West of Capital Knot City, Eastern Region ✶

This was Sound Space 5, in Kojima’s Death Stranding.

Sunday, 14 December 2025

Hand-drawn map of the original Jagged Alliance’s Metavira ✶

By one of the original Jagged Alliance designers, Shaun Lyng.

Friday, 12 December 2025

HTML tools ✶

Useful HTML+JavaScript tools built by Simon Willison with the help of LLMs. These remind me I need to improve my own 7-minute workout tool, where voices won’t play on iOS mobile.

Thursday, 11 December 2025

The order of a healthy civilization ✶

Stuart Brand:

I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are:

  • Fashion/art
  • Commerce
  • Infrastructure
  • Governance
  • Culture
  • Nature

In a durable society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above. “Every form of civilization is a wise equilibrium between firm substructure and soaring liberty,” wrote the historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.

Make web browsers render an HTML entity glyph instead of an emoji

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Web browsers and operating systems often default to rendering certain Unicode characters as colorful emojis rather than their original, monochrome text-style glyphs.

The most direct and widely supported way to request a text presentation is by appending the Unicode Variation Selector-15 (U+FE0E) character immediately after the character you want to display as text.

  • How it works: This special character is an instruction to the rendering engine to use the text-style glyph variant instead of the emoji-style variant for the preceding character.
  • HTML Entity: Use the HTML entity ︎ or ︎ right after your Unicode character or entity. Examples:
Character Emoji (default without selector) Text-Style Glyph (with selector) HTML for text-style glyph
Star ⭐ ⭐︎ ⭐︎
Heart ❤️ ❤︎ ❤︎
Black Sun ☀️ ☀︎ ☀︎

Example HTML code:

<p>Default heart: &#x2764; (often renders as ❤️)</p>
<p>Text-style heart: &#x2764;&#xFE0E; (tries to render as ❤︎)</p>

Note: This selector won’t work for all Unicode characters, as some characters only have an emoji presentation.

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Wednesday, 10 December 2025

Size of life ✶

Another beautiful project by Neal Agarwal, with illustrations by Julius Csotonyi, production by Liz Ryan, music and sound effects by Aleix Ramon, and cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga.

I love many of the descriptions, including the one for humans:

A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.

Tuesday, 9 December 2025

Tessitura ✶

Found this term while researching answers to the following:

Is someone’s natural speaking voice in a particular key? Might it be a minor or major key? Would this inform which mic would be best for it?

Monday, 8 December 2025

Brian Boru’s harp ✶

A ~500 year old medieval musical instrument that you may have seen on some logotypes around the world. On display in the long room at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Newbie rendezvous & first landing in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey ✶

Helping a new player land on a moon in space.

Saturday, 6 December 2025

There’s a training area in Arc Raiders ✶

It’s called the Practice Range and appears after you have done a few runs, maybe 4 or 5.

Any gear you take in or find there and use is reset when you leave, so it’s a good place to practice using items without losing them (though in an extraction shooter, and any video game, really, why not USE the digital gear you have?).

There are training target “crash test dummy” dolls and drones, an environment traversal practice course, and a Raider hatch with a key next to it that can’t be opened.

Maybe a puzzle or easter egg somewhere?

Monday, 1 December 2025

Soundscape by Horizon’s Glow ✶

In Col 359 Sector DZ-M b9-2, Elite: Dangerous. Sound Space #3.

Sunday, 30 November 2025

Elite 46: Trouble during Artemis Grade 5 suit testing ✶

The lastest Elite episode, starring Yootsvik and RazWasabi.

Saturday, 29 November 2025

Music video for E44 Stream End Piano Synth Improvisation ✶

Improvised music during an Elite play session, with thanks to Cmdr Yootsvik.

Friday, 28 November 2025

Roguelike or roguelite video game characteristics ✶

Responding to video game, literature, and music enthusiast Evans-Thirlwell over at Rock Paper Shotgun:

Here are Rogue-like video game characteristics from someone who played the original Rogue in the 1990s and some recent ones like Noita and Dead Cells:

  • Random places and things in a set or “biome.”
  • When your avatar dies you start over from the beginning.
  • Progressively higher difficulty, with only a few managing to reach the end and transcend.

Roguelites let you keep skills you learned during your prior play.

I suspect VVilliam the Spearshaker would agree that they are attractive to many because they are similar to life in the sense that you die and are reborn continuously with the passing of time, the cells in your body, and more mystical things like Groundhog Day.

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

Sound Space

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From a page of notes from the 1st Sound Space stream on 2025 November 26

Sound ambiences in real and virtual worlds, with layered improvisations of music, at times called autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR.

This is Sound Space, a sort of search for my own musical voice begun in 2025 while learning to play piano and exploring sound synthesis.

While usually recorded live at youtube.com/@hypertexthero/live, sonic landscapes and imagery from the real world occasionally appear, too.

Past sessions:

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  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .
Atmospheric landings in Elite Dangerous soon? ✶

I hope so. The Radicoida Unica community goal at HIP 87621 seems to be the beginning of something big in Elite. Here’s the full stream, in 1440p, and in behind-the-stream news, YouTube livestream tests are on the horizon, too.

Friday, 21 November 2025

Numa compact digital piano notes

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My second keyboard,1 the Studiologic Numa Compact X SE made my love for piano blossom. I turn it on first thing in the morning, turn to it to play and practice throughout the day, and turn it off before going to bed. It’s in my first published songs.

The instrument has 88 semi-weighted piano keys that are around a centimeter shorter than full-sized keys, internal sound banks with good piano and synth among other sounds, built-in effects like drive, delay, and reverb, and can also be used as a MIDI controller.

I have the SL P3-D pedals to control sustain. Press the right pedal and the vibrating waves from the keys you played keep ringing into the ethereal space where music lives.

Here are the full specifications and the user manual.

Many thanks to Studiologic’s Gianni Giudici for technical support.

Notes

Buzz in Organ sound bank sounds

If you don’t like the buzz in the initial attack when pressing keys in most of the Organ drawbar modes, go to Global settings (press and hold [Global] EDIT button) and set both Click Key On and Off to 0.

You can also use the last Pipe Organ sound bank which doesn’t have the buzz, if you don’t want to change the global settings.

Can’t hear effects

Stick 2 controls effects, so if you’re not hearing your Delay, for example, make sure Stick 2 is set all the way to the right.

Slider programming to control DAW via MIDI

  1. Press MIDI button.
  2. Press [Global] EDIT button.
  3. Use Encoder knob to select Zone Edit [14] CC Slider 1.
  4. Click Encoder knob and select the desired control such as 111-Undefined.
  5. Physically move the next slider so it appears in the menu (CC Slider 2), repeat 4 and maybe select 112-Undefined, and so on.
  6. Click [Global] EDIT button.

  1. My first one was a little 25-key Akai given to me by Matt DeVer. ↩︎

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

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