Week 21 2025

Like an animal bred in captivity, I feel unfit to be uncaged. But here I am, unleashed.

The business class section of the Heathrow Express is packed. I arrived early and set myself up with a seat in the corner. The lady across from me seems irritated that I have chosen to exist. I’m in concordance with her, it is annoying. I wish she could sit with her husband too. I wish I could sit with mine. We should all get to sit with our husbands.

What else is there? Remember that time Sofía said “I don’t like Mickey Mouse”? Back then I knew how to play a triste. Been walking around the house singing a song about being in pain. So maudlin. So dramatic. One time in school a teacher called me a “drama queen” and I walked out.

Your journey’s not over, it’s just begun.
Make your dreams your destiny.
And do what must be done.
If you’re frightened, if you’re worried: you’re not alone.
Hand in hand we’ll take the step into the great unknown

Littlebook

This week I’ve been sitting in one spot, holding onto the part of my life that is not fluctuating. That part of my life has cotton sheets. When not working for a living, I’ve been working on Littlebook.

p: But, why?

s: Because it’s beautiful!

occasionally collaborative rectangles

I’ve added an opencanvas experiment where there is an Automerge doc the shape of a canvasprotocol.org OCIF file. The opencanvas plugin provides two Views:

one capable of converting to-and-fro Tldraw<->OCIF.
one capable of converting to-and-fro Excalidraw<->OCIF

So far I’ve only implemented rectangles, but it’s cool. Collaborative rectangles between devices, browsers, and even apps! You can move them around and change their colour and resize them in Tldraw, and watch the same thing happen over there on your phone in Excalidraw.

Plugin Workshop

I’ve also added a PluginEditor plugin which is a mini-IDE that allows you to build Littlebook plugins within Littlebook.

PluginEditor supports .tsx, .ts, .jsx, .js and .css. You can import from https://esm.sh. You can set the @jsxImportSource and then write React, Preact, SolidJS, etc.

There’s a little special set up to get SolidJS working properly behind the scenes because it depends on its own babel plugin, but anything that uses the regular JSX transform will Just Work™.

Some common libraries are available from an importmap on Littlebook itself. Any https://esm.sh imports will be cached by the ServiceWorker. Did you know that you can @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/preact and it actually works?

There’s some Automatic Type Acquisition affordances too.

hehe

In fact, you know i’m writing this article in it right now.

To Berlin

I’m off to Berlin now for the Local-First Conference. It’ll be nice to talk to the people who are interested in (the non-corporate parts of) that. The parts that are to do with freedom and ownership, and about making the world brighter and fairer. A lot of it will be about Sync Engines, which is fine. But the really special stuff is happening in other places: collaboration without a server, without the internet, without a network. If I send you a file, it’s yours. We can merge them together later, but it’s up to us. Every single person is the source of truth for their files. And a server is just a computer that’s more likely to be on than off.

In the airport, I keep on remembering how excited I was for the future, and then breaking my heart over again. Little things. And big things. I keep remembering that I was excited for the future, and then it cracks a little more again. But I’m also in heat and salivating.

My work decided they didn’t want to pay for my conference anymore because I quit my job. That’s fair, though I wish they’d given me more than 2 days notice hahahah. So my bank balance is twice light and red.

landed

ate whopper

Ode to the girl with pink and lilac space buns and little star hair clips and yellow and magenta tie-dye santa cruz sweatshirt who gave up her seat on the bus for an older lady

The guy at the front desk of the hotel gave me a free drink voucher, and told me he’ll be in london in a couple of weeks. The people of Berlin are hungry for rabbit.

And I don't do love
I just know someone who I can think about

I’m back in my room now. This hotel has room service guitars supplied by Gibson. It also has €26 breakfasts. I’m looking forward to trying both of those things tomorrow.

It was great listening to peter, alex and seph talk about events and everything. i have things to say but i think i’m talking too much, so tomorrow perhaps i will not speak anymore. orion is lovely.

It’s been enjoyable meeting everybody so far. I’m tired and riddled with anxiety. Hope I can manage to make it out of the hotel room tomorrow.

It’s nearly 4am tomorrow and I promised breakfast that I would be up by 7, so I’d best turn off

time passes

it is now after nearly 4am. it is closer to 4. am i going to get no sleep? it’s been a while since i’ve tried to sleep in a new bed alone. i never fare well with sleeping in that scenario.

i'm so tired

Let’s get matching tattoos.