiring Pino, it has been a more challenging project than we had hoped but we will sleep soundly knowing that each connection has been well made.

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..

2022

We sailed to Desolation Sound in late spring spring, spent the summer up there, and didn't return until the fall. We left with stores bursting with preserved foods, allowing us to stay away for months without the need to resupply.

The year was beginning and I hadn't entirely made up my mind about Uxn, I had doubts that it might be the thing that I would want to keep on using, as it often goes with such projects, but the year came and went without ever finding myself wanting to program in any other language.

For the year of 2022, Richard Adams' Watership Down, was my favourite book. Only Yesterday was my favourite movie. SadSvit's Cassette was my favourite album.

16Z

2022-12-25 Reversible Computing

This week, I was introduced to reversible computing and linear logic, which not only do not generate garbage, but also preserves state by making any loss of entropy explicit and an integral part of the program's architecture. To say that this new knowledge shook my understanding of programming would be an understatement.

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

16Y

2022-12-12 Beetbug

Continuing my recent experiments with the self-hosted emulator, I decided to repurpose it and turn it into an entirely virtualized step-debugger. It is called Beetbug, after Uxn32's debugger. To improve error reporting across the ecosystem, I've also written a symbols file specification that will allow the various emulators and debuggers to add labels to addresses when throwing errors and warnings.

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.

16X

2022-11-27 Soroban

I had this idea of implementing the Uxn virtual machine in itself, to virtualize the memory and runtime entirely in a sandboxed emulator rom. That would allow something like a debugger to be built that doesn't preclude any special Varvara support.

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.

16W

2022-11-18 Merveilles Meetup 2022

I had a unforgettable time at a conference. I met countless wonderful creatives, including someone who introduced me to Interaction Nets, another who showed me their little programming language targeting Uxn, someone even noticed the Ithkuil easter egg on one of my slides and came to talk to me about it. I also got to spend hours exchanging ideas with Peter van Hardenberg and Rasmus Andersson, whose work inspire me.

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.

16V

2022-10-31 Last Daily

Today was the last day of October, and the last daily drawing. I had a good time beginning each morning that way, but it's time to wrap up the slides for 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.

16U

2022-10-08 TinyBASIC

I've recently finished reading What The Doormouse Said, and I was fascinated by the story of the People's Computer Company publishing the specification for a subset of the BASIC programming language, inviting programmers to write their own unique implementations for their machines.

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

16T

2022-10-02 A month of conworld

We have returned to Victoria for the winter and reconnected with our little local sailing community, it has been wonderful hearing about everyone's summer adventures. We have a lot of challenging projects to do over the next few months and knowing that we have dependable friends nearby is reassuring.

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.

16S

2022-09-12 We've got worlds to go to

Once again, finding ourselves having drinks over a scattering of world atlases and passage planning compendiums.

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.

16R

2022-08-30 Hunger for a Way Out

The misantropia that accompanied our return to the noise and smell of the cities, has not yet subsided. We find ourselves surrounded by people, homologous to those who merrily mow the lawn at dinner time, who will break the quietude of an anchorage by running a gas generator to watch television as the sun sets.

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.

16Q

2022-08-16 Farewell Desolation

We've left Desolation Sound, and stopped in Texada to reprovision before sailing south. We finally have access to reliable internet access again, but none of my near-endless supply of things to catch up on, none of it stirs any interest in me right now.

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.

16P

2022-08-01 A Potato

We've sailed ourselves into somewhat of an internet deadzone, where my evenings consist of lying in the hammock hung between the jib and the mast, thinking about what sort of an operating system I'd like for myself; what would be both realistic for the Uxn platform, and the limits of my own aptitude for realizing it.

16O

2022-07-16 Slideshow Tech 2000

I haven't had it in me to start new projects these past two weeks, so I've instead revisited projects in need of care; namely Adelie which was until now undocumented, leaving people to guess at how things worked. It has been nice to see some terrific projects made with it, like tower of hanoi, and these gorgeous slides. It took all the restrain in the world not to turn it into another Hypercard.

