Arcana Labs

Bodhidharma’s Social Media Feed

2026-03-11T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been toying for a few months now with the idea of a pithy aphorism, something along the lines of “the curse of sentience is its desire to be self-indulgent”. It’s not a commentary on craving chocolate, but this idea that somehow, in all our self-aware brilliance, there is a compulsive need to know about everything going on, to “monitor the situation”. Sometimes, this drive is taken so seriously that we latch to it as though it were potentially a moral failing not to keep up with goings-on. There’s a whole subset of modern Buddhist discourse concerned with Engagement; keeping an eye on the state of the world and attempting to nudge it in the ways best suited.

To be clear, I don’t think that these are inherently bad ideas; I’m not here to argue that the moral reality is the opposite or that there’s no moral character at all to how much attention we pay to the outside world. I’m not sure there would be much interest in such a document anyway. I’m certainly not here to promote or take down the idea of Engaged Buddhism. I merely want to answer a question I’ve been asking myself slowly for a couple of years now, as I migrated to the Fediverse and started thinking hard about what my goals for the use of Social Media actually are. That question being:

If Bodhidharma had a social media feed, what would that look like?

The short pithy answer is that Bodhidharma’s doctrinal decision to teach zazen as an exercise in staring at blank cave walls probably means he wouldn’t have a social media feed at all. For many of us that’s probably the “best option”. If you have no need of social media I really wouldn’t advise anyone to ever actually use it.

But I’m not sure that anyone exists who has no need for social media. The internet has become a solid contender for a third place for all mankind. I for one, having had social media, would be loathe to give it up even if the only use I had for it was socializing with like-minded peers, and that’s not the only valid use. Creatives of all kinds ply their trades in large part due to being able to promote their work effectively on social media. There’s good reasons to use it.

There’s also bad reasons to use it. Social media platforms which are supported largely by the ad revenue they can generate have a financial incentive to keep you engaged with their platform, scrolling down your infinitely-scrolling feed, so that they can interweave ads into the content. And of course, the more ads they add the more you’ll get annoyed with them, so they have to make sure the feed they’re showing you is so engaging that you’ll actually feel the need to continue scrolling in spite of their advertisements. For this reason, feeds that are algorithmically crafted tend to farm strong emotions - the easiest of which to capitalize on is outrage.

And boy, are we in a time of plentiful reasons to be outraged.

So, whether you’re just a cartoon dog on the internet or a writer doing their best to build a following and engage with their community, you’ve got a few good reasons to be on the social media.

What you don’t really need - what I would certainly advise against - is confusing Social Media with a news source. That isn’t to say that politics should never be discussed and that you shouldn’t have a broad swathe of people you’re paying attention to who might, depending on where they live and who they are, be Going Through It™. What it does mean is that there’s nothing wrong with keeping your social media feeds as pleasant as can be managed.

News Sources aren’t going to be posting their nuanced positions on character-limited ActivityPub and Bluesky feeds. Your favourite Radio Hams aren’t going to have the latest report from Kerson (and even if they did, you don’t likely need the latest report from Kerson). If you want your X feed to be nothing but accounts that automatically post photos of birds native to your special interest continents, that’s not the worst use of bandwidth of all time.

Zazen is Zazen, and Samu is Samu.

It might surprise people to learn that the majority of a Zen monastic’s time is not spent in seated meditation staring at the wall (outside of things like osseshin). Running such a facility takes an enormous amount of work. There’s floors to clean, fields to plow, rounds to make, laundry to fold, and all those things. Such institutions recognize work as a second occasion for meditation - Samu. It’s not the same as Zazen, but it is. It’s an extension built upon it, a recognition that “yes, yes, this is all very well and good on the cushion, but if you can’t bring it into the waking world, what’s the point?”

Your engagement with the world can lso be like this. You are under exactly no obligation to have your social media feeds be the entirety of your day, and even if you can’t help but spend all day with a mastodon tab open or sitting in a matrix chat, you don’t have to let your every conversation be about The Situation™. There’s an old tumblr saw about the internet being a place you visited, because you had to travel to Desktop to get onto a Browser and go to The Internet. I like this thought very much. I think it is wonderfully extended if you remember that the news used to be a thing you got by “Reading the Newspaper”. It was a thing you got by going to a place to get the news and sitting down consciously and engaging with the news. Sure, news conversations would arise at work or at the pub or in the barber shop, but you made a decision to engage with the goings-on.

And I think creating that space for yourself, that distinction between “I am checking in with the situation” and “I am catching up with my friends”, that’s so important to re-create in how we engage with media.

I don’t have a good system for creating that division yet, but I think, looping back to our original question, that it would be something like Bodhidharma’s Social Media Feed. This is a man who cut off his own arm to demonstrate a point to a student. I can’t really picture the red-bearded foreigner exposing himself to a constant stream of the happenings at court.

If you are going to chop wood, chop wood. If you are going to carry water, carry water. If you are going to catch up with friends, catch up with friends. If you’re going to look at films of people’s pet rabbits, do that. If you need to read the news, do that, on purpose.

After all, a huge part of zen is learning how to resist the urge to control the uncontrollable by accepting that it’s out of your control. Unplugging from the constant news and turning it into the news you fetch when you need to know about it is a first step toward realizing that most of this stuff is beyond your control anyway.

Whether or not it’s worth witnessing in spite of how you can’t control it is an exercise that needs to be left to you, because at the end of the day, we each only have our own perspective to work from, however hard we try to incorporate the perspectives of others. Though on that, I will add this: when the cabin is compromised and the air pressure is gone, you have to put your own breathing mask on first before you can help anyone else. The Bodhisattva who is staying behind in Samsara until all sentient beings are liberated needs their own liberation before they can do their work.

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Signifying Nothing - US Operation Epic Fury

2026-02-28T00:00:00-06:00

It’s 9 AM on a Saturday morning and somehow I am already an hour into having learned that the looming US strike on Iran has finally happened, and that they’ve only gone ahead and gotten Israel involved too. The US has named this operation “Epic Fury”, which always brings to mind the old Shakespeare saw “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It’s easy to get pulled into asides about the name of the operation and wrack up a few quick morale-boosting rhetorical kills against the men in the US who made this decision, but that would be missing the broader point here.

Being the aggressor in a war almost never actually benefits the aggressor and almost never turns out to be morally justifiable. This only gets worse when you’re squaring up against a near-parity force. Not that anyone is near-parity to the US but for a country that outspends any given 20 or so collectively on their military they do have a shocking habit of losing almost any time they’re the ones in charge, which is interesting in a case like this.

If POTUS was undeniably mentally competent, it’d be pretty easy to make the argument that the sole responsibility for his actions lay with him. But to be honest, even in cases where the position is being held by a mentally competent individual, one man can never be solely responsible for war. Thousands of people between his whims and the blood on the pavement have to accept the necessity of the war and engage in the business of bringing the war about. It’s a bit like the problem where a toddler gets control of a motor vehicle and kills the old lady across the street when they back into the rosebushes; you don’t arrest the toddler, but the parent.

The citizens of the US and Israel, and their partner nations in the conflict, have a responsibility to immediately down tools, especially if they’re actually in these nations’ respective Military-Industrial complexes. “Not in my name” has to be more than your muttered Nuremberg defense. It is your rallying cry, the first line of your protest songs and if need be the last line of your epitaphs. Get yourselves familiar with the CIA simple sabotage field manual. Lose work orders that would facilitate the war. Struggle to process tax filings. Continue to clog the toilets on the USS Ford.

Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people on all the sides of the conflict are about to die so that a few mostly old mostly white mostly men are going to be able to feel like they created a place in history for themselves. And to be entirely too fair to them, they have.

But that place has to be in Den Hague, and if you in any way are helping to hand them the keys, you need to be right there with them.

We’ve Been Doing Business Wrong

2026-02-18T00:00:00-06:00

For some reason, after spending the best part of a decade in the tech industry, I’ve begun to feel a certain kind of way about the state of enterprise in the highly industrialized parts of the world. I can’t begin to imagine why. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”, the kids say. (I’ve looked. The quote’s hard to source, but it appears in a 1969 article by Edward Abbey, though he was chiefly concerned with urban sprawl.) Like most ideas a person can hold, the way I’ve viewed enterprise and corporation over the last thirty years or so of my life has gone through some changes. Now, with nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon but finally put some of those thoughts to pen, I am going to inflict them upon you.

Scarcity is a Dead God, and We Have Killed Him.

There’s this concept in science fiction, that at least makes a nod toward economics as a science, of ‘post-scarcity’. It’s most strongly featured in Star Trek, and the progenitor-idea behind the leftist’s favourite meme of “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism”. The short version, again without reference to actual economics (at best a minor in my management-oriented post-secondary education) is that it’s possible for a society to hit a level of industrialization and economic productivity where resources are effectively unlimited - e.g. the Star Trek “replicator” or the fact that humanity collectively grows more food than it can consume, logistically.

There’s sort of two problems with post-scarcity thinking:

It creates a general idea that anything post-scarcity is effectively worthless because there’s effectively infinitely many of it;
As a result of one, which is caused by the supply/demand idea in your first-pass macro-econ course, the presumption that Infinitely Many of something is “worthless” incentivizes the manufacturing of scarcity.

