Jason Bonthron

eva
a haunted house
a digital corruption of my card game R.I.P.

Emacs Carnival
Like many emacs users, shortcuts are burned into my muscle memory. It's like a playing a musical instrument, the finger motions are an extension of my thought. Don't ask me what the commands are, because i don't know! If forced to think about them, i get confused. My fingers simply type them on their own. The same thing would happen if you were to interrupt a musician and ask, "hey, what notes are you playing?"

As i am thinking, Emacs bounces between files. My cursor jumps into the middle of lines. It finds strings as i think of them. There is no friction to my expression. Like riding a bicycle, the mechanics of operating it disappear, and your mind can roam freely.

After fifty years of continuous development, there are, of course, tools and environments customized for any programming language. A running lisp interpreter you can hack into at any time. Sub-systems so complete they are software in of themselves.

The cost of all this is complexity. It's not unfair to say that Emacs has a vertical learning curve, and even experienced users will struggle to get some features working. However, for those willing to persevere, the reward is unmatched power of expression.

At the moment, the industry is trying to make sense of LLMs. LLMs can produce volumes of code. but it feels painfully slow... the cursor does not fly between buffers. i am not cutting and yanking by thought alone. You prompt. You wait. It's unspoken, but there's something backward happening: ideas are presented to you, which, then must be evaluated post-hoc. That's the opposite of advancing your own thought.

To mix metaphors, if a computer is "a bicycle for the mind", then it should accelerate and give flight to your ideas. What Emacs gives you is a way to express yourself in endlessly customizable ways.

Protoculture
Protoculture is a 2D retained-graphics library for Guile Hoot. It provides a hierarchical display list for composing shapes, images, and text, which, can be manipulated, animated, and interacted with directly. The api is similar to pixi, svg, or flash.

Penny Poltergeist
Penny Poltergeist is a spooky 9 card haunted house.
Solitaire. Print and Play.
designed for the
'2025 BGG 9-card Design Contest'

a new game-thing: Séance is a phantasmagorical mystery setting and micro-RPG.

new puzzle game: World Without End
i found this puzzle in the back of an old magazine from 1985. It's a geography puzzle. It's not difficult or long.

I'm on the fediverse! Say "hi"
mastodon.art/@bonthron

I'm featured in Magpies Magazine with my friend Pat Lambe.

"An Anchored Friendship is a beautiful recording collaboration made by author/artist Pat Lambe and composer Jason Bonthron. This neo-noir short story features the Iowa State Police, a displaced bounty hunter, a broken farmer, and his local cop acquaintance caught in a Mexican stand-off in a gasoline-soaked corn field. Excessive drinking and an overzealous rookie armed with a brand-new 55-caliber sniper rifle aren't helping the situation."

"Like all good noir, this is about so much more than the plot itself. This story is about dark and light, ice and fire, strength and frailty. The finely observed details speak to us of friendship, memory, hopes, regrets, duty, and the way life passes at its own incomprehensible pace following its own incomprehensible rules. Jason Bonthron's perfectly measured score adds a depth of resigned melancholy to the proceedings."