Here on the porch at Dani's, enjoying the chill breeze as a distant storm passes by, and the last half hour of daylight, it seems right to have been awake to see the solstice dawn, and out in the world all day. Though after 16 hours, the part of the day spent napping in a hammock barely seems enough.

Such an early start to this day, first visiting a small-town garage with Dad, where skype video calls were being made, and then racing the morning heat north, out of South Carolina.

(I can't hear "frakking water" on the radio without snickering. Congratulations to all the news-people who pulled that phrase off today.)

A long drive punctuated by picking up my passenger, and my own Goodbye Solo drive up by Blowing Rock, looking in the mirror at passenger dreaming in the backseat. Thinking about how, in the flat lands, cresting a long, slow hill, I often feel as if the road ahead could at any moment vanish, sending the car plunging into nothing; a latent agoraphobia. And in the mountains, as the road narrows and winds, I'm always confident it continues solidly around each blind bend.

Going out to Abram's in early summer, when it starts to get uncomfortable, and sitting under the falls is a full-fledged tradition for me now. This time my camera worked, and I even brought a laptop (ziplocked) on the wade down the creek, so I spent the afternoon in the canyon. Office with a view..

I love this game.

Love that it's so abstract and beautiful and meditative.

Love how it plays with fractal scale. Am I a planet or a unicelled organism?

Love that this basic game idea could have been written at any point since Spacewar (1961), and could be said to be recycling ideas from everything from that to Pac Man ... but instead seems entirely new, pure, and fresh.

Love that I can be playing it and it makes me think about things right out of a Greg Egan novel. Like about how it's most efficient for conciousness to be slow and not care about the passage of time. So you don't have to waste much mass on delta-v. Until carnivorous life enters the picture. Then you have to be bold, and fast.

Love that it has a linux port.

Love that it's hard.

A screenshot can't do it justice -- the video on its site gives a better idea.