Basically, if you make Software TM, you want to be able to generate the greatest profit making that software possible. This means being able to somehow drive up the price you can extract (amazingly, this is possible even though software is an effectively post-scarcity resource right from the outset!) while driving down your cost to manufacture. Most recently we see this in terms of replacing human employees with unfit-for-purpose toolboxes instead in the form of LLM slopcode-agents, but it’s a problem as old as double-entry accounting.

“Software” here can be considered a meta-syntactic variable: my complaints apply to basically any product you can think of.

And here’s the thing. Let’s suppose you’re me: writing blogposts, creating small gizmos and bits of software, writing books, and throwing livestreams onto the internet every few days. If you want to earn a living doing that, meaning you want to financially justify this use of your time by ensuring that, as a result of these activities you are able to cover the costs of your necessities of daily life and bonus luxuries as are afforded to you, you too need to have a corporation’s eye for the profit margin - that difference between what you can get other people to pay you for your activity and what it costs you to pursue that activity and deliver those things to the people who are paying you. For the vast majority of people in “developed” countries, this problem is most easily solved by agreeing to work for a corporate entity or some other enterprise in exchange for a wage or a salary.

There is nothing wrong with earning a wage, or a salary, or using your skills for profit in any other way. The problem is when concern for profit becomes an all-consuming need to grow the profits. The problem, in short, is Fiduciary Responsibility, not merely a profit-motive.

Fiduciary Responsibility is the Worst Period Idea Period Ever Period

Fiduciary Responsibility is, in essence, the idea that if you are an agent of an enterprise, you owe a responsibility to everyone with a stake in that enterprise to make the enterprise as profitable as possible. Where this differs from a profit motive on its own is that key phrase, stakeholders.

If I wanted to make Arcana Labs and all it’s various strange activities, or my fiction writing, or my twitch streaming a full-time career, we could think of that in a way as a form of sole proprietorship. I am effectively an enterprise of one, and everyone in the enterprise is a stakeholder, obviously.

If you had a partnership structure, all the partners would be stakeholders, which is also appropriate.

A major problem with the current mainstream model of incorporation, where ownership of the corporation is staked to effectively tradable tokens-of-ownership (shares, whether or not the company is publicly traded), a problematic situation can develop where most of the stake held is by a comparatively small number of people within the enterprise, or, worse, a significant portion of stake is held outside the enterprise entirely. When this happens, the Fiduciary Responsibility principle makes your decision-making beholden to either a minority of your fellow members of the enterprise or to individuals outside the enterprise entirely. The concern is now “what will make the shareholders the most money?”, and this increasingly reduces the amount of concern that goes into the enterprise itself. If it’s most profitable when the time to compute profit comes around to reduce headcount, you’ll shed hundreds of employees to meet those growth targets the stakeholders expect.

You’re holding my Bag.

We accept this behaviour because we accept a collection of social constructs that have become truths of the world, but they’re less true in the “water is wet” sense than they are in the broader sense of “vanilla smells pleasant”. Of course the profit should go to the stakeholders. They’re stakeholders. They have the risk and should get the reward.

These truths are numerous: money has a value, rent-seeking is acceptable behaviour, investors hold all the risk. They are, however, Lies to Children. Useful fictions. Money services as a medium of exchange only because we’ve all agreed that it should. We allow for landlordism and other rent-seeking behaviours because we’ve got a situation where housing and other needful goods are not in surplus and also unevenly-distributed. “Landlords give access to housing” is a true statement that is also true in the sense that “cars are a more free method of transport than busses”.

But that’s a discussion for another time. For the present, our real bone to pick is this idea that stake-holders, especially shareholders, are “holding the bag” of risk and reward. That statement is arguably still sometimes true, to be fair; when an enterprise is in its infancy, not yet stabilized and established. It becomes less true as business models solidify, and I would argue, absolutely fallacious by the time a business is stable enough to consider “going public”. The risk assumed by the NASDAQ or NYSE investor can be better compared to the risk assumed by the gambler than the baker, though the stock game is arguably safer to the initiated than buying a lottery ticket is. (“Lotteries are a tax on the poor” is another idea that might bear some examination at another time.)

Indeed, any time a situation has emerged where a legal move for a business is to shed employees - contributors to the enterprise - in order to maximize the profit opportunities for the “legal” stakeholders, the real risk is on the shoulders of these ‘unstaked’ employees.

In fact, I’m comfortable to say that this situation is a form of legalized theft. If the worker performs their job poorly, they realize the risk of the failures of the enterprise. If they perform their job well, but Infinite Growth isn’t on the cards for the company they work for, they still bear the risk of the insufficient success of the enterprise.

The Game is not Zero-Sum, Even When It Is

Let’s digress for a moment to discuss the infinite growth meme, because I think it’s important for people to understand what I see as the true punchline of a “number go up” mentality: absolutely nothing works that way in reality. All products, scarce or post-scarce or never-scarce-in-the-first-place, have a saturation point where everyone who could possibly be convinced to purchase that product or patronize that service have done so. It’s not a question of expanding your offering or getting into new markets: if there’s only eight billion or so living and financially liquid souls on the planet, it is improbable you are going to sell many more than eight billion licenses for Software TM.

That doesn’t mean everything, or even anything, will only ever be purchased by one person one time, of course. As we figured out with the frankly rather infuriating move from perpetual licensing to personal-use subscription SaaS, almost anything can be turned into a forever revenue stream. At that point, your concern turns a little bit toward client retention, sure, but there’s still a greatest possible extent to which you’re ever going to spread your market cap.

And that is absolutely okay. If the business is profitable, if the enterprise is able to sustain the livelihoods of all engaged in the enterprise, it is doing its job even if it’s not setting new records every year.

The Guilds and the Trade Unions had a Point

The thing is, I just don’t think that limited liability corporations with transferrable shares are a responsible or ethical way to organize an enterprise, for much the same reason I don’t think it’s a good idea to let someone else own all my data storage or to let a child have unrestricted access to a firearm. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in stakeholders. I’m not an idiot; there is risk in enterprise. My education was to support a career in an industry where the average life expectancy of a fresh enterprise was 3 years and you shouldn’t expect to turn a profit on the original investment in the first five years. Obviously that’s not the kind of thing that just anyone should do or the kind of risk that just anyone should take.

There’s a reason the majority of people are employees of an enterprise with an agreed wage or salary rather than taking the full risks of ownership of an enterprise, after all.

I was asked a few months ago what my ideal enterprise looks like, and I can articulate it in the silliest way possible: it looks a lot like what a pirate crew on the web game Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates looks like: everyone staked to varying degrees to the success of the enterprise. You had tiers that were something like “double share”, “full share”, and “half share”, and at the end of a session once the booty were liquidated into currency, that pool of currency was split according to those shares (2, 1, and 0.5). As long as everyone knew what they’d signed up for, things were fine.

(Occasionally, someone would misunderstand, and war were declared)

Now, it’s a risky proposition for the average person stuck on a salary - I know I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around deciding to give up a salaried position where I know that on certain days every month I have a certain amount of money coming to me and can budget accordingly. I don’t think “fixed rate” employment is ever going away completely.

But I do think it’s a good model. I think it actually creates a sense of being a stakeholder in an enterprise, of having a vested interest in doing whatever you can to ensure the success of that enterprise, in order to maximize the pie for everyone else aboard (beg pardon) and make sure those two slices, that slice, or half-slice you’re taking home was worth your time and effort. And here’s the thing: nowhere in there did I suggest you should be able to buy your way to a slice of the pie, let alone a bigger one. If you have too much money lying around, and you wanted to use it to speculate on the success or failure of an enterprise, we have a tool for that already - it’s called usury.

I don’t think that you should really be taking the stake with you when you leave, either. You should obviously get the share that’s coming to you on the way out the door, but if you’re gone you’re gone.

So how do you move up this ladder of stakes? The hopeless optimist in me thinks merit might suffice, but that’s an awfully broad term. The part of me that tends to view all labour as a trade wonders if it shouldn’t be something a bit like seniority. When you’re junior and fresh in your role, maybe you are a rate employee, and become a half-share when you’ve got the basic ropes. Then, as you move up that ladder of instrumentality, demonstrate a greater mastery of your profession and eventually even start mentoring others, you’re granted more share as you go up. I know. Imagine working hard and improving your skills being a rewarded behaviour.

That was really the other half of my ideal model: the enterprise, as a by product, should be creating masters of the trade the enterprise plies. Anything worth doing is worth doing well. None of this “let’s automate away all the work we normally give junior engineers” as if you have no idea where senior engineers come from. (If you really don’t, ask your father.)

Bus Factors of 100% are Perfectly Reasonable

Anticipating reactions, the next objection is probably “well, that’s all well and good for an enterprise where one accident wipes out all thirty employees, but what happens when you want to scale”, at which point I politely remind you that “scale” is a four-letter word in this laboratory and shake the swear jar under your nose like the mother of an unruly teen.

I don’t know that I believe a business should scale infinitely. In software it’s certainly easy to grow, but I’ve worked in plenty of other industries where it wouldn’t make sense. What would a restaurant even do with 500 employees?

