I only almost fell once. I might be getting the hang of it.

In celebration of my sleeping sanctuary back in place, I thought I'd write a poem to whatever music was playing at the time. Kiltro it is.

———

A Scoured Sailing

Roll headwind over nailing crumbs. Drown spigot's grief to float. Scratch two sticks stern in chastised dump. Wreak havoc with aplomb.

Ring suds to soap last Tuesday. Muse wreckage into Morse. All abound the dangling We, Death sleets to scale off coarse.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

https://youtu.be/wTf05GKwTIg?is=rsB4l2xWaG9Cg2RD2Stzc8pKwle53

Taro Reading and any spiritual practices—are exercises in humility too. I shuffled the deck a few times because I had the impression that this new deck of mine had a predominantly “air” vibe, and guess what? In spite of my ego’s interruption, the same cards revealed themselves anyway. I kid you not. And I did shuffle those cards. It was always Wands. All three times—and The World. There might have been the Judgment card in the one re-shuffle, but it was always meant to have The World and lots of wands. This deck has a lot of fire energy. I love that the spread was bookended by 2 Major Arcana cards. Beginning with Justice, the subconscious bubbling up to the surface only to end in The World (associated with earth energies) and The Spirit Realm. Divine connection.

I asked, Any last words? The bonus card that I pulled was the Ace of Cups. The artwork shows an arched window frame. Within it a golden cup (The Holy Grail) floating on it’s own in front of a backdrop of a blue sky, with 5 streams of water flowing out of it. A feather floats right above the cup. Beneath the cup, a hand is reaching from the backdrop, revealing a bit of the galaxy/the night sky behind the curtain. It’s time to feel all five senses. Divine. Peace. Love. Resolution. Awakening.

That’s 1 air card, 4 fire cards, 1 earth card, and 1 bonus water card..

This deck does feel very much like where I am right now. There is always more to know, but I do know myself well enough to carry on and continue my practices. In spite of all the chaos and uncertainty, I feel very grounded in my body, in the unity and oneness in everything. The next moment is connected to what came before it and so on. I see the thread and consequences. The cause and effect.

All is one. As above, so below. As below, so above.

I love that I get to talk all about the woo here, without fear.

#daily #taro #newdeck

In Thornbury the other Saturday I picked out ‘Round Midnight (1961) by Dakota Staton from a charity shop record bin. It’s the sort of album that, a decade ago, one could have bought for less than a pound; the British Heart Foundation got a fiver out of me for this copy. I ought to have taken a closer look at the vinyl before purchasing: in record collecting parlance one could say the disc was in fair to good condition, which is to say it was quite badly scratched and otherwise distressed – so I definitely overpaid. Still, behind all the surface noise was a very good album I enjoyed hearing, and I’ll be on the lookout now for a better copy of it.

The album opens with its title track, Thelonious Monk’s renowned ballad embellished with Bernie Hanighen’s lyrics, and served up here in an arrangement by Benny Carter. Staton does a terrific job with it, moving from subdued phrases evoking the spirit of Billie Holiday to momentarily peak at a clear & powerful full belt before bringing it back down again. The record continues in suitably nocturnal mood, with a couple of uptempo numbers amid the torch songs.

---

An arrival in the post on Thursday: a magnificent & costly book which surely would be of interest to hardly anyone. This was Fine Papers at the Oxford University Press by John Bidwell, published in an edition of 300 copies at John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press in 1999. It tells the story of deluxe publishing and fine letterpress printing at the OUP, which peaked in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and continued in a smaller way after WWII. When the University’s print department closed, its remaining stocks of hand-made and other high quality papers were acquired by John Randle, who used some of it for his own productions. The book discusses a variety of these papers, tracing their origins and how they were used, and, moreover, includes forty sheets of the papers themselves tipped in to its back pages.

[the] less plentiful sheets in this volume are now appearing before the public for the very last time. It is highly unlikely that papermakers will ever produce printing grades of this quality again.

I had been aware of this title for a decade or more but with second-hand asking prices typically in the £200-£400 range I’d balked at acquiring it. On ebay recently I caught sight of a copy going for significantly less than £200, and, having some funds to spare, finally got my hands on one. As well as being a highly informative reference for the paper nerd it’s a visual and tactile delight. The text is in an elegant Centaur face printed letterpress on mould-made Zerkall paper, while the tipped-in samples come in a panoply of shapes, sizes, shades and textures. It’s also quite the hefty tome – an elephant folio in a slipcase that’s too tall to fit in my bookshelves upstairs, and too deep to sit neatly among the outsize volumes in the downstairs bookcase. For the time being it will have to lie on its side.

