Links: December Adventure Slush Repo
Writing this well into January 1st. It was a very busy, but fun and exciting night.
I don’t really have anything else to say.
Happy new year!
Reversed the order of this page, didn’t really cross my mind that it makes more sense this way lol
I’ve continued working on my retail sim game prototype. I spent some time lurking around the Playdate developer forums and found this really interesting post that answers a few questions I’ve had and wanted to share “Dirty Optimization Secrets (C for Playdate)”
I’m hoping I can finish the prototype tomorrow because I would love to share it with the last log here, it’s very close to being ready, but I’m not sure I’ll have much time tomorrow.
It has been busy, but not quite as much of an exhausting busy as it has been. In the time that I’ve had I’ve come up with a bit of new stuff for Slush, I haven’t written any kind of parser for it, but I think I’ll have to start over once again. That’s fine, I think I’ll take a pretty different approach this time.
On the 25th I was gifted a Playdate. I’ve played a few games on there (and loved them), and I’m very interested in building my own. I’ve started working on a prototype for a little retail simulator/management game in C using their SDK.
December and 2025 are coming to an end. Reflecting on this year and especially this last month, I need a change.
Sorry, I’m going to be sad for a bit.
This year, like the year before, I’ve spent mostly feeling numb. Depression? I don’t know anymore. What I do know is that I really need something to change. I started this website and tried to put myself out there more for this exact reason, and I’m proud of myself for that. Even this December Adventure thing, although I haven’t logged nearly as much as I wanted to nor do I have anything really tangible to show for my work this month, I’m very glad that I did it. I’ve seen others doing such cool things, and I’m proud of the things I did. I hope to do it again next year.
Earlier this year, I graduated high school. Barely, I was a horrible student, I was a couple failed tests away from dropping out. Ever since, it’s been scary. Watching my friends move on to college and losing contact with many of them. Meanwhile, I’ve been working a terrible job with terrible pay and terrible hours, with no real plan or feeling of strong direction. I’ve been living in horrifying, painful, motionless comfort. Going into 2026, I hope to have more moments of real uncertainty. I want to do new things, I want to meet more people, and I want to build and express a sense of my own identity even though it’s the scariest thing I can think of.
Truthfully, I’ve felt this way many times. It’s been a cycle of thinking that this will be the thing that makes me happy then usually feeling too scared to act on it, or compromising to the point it becomes hardly anything at all. It’s an odd thing, knowing that you’re not content yet being too afraid to lose the contentment you don’t have. I have to assume it’s part of being human. I have been taking steps even if they’re not as big as I’d like them to be and even if it hasn’t really felt like it. I’ve definitely moved forwards since the start of the year, I just have to hope I can build momentum.
(6 7?)
My laptop reached the grub rescue screen again, so I’ve installed Arch Linux. I think the latest Alpine Linux must have done something to break the WiFI on this laptop, it works out of the box on Arch. It probably wouldn’t be too hard of a fix, but Alpine has had a couple of other weird hardware issues on this laptop in the past that seem to not happen on Arch.
I switched back to Sway from Niri while I was at it, I just like it better personally, and started fresh with some new dotfiles.
I wrote a test for the slush lexer and discovered a bug. I didn’t have time to fix it, but I’ll have to do that soon.
As Christmas gets closer, life is calming down. I look forward to being less exhausted all the time.
It has been a very busy and stressful few days. When I got some time to work on projects, my laptop booted to a grub rescue screen. I flashed a USB with the latest Alpine Linux, and it just freezes on the boot menu whenever the USB is plugged in. Spent a while unmotivated and too tired to deal with it until yesterday.
I messed around in the BIOS, updating it and trying to figured out what could be interfering with booting from a USB, and eventually I got it to boot. Once it booted, it immediately went to an emergency shell because it failed to mount the file system. I switched to a different USB, re-downloaded, and verified the iso, and it finally got to the installer! I started to go through the installer, but it didn’t detect my wifi card… This has never been a problem before on Alpine or at all on this laptop. I rebooted and forgot to hold the key to boot into the flash drive, and it just… booted into my original system? Everything seems to be working correctly now. I have no idea what happened, but I guess I’ll just go with it until it starts having problems again.
Today I got back to working on Slush. I didn’t have much time today, so I moved errors into their own module because there doesn’t really seem to be a good enough reason to have them handled by each module like I was originally planning on. I also implemented a simple system for tests and some helper functions for testing.
I didn’t end up having enough time to do much more than that, but next up I plan on writing an automated test for lexing the existing helloworld.slush example. After that I think I’ll start on actually executing the code and using this testing system for that. I still plan on having an additional “parsing” step before execution, but I want to go to execution next to have a better idea of what I want the output of that step to look like.
Today I moved a bunch of things around on this site. I have some ideas I’d like to implement here, but I think I want to write my own site generator before going ahead with those (I honestly can’t wrap my head around much of Hugo, but it also just sounds fun to build my own). I’d like for this site to be able to hold a lot more notes on various things, and I don’t think the current structure suits that in a way that’s very manageable.
Played around for a while with the CSS of this site. Changed the colors around, but didn’t end up keeping any other changes.
Another chill day. Spent a little bit learning about abstract syntax trees.
Fixed slush not compiling on Musl systems and a bug. Just a chill day :)
Finished rewriting Slush’s lexer. I’m pretty happy with it now. There is definitely room for improvement with error handling, but it’s feeling very maintainable now.
Next I’d like to write some little tests for it. Then I’ll move on to making the code actually execute.
Another busy day. I spent a little bit working on the same thing as yesterday, but didn’t have enough time to make much substantial progress.
I thought a lot about a game I’d like to make. Maybe soon I’ll be able to write it in Slush :)
Started rewriting Slush’s lexer. It’s not working yet, but it’s feeling a lot cleaner than it was.
Had a busy day, I was very tired before I had any free time.
Added a cli flag to Slush to print the lexer’s result, and spent a bit reading about interpreters.
Tomorrow I may rewrite the lexer having learned a bit about how not to write a lexer, or I might just move forward with the next part and come back to it once I have a better understanding of what exactly I need it to be. Or maybe I won’t do any of that.
Today I started on a project I’ve been wanting to give a go for a while now. It’s an interpreter for a little language that for now I’m calling Slush. It gets this name because Slush is the first word that came to mind.
I’ve never built a compiler or interpreter before, so I’m learning as I go.
It’s a concatenative language inspired by Forth and Uxntal. I’m aiming for the langauge to have strong C interoperability, so I can easily use libraries like SDL and Vulkan to build graphical software and games with it. As of right now it doesn’t have much of its own identity.
Today I wrote a little “Hello World” example and built a quick-and-dirty lexer capable of lexing this example code.
