Piano Sonata 1 & 2, Some Flash Games, RSS

February 2026. Continuing in my quest to dump more creative work onto my website.

The biggest thing for me, by far, is releasing two piano sonatas composed in 2023-2024. The second one I have notated in MuseScore, so there are PDFs that are readable and which I have done at least one set of revisions on. I really needed to get these out into the world.

There are also a few more tracks on the music page, and I'm going to dump some collected tracker music from around 2000 soon. (This is not very good music, though...)

I also dug up a new story fragment, "Down By Seattle", from 2015.

I have made just a couple of flash games playable (Craemle Zone, Whales of Aelia) via ruffle.rs, a Free Software web player for Flash content. Testing these out just now, the experience is a bit rough since for some reason there is no video acceleration in my browser. Please tell me on fedivers if it's OK for you. I'll make the rest of the flash games playable, regardless, though.

Finally-- there is an RSS feed. I have tested it in one RSS reader and it seems to work.

Sonata for Piano Nr. 2

This was started-- I think-- not all that long after I finished the first piano sonata. I did make a note that I finished it on January 19, 2025.

I did put this into notation software, MuseScore. This was more work than I anticipated and not that much fun, but it does make it possible for me to (sort of) play through it. (I can't sight-read my own handwriting well enough.)

I think the process of notating it sort of slowed me down, and I want to continue to write music like this so I may not spend time notating the work but just try to get it out. I do enjoy writing pencil + paper.

Absolutely, anyone out there, please tell me if you attempt to play this.

Sonata for Piano Nr. 1

This was written in the winter of 2023-2024. I can't remember the order the movements were sketched out in, or finished in, but I did write "Feb 19 2024" at the end of the middle part of the third movement, which I think must have been when I finished writing it.

I don't have this entered into any music notation software but I will do that sometime. But I want to upload scans of this because I find it a terrible almost opressive feeling to have something complete and not released into the world. I would like to find a way to perform it or have someone play it.

I know I was listening to Good King Wenceslas sung by The Dellar Consort at bedtime and it struck me how beautiful this simple song really is. The second movement is also a set of variations on a melody by Yoko Kanno, from the videogame Ghengis Khan for the NES. It may be called "Mongol Theme." I find it incredibly beautiful. The third movement, if I remember, starts as a final variation from movement 2.

Spending time playing music from "The Real Book", which I discovered from YouTube videos during the pandemic enabled me to devise a way to sketch music more quickly. It also helped me build better intuition around harmony and even notes, and improved my piano playing incredibly. In terms of composition, I had always felt frustrated and in some sense trapped by digital tools-- what I really want is to just write music, not deal with sounds, per se. I finally felt able to do that, here.

Please tell me if you attempt to play this, it would mean a lot.

Down by Seattle

When the moon came up, the navy sky hanging low and warm on S. Elk Street, it was like a sign to the group to move on. We had been sitting tight in a residence of Marley's sister's acquaintance's brother, but it was wearing thin. A host is like a natural resource that will replenish itself if not let run dry, so we tried not to.

We had only to move east out over the plains, into the unknown lands and the network of caches which was our real target. There wasn't any map that would much help us, overlaid with the familiar streets and avenues of America were the between spaces, abandoned lots that weren't abandoned, surveyed hills and mountains, barren and nameless save for "private property: no trespassing" signs posted along barbed-wire fence. These were the places we went after.

It's a common wisdom that you can hide a thing easily, at times, in plain sight. Likewise, to hide a place, you needed to make and widely publish maps of it. A small change or error it a remote place would at most be reported by one or two people, but so long as you chose a place that never would matter much to anyone if it was corrected or no, you would never need to correct it.

And people live at the ends, or at the edges of places. In between is what we travel past.

Sarkirk was definitely one of the best diviners any of the rest of us had ever met. We didn't know if what he did was really magic, or a blend of intuition, but his ableness to find was something we had over the last year of our journey learned to put a trust in.

We found him on a farm in Arizona, at that time I was divining for the group and doing a bad job. None of uhad really made any good money for a long while, and in truth we were living by now on Jordan's graces, who had made an immesurable hit about 10 years back. He would move on a little later, we never learned where.

Back to Sarkirk. He kept a shave head, stocky but without any kind of threatening demeanour. He had brown skin, tended to dress in linens. He was introduced to us by a host, the name escapes me, who was running a small bar-and-filling-station by the highway. He had recognized Sarkirk by his mannerisms, as being someone trained in Buddhist arts, or yoga, or something along those lines. When Sarkirk came to him it was looking for a job, and so our host in Arizona put him to work, waiting and evaluatig whether or not he should be told about the tree.

It wasn't an easy thing, to initiate someone into our line. Lots of things were running dry, food and water in many places, and the disconnection that bred in society bred in turn a lot of superstitions, and worse yet prejudice. People could turn to the government for survival, when it was able to provide it, and to the landowners for work, when they could, but religion was a more splintered affair.

Of course most would call themselves something along the lines of "Christian", but this hadn't meant anything for a long time, if it ever had. The religion people really clung to was really at it's core a desert mythology infused with mysticism that helped everyone understand the technology that surrounded them, that so little worked.

Sarkirk was a candidate, therefore, due not to any religious affiliation per se, but more due to the lack of one. He was centered if not in science then in a philosophical practice, in a way that few modern people were any longer. And so our host in Arizona, one calm night on a black moon, took him out to a rock and gave him the water and told him about us.

We had first come to Seattle as six: Marney, Jones, Sarkirk, Dal, Moshe, and myself (Lin.) Dal had decided to head south to join with another branch, which was unexpected as her chemistry was good. So she must have had a reason, and would have shared it if she wanted to, so we didn't ask.

Jones was the oldest, most experienced, and probably in some ways the best of us and Marney and myself both loved him. He was the one who recruited Sarkirk, he was often the one with a contact who could host us, and often knew of open hosts who weren't in any of the drive tables.

Hosts could be open or blind. A blind host, like the one we were staying with, didn't know about the tree. These had to be networked and given a reason. In the old days it was as simple as using a line service like HotStay but nowadays with the fibre all broke up most line services were closed, at least anything that required being up-to-date. So that left hotels, which were unaffordable and worse-yet conspicuous, camping (which worked away from cities but was, again, conspicuous, within), and the drive tables.

So if Jones (and next, Marney) were useful for hosts, Moshe and I were useful for more practical considerations. Chief among what I brought to the group was my sense of direction and uncanny ability with animals (people included.) Moshe was also good with people but even better with machines, whether they were of the computing or mechanical variety. He also had a fantastic sense of humour.

Where Jones would look out over a space from behind his wiry moustache, Moshe would tell a story about it, about who lived in a town we were coming into, how they thought, what the television had done to them, that kind of thing. Invariably these stories were clever and, although completely invented, insightful. I envied Moshe's ability to make people laugh, although we usually worked together if there was anybody around that needed prying open.

Seattle wasn't a bad town, in fact it was still mostly together. Occasionally it would be raided by sea, and if there weren't coastguard available thing would sometimes be lit up but all told the people were still very open and warm. When we arrived from further down the coast, and before that from China, it felt like finally a safe harbour. Of course we had the usual suspicion to cast off, a group of travelers with less-than-perfect documentation and an unlikely makeup. But here it was a bit easier as we could pass ourselves as hippies traveling to a commune in B.C., which was common enough.

Our hunt in Seattle, however, had been bust. There was supposed to be an open lot in which was buried a full-armoured horse and warrior statue, taken from Mongolia during the climate war. We arrived in the area and Sarkirk knew right away that it was dry.

And that is how we ended up in, and then shortly after leaving, for the east, down by Seattle.