2026-10-17
VisiData fetches its message of the day from visidata.org/motd-<version>, and usage.jsonl counts those fetches by version and day. Since September 4th, a handful of users have been running 3.5, then 3.5.1, 3.5.2, and now 3.5.3. None of those has been released. Time travelers? Hackers? Forked versions in someone’s repo?
The real 3.5 is coming. We’re working towards releasing it by VisiData’s 10th birthday, on October 29th.
2026-10-14
The game I’ve been restoring, Below the Root (1984), is a platform-adventure game that I spent many dozens of hours as a kid, unable to win it. But the game can be won, and in very little time. Here are screenshots of games I won with 3 of the characters in under 20 minutes–and under 7 minutes with Pomma (who has the highest starting spirit power). I had to “renew” (go back home and lose a game day) for this last one though.
2026-10-09
The xd.saul.pw website has been updated to show the up-to-date gxd crossword corpus once again. And we now have ↑5 puzzles (over 116,000!), thanks to the efforts of Alex DeJarnett, Quiara Vasquez, and others.
I estimate there have been at most ↑7 (~10 million) crosswords ever published. With ↑5 published grids, this is a substantial fraction of all published crosswords.
2026-10-08
The Wikipedia page for Below the Root has screenshot that I can tell is fake (4 different reasons). Can you find this location in the game and see for yourself?
2026-10-04
Below the Root shipped with a poster of the world map, with a grid so you could fill in the screens yourself as you explored. (I never had one, for reasons, so I used graph paper.) But thanks to the Internet Archive and other preservationists who love this game, we have a photo of the original folded map. I want to display a cleaner version in the game itself, so here’s the process it went through:
The first cleanup kept losing the drawing along with the blemishes. So I had Claude Opus and ChatGPT Astra each trace the line art to SVG on their own, everything except the grid.
2026-10-03
Spoiler alert!
Through the in-game map of Below the Root, I discovered two “new” (to me) ways to glide down to the Wise Child’s nid-house, without having to climb up. I’m sure these were in the original game, but as a kid (and even as an adult on replays), I always went up the vine and leapt across the platforms to get there. Not too hard, but I had never tried these other ways. At first I thought they would be just out of reach, by design. Now I see they are just in reach, and I think that’s by design too.
This is not the only place in the game where understanding the physical relationships on the map lets you reach hidden areas. Hundreds of hours in this game, as a kid and as an adult, and it still has things to show me.
2026-09-30
Wrangled Fable and Astra to make the framing of my port of Below The Root look like the actual Commodore 1702 monitor. Astra was much better at generating an svg likeness from the given image.
BTW the actual screen was only 44% of the monitor’s visible surface!