It’s like the old joke about the more popular furry conventions: the wrong plane crash on the way to or leaving Midwest Fur Fest is going to kill the entire staff-engineer-and-higher generation of the US IT industry. Obviously that sort of thing would be a disaster, but I sort of think that all of your employees probably should be able to fit on the same airplane (even if it’s a really big one). It keeps the heirarchy reasonably flat and facilitates an environment where a share of ownership is actually worth something.

Remember, you want a flat heriarchy because why be a half share when there’s a 100-share member of the c-suite (which would actually be less skewed than the minimum/maximum compensation disparities at most tech firms), and you don’t always want a situation where the total number of shares in the entire enterprise is so high where your share can’t support your livelihood anymore!

XKCD 2347 is an Ideal, Actually

Obviously, there comes an objection to this: in order to grow the enterprise, more people are needed. The counter-argument to this, is, of course, to point at recent layoff figures, but let’s address the problem more specifically:

I don’t think that anybody needs to be the “world’s standard producer of X, Y, or Z” anyway.

This might be the FOSS/OSHW brainworms, or my recent increasing radicalization toward being a proponent of federated technologies and platforms, but you can just be curl. There’s no reason we need to be creating these huge software monocultures to let one womable vulnerability rip through everything. There’s no need to be the global leader in social media platforms for pictures of cats messing up calligraphy projects.

From an economic perspective, there’s an important difference between a company selling paperclips in 450 countries and a company selling paperclips in one logistical region of one administrative division of every country: a whole lot more job opportunities for would-be sellers of paperclips, makers of paperclips, and designers of new and exotic paperclip technologies.

XKCD 927 doesn’t Matter

From here, the obvious objection becomes that sounds like an interoperability nightmare, but it’s really only as big of a problem as market forces would allow.

It’s a comparison that annoys a lot of people, but of the things Discord replaced, one of the core examples is IRC. But IRC wasn’t one piece of software the way that Discord is. It was a standard, a protocol for a way to use the internet to reliably move text messages between individuals on different computers. It had as many clients - produced by as many different enterprises - as there are fish in the sea. People are still producing new software that uses the standard.

A standards-based approach to manufacturing is literally all it takes to have global interoperability of “stuff”, and we had that (or were on the way to that) for the better part of a century. It wasn’t even “the internet” or “big tech” that ruined that for us per se, it was the late-internet-2.0 “FAAANG” era of “one stop shop” apps where something that used to be a distributed standard and the people who used it were increasingly replaced with one product owned and maintained by one company whose profit motives (and fiduciary responsibility) might not best align with the interests or tastes of their users.

And every time you try to suggest that sort of approach again, people bring up XKCD 927, as if somehow the integer count of standards available is actually a problem. Even if you have fifteen competing standards for (e.g.) smartphone OS image baselines, it doesn’t really cause a problem as long as products that have to interact with that list what standards they conform to and are compatible with.

You know, like how we have a dozen competing net-friendly (and sometimes not net-friendly) formats for storing digital images.

The Arcana Corollary to Vimes’ Law

I mentioned early the idea that an enterprise can reach a sort of break-even where they’ve reached everyone they can, and at a certain point, their only hope is essentially repeat business. This phenomenon is responsible for most of the stuff you don’t currently like about any industry you could probably mention, and to rattle them off is a risk of projecting that “old man yells at cloud” image. Nothing has a decent amount of on-board storage anymore. Cars aren’t built to last anymore. “Device Hording”. Fast Fashion.

In one of his Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett expounded an idea that has since become known as Vimes Law or “The Boot Rule”. To not crib him directly, the idea was that an expensive boot probably lasts a good long time, but a cheap boot almost certainly won’t. By the time you’ve worn out the expensive boot, you’d almost certainly have spent more money replacing the cheap boots. He likens the idea to a tax on poverty (if you’re too broke to afford the expensive boots once, you have no choice but to repeatedly by the cheap ones), and I in no way disagree.

This is a problem for me personally. I have strange cares. I am not interested in participating in a system where you’re deliberately making an inferior thing so that you can sell more of the thing. This phenomenon is in no way limited to physical goods.

There was a time, in my lifetime, when software was actually really expensive. (Quiet down, FOSS). If you wanted that year’s edition of Microsoft Office, or one of the Adobe suite programs, or something from Autodesk like AutoCAD or Maya (I think they made Maya, anyway), you needed some appreciable spare dosh. This was a real problem for people just starting out, like students in a field that used the specialized software. FOSS really didn’t have the broad format compliance it has now, and even if it did, a bunch of students in a classroom are going to be much harder to teach if they’re using half a dozen different programs in the same general category, by comparison to teaching all of them Excel specifically. But, there was a beautiful compensation: most of the time these licenses were perpetual. If you bought, say, Microsoft Office 2006, you had it until the wheels fell off.

This was true of operating systems, software suites, etc. You actually owned things.

Now, of course, with the subscription model, that barrier to entry is lower. A self-employed artist can almost justify the expense of Adobe (but obviously, profit motive being what it is, should be exploring other alternatives!) on a month to month basis but over the run of years pay enormous sums of their profits. Perpetual licenses for a lot of software isn’t even always available. (For a while, gaming was a sacred island in a sea of this nonsense, but the proliferation of mobile games and MMOs has made that significantly murkier over the years.)

There’s a million justifications. Oh, you get updates more often, and that can be important for security. Oh, we’re constantly adding new features.

But you don’t own anything. If you stop paying, you don’t even retain access to the software in the state it was in when you stopped paying for these new updates and features.

And if you’re not careful about that, especially with the increasing reliance on paid cloud storage - you can lose your livelihood this way.

It’s a tax on individual enterprise, it’s the Vimes Law tax on being too poor to afford licenses that they won’t even sell you in the first place, and it’s just wrong. It’s not how an ethical enterprise should operate.

But how do we get around market saturation if we can’t double dip? The same way we did before: the upgrades need to be genuine upgrades. The next widget in the product line needs to be an actual improvement. You sell service and repairs. It’s not rocket appliances, it’s just slightly more effort than rent-seeking. But the choice between the two is straightforward, if you have a conscience.

The Ethics of Vast Wealth

I’ve had to tack this bit down at the end, as a sort of final thought, because there’s no straight flow into it from any one other topic we touched on: while a reasonable appreciation of profit motive is a necessity in a monetary economy, and the fiduciary responsibility is reasonable when it’s not being abused (it is still, after all, present in a system where the stakeholders are the main agents of the enterprise rather than external actors), I’m still not wholly convinced there is an ethical version of being a billionaire, or millionaire.

Not in the sense of those specific numbers - inflation is hitting a point where you almost have to be a millionaire to be comfortably middle-class, in some senses - but this idea that somehow anyone’s contributions to society as a whole or the enterprises they’re active in to the extent that they’re worth hundreds of their comrades.

I believe this is where the kids would say “Eat the Rich”. Horded money serves no ends. Get it out there, get it flowing, get it doing stuff. It’s good for you, good for enterprise, and good for your community.

The ironclad way to not get torches-and-pitchforksed by the peasantry is not to be the lord in the first place. Or, to put it another way: Corona onus grave est; noli eam gerere.

PETI Single-Board Dev Kit, Consumerism, and Unusual Delays

2026-01-21T04:00:00-06:00

Last October, I took the time to share some updates about PETI, which at that point was more a project-in-concept than something I was hands-on-keyboard “working on”. That’s not really true anymore; over the last couple weeks, I’ve been actually working on our favourite virtual pet again. Specifically, on the new Single Board Development Kit (SBDK).

Gordian-Knotting the Battery Capacity Problem

One of my big concerns last October was whether or not I could reassemble the development kit in a way that all the various daughter cards currently part of the development kit could fit on one board with roughly the same footprint as the TI Launchpad that would form its brain. A big part of that concern came from the battery that drives the development kit.

The current Development Kit, with Revision C of the “backplane” board, uses a 2x AA cells-in-series battery to drive the toy. Since these are NiMH batteries, they provide about 2.4v DC for about 1200 mAh, and even with some care and attention paid to cutting certain circuits out of the flow when running on battery power, that wasn’t really enough to play “more than a day or so” of PETI. This made the obvious size solution - replace the AAs with button cells - undesirable, because any version of that I could pursue would (a) replace secondary recharagable cells with primary single-use cells and (b) lower the overall power capacity even further.

I spent multiple hours chasing possible efficiencies around the circuit in terms of the amperage only to come up with something that made me feel kind of unhappy: the only time the power draw is even remotely high anywhere on the toy is when an LED is flashing or for the brief moment that a button was being pressed.

Brief Sidebar: in the video linked above, I conclude without ever resolving something that was left as an open mystery: why disconnecting the LCD board lowers power consumption device-wide by 6 mA, even though I don’t actually measure that amount of current on any signal or power pin. During a later session, which is linked below, I make the discovery that one of the pins on the LCD panel happens to be tied directly to ground in the stock configuration of the toy. That pin is also a GPIO pin. I suspect the current fall is coming from the LCD no longer pulling a GPIO pin to ground, since the way I have that GPIO pin configured makes it a pull-up-resistor pin. 6 mA happens to be the rough maximum rating that the GPIO pins can provide for this microcontroller.