16N

2022-07-02 Self Documenting Binaries

The more I try to imagine what resilient software might look like, the more shortcomings I find in Varvara roms, namely, the ones that rely entirely on external documentation. So, I decided to try and begin to tackle this problem by adding a menu navigation manifest to each one, which not only makes the application self-documenting, but also improves accessibility.

16M

2022-06-19 Dwindling Stores

I hate to think that we will, at some point, have to sail south to re-supply, we've both decided that we shall stretch our supplies for as long as we possibly can. We will soon run out of fresh produce, but we have prepared enough preserves to last us for months.

16L

2022-06-03 Uxntal Communication II

We've arrived in Desolation Sound and met up with friends. We spend the long afternoons rowing the dinghy along the shoreline and exploring the thickly forested coast. I went ahead and assigned a glyph to each Uxn opcode, to make an Uxntal Alphabet, it adds a wonderful conlang aspect to the project. I'm hoping to turn this into a little graphical assembler at some point.

min2()

16K

2022-06-01 Uxntal Communication I

I couldn't stop thinking about the idea of a Uxntal Sign Language. So, with Rekka's help, I began assigning hand gestures to numbers, operators and modes. I'm also thinking that I might like to assign glyphs so an assembler that does away with English altogether could be envisioned.

16J

2022-05-30 Heading North

We are finally making our way north toward Desolation Sound and the Broughton Archipelago. We are spending these late spring days anchored between high mountains, revisiting ideas for projects we conceived of this last winter, but decided to leave for a later time. I've been fascinated by how an entire computing paradigm can emerge from the primitives of combinatory logics, my recent thoughts have been populated by these strange talking birds.

16I

2022-05-14 Slides rules

Aquired a couple of slide rules from a retired teacher, and figured out how to use them. My plan is to gift them to people we meet in our travels. I've spent the better part of the week plotting shapes on paper with the help of the slide rule, while also experimenting with a line-plotting engine, inspired from Turtle Graphics, for creating procedural graphics.

16H

2022-04-30 Uxn Specs

I felt frustrated by the development of Uxn this week. It reminded me of the difficult period in Orca's development when it was beginning to be actively used, meanwhile the last few operators were being finalized. Folks would raise hell each time operators were moved around and it made finalizing the spec extremely painful.

16G

2022-04-14 Bedrock Failure

Inspired from the Cuneiform Tablets paper, I considered realizing the paper's point of implementing Smalltalk72 on a UVM, I spent a few days experimenting with the ST72 environment — Only to realize that, like the ChifirVM, it is poorly thought out and fundamentally irreconcilable with my vision of small computing.

16F

2022-03-30 FSF

We gave our talk at LibrePlanet 2022, and it went very well. During the Q&A, we talked about living without a fridge, from food preservation to sprouting, and we were delighted to see so many people interested in that stuff. I guess the intersection of computers and gardens is slightly larger than I thought.

16E

2022-03-14 Digital Preservation

Took a deep dive into the various experiments in digital preservation(PADI, CAMiLEON, Domesday, etc..), didn't really find anything worthy of note, but it did inspire me to rewrite some of the content on permacomputing. I've also spent the past couple of days improving Noodle, and adding support for tga images.

16D

2022-02-30 A Dice Game

Rekka is putting the finishing touches to Wiktopher, and asked me to design a game that the people of Iridi could be playing. I thought a dice game combining the capture mechanism of Go and the randomness of the Domino draw might be a good fit, learn to play Hako.

16C

2022-02-14

Our upcoming keynote for Libre Planet 2022 has been announced, we've built a little slideshow program for the presentation. I've revamped the Orca documentation and added a reference page, as well as fixing a few bugs in the Uxntal implementation. Toying with wireworld sucked much of my time, again.

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

16B

2022-01-30 Tamagochi

Rekka and I completed Yufo, our entry for the Virtual Pet Jam 2022, we also added a Serbian and Polish translation to Thousand Rooms. When I wasn't playing with primes, or reading, I was noodling in wireworld. Ah! Also, Uxn turned one year old.

