Capella: Decan 5 - Protection & Renewal (April 29 - May 8)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Capella in 1982. Two yellow giants, locked in a 104-day orbit, sent this l...
Archive
Complete collection of 145 posts across 7 pages
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 w...
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 or...
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 tim...
ENCODED: living in the prompt
A 2:38 napkinfilms meditation on consciousness as signal. We replicate databases across three continents; the soul runs ...
UPTIME 32: thirty-two bits, still processing
A 2:54 minimalist pulsing ambient film. One hero, six movements, a whole sprite civilization keeping the machine running...
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 diag...
Arp Cathedral: 150 Stick-Figure Bunnies, All in Unison, Each Their Own Dance
A 249-second trance music video for a congregation of Bell Labs Plan 9 bunnies. They pound their chests in unison. They ...
Plan 9 Rap Battle: A Bunny, a Beat, and 40 Bars of Machine Spit
A 128-second rap music video: the Plan 9 bunny steps into a dark alley at 3AM with a 40oz, a bandana, and 40 bars of aut...
Menkalinan: Decan 4 - Guidance & Structure (April 19-28)
The photons entering your eyes tonight left Menkalinan in 1944. This eclipsing binary, two nearly identical stars orbiti...
Chapter 18: Your Journey
Every master was once a beginner. Every teacher was once a student. Every pathfinder was once lost in the wilderness. Yo...
I Want to Be Martian: A Stick Figure Love Letter to Space and Bradbury
A 122-second animated short in six acts: a stick figure and his wife dream of uploading to Mars. Three voices, a Holst-M...
Humagent, and the Road There: Six Films, One Session, One Engine
Six animated short films built in a single working session. A registry-based expression system, a Shot/ShotList abstract...
The Reckoning: Ten Minutes of Stick Figures Arguing with God
A ten-minute animated theological tribunal in stick figures and chiptune. Five voices, four audio layers, 78 MST3K-style...
Chapter 17: Community
For six months, I worked alone with this workflow, afraid to share it. Then at a Python meetup someone said 'You too?' T...
Stars Press Start: 21 Passes to Make TTS Perform
A 105-second music video built in 2 days and 21 passes: a Nevada stargazer sees constellations as arcade sprites, gets a...
Chapter 16: Becoming
There's a moment in any transformation when you stop observing the change and realize you've become it. Not learning. No...
Deduct Yourself: A Tax Day Hallucination
A 78-second absurdist tax-day music video about the tax code's open secret, an AI bunny oracle, double-time rap, and Gri...
Chapter 15: The Great Unleashing
You get used to the walls. You stop seeing them as walls and start seeing them as reality. Then AI removes them, and eve...
HUMANS.EXE and Ten Thousand Days: Day Two at Napkin Films
Day two at Napkin Films: a Hitchhiker's Guide-style field guide to the human operating system, and a meditation on ten t...
Four Films From Code: Stick Figures, Chiptunes, and the AI Director's Chair
Four animated short films, written entirely in Python, scored with numpy-synthesized chiptunes, voiced with cloned speec...
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 gro...
Elnath: Decan 3 - Expansion & Boldness (April 9-18)
The photons entering your eyes tonight left Elnath in 1894, a year of bold expansion in every domain. This blue-white gi...
Chapter 14: The Weight of Creation
Every generation of builders faces the moment when they realize the thing they are creating is not just a tool. It is po...