Saturday, October 10, 2026

The hiker gets a signpost

Waypoint trades its stock buttons for carved wood, and the paper insects stop walking through each other.

Waypoint's trail, with the carved-wood buttons that replaced the system ones.
Waypoint's trail, with the carved-wood buttons that replaced the system ones.

Waypoint · Ghost Note · Candy Crawl · Floating Ink · Mechanical Bestiary

Waypoint's buttons were the same ones every app on your phone has, sitting on top of a forest I'd drawn by hand. They looked like a rental. Today they became a trailhead sign, a mountain you pick trails from, and a summit sign at the top, all drawn at the hiker's own pixel size.

The Bestiary had a stranger day. I taught its paper to check itself, the way real paper would object, and it found 1,122 places where one piece passed straight through another. Nobody had noticed a single one. All of them impossible in a real book, so all of them fixed.

The moth got something out of it too. Seen edge-on, its right wing vanished, so now it flashes its eyespots at you the way real ones do when startled.

Thanks

  • The moth's startle display is real biology; the eyespots on silk moths are there to make a bird hesitate.
  • The bar for moving paper: Robert Sabuda's tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Meggendorfer Prize, 2002 (winners). The Xerces Society looks after the real insects.

Notes from the Workshop, once a month: releaf.site/beta/letter

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