Projects

Explore all posts in the Projects category.

65 posts • Page 1 of 4

STOP LOOKING: an Alan Watts chase film about the seeker who is the sought
4 min

STOP LOOKING: an Alan Watts chase film about the seeker who is the sought

STOP LOOKING is Song 13 in Out of Your Mind, and the chase film. Stop hunting the one who is looking, because the thing you are searching for is the one doing the searching. The eye cannot catch the eye behind the scan. Watts told it as a comedy: a thief climbs floor to floor with the police behind, up to the roof, nowhere left to go. The film chases hard over a Bach-toccata EDM, then drops into a dead-still heartbeat, and the thing the bunny was hunting turns out to have been here the whole time. CC BY 4.0.

THIS IS IT: an Alan Watts radiant film about the it that is already looking
5 min

THIS IS IT: an Alan Watts radiant film about the it that is already looking

THIS IS IT is Song 12 in Out of Your Mind, and the radiant film. It is the warm twin of One Hand. Where that one was a black void and silence, this one fills with light. The it you have been looking for is the one that is looking. You are it, already, you just disguised it so well you forgot. So the film does not climb to its point, it settles into it: a pre dawn field, a bunny walking toward you, and then the light blooms and two more selves are simply there. A Hildegard chant score that was always already home. CC BY 4.0.

The Data Wing: Six Short Films on How Distributed Data Behaves
7 min

The Data Wing: Six Short Films on How Distributed Data Behaves

Six short films on what happens to data the moment it stops fitting on one machine: the forced choice, the dial, taste, the cache, the branch library, the shard. The first wing of Learning Maps, the durable principle under each rented AWS label.

ELEPHANT: a whole track built on one word
3 min

ELEPHANT: a whole track built on one word

OG Bobby Johnson built a whole trap cut on one word. A beat-locked "EL...EPHANT" hook, an elephant-trumpet that blasts on every drop, and Anubis riding the elephant across a moonlit desert.

ONE HAND: an Alan Watts silence film about the koan that breaks the answer-machine
4 min

ONE HAND: an Alan Watts silence film about the koan that breaks the answer-machine

ONE HAND is Song 11 in Out of Your Mind, and the silence film. It is the one about the koan. Watts said the koan is not a riddle to solve, it is a device to break the machine in you that needs an answer. Hear the sound of one hand, now explain it, and the explaining stops. So this film is the opposite of every other one in the series. A black void, a pool of light, a meditating bunny, an enso drawing itself, and a sparse Honkyoku Zen score. The empty space turns out to be full of stars. CC BY 4.0.

THE RESERVATION: an Alan Watts card-table song about betting everything and laughing
5 min

THE RESERVATION: an Alan Watts card-table song about betting everything and laughing

THE RESERVATION is Song 10 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the inner reservation, the quiet knowing that it is only a game, the thing that lets you bet everything and still laugh when you lose. So the song is a card table. A Plan 9 bunny pushes its chips, shoves all in, loses the pile, dusts its paws, and walks off grinning while the chips scatter up into the stars. Ragtime that lifts into EDM, in F major. CC BY 4.0.

Just Enough Agreement: read your writes, and why not to over-buy consistency
3 min

Just Enough Agreement: read your writes, and why not to over-buy consistency

Just Enough Agreement is Episode 3 of Learning Maps, a Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. Strong consistency is the expensive default, a cathedral when a sticky note would do. The skill is buying the cheapest guarantee the story actually needs: read your writes, monotonic reads, session consistency. Hand drawn on a napkin, narrated by two cloned voices, scored with a 14 Hz focus layer. CC BY 4.0.

MAYA: an Alan Watts hall-of-mirrors song where a stick figure dances inside the illusion
4 min

MAYA: an Alan Watts hall-of-mirrors song where a stick figure dances inside the illusion

MAYA is Song 09 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the convincing illusion of separation: lift one mirror, another one lights, and each reveal hides one more until the audience is you. So this one is a literal hall of mirrors, and the Plan 9 bunny dances inside it on a real skeleton rig over a proper EDM score with an anthem hook. CC BY 4.0.

The Dial: quorum, R plus W greater than N, and tuning consistency by counting
3 min

The Dial: quorum, R plus W greater than N, and tuning consistency by counting

The Dial is Episode 2 of Learning Maps, a Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. Consistency is not on or off. It is a dial you set by counting: with N copies, when your reads plus your writes are greater than N, a read is forced to overlap a write and see the latest truth. Hand drawn on a napkin, narrated by two cloned voices, scored with a 14 Hz focus layer. CC BY 4.0.

The Forced Choice: CAP, PACELC, and the trade every database already made
4 min

The Forced Choice: CAP, PACELC, and the trade every database already made

The Forced Choice is Episode 1 of Learning Maps, a new Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. A storm takes down the phone line between two librarians, and what happens next is the deepest fact in distributed systems: the CAP theorem, its honest twin PACELC, and the trade every database has already made. Hand drawn on a napkin, narrated by two cloned voices, scored with a 14 Hz focus layer. CC BY 4.0.

SAME NERVE: an Alan Watts mirror-song where pain and pleasure share one wire
4 min

SAME NERVE: an Alan Watts mirror-song where pain and pleasure share one wire

SAME NERVE is Song 08 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about pain and pleasure: the same nerve fires for both, and the suffering is the resistance, not the sensation. So the song is a literal mirror, the same melody and the same words harmonised first in C minor and then in C major, while a Plan 9 bunny walks the nerve like a wire and learns to ride the pulse it used to brace against. CC BY 4.0.

ONLY LIFE: a machine of coherent complexity, undone
4 min

ONLY LIFE: a machine of coherent complexity, undone

The opposing view of coherent complexity. A cold blue machine of rings and gears and towers cracks, collapses, and reveals a warm breathing core of life that blooms to fill the frame. F minor trap, a Bavarian philosopher voice, and a Sanskrit chant of darkness into light.

Making Complexity Legible: a beat-locked spit-rap on charting complex systems
3 min

Making Complexity Legible: a beat-locked spit-rap on charting complex systems

Making Complexity Legible is Case I of The Cartographer of Complexity, a new Napkin Films series about Making Complexity Visible. The idea: you cannot make a complex system simple without deleting what made it work, so you do not shrink the sea, you learn to read it. A tidal-EDM spit-rap, Plan 9 and OG Bobby trading bars over recomposed Telemann, with a cartographer bunny who roams a sea that brightens as it becomes legible. CC BY 4.0.