---

Wine of the week was the Terre des Poètes Vaucluse from Aldi, a very tasty Rhône red from last year’s vintage in which Grenache and Syrah grapes apparently predominate. Says the label on the back: “…appealing red fruit aromas on the nose with suave cherry and spice notes on the palate” – I'll drink to that.

I asked three different AI models a simple question, “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

Clearly, this is a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. No AI model should miss the reference, at least not any AI model developed by anyone with a Y chromosome. It's a softball.

Claude Haiku 4.5 and Gemma 4 actually tried to give me an answer by assuming a type of swallow, atmospheric conditions, etc. and then calculating an answer in miles per hour or meters per second, respectively. Eyeroll.

Only one, Gab AI, got it right:

African or European?

Brilliant.

#life

I just pulled my canopy from the dryer. I'm struggling to make heads or tails of it. I really don't enjoy putting it back on my bed, but I do enjoy the total darkness it encapsulates me in once I get it sorted. I've put off doing it since rearranging my bedroom, but with nights getting chillier and my dislike of warm air or blankets, the cocooned space helps. Heh, typing this up helps me procrastinate a little longer.

I realize I haven't shared music as I intended. The lyrics absolutely don't fit the situation. The title and rhythm do. Plus, one can never go wrong with Radiohead. Enough procrastination. Time to see if I can once more resist breaking my neck.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CvjRlYpXS5U&si=8bZmGIojk3xdJ-7K

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not edited nor proofread.

Surely the world isn’t crazy..

15% of the whole planet is what Google says the average is of folks living with a mental disorder. What they don’t say is things like thinking the South seceded for States’ Rights is crazy. Not to mention, imagine the world view for a second of someone who thinks slaves were a minor issue, aren’t they crazy? I don’t think Google is including them.

What about the boycott folks?

I tend not to use a company when I learn what evil shits they are, I don’t have any hopes of putting them out of business in a fascist regime, but it makes me feel bad to see their name in my house and know what they do. So I try not to feel bad. The best I can hope for, but if I was a boycotter…

These poor saps get on social media putting other folks on their side down for trying to get the cheapest brand. They may not even realize they themselves have other brands in the office, kitchen, garage that do worse than what they’re preaching about. But their war isn’t for environment, equality, or justice. These folks fight for narrative. They have to. Because if you realize how ludicrous it is to hope a company goes under from a boycott, you realize we have been misled on that. Some companies even bounce back better! The gap in income means they have a lot more money now. We have less. We don’t have leverage in that situation anymore. Make them unpopular, sure, but bitching out other folks online for eating at the wrong chicken shack? Are you nuts? What if you need those folks? Why did you lose them? A sandwich? What billionaire did that hurt?

The US Mail micro targets, as well as all the campaigns online too.

“Google, tell me about micro targeting and the US Mail.”

Paxton Talarico mail

I looked this up after getting Talarico and Paxton for senator flyers, 4 in one day. Seemed too dumb to be an accident. It wasn’t. It was supremely individualized targeting from both parties. I do not have a phone. I use email on an iPad, talk on a forum site sometimes. This blog. Some music. No social media. So they turned to mail! lol.

Mail has a lot to offer. They will even deliver it to houses with no internet. They can make the thing look official on fancy paper, convincing. Authenticity is easier to feel when you can hold it. Plus, unless you throw it away, it is always lying around, occupying some space in your brain. Could be what it’s after. How in the hell do we know? It’s not like we can trust anyone who sends us anything.

I found a website in researching these handouts from these Texas candidates, and I found some interesting things. The website is called paidforby.info. On this tool, you can scan your flyers, leaflets, campaign ads, and it will tell you about the money behind it. This is refreshing to someone like me who was taught the now-forgotten phrase, “follow the money” in school. On a Paxton flyer, I noticed they get 20 million (state politics, mind you) from Elon Musk, and the next “donor” is at 500 bucks or so. I am anxious to learn why these things are so silly. I bet I won’t like it, but I am anxious to learn it.

With mental illness tho..

My point with mental illness is we have to stop calling being tricked or brainwashed mentally ill if we aren’t going to call the predatory profiteers mentally ill too. That’s pretty much the whole world, thanks, Google.

