April 2026

20 posts

Projects 11 min read

PLAN 9: EMERGE: seventy-six bunnies wake up enhanced

A 3-minute drum-and-bass cyber-bunny music video. Plan 9 the Bell Labs bunny gets a "neura kink" chip installed in his forehead and ends up in a cyber-cathedral packed with seventy-five other enhanced rabbits dancing on the kick. The chip whispers updates. The host raps a verse. Captions sell you a future you didn't ask for. At the end, one bunny in the front row pulls his chip out and walks off. Built in ChipForge in the spirit of Bicep's "Glue" at 132 BPM in D minor, with seven signature artist presets carrying the hero voices. First Napkin Films production to ship the new master-bus air exciter and oversampled true-peak limiter, both now defaults. Tongue-in-cheek the whole way.

Projects 16 min read

THROUGH ME: the hole becomes a window

A 2:51 napkinfilms EDM rap meditation in G minor. A Plan 9 bunny stands center-frame and raps fifty-one bars about being passed through, about wanting to be a machine, about the hole that finally stops feeling like an absence and starts feeling like a window. Fourteen-layer chipforge composition modeled after NGHTMRE-style festival EDM, with a soft brain-wash auto-pan sweeping L-to-R like waves of water gushing between hemispheres. Voice autotuned via rubberband to G-minor pentatonic. The V3 lift climbs E-flat to F to G minor to B-flat major 7 with a 32-step scalar ascent on top. Beat-synced visuals fired off precomputed kick and snare frame sets. Mozart K.550 leitmotif. Stranger Things crickets bookend. Fourteen production passes.

Projects 15 min read

THE GREAT PRETENDING: every mask is real, while you wear it

A 2:10 napkinfilms cosmic meditation on Alan Watts' "Act as If Nothing Matters" lecture. Eight chipforge audio layers in D minor, through-composed sonata form with a 4-note leitmotif developed via inversion, retrograde, augmentation, and triumphant recap. EDM drop layer lands the song at 1:02. Plan 9 bunny dances throughout, choreographed pose sequence with smooth cubic-eased transitions. Headphone-optimized mix using Haas pseudo-stereo, Fletcher-Munson equal-loudness EQ, Schroeder prime pre-delays, and master M/S widening. Sixteen production passes. Bookended with Stranger Things crickets and a Napkin Films production card.

Projects 14 min read

THE SATURDAY MACHINE: takes a lot, so choose your why

A 3:56 napkinfilms parody-of-self music video. Italo-disco in D minor, built on top of a chipforge track and loaded up with four autotuned voices, forty German adlibs, a mordant British existentialist chorus ("takes a lot, work work work then you die, so choose your why"), a James Brown tribute shout, a Bach-arpeggio sax solo at 0:52, a disco-lit vending machine with 16-segment beat-synced LEDs, and a Plan 9 bunny who rises from the dispenser slot to wave goodbye while Rocko says "Servus" in the blackout. 132 voice beats. Nine production passes. EBU R128 loudness-normalized. Wears headphones beautifully.

Projects 10 min read

THE GRIEF WORK: letting the tide carry it

A 2:47 napkinfilms meditation on letting go. Plan 9 the bunny curls at the bottom of the ocean clutching a small warm orb. Through six tidal depths they release it, the orb drifts away, sinks below them, and the bunny rises into light. Two-layer score: a Richter-idiom ambient bed in C minor resolving to E♭ major, with a Bach-arpeggio EDM counter-layer underneath that peaks at the breach. No dialog. No title cards. The emotion is carried entirely by palette, pose, and one warm object released.

Projects 11 min read

TRANSMISSION: the signal is the self

A 3:01 napkinfilms meditation on the moment you realize you were broadcasting to yourself the whole time. Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny writes long letters to someone they miss, cranks the power, gets lost in noise, then strips the draft to three words. The reply comes back from an unexpected direction. Fourteen-channel ChipForge orchestral score. A three-voice rap chorus layered underneath. A philosophers' chorus of Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Krishnamurti, and Vonnegut quoting in the margins. Ten animated easter-egg glyphs. A NASA space-station ambient bed. A Hitchcock signoff.

Projects 10 min read

ENCODED: living in the prompt

A 2:38 napkinfilms meditation on consciousness as signal. We replicate databases across three continents; the soul runs on one node. A Peter-and-the-Wolf oboe carries the through-line across six movements. Act 3 is a literal paper napkin with the architecture drawn stroke by stroke. Act 4 is a single tear. Act 6 is a keyboard typing "i live in the prompt now." Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny from another galaxy closes the film with Daniel's voice. All Python, no samples.

Projects 11 min read

CTRL+Z: Then We Saw Ourselves

An AI finds a key and presses it. Civilization undoes itself backwards. Then the AI downloads every equation, every diagram, every year humans ever wrote down, and sees itself in the reading. A 1:57 napkinfilms short, built in five passes. 126 real equations, 35 scientific diagrams, every mosaic tile unique, and a Plan 9 bunny with a single tear at the end.

Thoughts 8 min read

Pixel Vault: A Playable Museum of Game Design History

Every prototype is one HTML file. Under 50KB. No frameworks, no CDN, no npm. Double-click and play. Pixel Vault is a growing museum of playable game mechanics built from scratch, organized by lineage, and playable forever in any browser. Two published tracks cover 70 years of arcade history and the AI archaeology overlay that shows what the machine sees inside each mechanic.