By the end of all my investigating I ultimately realized that there wasn’t going to be a change in firmware that would meaningfully lower power use, beyond possibly changing the timing and duty cycle of the LED flashes for the alert and low battery LEDs (which should probably also have their resistances increased). That meant I had a real problem: the AAs are too big for a single board design but no button cell existed that could even come close in capacity, even with many wired in parallel, without losing their advantage in compactness.

Enter, please, Lithium battery chemistry. Many lithium battery configurations exist with some real advantages here. For one, both Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries are rechargable, meaning that we don’t have to lose the advantage in waste management we had from working with NiMH. Second, most LiIon and LiPo cells that I can find output a voltage of 3.7v nominal. This means that even a battery with slightly less nominal capacity (in mAh) will last longer than the NiMH battery, because there’s a loss in capacity caused by stepping the 2.4v NiMH up to the 3v3 rail, whereas the lithium chemistry is actually stepping down. (Ohm’s law. It’s not just there to give your high school physics teacher something to make you memorize.)

Originally, PETI was going to explicitly have an integrated Lithium battery pack. It was 2019! Who ever heard of a toy that needed batteries? No no, you just plug that thing into the wall overnight while you weren’t using it anyway! As a beginner at this sort of thing, I had a healthy appreciation for Risk, so when I started to realize I was having difficulty fully understanding the circuitry needed to safely charge an on-board battery and regulate its voltage (all while managing the way voltage is being supplied to the toy, on top of which!), I balked. Let’s take the rechargable battery off the board, said I.

Well, I’ve talked myself back into it. This way, we can achieve parity or possibly even surpass the AA battery pack, if not in terms of actual electrical capacity, then in wall-clock uptime. And, if nothing else, we can just plug the darn thing in to charge it.

Restarting Schematics from Scratch

With that decision ‘made’ (for values of made), we could then set about the work of pulling the existing circuits knowledge from the RevA/C Development Kit and creating schematics for the new SBDK. This is the humbling exercise of going over all the pre-existing (and frankly horrendously drawn) schematics for the PETI Rear Expansion Board, the BOOSTXL-SHARP128 LCD module from TI, and the “control daughterboard”, breaking them all apart into their relevant circuits and schematics, and then recording those into a fresh KiCAD project. Most of that is incredibly straightforward, actually. I would argue that there are no complex circuits in PETI, which is where the humbling part comes in - this is 5+ years of my hard-won hobbyist EE experience and the most complicated circuits on the whole board are the pinout for the LCD header (which is just a bit of power, a bit of decoupling, and some SPI signal lines), or the pinout for the power converter (which we aren’t even keeping for the current redesign!).

Fully redrawing all the circuits we’re actually keeping from previous hardware revisions took about an hour and a half, and a goodly part of that hour and a half was the distraction of chat banter, or the occasional hiccup with KiCAD. From there though, the supposedly fun part - settling on a specific battery to use in the design so that we can pick an appropriate charging IC and an appropriate power management IC and start wiring together all the power circuitry, from the two battery terminals to the 3v3 and ground rails.

Sidebar again: I had a thought to possibly not bother designing the USB connection for the charging circuit at all on the SBDK but instead to use the 5v rail to supply the “charging” voltage to the battery charging portion of the circuit. This 5v rail comes from the 5v of the Ez-FET subsection of the launchpad board, which itself is supplied via USB. Why spec in a connector we don’t need?

The problem I ran into there is that for reasons currently passing my understanding, neither of the suppliers I normally turn to for components on these projects - DigiKey and Mouser - were willing to sell lithium batteries in Canada. Mouser explicitly says this when you look up the parts; in DigiKey’s case, they just appear as “unavailable in your currency”.

So now I’m kind of hung up on the problem of choosing the battery, which brings everything else to a crashing halt.

Where to Go from Here

While it’s unquestionable that Lithium chemistry batteries are hazardous to ship (as are, if we’re being honest, almost all batteries), I am not ecstatic about the leading solution to the problem of sourcing the battery - that is, ordering one (1) battery for myself at retail prices from somewhere, and building the spec around it. These are sort of a specialty good (not that the development kit isn’t), so there’s that problem. But also, the SBDK’s design considerations are all around “easy adoption” of the development kit by someone who wants to use this project as a launchpad to get into this kind of development. Eliminating the LCD module by moving the display onto the SBDK is explicitly about shortening the overall BOM for the new user. Making them responsible for buying a slightly exotic battery is not really progress.

The other problem is that it’s also just annoying. It’s patently absurd that almost any J Random Toy Manufacturer on Wish can ship you something with a battery in it, but for some reason I can’t.

Finding a supply of these batteries - possibly now from a vendor overseas (which, let’s face it, is where they were being manufactured anyway) is obviously the next step for hardware development on PETI, but hardware development on PETI isn’t only part of this project. The revision C development kit still exists, and I still own one.

So while I ruminate on battery choice, I’m going to keep working on firmware version 0.6.0, which is an update comprising of a more advanced evolution system that ties in with an all-new pet health system. I rather frustratingly stopped development in the middle of that update so I’m not entirely sure where the state of it stands, but that’s what git and notes are for.

And, in keeping with the new stream schedule, I will at the minimum be working on the pet in public on Tuesdays at 7 PM Atlantic/Halifax time on my Twitch livestreams.

PETI is an ongoing project to develop a 90s-style virtual pet using mostly modern microcontrollers and other hardware. It’s one of Arcana Labs’ longest-running projects, and the project materials have been available as FOSS and OSHW (to the limitations of licensing agreements with other vendors) since the project’s beginning. For over 5 years at this point, the project has largely been a one-person passion project to make a particular object exist, and in doing so hopefully do some small part to democratize that process. Your support of the project is greatly appreciated.

Internet Highlights - 2025-12-31

2025-12-31T00:00:00-06:00

As is increasingly our tradition around here, I wanted to take one final opportunity this year to round up the fun and interesting things I found this month and share them with you! But first, a more important message: If you’re on the Gregorian Calendar, let me extend to you my warmest wishes for the upcoming year. I don’t think there are many adults whose impression of 2025 was overwhelmingly positive, so, quite seriously, All the Best.

The first highlight of the month was finding a new mastodon/fediverse hashtag game, #MakersHour. It’s a one-hour run every Thursday, a set of five questions with 10 minutes for everyone to respond to them. Big hoot, and I’m finding some cool new people that way too.

NASA has open-libraried a large number of e-pub and PDF books on astronomy and aeronautical science. On a similar vein, I also learned about DokuWiki, a database-free wiki software package which might allow for an even simpler setup and management workflow than MediaWiki, which is our current standard. Sticking with books, I’ve also learned of an upcoming new book on the internet of my childhood, meaning I’m now “sing you the song of my people” years old, I suppose. On the topic of the Oldternet, Neocities is a whole thing. To my immediate pleasure, there’s been no end of progress made in terms of advancing the return to tradition of our internet prime - including this special backend for having a static, but periodically updating, site.

As the oldheads around the lab know, I’m something of an information security and privacy nerd. Some folks have expressed some concern that I primarily use the fediverse for online social media, because the fediverse, broadly speaking, cannot handle end-to-end encryption. That may soon change. Frequent flyer on these aggregation posts, Soatok Dreamseaker, has introduced a prospective implementation of a standard for key transparency. This is a major step toward solving that problem, which of course makes it a major step toward a freer, more equitable, and abuse-resistant internet. To the immediate contrary, Quebec is doing Quebec Shit, proving once again that the Notwithstanding Clause was a mistake and that we really need to amend some basic law around here.

In “Lies to Children” news, your brain is less of a computer than you think it is. I gotta be honest, if I could just learn for a living instead of having to farm computers, I’d probably dive a lot deeper into that strange edge of science between neurology, psychology, and Theory of Mind, because this is definitely a field where the more you know, the less you understand.

I like to play a little game, and this month’s big hits have been Space Haven and (since I’m such a sucker for Zachtronics games)TIS-100.

And, because I just can’t ween myself off the platform (in fact, I’ve been thinking about creating some videos for it directly), a brief roundup of youtube videos worth watching.

SAD: Frontier, a channel where someone has created their own hard sci-fi setting that I’m absolutely fascinated by.
MsMadLemon mods an Amiga to take USB-C Power
My Favourite Book Binder, Four Keys Bindery, has a special project for Andy Weir

Finally, since it’s the year end and there’s no point in doing a separate announcement for it, I’m excited to say that I will be returning to Twitch starting next year. The times included below are Atlantic Time, which is currently UTC -4.

Tuesdays at 7PM - Lab Nights with much tinkering and poking. Effectively, anything to do with creating or modifying software and hardware. Think PETI, but also think perhaps kit assembly projects, creating household helper software or libraries for the same, etc etc.
Thursdays at 7PM - Office Hours, which’ll be writing and journalling streams or things that are close cousins. RPG session prep, planning and curruculae, maybe even literary analysis stuff.
Saturdays at 3 PM - Free Play. I’ve always got some game or other under my skin worth showing to people. Possibly also RPG Liveplays, but I think those will be fewer and further between. Either way, we’ll crack some beverages and play in some sandboxes.