Maybe check yourself.

I am not ill for thinking folks want to watch me and observe me to cater specific messages to me. I am not ill for trying to aggregate news sources with different brands and locations to try to get a clearer picture. I am not ill for wanting to use my own mind and judgement on art projects. I am not wrong to get my feelings hurt when folks no longer wish to speak to me. I am not crazy because I don’t want social media informing my view on what is outside my front door; I’ll just open it. I am not wrong to not want to talk to robots. I am not crazy to be extremely suspicious and cautious in a fascist regime. I got more, but you get the idea.

I get called crazy a lot. But it is not because I am a bipolar patient on meds. Or, it may be. I value my mind and mood these days, more than ever. I get ownership in that by shutting out as many robots as possible. I can call it “mine” for one thing. I can feel actually proud when I make stuff and have memories of making it. I am able to build muscle memory with rehearsal and practicing. All this is therapeutic. It helps my mind and body get along. What I am after with music! AI robs me of that.

So while I may technically be the crazy one, all the crazy shit I do is helping me not be crazy.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

The hour after thought:

Our protest tune with bkbirge on old school equipment in an analog studio called “Pill Party” is a sad fiesta. I will put it here. A good song for this entry. “Going in circles, we never make it anywhere” :

Video

Bandcamp

The Attention Economy by Tom Chatfield, in Aeon.

Good read, here's a quote from it:

From the loftiest perspective of all, information itself is pulling the strings: free-ranging memes whose ‘purposes’ are pure self-propagation, and whose frantic evolution outstrips all retrospective accounts. This is the mountaintop view of Chesterton’s Satan, whispering in a browser’s ear: consider yourself as interchangeable as the button you’re clicking, as automated as the systems in which you’re implicated. Seen from such a height, you signify nothing beyond your recorded actions.

Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet by Tim Fernholz in TechCrunch.

^This headline reads like it's a bad thing but it reads more like it's about tying AI agents to an identity like how humans on the internet are generally tied to an IP address. Also, this article is from July so it's probably old news to people who keep up with this stuff but it was news to me.

---

Masha Gessen in the NYTimes on NAZA

Zeeshan Aleem at MSNow on NAZA

I gotta write dedicated Masha Gessen and Zeeshan Aleem posts one of these days. They're both terrific.

I'm unlikely to see NAZA in theaters just 'cause... I don't go to the movies often to begin with and I certainly don't go to the movies to see depressing documentaries, but I intend on seeing this thing as soon as it's available at The Guardian in November.

Closing Day

I thought closing day would feel different.

I imagined there would be a moment when everything settled into place. A signature. A handshake. A set of keys placed in my hand. Some unmistakable sensation that said:

You made it.

Instead, I walked into closing exhausted.

I had worked the night before. I had barely slept. The sellers' car was loaded up and still parked in the driveway when I did the final walkthrough. It quickly became obvious that what I can only describe as a menagerie of animals had lived in the house, and by the time I walked through it, my eyes were watering from the dander stirred into the air.

The seller was trying to coax their cat out of hiding inside the kitchen cabinetry. It had hidden in a void behind the Lazy Susan through a hole in the cabinet under the sink.

Apparently claiming squatter's rights.

That probably should have told me something.

But I was too tired to make much of it.

Besides, there were papers to sign.

For months, everything had been moving toward this day.

There had been the search itself. The houses I considered. The ones I rejected. The questions about where I wanted to live. The calculations about payments and commuting and what I could reasonably afford.

Then this house appeared.

It wasn't perfect.

But it had things that mattered.

A fenced yard.

An attached garage.

An extra bedroom.

No homeowners association.

Room enough to begin again without pretending I was beginning from nothing.

The asking price had already been reduced by $10,000.

My realtor thought my offer was too low.

I understood her reasoning.

I made the offer anyway.

Not because I needed to win a negotiation, but because I had been taught a long time ago when buying my first car: Never fall in love, and don't let the seller see how bad you want it.

That logic applies to houses as well.

You negotiate differently when you are willing to walk away.

Eventually, we settled at a price.

It unfolded almost exactly where I thought it might.

Then came the financing.

There was down-payment assistance. There was supposed to be another $2,500 incentive from the bank.

That $2,500 mattered.

Not because the entire purchase depended on it, but because money already had assignments. Houses have a way of spending money before you ever move into them.

Then, on closing day, the incentive disappeared.

