A creek with a name, a loupe, and a plug that fills a Kindle

The puzzle has a name now. It is Creek, and it lives at releaf.site/creek. A day of playing it on a real phone taught more than three days of building: the sheet was too small, the dashed channels too fine, and the oval around the title looked like something a machine would draw. So the board now fills the phone's width, the channels are heavier, and the oval is gone, replaced by a ruled title block taken from the Sanborn insurance maps of 1885, with the word CREEK in the shaded capitals of the 1839 plan. Press and hold anywhere and a surveyor's reading glass rises over the spot and follows your finger. Pinch to zoom. On Sunday's sheet, the mouth of the creek, the Central Library stands at the last bend, drawn the way the Sanborns draw a public building. And there is a compass: turn it on and the rose follows your heading, and the last rush of water to the lake waits until you face downstream.

The next creek is researched: Waller Creek, from Hancock down through the tunnel at Waterloo Park to Rainey Street, with Barton, Bull, Walnut, Boggy, Onion and Williamson sketched for the weeks after. One fact on our own sheet was wrong and is fixed: Shoal Creek had its name by 1838, before Edwin Waller's surveyors arrived.

A small thing that made the day: the Kindle, plugged into the little Linux machine that does the Android work, now fills itself. A rule on that machine notices the Kindle, converts the newest gamebook, copies it on, and ejects. Nobody has to remember. The gamebook itself reached 177 pages live overnight.

Tachline builds and runs on iPad and Apple TV, with a public scoreboard through Game Center and a remote whose up and down stand in for the Crown. Candy Crawl's winter reveal is a gingerbread person made of baked corridors, a hairline seam that had been on every one of its store frames is fixed, and both of its branches pass the release gate at last, once a "With thanks" page was written.

One honest thing. Every one of today's improvements to Creek came from one person holding a phone. The measurements said the sheet was legible. The thumb said it was not.

Sources and thanks

• The Sanborn fire insurance maps of Austin, 1885 and 1889, UT Libraries, and L. J. Pilie's Plan of the City of Austin, 1839, both public domain.
• The creek's history from the Shoal Creek Conservancy (support them), the 2018 Shoal Creek Historic Context Study, and the Waterloo Greenway for Waller Creek.
• The first drafts and the checks had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.