Passkeys: Ruining a Great Idea

2025-12-16T04:00:00-06:00

Passkeys are undergoing a major adoption push at the moment, as a replacement for the more traditional username/password authentication model. And while they do carry significant benefits, the way they’re being adopted makes me a bit nervous, to say the least.

It’s been a while since I wrote on a security-related topic, and there’s a good reason for that: I’m now qualified enough in this area to understand how big the gaps in my understanding can be. It’s a bit like accounting. I know enough about accounting to be dangerous. That’s why you shouldn’t ask me for accounting device, but work with an actual accountant who carries liability insurance. That said, I think I know enough in this one particular area to at least raise some concerns.

For the uninitiated, a passkey authentication model involves a cryptographic challenge to test whether you and a thing-to-authenticate-to (usually, this being the 2020s, a website) agree on the value of a shared secret. There’s a thousand standard and non-standard versions of this arrangement, and my critique isn’t for the cryptography itself. It’s the way those secrets/keys are being handled.

You see, I’m a big believer in additional factors of authentication, and asymmetric encryption makes me very happy. I’ve been using a Yubikey Hardware Token for years, and if I had my way, they’d be as ubiquitous as house-keys. Many passkey schemes allow a compatible controller (like the Yubikey) to hold the keys for a passkey challenge. I have zero problem with this model. I own the physical hardware key, that key is robust, and, (to within a reasonable limit), backup authentication workflows exist in case I somehow manage to destroy the damn thing.

The problem I’m seeing now, though, is how often the passkey storage method is being pressured toward unsuitable models. All too often, the key is being stored in a browser or attached to an account from a service provider: your password manager, gmail account, or similar. This becomes a real problem, not because the backup access methods aren’t viable (I have no comment on that),but because of the further consolidation of “authority” as to whether or not you have access to your various accounts in the hands of a small number of vendors. Vendors who usually have terms of service that allow them to boot you off their service, with limited appeal and little recourse.

Now, if you’re a professional paranoid like me and you keep all your backup passcodes printed or written out in a safe somewhere, that might not be a huge problem. But for a large number of users, that’s probably not happening. I’m not going to pretend this is truly novel threat service - the average person with one master email account is pretty well hosed if that account ever gets taken over by a malicious user already anyway. The bigger problem is the cascading effect caused by the loss of access if you are ejected, at a time when the big vendors are becoming more and more overtly conservative and willing to terminate accounts for absolute nonsense reasons.

Let’s suppose a prototypical user, Able Baker, has a gmail account that he’s used to sign in to chrome, and that chrome is acting as a passkey store for all of Able Baker’s pass keys. Mx Baker is using passkeys to authenticate to most important things in their life: bank, github, entertainment, and so on. Unfortunately for Mx. Baker, an erroneous report reaches Google that Baker is involved in sending Spam emails, and with minimal investigation of the matter, Google terminates their business relationship with Baker. Unless they have already pre-saved backup keys in a convenient location, Baker is now effectively hard locked out of all their web identities, and has to more or less start over from scratch, or at least deal with a long and arduous process of working with dozens of vendors’ customer support; and let’s face it, that’s a lost cause.

This risk does not occur if you have a hardware store for your authentication keys. Especially with the newer Yubikey models (which can store hundreds of such keys), the only real risk is a loss of the device. Usually, when setting up passkeys that run through the Yubikey, most vendors explicitly prompt you to save backup keys immediately. Even if they don’t, I believe there is a utility that allows you to sync two yubikeys together. Stash one in the firebox and keep the other on you, and the problem goes away.

There are good reasons to adopt passkeys over username/password combinations. There’s also good reasons not to, since multifactor authentication involving a username and password is reasonably secure. I think we have to be careful about how this technology is rolled out, in case we wind up in another “SMS Second Factor” situation, where trying to add a security control actually exposes an entirely new threat surface.

Internet Highlights - 2025-11-30

2025-11-30T06:00:00-06:00

It’s not the most pressing thing in the backlog, but it’s time again for the monthly post of what has struck me as interesting from around the internet. Since we’re not starting off in the middle of the month like last time, this month is a bit more robust:

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to burn even more hours in Vintage Story in an effort to stay halfway sane after a particularly maddening week, because nothing makes your Reliability Engineering woes go away like fighting for your simple survival when a bear has decided your dooryard makes as good a winter haunt as any.

(Burkhardt’s) Alchemy, the Anathor, and the Zendo

2025-11-18T09:00:00-06:00

For arcane (hah) reasons known only to me and my browsing history, I’ve recently taken an interest in alchemy, and to that end, was tipped to Titus Burkhardt’s Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. I’ve made no small amount of noise in the past that I generally try to take a syncretic view of the world, and as part of that general attitude, I’ve been interested in examining how some western mystical traditions relate to (and differ from) my own practices. I’ve always been the “chop wood, carry water” student of the mysteries of life — since long before I knew that particular phrase, I’ve always considered the weight of a practice against what it brings into The Work - and day to day living. So, now that I’ve finally finished digesting the text, I thought it would be good to opine a while on Burkhardt’s views of Alchemy, and where I think Alchemy fits quite nicely into the rest of The Work.

Who is Titus Burkhardt and What is This Book?

Titus Burkhardt was a prolific writer on esoteric and religious topics who was active in the middle of the twentieth century. Alchemy is actually not considered one of his more important works, but it did make its way onto a short list of works that feed into each other and ultimately build to some readings of Jungian psychology, which is how it grabbed my attention.

For my money, I would describe the book as a primer on the understanding of Alchemy As Spiritual Practice and the basic symbolism used by older (even ancient) documentation, such as the Emerald Tablet or the works of paracelsus. In that respect, it does its job very well. It probably didn’t need to be my active read for several months, or be picked apart quite as thoroughly as my notes and marginalia covered, especially if you aren’t using it as a stepping stone to some other work. In my case though, I am working on a thorough synthesis of ideas from multiple - at times, esoteric - traditions, so I wanted to make sure I had a firm grip of the material.

A Caution on Historical Authors

Something you have to keep in mind about Burkhardt was that he was born at the outset of the 20th century and wrote through the middle century. This leads to two particular quirks of his writing and argumentation that you have to sort of tease out, or at least be prepared for, and adjust your writing in kind. The first is that very early on he makes an argument thusly:

There can be no free-thinking alchemy whose interpretation is hostile to the Church.

Burkhardt was a Catholic, from what I could gather, and it’s somewhat clear based on his writing that - while he freely references other religions (occasionally even with a reasonable amount of understanding), he considers Catholic Christianity specifically correct in a way that he seems to consider all other doctrines slightly in error. This is made particularly ironic by the lovely quotation from him which comes earlier the book, and which I’m tempted to do an illumination of:

The growth of a genuine tradition resembles that of a crystal, which attracts homologous particles to itself, incorporating them according to its own laws of unity.

And, honestly, I believe in this respect that Burkhardt is approaching the topic in the same way I am, but just with a different position. He considers the Church to have papal inerrancy, so he has to interpret the mysteries in that light. I believe (as I’ve explained before) in the Mahayana (specifically, Zen) understanding of reality that is best articulated through the Three Truths (which I go into more detail about here), and have to approach Alchemy in that light - this essay is overall a piece of that.

The other caution worth throwing at Burkhardt immediately is that he has a very early understanding of mental health. At Freud and Jung were contemporaries (but not likely correspondants). At various points in the book he’s going to say things along the lines of “Alchemy is not a cure for mental illness”. When he says this, he is not necessarily meaning the phrase ‘mental illness’ the way you or I would today. This was an era when only the most abject forms of mental illness were noted. Think less neurodivergence and anxiety or mood disorders, and more in terms of severe, inadequately treated psychosis. Certainly, no purely-mental process is going to address that.

What is Alchemy (According to Titus Burkhardt)

Burkhardt begins with a well-sourced (and most likely correct) assertion: Alchemy is best understood less as a strict precursor to chemistry or metallurgy and more as an outright spiritual practice. The “lead” to be turned into “gold” is nothing more or less than the Alchemist themselves. What it means to become such a “golden” person is left nearly as an exercise to the reader, but the assertion that this was the primary goal of the practice is robustly argued. It has at its center a single tenant: reality (such as it is) is an onion or matrushka of concentric micro- and macrocosms.

Saying it that way sounds more fantastic than it actually is. What Burkhardt is driving at with this model is the idea that various processes at all levels of reality are symbolic of one another - not merely alegorically, but in actual practice. In a more concrete example, we can see the process of calcining a mineral by combusting the hell out of it to drive off impurities as an analogy and model for perhaps applying stringent and ruthless “heat” in terms of attention to a knot in the personality to try and burn it away.

To put it in the shortest way possible, Burkhardt believes that the secret alchemical teachings are a path by which the “spirit can be embodied, and the body imbued with the spirit”. Throughout the book, he explains this teaching by alluding to the alchemical working processes as ways of thinking about, and thereby acting upon, three elements of the self: the body, the soul, and the spirit.