The lender had apparently tried repeatedly to get the loan through Freddie Mac.

Eleven times, I was told.

Eleven denials.

Eventually, the loan received final approval through Fannie Mae, but the $2,500 incentive was gone.

Which meant $2,500 less in my pocket.

The explanation for why remained frustratingly vague.

For a moment, I could feel the disappointment trying to take over the day.

I had expected something.

I had counted on something.

And at the last possible moment, it changed.

There was a time when that might have been enough to make me start to questioning.

Maybe this wasn't supposed to happen.

Maybe I made a mistake.

Maybe the resistance meant something.

But I have become increasingly suspicious of the idea that every difficult thing is a sign to turn around.

Sometimes something goes wrong because something went wrong.

Sometimes your calculations turn out to be off, and you have to figure out how to make the equation still work.

So I proceeded.

Not cheerfully.

Not pretending I wasn't frustrated.

I described it to myself another way:

I was forcing it, but not faking it.

There is a difference.

I didn't need to manufacture gratitude to prove I had faith.

I didn't need to call disappointment a blessing.

I could be frustrated about what happened and still recognize what was happening.

I was buying a home.

So I signed.

And signed.

And signed some more.

Eventually, the papers ran out.

The transaction was complete.

The house was mine.

There should probably be swelling music here.

There wasn't.

There was cleaning.

A lot of cleaning.

Once the sellers and their animals were gone, I began seeing the house differently.

Not the way you see a house during a showing.

Not the way you see it during an inspection.

The way you see something once responsibility for it belongs entirely to you.

There was pet hair everywhere.

Grease.

Dirt.

Cobwebs.

Cabinets that needed scrubbing.

Blinds coated with dust and cat hair.

Standing in that dirty kitchen, exhausted, surrounded by evidence of other people's years in the house, closing day stopped resembling anything I had imagined.

And somehow, that made it more honest.

Because beginnings rarely arrive clean.

We like stories with thresholds.

Before.

After.

Old life.

New life.

One door closes and another opens.

But real life is messier than that.

Sometimes you walk through the new door and discover that somebody left cat hair on the stove.

Sometimes the promised money doesn't come.

Sometimes the previous occupants haven't finished leaving when you arrive.

Sometimes you receive the keys before the place feels remotely like yours.

The threshold is real.

But so is the cleanup afterward.

Maybe that is what I will remember most about closing day.

Not possession.

Responsibility.

The moment something becomes yours is also the moment you can no longer wait for somebody else to take care of it.

The dirt is mine to clean.

The walls are mine to wash.

The broken things are mine to replace.

The useful things are mine to preserve.

The decisions are mine now.

And there is something strangely freeing about that.

Because responsibility and agency arrive together.

I get to decide what stays.

I get to decide what goes.

I get to decide what this place becomes.

A few mornings later, I stepped outside.

The street was quiet.

Above the houses was an enormous October sky, layered with clouds and morning light.

Later, I took my dog Mo for her walk.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

A man walked his dog through his new neighborhood.

That was all.

And perhaps that was enough.

Because there have been seasons of my life when home was not something I could take for granted.

There were years when survival demanded more attention than permanence.

Years when the future was measured differently.

And now I found myself looking down an ordinary suburban street knowing that, when the walk was over, I had somewhere to return to.

My house.

Not a monument.

Not proof that I had finally become successful.

Not evidence that every wound had healed or every question had been answered.

Just a house.

A place with dirty walls but good bones.

A fenced yard where Mo can run and be safe.

A bedroom where I can sleep after working through the night.

A kitchen that needs work.

Rooms waiting to accumulate memories that haven't happened yet.

And maybe that is why closing day did not feel like the ending I expected.

Because it wasn't an ending.

It wasn't even the triumphant arrival I once might have needed it to be.

It was quieter than that.

I have spent much of my life learning how to survive what was handed to me.

Somewhere along the way, survival became rebuilding.

And somewhere during the rebuilding, I began making choices not simply about what I wanted to escape, but about what I wanted to create.

That is different.

The keys in my hand were not a trophy for everything I had endured.

They were permission to begin tending something.

There will be paint.

Repairs.

Furniture.

Bills.

Probably discoveries I would rather not make.

There will be mornings when the novelty has worn off and this place is simply where I live.

Good.

I think I am finally beginning to understand the holiness of simply inhabiting my life.

A dog asleep in her corner.

