The Neon Kiosk

2026-03-09 Busy Banshees - a

A lot has happened since my last update. I traveled to Spain for a few days with Devine for the Ink & Switch Summit(see travel). Neither of us had ever been there before. We spent a day in Madrid, and the rest of the time in Chinchón, staying in an old converted convent. Chinchón had buildings dating back to the 15th century. From our window, we could see the remains of Castillo de Casasola. The weather was unseasonably cold and rainy, forcing us indoors. We played two great card games while there, Sea Salt & Paper and The Crew.
On march 6th HundredRabbits was invited to talk at the University of Victoria to give a talk about permacomputing, in which we made parallels between sailing and software. The room was at-capacity, we had a really nice time and got to meet a lot of awesome people. I don't do talks very often, but I think I did well in this one. I am very proud of myself. I hope to one day be as comfortable as Devine in front of crowds.

HEALTH. I went climbing with Tamara, Owen & Devine at a very nice climbing gym. I really enjoyed it, but found it very challenging, I could not get past most of the overhangs. I hope to go again soon. For now, we are renting gear from the gym itself, because getting 2 pairs shoes and 2 harnesses is a bit too pricey for us currently, and both of these things are not really advisable to purchase used. It is important to buy climbing shoes that fit, and a used harness is a potential safety hazard. I was very sore after the climb, the soreness lasted for 2-3 days.
I am still playing squash, every 3-4 days, but as the weather warms I'll likely play less and spend more time outside, or doing boat projects(it's that time of the year!).

ART. I printed some punk rabbits stickers this month! Evidently, I could not print more than a selected few, I chose Bobcat, Howl, Sy, and Em (they were the most popular). They came out so nice! If you're interested, you can buy them here(100r store).

MUSIC. Pvh introduced me to Zammuto recently, I've been listening to it a lot since.

MOVIE. In the movie One Battle After Another, there is a scene in which Leo Dicaprio's character watches a movie called The Battle of Algiers. I hadn't heard of it, but decided to find it to watch it. It is an excellent film, following a group of rebels seeking to liberate their country from the French, based on actual events. The film style resembles a documentary, and much of the people featured in the film are non-actors. In this same line, I also watched Z, a fictionalized film about the rise to power of a right-wing military government in Greece following the assassination of left-wing leader. The film, like The Battle of Algiers, tells a very grim tale, about injustice, and political corruption.
While on the plane ride back from Spain, I saw Banshees of Inisherin, a black tragicomedy I really enjoyed, set in 1920's Ireland. This movie goes to some really dark and unexpected places. Colin Farrel and Brendan Gleeson play off each other so well, it was the same in Martin McDonagh's other film In Bruges(which also stars both of them). I absolutely loved it.

READING. I started reading Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, a book about 1950s USSR, weaving fiction and history to talk about the "planned economy", a system which they hoped would bring forth an abundance of good things for everyone. Devine & I re-watched Chernobyl(HBO series) and so learning about some aspects of Russian history was insightful.
I finally finished reading George Eliott's Middlemarch. What a fantastic book. I've never read an author that understands people(and how they think) as well as her. Her way of describing inner turmoil is just so vivid; their pain, their joy was mine, too. People as good as Dorothea are too few in this world. I also finished Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I enjoyed it, but this book could have been a lot shorter. I especially enjoyed hearing about people in the US and their thirst for literature, about them going Dickens crazy, snatching his books just as they came off the boat. This was during a time when people could sit and listen to live political debates for hours on end. These debates were done with respect, of both their opponent and their audience, and with good language. The books describes the coming of telegraphy, radio, and television, and how these things have cheapened discourse, and lowered the value of the written word in favor of cheaper, shallower media. All that was said in this book is still relevant today.

GREAT FINDS OF THE MONTH

• Hot Pizza, a really neat community art studio in Toronto.
• Hack This Shopping Cart
• The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, a thought exercise in financial history from the Future.
• The Anti-Dystopians’ Guide to Generative AI
• AI is a Hype-Fuelled Dumpster Fire, a talk for Programmable 2025 by Chris Simon.
• Buckwheat Bread Recipe

2026-03-08 — Only sometimes - NUEDGE unhinged journal

Here we go again. My current mental state is not the best, although not as bad as what you can read in the first entries of this new instance of the journal. I register a sharp decline in all interests, which means less music, fewer gaming sessions (if any), no movies, no clubbing. For the last thing, the fact that my usual partners in crime are out of sync with my life rhythm may be the main cause: when they’re available, I’m not, and vice versa. It happens, sure, but it is not pleasant on the short term.

Do I ever feel okay in all of this? Only sometimes.

2026-02-27 Everyone's rich inner-lives - Devine Lu Linvega's journal

They're still up, preparing for bed, watching a film, reading? I always wonder how anyone's evening is spent. I could peer inside, and I would know and they wouldn't see me against the night, but I would see them. Walking by, throwing the briefest of glances into this life, and that one. They're playing cards, a late dinner, they're talking to their dog and brushing their teeth.

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.

2026-02-25 - Apropos of nothing

February is starting very slowly. Temperatures are back above freezing at least, and we have hot water. There were good moments too, such as spotting storks at the park, and even a big woodpecker, feathers a brilliant green. Been learning new things again, still without much of a plan.

After multiple attempts to host it on other websites, I synced my link directory to the latest version. This is where it took shape and where people expect it. And there's no point in duplicating work while this site is still online. Likewise for my programming language notes, where I just merged some side text that was lying around.

Other highlights include seeing a friend and printing out some writings, both for safekeeping and so I can more easily hand out copies to interested people.

Long read of the month: Weathering Software Winter, by the Hundred Rabbits.

As the winter is ending (and I'm still behind on writing my journal) another idea for a toy programming language pounced on me. This one is novel enough to be worth my time for a change, and as a bonus it pushed me to learn more on things like Python type declarations or JavaScript classes+modules. That, and it was a reason to finally join the young meta.lisp community. Which, by the way, could use more people if you're into that sort of thing.

Second long-read of the month: The Slow Death of the Power User. Recommended!

2026-02-16 Mathematically elegant, thermodynamically fictional - Devine Lu Linvega's journal

In classical logic, bindings are inexhaustible, if a formula proves something from x, you can use x ten times, or zero times, it doesn’t matter. But programming doesn’t work like that, resources do matter. I don't say this to mean that copying a register is costing cycles, but that semantically speaking, closing a file or freeing memory should consume the access to that resource.

In catlangs, bindings are fuel, if you want two copies, you must duplicate. It becomes an operation, not a ambient assumption. Jean-Yves Girard wrote extensively about this, and his insight was that this linear logic was closer to reality, it makes logic reflect process. In other words, traditional logic is static and he wanted a logic of change.

I see Forth thrown left and right around permacomputing circles on vague notions of efficiency and human-scaleness, 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. Stack machines expose the structural rules that classical logic hides, duplication and erasure are explicit instructions. This conservation law aligns logic with a finite natural world.

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 thought process but keep the spatial system asleep. My experience with catlang has had less to do with fussing with names and symbols and more to do with something like weaving. On this loom, things don't have names but occupy spaces in a braid over time. If I had to guess, I'd say that probably triggers the same geometrically thinking 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.