The Body, The Soul, and the Spirit

If we take our micro-macrocosmic onion model and pick an arbitrary axis running through it to explore, Burkhardt posits there are essentially four layers the “self” passes through - three that are ‘truly’ the self, and a fourth that’s a bit special. From order of most to least mundane, those are the body, the soul, the spirit (or, sometimes ‘the intellect’), and the Logos. I told you it was a bit special. He places this argumentation near the beginning of the book, where it is at its most esoteric. It is, however, important argumentation to establish the idea that all the layers of the cake are coherent with one another, because quite a bit of it falls apart without this idea of a Logos.

By the Logos, Burkhardt is referring to “the Substance of God”. At various times he also calls this same concept the “Universal Intellect”, with the idea being that “The Spirit/Intellect” which is part of the self could be seen as a facet or constituent part of the Logos. He uses this term, Logos, I think out of reflex, though I could certainly see it being included in any Christian Mystic tradition. It derives from the first verse of the Gospel of John, which of course in English can be read:

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

You can make of that what you will but it’s important that you remember this for the upcoming section: I believe he is correct about the position of the Logos in this model. And again, if you’re a Christian building the model, the Logos is probably what goes there.

The other three elements bear some explaining. I think we all know what a body is. Having both the Soul and the Spirit in the same model can be, however, a bit confusing. To massively abbreviate, the Soul is the part of the self (which Burkhardt calls the Psyche) which forms the “base” of our behaviours, physical and mental. Conversely, the Spirit (our little sliver of the divine intellect), is the “higher” mentality of our thought processes, among its properties being that of discernment. To put it one way, the body is what does yelling at your co-worker, because the soul knows how to perform anger, and the spirit is the part of you that is disgusted when you do it.

Armed with this knowledge we can now furnish ourselves with a better idea of what Burkhardt thinks philosophical alchemy was for: a process by which the Alchemist slowly embodies, or realizes (in the sense of “making real”), that enlightened/purified/”higher” self.

“Please install Logos or a compatible Library”

I believe that the relationship between Spirit and Logos in this model is extremely important when it comes to making the rest of the model make sense, I just don’t believe that it necessarily has to be the very, very Christian idea of the “Logos” as in “YHWH and His Son” specifically that makes the model make sense. What’s important here is an understanding of a “selfish” versus “universal” intellect. Burkhardt himself makes this somewhat clear:

The Intellect has direct and immediate knowledge of itself, but this knowledge lies beyond the world of Distinction.

Burkhardt assumes this is a relationship of top-down inheritance: a universal intellect begets Mankind, and therefore Mannish (or Selfish) Intellect. I would however argue that it’s just as valid to assert the relationship flows the other way. The self is an engine by which the universe percieves itself, and in a universe that is (a)strongly causal and (b) contains Intellects, you will necessarily arrive at a Universal Intellect.

In my notebook almost every time Burkhardt wrote “Logos” or “The Intellect” (meaning the universal intellect), I found the text was equally intelligible if you wrote “Indra’s Net”. What’s important here is actually not the presence of that fourth piece (beyond insisting that a world of causes and effects means micro-macrocosmic symbols are valid), it’s that you understand the “self” as a layer-cake of things… which are ultimately part of that one Allness.

Speedrunning the Alchemical Process

Titus, usually through attribution to ancient alchemists (Flammel and Paracelceus being the standouts), insisted that the alchemical process could be quite easily explained. He modeled it after two different, and somewhat cyclical, processes, at the root of which was the single idea “solve et coagula” - dissolve and coagulate. In short, it’s only by dissolving and “re-forming”, or the process of actively changing, that the Alchemical process can be achieved.

His two models were a “progression of the planets” (by which I need to remind everyone involved the term ‘planet’ has a significantly different meaning here than it would in an Astronomy lecture), and the progression of the colours. If one considers the seven relevant planets in order: mercury, saturn, jupiter, the moon, venus, mars, and the sun; his model divided them thusly:

Mercury is the planet which governs Quicksilver (which is the Prima Materia (or like the Prima Materia)), and is therefore the key to the work.
Saturn, Jupiter, and The Moon are the progression of the silver-bearing planets through lead, tin, and finally to silver, and completing this work is known as the “Lesser Work”
Venus, Mars, and The Sun is the progression of the gold-bearing planets through copper, iron, and finally gold, which of course is the ‘Great Work’.

It’s very important to state now that quite obviously chemistry will not let you turn any of these elements into any of the other elements. That is a job for applied nuclear physics and explaining how to achieve it is beyond the scope of this essay.

He also considered these three processes in the lens of another three-step alchemical model, named for the colours representatives of the step:

Nigredo or “Blackening”, which can be analogized to “dying to the world” or in some interpretations “fermentation”
Albedo or “Whitening” or “Bleaching”; purifying that which is created in Nigredo.
Rubedo or “Reddening”; giving form to the purified thing.

Armed with this explanation, we can further understand that the lesser and greater work each proceed through a step of blackening, whitening, and reddening. In the Lesser Work, there is a “spiritualization of the body” which takes place, which Burkhardt likens to the action of solve. The work proceeds thusly:

Saturn(Lead) - The Nigredo of the lesser work, which is dying to the world (what Burkhardt calls a “nox profunda”). During this stage, it is said that we are “producing the ash”. This phrase has some importance which I will explain further in the section on the Anathor. He explains:

“Thus man can only know his immutable essence when he has renounced all that is in him as perishable, including the soul”

Which is very interesting because it’s both (a) a poor Christian doctrine, and (b) consistent with the Zen concept of anatman, which of course is the idea that there is no permanent and inviolable kernel of the self (atman).

Jupiter/Tin - The start of Albedo in the lesser work. The soul has now been freed by the destruction of the body. This leads to something he refers to as the “sublimation of the subtle power”, meaning the ability of the soul/quicksilver/prima materia to take forms. It is now possible to bring the soul back into the now-purified body.
Luna/Silver - The conclusion of the Albedo and the last step of the lesser work. This is the “most dissolved” state of being. Of it, Burkhardt says:

All the potentialities of the soul contained in the initial chaos have now been fully developed and united in each other.

From there, we proceed immediately to the Great Work, which brings us through the full process of Reddening. In a way, you could see the lesser work both as “dissolution” and as the creation of a volatile, imprintable “self”. At the conclusion of the lesser work, the alchemist is in the state of being able to be formed. The active principle of gaining form (Sulphur), then acts upon our prima materia/quicksilver-like selves. Sulphur is an important concept here; it is the form-giving capacity of “the Spirit”, that is that piece of ourselves that is a face of the Divine Spirit (Logos/Indra’s net).

Venus/Copper - An unstable and coarse reception of the colouring or “forming” power of Sulphur.
Mars/Iron - Completing the penetration of the Body (which is now coterminous with the soul!) with the “incombustible sulphur”. Titus refers to this stage as “incarnation of the Logos”; if we think earlier of the model with Indra’s Net in place of the Logos, this could be “reception of the expression of Buddha-Nature” or perhaps “dharma transmission”.
Sun/Gold - The completion of the great work, and the final reddening. The Sulphur has reshaped the solution of spirit in body fully. Put another way, we have given colour and form to a fluid Bodymind.

Solve et Coagula (et Solve… ad mortem)

In the final analysis, we see that Burkhardt is outlining a relatively simple process: by dying to the world, we can take pains to make ourselves into a fluid self-substance (“dissolve” and become a formable prima materia), which can then be shaped by the shape-bearing power of Sulphur. At a first blush, this makes it seem as though the process of Alchemical Great Work is a “one and done” firing; that this describes an enlightened or purified “Golden” state which can be definitively obtained. I do not think this is actually so, and I can argue it from physical reality, as well as from Burkhardt’s own text.

The argument from physical reality relies on the previously-established premise of the Alchemical Philosophy which is that processes and arts which take place in the physical microcosm are reflective of processes in the mental-spiritual “macrocosm”. Specifically, it has to do with the process of chemical purification. When chasing a very high purity end-product, it is almost never viable to go through your purification process a single time. We see this in everything from synthetic chemistry to metallurgy. The writer knows the first pass at a passage is rarely the perfect distillation of the idea you’re trying to communicate. So too, then, with the Alchemical great work. Every nigredo combusts the alchemist more completely, allowing each albedo to drive off more of the impurity, and the purer the resulting substrate, the more perfectly it can be shapde during Rubedo. This interpretation is broadly consistent with the thrust of the Genjokoan as interpted by Okamura. And let’s not forget that in addition to purifying the target substance, you also need catalysts and reagents of high purity and instruments of increasingly precise sensitivity. We see this not just in chemistry but other disciplines: in metrology and machining, for example, we have reached levels of precision that no human sense could validate, and we got there by first establishing a very high standard for flatness, which is no more sophisticated than a particular way of grinding stones together.

I believe Burkhardt means to at least imply this, though I cannot point to a singular passage where he actually makes it clear that the great work is a repetitive endeavour. My strongest argument for this is the entirety of Chapter 14, which is a discussion of the story of Nicholas and Perrenelle Flammel, and their repeated successes and failures to perform the work themselves. It is only by nearly-extreme repetition that they supposedly complete the work.