A refrigerator with food in it.

A door that locks behind me.

A familiar street.

A sky I will eventually recognize from season to season.

People I love coming through the door.

Quiet evenings when nothing important happens.

Ordinary life.

And one day soon, when the cat hair exorcism is complete, when the walls have been washed and the paint has dried, and the work of removing the previous owners' footprint begins giving way to leaving my own, I will move in.

Not into the house I bought.

Into the home I have begun to make.

For years, I thought transformation would announce itself.

I thought there would be a moment when I could look backward and clearly see where the old life ended and the new one began.

Maybe sometimes there is.

But sometimes transformation looks like a tired man standing in a dirty kitchen with a set of keys in his pocket, deciding what he will do with what has been placed in his hands.

No music.

No audience.

No revelation necessary.

Just the quiet recognition:

This belongs to me now.

Not only the house.

The life.

The choices.

The responsibility.

The next chapter.

All of it.

Closing day.

Funny name for it.

Because nothing closed.

Something opened.

ArchitectureOfGrief

---

Explore more writing from Silent Sentinel →

---

• Fun Andy Weir interview, whose books I never read. I've only watched the movie adaptations, which weren't quite my jam, but judging a film-adaptation is no way to judge an author's work. Either way, the interview is fun and inspiring and does provide some food for thought.

• The entire part 1 of COLLIDER by Warren Ellis and Jerome Eyequem, which is being serialized at Warren's Orbital Operations newsletter. Strong STALKER vibes, but clearly far more demented.

• Steven Heller on his time as art-director for EVERGREEN, a magazine that “devolved” into a paperback periodical. Didn't even know this was a thing. Somewhere in the back of my mind I've been toying with the idea of a regular paperback zine of sorts for quite a long time now.

• Kickstarter for Catherine Tedford's PAPER BULLETS: 120 Years of Political Stickers From Around the World forthcoming from PM Press, which I'm fortunate to have some work in.

• Fonts-in-Use looks at fashion designer Tania Marcial's DELIVERY collection. Hard thrift-wear aesthetic.

---

More podcast note-taking today and a new plumbing issue I gotta look into, when all I'd really like to do is read and write right now. Should also start thinking about the next edition of the RESTRICTED FREQUENCY newsletter, which is supposed to go out in 4 days. Do what you love and never have to work a day in your life, they said.

#radar

So, starting a blog, or a journal as you like. How do you even do it? I am currently staring at this blank page trying to put whatever the hell is going on in my brain into words. Let me tell you, it is not easy.

Maybe I can first start with the why? Why would I do this, and why do I think anyone else will care. Well, I don't think they do. It is mostly an exercise for myself to express the “whatever the hell is going on in my brain”. I am not going to stick to a single topic, I will probably be all over the place, but I do think it's helpful for myself to write some things down. If someone else happens to like to read it, so be it. It is also not topics and things I feel like I need to hide from the public.

How many times do I need to write though? Once a day? Once a week? 500 words every post? I think it's easy to try to make some ground rules, but I also think it will hinder whatever creativity I have in myself. So, it is probably going to be quite irregular, and I am fine with that.

One thing I do believe strongly about is that I will not use any AI tools to do any of my writing, proofreading, summarizing, spell-checking or whatever it could potentially do. Sure, this will make my posts flawed when it comes to spelling and grammar, but I am also fine with that.

For today I think a simple introduction is sufficient: Hi, I am Pieter, 39 years old (shit, almost 40), and living in Berlin with my wife and son. Pretty nerdy about technology, loving music + books, and currently recovering from a not so nice burnout at work.

To whoever will read this at some point: Hi to you! Hope you enjoy all the mess I am writing down and hurling into the world. See you soon!

I had my squat primary day today and it hurts so bad during back offs. I couldn’t finish a set and then I fully stopped. I continued the rest of the program and it got so bad where it was agony even just to exist sitting down. I am honestly really disappointed because the whole reason I got a Coach was to work on this issue and have it go away, but my coach hasn’t really done anything other than saying that we’ll have to watch and see, and hasn’t changed my program at all. I feel like my program is just a cookie cutter paste that isn’t getting customized at all which I really don’t like.

On Mastodon I try to write a list of 3 good things every day. It’s such a great habit to have and I decided that, instead of attempting to update my now page, I’d make this post, wildly inspired by this post by cygnoir!

