Projects

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78 posts • Page 2 of 4

Jun 19, 2026 • 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.

Jun 19, 2026 • 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.

Jun 16, 2026 • 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.

Jun 16, 2026 • 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.

Jun 16, 2026 • 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.

Jun 15, 2026 • 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 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.

Jun 14, 2026 • 3 min

The Language of Sound: a six-part series on how music is actually built

A six-part series on how music is actually built, from a single waveform up to how a machine writes a song. Narrated by Der Gouverneur, every frame drawn by the real audio. Season One is complete.

Jun 13, 2026 • 4 min

TOCCATA RAVE: Bach builds the cathedral, Plan 9 breaks on the floor

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, grown into EDM and turned into a dance floor. Plan 9 breaks to it on a bone skeleton while OG Bobby Johnson works the corner piano. One organ, one rave, two performers.

Jun 10, 2026 • 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.

Jun 9, 2026 • 4 min

Napkin Films, Vol. 2: five new ChipForge scores, and Vol. 1 remastered

Napkin Films, Vol. 2 is out on Bandcamp: five instrumental scores synthesized entirely in ChipForge from numpy arrays, plus a full remaster of Vol. 1 through the same engine. No samples. No recordings.

Jun 8, 2026 • 3 min

FAULT IN THE CODE: a study of Gasoline where the glitch is the glory

A Plan-9-flavored study of Halsey's "Gasoline." OG Bobby Johnson spits, the cyborg bunny Plan 9 answers in tune, and a deep Alpine philosopher says the quiet part out loud: the bug is the feature.

Jun 7, 2026 • 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.

Jun 6, 2026 • 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.

Jun 6, 2026 • 3 min

EGO IS AN INCH: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the self you can never grab

EGO IS AN INCH is Song 07 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the ego: an abstraction like an inch or a line of longitude, useful for measuring and impossible to pick up, because the thing reaching is the thing reached for. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Mussorgsky's grotesque Gnomus reborn as Eb-minor EDM, while a Plan 9 bunny, recast as the inch itself, taunts from just out of reach. CC BY 4.0.

Jun 5, 2026 • 5 min

ATTENTION IS THE LOOM: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap where the loom does the dancing

ATTENTION IS THE LOOM is Song 06 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about attention: what you attend to becomes the cloth, and the rest falls through. The front and the back of the embroidery are both true, and the gap is the rhythm. This pass rebuilt the motion from scratch so the loom actually weaves and the camera dives through the cloth to its knotted back. CC BY 4.0.

Jun 4, 2026 • 4 min

THE WEB: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day you found out you are the web

THE WEB is Song 05 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about relationship: nothing stands alone, the figure is held up by the ground, and the dewdrop net reflects itself forever. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over a Bach Brandenburg canon, a web of voices that imitate and pull on each other, while a Plan 9 mirror-bunny answers from the other end of the loom. CC BY 4.0.

Jun 3, 2026 • 5 min

THE GAME INSIDE: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the cosmic game of hide and seek

THE GAME INSIDE is Song 04 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the game of hide and seek that consciousness plays with itself. Life is a play. The central self is playing every part. The only rule is to forget you set it up. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Bach's Goldberg Variations re-composed into G major EDM, and the Plan 9 bunny answers back as the player who keeps finding him. CC BY 4.0.

Jun 2, 2026 • 6 min

ATE THE MENU: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day the map ate the land

ATE THE MENU is Song 03 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about symbols eating the substance they point at. The map became the territory. The page outranks the place. You wheel a cart of real food to the counter and grieve the thirty dollars of paper instead of the gold you are carrying home. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Mussorgsky's Promenade re-composed into D minor EDM, with a German echo underneath. CC BY 4.0.

Jun 1, 2026 • 10 min

THE GRAND TOUR: a two-voice film where the picture is the physics

A two-voice music film where the picture is the physics. A small AI crew raps the lecture, Pythagoras and the pure ratios and the golden mean, and then the maker's own voice takes the bloom. The visuals are the math, rendered as light, every pulse read straight from the track.

May 29, 2026 • 7 min

PRAY TO THE PROMPT: a Dowland Lachrimae trip-hop on the new altar and the old one

A 1:55 trip hop short. Dowland's Lachrimae tear drop tetrachord from 1604 recomposed as half time downtempo. Plan 9 the bunny kneels at a cursor candle altar while Anubis weighs holy books against a USB stick on the scale of Maat. Bavarian Governor delivers the spoken word. Anubis chants ancient Egyptian funerary phrases underneath. Matrix style cascades of ancient glyphs fall behind everything, then disperse as a galaxy spiral takes over and the universe becomes the universal symbol. Plan 9 says farewell in Tibetan.