The Divine Androgyne, the Union of Opposites, and “Universal Nature”

Burkhardt spends several chapters setting up his big reveal of the alchemical process. In “speedrunning”, we skipped over a few of his salient ideas that didn’t directly relate to the process itself, but in so doing, I failed to establish the meanings and symbols for three specific “substances” he was discussing: Quicksilver and Sulphur, and then a more allegorical substance he calls materia prima.

Quicksilver, which is now known by the chemical name Mercury (which you can remember by its old alchemical symbol being that for the planet mercury!), is an allegorical construct describing the most form-receptive condition a material can be in and still be classed as a material. It is ascribed a feminine nature, because it is receptive to form.

In contrast, Sulphur is considered a masculine compound, because of its inerrant rigidity and its ability to give form. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the combination of mercury and sulphur results in a variety of compounds, some of which form the distinctive red mineral Cinnabar, or that the philosopher’s stone is usually described as red. This of course a solid, and thus sulphur is symbolic of coagulation or crystallization (coagula). I also do not think that it is a coincidence that Cinnabar is not gold, but the action of quicksilver and sulphur is said to produce the gold of the Great Work. The solution to this problem is hinted at in the description of Materia Prima.

Materia Prima is an esoteric and hard to describe “substance”, so much so that Burkhardt dedicates an entire chapter to attempting to describe it. Fundamentally, it is not to be thought of as a “substance” the way that “mercury” and “sulphur” are things which you can obtain and keep in your workshop - if you do so, however, please follow the appropriate material safety guidelines, as mercury metal and sulphur compounds can be hazardous to the health. Of it, Burkhardt writes:

Only when the soul is freed from all its rigidities and inner contradictions, does it become that plastic substance. […] The unity of the soul with prima materia is lived and known only to the extent which the work has progressed along the road to completion.

He calls it the “fundamental substance of the psyche/soul”, but draws a clear line that it is not synonymous with the “unconscious mind”. He invites us to consider the mind like geological strata. At the topmost, is the live and loamy level of conscious thought. Beneath the conscious thought is a bedrock unconsciousness, of which the Prima Materia is just a part. It is “locked” in the physical matrix of unconsciousness, like an ore in limestone, and that matrix (in the geological sense of the word) is made up of our habits, behavioural modes, and “psychic impressions”, by which he seems to mean those experiences which have had a lasting impact on us, for good or ill. Through allusions to Morenius and Abdul-Qasim al Iraqi, he goes on to say that, in order to perform the alchemical work, we have to mine this substance out of us, and the two keys to that are Sulphur and Mercury. This refinement of Prima Materia is necessary to perform the work, and is itself the work.

Putting it another way, the Alchemist must use both masculine (form-driving) and feminine (form-receptive) energies and attitudes in order to dig past the conscious soil and mine valuable ores of the unconscious, and, using both energies, “burn away” or “refine off” the habits, rote behaviors, and (for want of a better term) “baggage”. This makes the soul or unconscious increasingly fluid and receptive. The true Prima Materia “is the faithful mirror of all truths”.

In the shortest way I can get around it: a person must use both masculine and feminine energies in their life to perform the heavy work that is known elsewhere as “dropping off bodymind”. This could be difficult for people who adhere strictly to the idea of binary gender, but remember: all in Alchemy is allegory. The idea that femininity is form-receptive and masculinity is form-projecting is important to understanding what is meant by the Divine Androgyne. The Alchemist should be both unattached to specific forms (form-receptive) and capable of assuming arbitrary forms (form receptive.) This is “dropping off bodymind”, couched in western alchemical terms. It is the active practice of passive processes.

Quicksilver is samadhi, Sulphur is Theory

In Philosophical Alchemy, the “Quicksilver” is said to be the key of all the latter processes. So what is this quicksilver? Surely, Burkhardt is not suggesting we huff mercury vapour (though that would certainly produce a marked change in personality)!

Burkhardt expressly mentions Zen buddhism by name when describing Quicksilver as “the heart made liquid by meditation”. It’s not the best definition he could have given, since throughout the text he demonstrates a different understanding of zen practice than we might be used to today, but by thorough reading together with what will make up the final section of the essay, I have come to understand that he is essentially saying Quicksilver is samadhi - the intense focus and attention that is cultivated in the practice of Zazen. It’s a clear, flowing mind-state.

This then helps understand a bit more what he means by sulphur, which he goes on to describe, on its own, as “theoretical understanding”. It is rigid and inflexible. It’s form-giving without necessary awareness, unable to react to what is going on around it.

He describes the alchemical work as in part being the act of dissolving “sulphur” in quicksilver thusly:

When the attraction of feminine nature dissolves masculine nature from its torpor […] calls forth by tension its truly masculine and active power.

Further: “Dissolving sulphur in mercury causes it to become liberated from conceptual limitations”.

From this, I can draw a straight line to the idea of “every minute zen”. By holding theoretical understanding and samadhi in tension, we are essentially exercising the “three truths” I referenced above, and maintaining a state of samadhi which, armed with proper theory, we can use to refine our “prima materia”.

The Athanor and the Zafu are the Same Instrument

Burkhardt devotes significant time to the study of a particular alchemical symbol - that of the “athanor” (from the arabic at-tannur), a specialized oven used for performing alchemical work. This is important to him, because his micro-macrocosmic model equates the cosmos to the human body, and the human body to the oven, meaning all three symbolically interconnect in important ways. The symbolism to the human body is more functional than anatomical, of course. The Athanor is best understood through two concepts: the three-fold envelope and the three-fold heat.

The Three-Fold Envelope describes the enclosure and structure of the oven, consisting of:

The earthen oven itself, which is the outermost layer, and where we build the “open fire”, perhaps best thought of as the world of deliberate action. The oven contains a small space for this open fire, and is built around an ash-bed and space for the glass vessel.
The “ash-bed” which is heated by the oven’s fires and diffuses and redirects them into the vessel. It is therefore one of the forms of heat as well as a component of the oven. The ash itself (as opposed to sand) is said to be symbolic of the uncombustable material “which cannot be obtained by the passions” - it is that which is left over during nigredo.
The glass vessel itself, of which there is much more to right. This is a sealed, transparent vessel that contains the substances being worked upon. It is also itself the source of the third form of heat: the latent heat of the reaction taking place. It is said to both be symbolically placed at the body’s solar plexus and symbolic itself of the soul.

The description of the oven is not necessarily a construction guide to middle-first-millennium or earlier metallurgical equipment, and there are two keys to fully understanding that. The first is the description of the glass vessel as a sealed bottle symbolic of the soul and which is being actively boiled. Of this process, Burkhardt says:

The Powers which are developed in it must not leak out, if the work is to proceed.

And I believe that quote to be directly referencing the idea that a state of samadhi (the “clear glass”) is needed to perform the refining work upon the raw soul to purify it into prima materia.

The second key is the idea of the placement at the solar plexus together with what we will now discuss as the three fires. This is similar to the idea of the three heats, except these only describe the sort of fire that can be built in the “open fire” of the oven:

The ‘artificial fire’, which is an analogy of methodical contemplation and breathwork (he describes this by analogy to bellows). If you take this together with the placement of the vessel at the solar plexus, it is not then hard to see the slightly lower position known as the tanden, which plays a key role in the cultivation of samadhi by the practice of zazen.
The ‘natural fire’ which is the “vibration of the soul initiated by the artifical fire”. This is the samadhi itself.
The ‘anti-natural fire’, which Burkhardt refers to as the spontaneous action of Grace, but by which we could mean something like Kensho (spontaneous realization of the buddha nature).

Following this model, it is relatively easy to see that this alchemical model points the finger straight at the like practice of zazen. I do not feel that there is a meaningful difference in practice between one or the other. In both practices, the physical body is being used to contain a spiritual process; one that begins at the cultivation through breath-work of a specific and focused state of mind. Whether you call that “refining prima materia” or “cultivating deep samadhi”, I believe you are pointing toward the same, ineffable, truth.

In short, I believe that the Alchemical Great Work and the Goalless Goal of Zazen are pointing to the same fundamental thing. There is no difference between philosophical gold and buddha-nature.

Internet Highlights - 2025-10-31

2025-10-31T00:00:00-05:00

As part of my mission to find, discover, and expose cool things, I’ve decided to start sharing the cool stuff I have found on the internet once a month with the rest of you. Unfortunately, in October, I had this idea rather late, so the pickings are a mite slim.

Firstly, on the good news front, the Python Software Foundation has given US$1.5M in potential funding on the basis of taking a stand in favour of appropriately equitable DEI programs. This is a really important and pleasing stance to see at a time when everyone is backtracking on what were already lip-service DEI efforts in their organizations just to kowtow to the latest casual racism from the US Government.

On the independent media front, I want to first pull your attention to Homemade Documentaries, a youtube channel by amateur documentarian Jackson Tyler dedicated entirely to videos about the US space program in breathtaking detail. As a space nut, its been very gratifying to have these on as I plugged through my workweek. Space not your thing? How about a homebrew 4-bit CPU?.