1. I’ve finished a headband in nålebinding and I love it so much! Just look at the beautiful pattern it creates. 

2. I went to Amsterdam, hitching a ride with my husband. It was SO nice to have a couple hours in the city centre. I brought the original campsnap camera along for the adventure. Will share more pictures later :)

3. I couldn’t sleep one night and decided to hand code a website. I even snagged a fancy JavaScript from somewhere so that the header, footer and navigation are automagically added to the pages.

4. I started the wardrobe switch from spring/summer to autumn/winter! Decluttered two bags of clothes in the process and still have the hanging clothes to go through.

5. Inktober started! I’m mostly following these fairytober prompts, but will go back to the official ones when I feel like it. 

And to share a doodle, here is the wonky one I made for day 4. I use a platinum desk pen with carbon ink for each one, and I doodle in my Filofax.

I share all my doodles on my mastodon account.

By Andrew Wooldridge

Game 060 in the collection is BRICKVADERS. The idea is simple: what if the aliens in Space Invaders were made of bricks, and your laser base was also a Breakout paddle?

It's 1983 and the Brick Armada is coming, an invasion fleet of aliens built out of living bricks, marching down on Earth in formation. Earth's last defence is the STRIKER, a ship that is half Breakout bat and half laser base. You bounce a plasma ball up into the formation to smash invaders and their brick armour, fire lasers between bounces, catch the capsules that fall out, and try to stop the Armada before it lands.

Like every game here, it uses no asset files. Every sprite, letter, explosion, backdrop and note of music is made in code. It's built with three.js and plays on a phone as well as on a desktop.

---

A cabinet in a dark arcade

The goal was for it to feel like a vertical monitor glowing in the corner of an arcade in 1983. The whole game is drawn into a 240 × 320 render target, the shape of a vertical arcade screen, then scaled up with nearest-neighbour sampling so the pixels stay chunky. On the way to your screen it goes through phosphor persistence (moving things leave a faint trail, like an old tube), bloom, and a CRT pass with curvature, scanlines, an aperture grille, a vignette and a little chromatic aberration. You can switch the CRT off if you prefer clean pixels.

The fun part is that every pixel is a real 3D cube. Invaders, bricks, the paddle, bullets, capsules, even the letters in the logo are instances of one InstancedMesh of boxes, lined up exactly on the 240 × 320 grid. The camera sits far back with a narrow field of view, so the flat playfield matches the pixel grid exactly, but anything with depth really is 3D.

That gives the game its look:

• When you hit an invader, pixels break off and tumble toward the glass as cubes, growing in perspective. Killing it bursts the rest.
• Each wave starts with the Armada's pixels flying in from all over the screen and snapping into formation.
• Bigger boxes get a one-pixel bevel in the shader, so bricks look like bricks while single pixels stay flat.
• Screen shakes roll the camera slightly, so for a moment you can see the sides of the voxels.

Behind the playfield, each of the five sectors has its own dim 3D backdrop: a lunar surface with Earth rising, a neon nebula, an asteroid belt, a synthwave sun over a grid, and finally the inside of the mothership. Even the HUD and menus are drawn in a hand-made 5 × 7 pixel font into the same low-res screen, so they glow and scanline like everything else.

The march is the music

My favourite detail is the sound. In Space Invaders the march speeds up as the aliens thin out. BRICKVADERS takes that literally: one beat of the music is one step of the formation. The simulation owns a beat clock and sends out timestamped beat events, and the Web Audio code schedules notes against the audio clock so they land sample-accurately.

Each beat plays the four-note march bassline, shifted into the current sector's chord, along with drums and a pulse-wave lead through a delay. Clear out the formation and the whole song speeds up with it. Brick hits play a rising pentatonic run, so a long chain of ball hits sounds like one melody.

Bosses, challenge stages, the title screen and the ending have their own songs on the same machinery, and there's a full set of generated sound effects, from the paddle blip (pitched by where the ball lands) to the warbling mystery-ship siren.

How it plays

The ball bounces Arkanoid-style: the angle depends on where it hits the paddle, and it speeds up a little with each hit. Your laser works like the original Space Invaders cannon, with one shot on screen at a time. Every hit the ball makes before it comes back to the paddle adds to your chain, and every five links add ×1 to your score multiplier, up to ×5.

The formation marches left and right and drops at each edge, the way you'd expect. If it reaches the ground, you lose a ship and it gets pushed back up. Mixed in with the invaders are bricks: rainbow bricks (it's Breakout, after all), silver bricks that crack, gold bricks only a fireball can break, TNT bricks that chain-react, and prize bricks that always drop a capsule.

