Notes from the bench. Progress, dumb tangents, the occasional postmortem.
I put a letter app on the App Store: you write without choosing who receives it. No notifications, one letter a day, and every first letter is read by a person before it is handed on. I spent longer on what to leave out than on what to add.
I made a song out of StarCraft's SCV. I was pleased with the chorus until I dug through the original voice files and found a line that says the same thing. It had been sitting in the game since 1998.
A song people in Latin America took to, back on a channel I used to run — re-sung in Spanish, late as it is. The problem was that AI cannot draw a body in mid-dance. So instead of dancers I shot shadows, feet and swinging bulbs.
City Girl in Japanese, The Soviet Cosmonaut Packed a Shotgun in English. Six trips to Japan left me wanting to give some of that kindness back, so I put a short drama to it for whoever is having a hard time right now.
A family member is buying a Tesla, so I registered as a developer to try sending a destination to the car — then a couple of things gave me pause and I stopped. Not a verdict, just where I got to.
For the tired nights when you wonder whether your work, and the people around you, are really right for you. No one told us it was okay, so we made two quiet songs to say it — first to ourselves.
Our first YouTube video is not a game trailer. It is the myth of a woman whose grief turned into song, and it is also where our app got its name.
It had to run without a subscription or an API key. The local model was, at first, oddly cold.
It would be easy to only post the stuff that works. That's not honest, and it's not that interesting either. Here's why the scrap pile stays public.
The webview version couldn't do it, so I'm rebuilding with a different engine. Still in progress.