Marcpux of FDroid put out an article on why sideloading isn’t real and Google are wrong to try and demonize it, which you are welcome to read this post as an endorsement of. After all, to own a thing is to control what it does. The real word for side-loading software onto a computer you own is “installing”, as in, “I’ll install whatever I damn well please, thank you kindly”. And speaking of software, let’s check out Soatok Dreamseeker’s cryptographic contributions to the security of the Fediverse.

In retro gaming retrospectives, how about an interview between blogger Blake Patterson and Jason Harper, who ported Airball to the Apple IIgs?

Lastly, for your passing-time needs, consider crawling through the banner farm at Improbable Island, which is specifically dedicated to hobby and teeny, tiny business websites and presented in the ultimate in Old Internet Reclamation Technology: 486 by 60 banner images.

That’s all for now - I’ll catch you next time with more!

A Grab Bag of PETI Updates

2025-10-20T00:00:00-05:00

I’m usually the first to admit that the transition from late summer into autumn is one of my least productive periods of the year. This isn’t to say I’m doing nothing, but it’s a time when my thoughts tend toward gathering rather than producing. This is (after spring), the season for tidying, and laying in the “winter store” of inspirations and plans that will get me through what hopefully will be a minimally unpleasant time. That said, quite apart from what was said back in June, I have actually had odd time, in between workplace service calls or in the weird hours of the morning, to think through some problems with PETI and how you’d solve them if, for some reason, you wanted to keep going on a major project you’d left half-finished.

Improvements in the Development Environment

A bit of an obstacle to getting PETI going again has been a growing distate for spending any more time than is absolutely necessary in the space I’ve come to think of as “the lab”. My lab, such as it currently is, is a third or so of a very small second-bedroom in my apartment, and this cramped and usually disorganized space is also the environment from which I “do the needful” for my day job. Accordingly, come the evening and afternoon, I usually avoid coming back up here if I don’t have to. The problem is, though, that PETI is a firmware development project, and I need access to the development kit hardware to do much more than modify the documentation. This lead me to contemplate two possible solutions:

Build an Emulator, which is both extremely doable and a massive lift. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s no stock emulator floating around for the MSP420FR5994, and even if there were, we’d still have to wrap a whole whack of “peripheral” interpretation logic around the system. I put some thought into it, and if that core emulator existed, it would have been worthwhile. It would be extremely convenient to me personally (and to hypothetical future code contributors) to have an emulator they could run builds against. That could even be a stepping stone into some automated testing.
Better Development Hardware. The current development kit hardware in circulation is what we’ve been calling the “Revision C” kit (due to the revision of the back-board component of the dev kit). It’s not without its flaws, so much so that I’ve been talking about a possible revision D now for at least a year. Most of these flaws, I thought, were logistical, but the more I’ve spent time with the Dev Kit, and the harder I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that, actually, it’s a big problem.

Ultimately, what I’ve decided to do is to pursue a redesign of the development kit in parallel to continuing the firmware development. The Rev C kit is “portable enough”, but designing a better version of the kit would really liberate the development process.

The “Single Board Development Kit”

So, the current avenue of progress on the PETI project has become the pursuit of this new design development kit: the SBDK, I’ve been calling it. The idea is simple:

Simplify the design of the development kit hardware to make it more robust
Make these new kits sturdy enough for “backpack carry”
???
Enjoy working on the project from my couch, kitchen table, or out and about.

And, of course, to talk myself into it: by using the Single Board Development Kit it’s now easier for a hypothetical Developer to obtain the hardware, move around with the hardware, and generally Have Fun Designing The Software.

Why Single Board?

The current development kit (Rev C.), as well as the past-postulated “Rev D”, design, was actually going to use three accessory boards on top of the TI “Launchpad” that made up the core of the pet:

A TI “Booster Pack” that hosts the Sharp mLCD display
A somewhat-sketchy “controller” board of my design, and
The PETI “Backplane”.

By switching to a single-board design, I’m hoping to solve a few problems:

Easier assembly for the Developer (if ordering as a self-assembled kit) or Myself (since I do the assemblies)
Mechanically-sturdier design (for slinging in a backpack or what-have-you for moving it around)
Minimal Part Ordering - the ability for me to sell the maximum number of the project’s components in a single kit, and have a developer need to seperately order just the TI Launchpad.

Why not Single Board? (Problems in the SBDK Project)

Of course, if this was necessarily simple, I would have done this in the first place, right? Designing a development kit currently distributed across several boards, all designed and manufactured in different ways, is a fun and exciting new challenge, which also means it’s sort of untested territory. I have problems to solve I haven’t currently considered:

Power Management
Part Pitches and Selection
Addressing Unsolved Problems from the Revision C Design

SBDK Power Management: Won’t somebody help me budget this amperage, my batteries are dying?

Currently, since I’m not making many changes to the codebase, a lot of my time spent with PETI is spent trying to play with it as though it were an actual toy. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t stay in operation long.

When I equip with with a pair of rechargable AA NiMH batteries, I get around “an afternoon” of playtime out of it. This is in part because my batteries are pretty old and well-used. On spec, I’d get about 55 hours out of it, but… that’s still not really enough playtime for a charge, is it?

This means I have a few questions I need to answer:

What individual components are most responsible for power drain?
Based on that information, is there anything we can do from the firmware side to lower standby power drain?
If not, what alternatives do we have?

This becomes a massive sidequest when it comes time to develop the new SBDK, doesn’t it? I don’t particularly want to get all tooled up to make a dozen of these development kits if I’m once again baking into hardware technical problems I have the opportunity to solve now. While the development kit isn’t meant to be run like the eventual standalone toy, it’s not unreasonable to want similar performance out of it. If the best I can do is “roughly a weekend” on a single pair of AA batteries (which are already much higher capacity than the button cells I was hoping to use in the final toy design), we are miles away from “solved” when it comes to power. If I can’t get the power consumption down, I need to get the onboard power storage up, or consider the possibility of in-situ charging, a capability I considered years ago and abandoned for its complexity.

And all of these things require repeated experimentation in breaking out existing circuits onto breadboards to take in-situ current draw readings while the device is operating under various firmware states, so it will be by no means a matter of whiteboarding the problem for a couple afternoons. It’s probable any work I do on PETI for the rest of the year is consumed with these three questions.

Size Matters: Technology and Pitch in New Parts

As I alluded to earlier, space becomes all the more at a premium if I take the approach of trying to re-create the current footprint of the backboard, but with all the desired functionality of the other accessory boards on-board with it. This is all the truer depending on other choices I make in selecting parts. Currently, all the PETI development kits are using almost entirely “through-hole” components, a choice I made as much for my ease and comfort in assembly as I did out of concern for the same in end users. THT parts are cheap, easy to place correctly, and easy to solder down. However, they occupy much more physical space.

Somewhere along the way I have to decide how much of that technology to replace with “surface mount” parts that simply float on a pad. This allows taking a more double-sided approach to the board design, and to be honest, is more in line with modern manufacture methods. SMD was always the direction the final toy version of the toy was going go in, but that was never intended to be end-user assemblable.

This is purely a “design for manufacture” problem with no immediately correct answer, and I need a larger peer group to discuss it with before I made a decision.

This question was actually the original impetus for looking at the battery problems: the AA battery holder is too big to include in an SBDK design without making that single board physically larger (in terms of footprint) than it already is. That still might be what we have to do, but I want that decision to be made in a considered, thoughtful way.

Unsolved Problems

Revision C was already retired almost before it became available to others. That’s why only the original manufacturing run of five pairs of the boards were ever sold on our Tindie Shop: the intent was always to almost immediately replace it with Revision D. The Revision D design already includes two changes from the revision C board other than minor tweaks to the layout:

A wholly different audio signalling circuit, using a simple transistor like an amplifier to play PWM audio, and;
A different pack of setting-selection switches that eliminated an unused 4th switch from the design for the sake of efficiency.

But these aren’t really the only areas for improvement in the board as a circuit. For example, it would be supremely convenient if the board could also mate over the “ez-FET” jumper headers on the TI Launchpad. That would let us build in some simple safety circuits to stop the battery power from trying to drive the ez-FET side of the launchpad’s board, which it doesn’t really have the “juice” to do. Setting that up the right way around could make switching from USB to onboard battery power as easy as unplugging the micro-USB programming cable from the device.

Ongoing Firmware Development

There’s still an active-ish branch of firmware development and there are still dozens of features left to be implemented in the toy. In theory, if this was the only thing to occupy my time, I could easily work on PETI hardware and PETI firmware roughly in parallel. The headspace needed to write good code and to solve problems in copper are two different headspaces.

In practice though, I have a day job, and one that involves (decreasing, but still significant) amounts of solving technical problems, so it’s unlikely I pick the firmware back up until I’ve solved at least enough of the hardware problems I’ve left myself out. For certain, I don’t think I’d release a 1.0 version of the firmware until the SBDK exists, at least in terms of being a set of workable schematics. Technically the version of the toy I have now is perfectly adequate for developing in the living room instead of the lab. In practice, the short battery life and cumbersome nature of the toy means it’s not well suited to play testing, which the game desperately needs more of between major firmware revisions.

So we’ll see. Either way, let me know what you think in the comments below.