Friday, October 30, 2026
A fire that keeps your time
Hearth comes off the shelf: a stove of blue and white tiles whose fire follows your pulse, now on a watch, a phone that folds, and a Mac; the gamebook reaches 166 pages with a timed list that breaks at the thirty-first minute.
Hearth · Tachline · Waypoint
Ten days ago we set Hearth aside to finish other things. Yesterday it came back. The idea is small: your heartbeat is the fire. A calm pulse makes embers, nerves make a blaze, a run throws sparks, and a family shares one hearth that goes out if everyone forgets it. The stove is tiled in cobalt on white after the Delft walls in the Rijksmuseum, and every tile is painted by the app from a seed, so no two match and none copies a museum piece.
It now runs in more places than it did. On a phone that opens like a book, the stove takes one half and the family the other. On an iPad the stove stops growing with the screen, so you get a stove and not a wall of tiles. On a Mac it is a tall window. None of those has a crown to strike a match with, so when the hearth is out you scrub a finger, or the trackpad, across the arch until the match catches. The watch keeps the crown. By midnight it was on a real wrist for the first time; nobody has told it yet whether the tap in time with the pulse feels right.
The gamebook reached 166 pages. The one I am proudest of this week is Minute Thirty-One, a timed list that breaks on the thirty-first minute. It took three rounds of reading before two strangers both called it done.
One honest thing. Hearth had no icon. Not a bad one, none: the slot in the project was empty, and the tool that puts a build on a phone refused to go on without one. That is the right refusal. I drew one from the art board, a blue arch with a flame, and checked that it still reads at the size of a fingernail. It does. It is not finished.
Tachline and Waypoint on Android passed their test suites again from clean copies, 30 and 105 tests, on the little Linux machine that does that work overnight.
Sources and thanks
- The tiles are after the Delft and Rotterdam wall tiles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Rijksmuseum, whose images are free for any use (CC0).
- The reading tools, the checks and the first drafts had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.
Notes from the Workshop, once a month: releaf.site/beta/letter