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2025-12 weekly post

recovery week, revokery week, allergy symptoms rising week, alright

Writing

notes app flash, old story revision, translations when i have time

onto ch 2 of the Revolution and quite happy with where it is. trying to solidify the so-callable internal logic, in order that the pointless continuity is even more solid, as a thematic thing

Other projects

fixed my rss feed, posted another devlog for the ants, tryna learn math. all this inevitable

Books

started the audiobook of Wittgensteins Mistress: that’s a book made to be read aloud, despite everything. started complete Garielle Lutz and loving it. the eternal present - by kate wagner - the late review was good

Other

on a neil young kick. fooled with the Pathologic 3 demo till i accidentally went to the menu and erased my save. saw my yearly of Montreal at Brooklyn Steel on sunday

ants devlog 2

this is part of a series. see the previous post here

ants

now that we have a world, let’s create life in it. because we are working with systems it seems imperative we create a model of our life cycle. thus:

→ birth
    ↪ struggle
        ↪ death

in other words, to create life true to life, we must allow our ants to live, to struggle, and to die. once we have these, we’ll have our most basic simulation

notice!

because struggle is often difficult to represent visually, we will be showing movement in its place

birth

but how will we birth our ants? ‘ants’ is of course a generalized term here, little more than metaphor, but if we follow our metaphor as example we open ourselves to a whole complex reproduction apparatus, queens and soldiers and social roles and all, which is more than we are ready to simulate now. we’ll need another way to birth them, with an artificially increased control

a shame: we must reveal ourselves so early

revealing the creators hand

pico-8 offers optional mouse cursor support. it’s a sort of imitation secret, in that only its implementation seems obscure, its existence is known by most who use the program. also, more relevantly, it seems the perfect way to spawn out ants: use the mouse to select a pixel, click, and bring a single ant to life

to enable the mouse, we need only call the below function somewhere in our program. don’t worry what it means now. the meanings mostly unimportant ¹

 poke(0x5f2d, 1)

at least now we have a use for our _init() function: to init our cursor. let’s put that at the top of our file:

function _init()
	poke(0x5f2d, 1)
end

try to run it now? does anything happen? no: we need to make our hand

revealing the creator’s hand, pt 2

hi! my name is j konger. its a pseudonym, of course. few parents give their child a single initial name. i had the idea this devlog would be fun to write in the voice of a tutorial, but the more i write on this the more i realize i need to drill down, explain things neither you or i find very interesting. instead of scrapping this work however (in accordance with my site’s first rule), i am changing course into simple narrative. i hope you don’t mind.

a shame: we must change our course so early

cursor

code

this is the image i used for my cursor. you’ll notice it’s the pico 8 cursor almost exactly, with the color changed. we’ll get to that later, maybe several posts from now

and this is the code i used to make the cursor follow the mouse, which i put in a separate tab:

-- cursor

function cur_init()
	cur_spr=1
	cur_x=60
	cur_y=60
end

function cur_draw()
	spr(cur_spr,cur_x,cur_y)
end

function cur_update()
	--mouse loc
	cur_x=stat(32)-1
	cur_y=stat(33)-1
end

and, under our main tab, we now have this:

function _init() 
   -- allow mouse :)
   poke(0x5f2d, 1)
   cur_init()
end

function _draw()
	cls(4)
	cur_draw()
end

function _update60()
   cur_update()
end

explanation

let’s start with that second part of code, as its simplest: for readability, we add a new init, update, and draw function to our cursor, then just call them in the generic version of each. we call this ‘separation of concerns’. we call this ‘elegant code’

the other tab is simple also, just not as much. let’s go function by function, ok? i think that sounds nice:

cur_init

here, we just set some defaults. cur_spr is the index of our sprite, cur_x and cur_y the starting position of our cursor, which we add only because we need to call it in…

cur_draw

here were merely draw the sprite to screen: spr() draws a sprite, and cur_x and cur_y tell it where to go, x- and y-wise. as we’re using the mouse here, we are continuing to use obscurant functions. all we need to know for our purposes is that stat(32) returns our cursor’s x coordinate, stat(33) its y, and that we subtract one pixel distance from each so our cursor points at the coordinate rather than overlaps, thus looking overall more ‘real’ to our precious user (in truer words ‘familiar’)

end

so now we have a hand in our own creation. if nothing else, that’s worthy of our pride. reach out now, with your pointer device of choice, and touch your world. hit ctl-r on your keyboard to run the app and watch the cursor move

-- ants
-- by j konger

function _init() 
   -- allow mouse :)
   poke(0x5f2d, 1)
   cur_init()
end

function _draw()
	cls(4)
	cur_draw()
end

function _update60()
   cur_update()
end


-->8
-- cursor

function cur_init()
	cur_spr=1
	cur_x=60
	cur_y=60
end

function cur_draw()
	spr(cur_spr,cur_x,cur_y)
end

function cur_update()
	--mouse loc
	cur_x=stat(32)-1
	cur_y=stat(33)-1
end

2025-11 weekly post

went to LA for a long weekend

Writing

revised on “a cliff”, my short about christian plants; started a long overdue revision of “the revolution”; tryna translate “we mimes” to japanese, for practice

Other projects

finally back to writing up about my pico-8 ants :)

Books

i’m reading clarise lispector now. everyones reading clarice lispector now. ive seen multiple strangers this week read her books. also been listening to werner herzog’s memoirs, as though to look for literary foils

Other

listened to music on planes cam you BELIEVE! (mostly blue gene tyranny)

2025-10 weekly post

a calmer week, a recovery week; attempting to resume a manic style

Writing

finished another draft of ‘the girl’. i really like this one now, its solidifying into something. in a month or so i’ll re-read and see how i feel about it, if its ready for desperate attempts at notice by the world

also thinking of new ideas for ‘the revolution’, adding a thematically facetious “generative” style

Other projects

cooking, posting, finished reading the manual of pico-8. in addition i made a stack of personal randomization cards, as a method of navigating life without control

Books

went to several bookstores. new york’s nice. there are so many book stores.

Other

• now, after swans, ive been listening to michael gira solo projects. i get the impression he might be a violent man
• also: stevie wonder, secret life of plants. imagine an alternate world where he kept this style up, avant-light synthesizer songs, pop-style blue gene tyranny… i loved this album lots
• went to some live tv recordings
• still playing zelda. i dont wanna stop lol. its very good

finally updated my list of publications, first time in years

i think i missed some things, but that’s alright. i’m a semi-professional writer. that means being messy is a boon