Timasomo 2025: Week 1 Updates

Been waiting for this! Turns out working on a project is a lot of fun if you know you can share updates with people who at least tangentially care.

So, calculator update one! I've found a name for the project, I've designed the keypad and the UI for it.

I've decided to call the calculator PIGS. Back in the day, I had a TI-84, and one of the few games I used to waste my maths class away on was called DRUGWARS. It was a management simulator, and you had to buy and sell drugs while moving from place to place to avoid the cops. Sometimes, random events would happen, and one of the random events (and the one that stuck with me the most) was "PIGS MADE A BIG COKE BUST! PRICES ARE OUTRAGEOUS!!!!". That would just always really tickle me in a strange way and I've always associated it with the vague notion of calculators.

For design, I am thinking black, white and orange. Dunno why, just seems right. Made some sketches on paper and reused an old numpad I had lying around from my mechanical keyboard obsession days, sketched out the keypad and i think i'm happy with this layout. Also made a custom set of keycaps and I'm having them custom printed on some website I hadn't heard of before, but their online keycap designer tool is surprisingly robust.

In terms of UI, if at all possible, I want the screen to be square. Just kinda seems cool, but if I can't find a screen that fits my specifications, I'm happy to settle for a portrait 16:9 screen. For now, I'm designing for the square screen. My screen design poison of choice is Sketch, not that it matters for white text on black rectangle, and I've made some screens for things I'd like it to have. Since it's all just math, and I'm pretty comfortable at web design, this should be easy enough to implement.

Oh yeah, I'll also probably just use a Raspberry Pi (I'm thinking Zero W, but I do have a 4B lying around too if it really is too slow) for this, running a web server and browser. I know that's not efficient, or particularly suited for the task, but I know I can make that work, so this is the army we go to war with. Making this thing for myself, after all.

Next steps will be actually writing the software and getting my hands on a screen to work with! Having a lot of fun with this project so far. Happy Timasomo!

So! I've been drafting a surrealist fantasy novel, and things are going pretty well, I'd say. First of all, just writing this thing, and when I'm not writing about it thinking about it, has been really good for keeping my mind off the state of the world, and for not falling into doomerism, so I'm happy about that.

When it comes to the actual drafting, I've been going at a good clip. I've written 12k words in one week, which, going by NaNoWriMo rules, is more than enough to hit the required 50k words in a month that that challenge requires. The problem is, I'm realizing that that pace is still probably too slow. This novel is fucking sprawling, there's so much that happens in it. I had speculated last week that it might be a novella; in actual fact, my first draft of this thing could get as high as 100-150k words, or at least that's what I'm estimating, and I'm actually a fairly economical writer, so that's fairly lean for the story being told. Guh. That said, I've been having so much fun writing this thing I might be able to pick up the pace for the next couple weeks.

Okay, so the biggest problem is that I have no idea whether this story is any good. As a surrealist novel, I really want to conjure up a poetic, dreamlike quality. I've recently been inspired by a lot of the Latin American magical realism stuff, like think 100 Years of Solitude or Pedro Paramo, and I think a lot of the success of that style relies on the cumulative effect of the finished product. Like, I've written some scenes where I was like, "Oh yeah, that's a great fucking scene," and some where I'm like, "this'll definitely need a few more passes in revisions," but as a whole I have no sense about whether this thing is working or cohering at all.

I'm a bit worried that I may be doing too much. So far, in the first 3 chapters, 12k words, I have a switch from past tense to present tense, a switch from third person limited narration to first person and then back, a switch from prose to script format and back, a poem and like zero conventional scene transitions, since I'm trying to just have the whole thing melt and flow together in a disorienting and organic way. This is why I'm enjoying writing this so much, the setting and premise mean I get to do some really fun and subversive stuff, but it's also possibly bad to read. We'll see when the second draft comes around, I suppose.

This is unironically the first time since my last creative writing class in college that I've written longform prose that isn't smut. I keep almost stumbling into writing dubiously consensual lesbian sex scenes, which sounds absurd, yes, but I think of sex scenes in the type of smut I write like songs in a musical: entertaining, yes, but also a great way to escalate drama or release tension. It's kind of stupid that I'm having to re-teach myself how to write scenes between two people without sexual overtones, but whatever. I can be normal for one story.

If anyone wants to read an excerpt of what I've got so far I can post it here as well!