Welcome to Arcana Labs

I Can't Believe It's Not Buddhism - Kishimi and Koga's 'The Courage To Be Disliked'

2025-04-28 00:00:00 -0500

I am not above judging books by their cover, and the snap impulse to snatch something up off a shelf and interrogate it deeply has brought me more joie de lire than just about any other way of discovering books; I occasionally get a good recommendation from a friend or fellow-reader, and more often than not fall down serial rabbit-holes (being an avid reader of genre fiction), but when I think of favourites from youth and beyond, I think of things like Ender’s Game, The Lord of the Rings, and Dragonlance, which you just see on a shelf and say “Hey, I’ll read that.” There are exceptions to the rule of course, but this was the rule that brought me to Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to be Disliked.

Why We Practice: Shohaku Okumura's Realizing Genjokoan

2025-03-24 00:00:00 -0500

Around the middle of 2024, I set myself a goal to “read more deeply”, which is a horrible goal by most metrics, since it doesn’t have a concrete deliverable artefact or metric you can care about. This was actually something of a weird theme in 2024 for me more broadly: for a year that was supposedly (at least in part) about metricized living and trying to have a concrete sense of what was happening, it sure contained a lot of ill-defined goals. Still, you can at least some up with a plan for this sort of thing, so I did: a small list of non-fiction books I wanted to get through in roughly six months, and a fancy new five-step process for doing my damndest to “really understand” what I was working with.

Releasing PETI Version 0.5.0: The Hygine and Audio Update

2025-03-18 00:00:00 -0500

Today in the lab, we’re doing some celebrating. I set myself a goal back around the turn of winter that PETI version 0.5.0 would release before Spring had Sprung. And now, with just about a full day to spare, I am announcing that release on time. This marks the fisrt time that a PETI release has been even close to its original promised timeframe and also was quite possibly the most straightforward update I’ve cut. Most of what we wanted to add is basically just new animation, and thanks to the last several refactors of the display code, adding new animation is just straightforward string manipulation now.

Coming Soon: A New Type of Essays

2025-03-10 00:00:00 -0500

"In the darkness, the netchiman's wife felt great knives try to cut her open. When the knives did not work, the Dwemer used solid sounds. When those did not work, great heat was brought to bear. Nothing was of any use, and the egg of Vivec remained safe within her.

A Dwemer said, 'Nothing is of any use. We must go and misinterpret this.'"
- The 36 Lessons of Vivec (Elder Scrolls In-Game Book)

Longevity, Repairability, and the Ethics of Manufacture

2025-02-24 00:00:00 -0600

It’s kind of held as a truism, at least in the west, that we become more cynical as we age. That’s certainly been my experience, though of late, I’d prefer to fight that impulse. With the ongoing decay of my personal mobile devices, and microsoft pushing people off of their Windows 10 installs, and Nintendo making noises about a Switch 2, I’m starting to notice that one area where I’m particularly cynical-of-late is in new device releases. I find it hard to get truly excited when an old favourite studio announces a new game, or a manufacturer announces next year’s model of phone, or when it’s time to get a new laptop. Part of that is just the reality that I’m an adult now, we’ve had several years of local-record inflation, and I haven’t had a pay scale change to match it. But I think that also runs a little deeper.