16A

2022-01-14 Devlog Start

To kick off 2022, I've decided to write 3 documents for the Uxn project, in which I'll save my design notes, the first one is about the virtual machine itself, the second one is about a personal computer and the last one might be about the language design. Hopefully, by the end of this year, this project will have have matured into something that is more easily definable.

mothra

2021

The pandemic restrictions forced us to stay at one place, if only for a moment. To stop running and possibly build something, to spend more time with the same people and to become familiar with our surroundings. Every year is meant to be my depth year, every January, I tell myself that this time, finally, I will look deeper into things. I typically don't follow through, and this year might not have been as deep a year as I had hoped, but I can say that my understanding of a few specific things have deepened.

By the year's end, I, along with a handful of amazing people, had brought a little programming language into the world, it cannot do much at all, but building this project brought me closer to understanding the deeper questions I had about programming, especially how human-language maps to symbols that computers can understand.

Between the air that's hard to breath due to forest fires, and the water rationing that stops us from filling up our tanks, the tumbling down of everything has, to my surprise, not paralyzed me as much as I expected. It has been a constant creative force that pushed me through the year to learn about food preservation, water purification, insulation, heating, and various endeavors that I had previously overlooked, and that might come in handy would things keep on deteriorating.

Among the more trivial things that brought me joy this year, I've successfully grown a large lion's mane mushroom aboard the boat, worked on a wonderful tribute of the catclock with Rekka, did plenty of origami with our friend's kids and played accordion for the first time.

For the year of 2021, Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, was my favourite book. The Lobster was my favourite movie. Tamaryn's Dreaming The Dark was my favourite album.

15Z

2021-12-30

Revisited the tga format as a potential transfer format for Varvara applications such as Noodle. I've also been flicking through the massive collection of notes I've accumulated on the topic of paper computing and reflecting on this year that is now ending.

15Y

2021-12-14

Spent the first few days of December solving the Advent Of Code puzzles in Uxntal, got distracted, and started thinking about image support inside Left. I've also spent time experimenting with the Subleq virtual machine.

15X

2021-11-30

Was away from Pino to visit family, spent our evenings catching up and watching movies. Received a replacement keyboard for Ayatori, it's good to be working on the Thinkpad again.

15W

2021-11-14

Wrote a little brainfuck interpreter in Uxntal during this week's transits. My thoughts have been drifting back to primes and fractions, I've been considering a twist to fractran where fractions with a zero as nominator or denominator might be used as jump operations, but I have yet to implement this.

15V

2021-10-30

Decided to stop doing daily drawings and port Donsol instead. I had it all planned out in my head before starting, I went ahead and completed the port within just a few days. The work was done on a Pinebook Pro, revealing a few issues with Left, so I spent some time optimizing the text-editor so it would run faster.

15U

2021-10-14

Spending the month of October between daily drawings, and various food preservation projects. As I work on a picture, I'll occasionally stop to improve Noodle in some way or correct a bit of friction. The near totality of my computer activities(drawing, composing and programming) are now done from within the Uxn virtual machine. I couldn't be happier.

15T

2021-09-30

Rewrote Dexe to be compatible to the latest changes to Varvara. I'm unsure what to do about Oscean's twtxt and RSS feeds, generating them in Uxntal will be hard, especially the date conversion. Maybe I could build the now page's body from the twtxt feed, but if I did, I would loose the Arvelie timestamps and links. Picked up Moogle again, cleaned up the codebase.

15S

2021-09-14

The grey weather gives us only a few hours of solar power each day, so we alternate between cleaning and doing other things, such as origami. I've been optimizing Orca, trying to make it run faster, inspired by the recent optimizations of Noodle.

15R

2021-08-30

Currently rewriting Oscean in Uxntal, as an experiment to see how far I can push Uxn, and explore what a wiki from first principles might even look like. A few features have yet to be ported, but the main components are done. We're slowly sailing North toward Vancouver to see friends, we left Saturna for Ladysmith and Silva Bay, Pino has engine problems, again.

15Q

2021-08-14

We're anchored near Saturna, it has been nice to work offgrid again. I've started porting paradise in Uxntal, it would be nice to port Oscean at some point too.

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.