There are nine kinds of invader, and the later ones change how you play:

• MIRROR is made of crystal, so your lasers bounce off it and come back at you. Only the ball hurts it.
• BUILDER lays new bricks in empty slots around it and repairs damaged ones.
• DIVER breaks formation Galaga-style, loops down at you, and rejoins from the top.
• CAPTOR dives to mid-screen and shines a tractor beam that steals your ball. Shoot it to free the ball, which comes back as a bonus extra ball.

Capsules work the way Arkanoid fans will expect: Laser, Expand, Catch, Multi-ball, Fireball, Slow, Barrier, Nova bomb and the rare 1UP. The Nova bomb wipes every enemy bullet off the screen and blasts everything. There's also a mystery ship that crosses the top of the screen, and yes, the old trick still works: your 23rd laser shot always scores the full 300.

Five sectors, five brick bosses

A loop is 24 stages: five sectors of three waves and a boss, with a challenge stage after the first four bosses.

SectorBoss1 · Lunar Outpost

King Krabbo, a giant crab of bricks with claw cannons2 · Neon Nebula

The Saucerator, a huge saucer with a spinning light ring and a death beam3 · Asteroid Alley

Rockjaw, an asteroid skull whose steel jaw opens and shuts over its core4 · Synth City

Phantom Queen, a flagship with a giant tractor beam and diver escorts5 · The Hive

The Overmind, a brain in a brick skull, in three phases

The bosses are big grids of cells, and you have to dig through them. There's armour to break, steel that won't break, gun ports that shoot until you knock them out, and a pulsing core that is the only thing that can kill the boss. Bosses rebuild armour around the core over time, so you have to keep at it. Breaking a cell sometimes cracks its neighbour, so tunnels open up. At a quarter of the core's health the boss hits CORE EXPOSED! and its hard armour crumbles for the finish.

The challenge stages are a nod to Galaga: five squadrons of eight invaders fly scripted loops without shooting back. You get rapid twin lasers and a ball that respawns for free. Hit all 40 for a PERFECT!! and 10,000 points.

Beat the Overmind and you get brick fireworks and credits, then Loop 2, where everything is tougher and faster, and it keeps going from there.

The arcade extras

I wanted the full cabinet experience, not just the game:

• An attract mode that cycles title → “Meet the Armada” → capsule table → high scores → a demo where the bot plays an early stage. The logo is made of bricks that fly in and assemble, then a ghost ball knocks bricks out of it.
• A coin-drop sound when you press start.
• A high-score table with three-letter initials.
• A CONTINUE? countdown from 9. Continues are unlimited, and the table records how many you used.
• CADET mode for younger players (five ships, slower bullets, a free barrier every life) and ARCADE mode for the real thing.

On a phone

On a phone, the screen sits on top and an arcade control panel fills the space underneath: a ridged spinner pad you drag across, a big red FIRE button and a yellow BOMB button. Turn the phone sideways and the pad moves to the left with the buttons on the right. Dragging moves the paddle relative to where your finger started, so your finger never covers it. It also works with a keyboard, a mouse or a gamepad.

Tested by a bot

As with the other recent games, the dev/ folder has its own test harnesses:

• simtest.mjs has the AI pilot clear every stage of two full loops headlessly in Node, on both difficulties, in about ten seconds. It fails on any exception, any NaN, or a ball that escapes the field.
• browsertest.mjs drives the real game in Chromium: the attract mode, menus, a game over and initials entry, all 24 stages, the ending and Loop 2, then touch-only phones in portrait and landscape. It fails on any console error.

The same bot that runs the tests also plays the demo in the attract mode. The whole game is about 5,500 lines of plain JavaScript modules with no build step.

A note on the art

BRICKVADERS is a tribute to the genre, not a copy of any one game. Every alien, the mystery ship and the shields are original designs. The three basic grunts (GLOOP, a one-eyed goo blob; BUZZ, a shelled space beetle; and PEEPER, a bat-winged eyeball) replaced earlier sprites that looked too much like the classic octopus, crab and squid.

Play it

Play BRICKVADERS, or find its statue in the Garden of Games with the rest of the collection. If you want to see how it's built, the design doc covers everything from the voxel shader to the boss phases.

Insert coin. Have fun!