Latest — LAYNG.COM

2026-06-01

Games

REVERSI

Classic disc-flipping strategy game, solo vs AI. Three difficulty levels, two colors, synthesized sounds. Pure browser, no install.

2026-06-01

Archive

June 2026 Pruning

Third pruning. Six cards removed: Infinite Story Machine, The Integrated Human, The Values Are Negotiable, LAYNG TV, Making the Video, Stuff I Like.

2026-06-01

Essay

The Same Pressure

The algorithm is just the latest costume. On the pressure that never gives a command and the correction that always finds its way home.

2026-06-01

Roads

A Reunion

35 years gone by and back in it easily. Drone 12 feet down the main street of Durango. Silverton calling. Then the Million Dollar Highway.

2026-05-31

Roads

The Cost of Doing Business

Cooking ground beef on top of the DJ gear. E-bike in the aisle. Firewood on the floor. The Strater Hotel is haunted. Telluride on the horizon.

2026-05-30

Roads

The Cold Plunge

Five months of keto changed how my body handles the cold. Hot springs near Durango, a new song taking shape, and a Friday night in a town I love.

2026-05-29

Roads

Cliff Palace

Four Corners underwhelmed. Cliff Palace did not. 65 degrees in Colorado, right in the middle of the butter zone.

2026-05-28

Roads

The Stack

Habit stacking. The 30 second video. Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. Rolling toward Durango.

2026-05-27

Roads

The Container

Move day from the North Rim. And something shifting about how expression and output fit together.

2026-05-26

Roads

The Ancient Television

4% battery after an overcast day. A campfire overlooking the canyon. 26 nights since resupply, and a realization about creative infrastructure.

2026-05-25

Story

The Power Plant Workers

The oldest workers in Cellville. The deal they made before Cellville existed. This is a story about mitochondria.

2026-05-25

Roads

Base Camp

Solo on the North Rim. Peaceful day, got in bed early. The van is full, no room for company. Deep ketosis back. A ledge above the Grand Canyon.

2026-05-24

Roads

The Trail of Torture

Shannon departs on the canyon's hardest backpacking route. Trail of Torture leaves new holes in the sweatpants. New Instagram for Chasing the Butter. The sense that this is my time.

2026-05-23

Essay

Chop Wood, Carry Water

On the two kinds of people you already know, and the pattern that explains the gap between them. Maintenance, margin, and why the arithmetic is slow and then it isn't.

2026-05-23

Roads

The Haydukers

Memorial Day brings the neighbors. Clay pigeons loaded with a man's father's ashes. Hayduke Trail hikers 600 miles in say we have the best view on the North Rim.

2026-05-22

Roads

The Burn Zone

Buffalo on the way in. Then the burn zone. The Grand Lodge is gone, both sides of the road scorched. Our campsite was spared. 10 nights, full setup. Last night: e-bike into the trails.

2026-05-21

Roads

The Volume

Nobody around means music at real volume. The DJ gear question. Biked the rim trail to a spectacular viewpoint. 12% battery. Plotting a system for the drone footage.

2026-05-20

Game

SIGNAL: AI hint fixes

Four fixes: retry logic with terminated word awareness; rejected clues tracked across attempts so the AI doesn't repeat the same bad guess; board word filtering on hint results; JSON parse fallback for generate-words.

2026-05-20

Story

The Foreman Who Was Blamed

The Cellville Chronicles #5. Sodium kept the signals running. Then the papers arrived and said he was the problem.

2026-05-20

Series

Optimized Against You

New series. Three essays on the systems inside the food supply and daily life that were never designed with your biology in mind.

2026-05-20

Story

The Vegetable Oil Man

The Cellville Chronicles #4. A stranger arrived with papers from important offices. The papers said he was safe. The papers said he was better.

2026-05-20

Essay

The Extraction Machine

Private equity has been quietly buying the businesses Americans depend on, and the experience of daily life in this country is measurably worse because of it.

2026-05-20

Essay

The Oil That Isn't

Vegetable oil sounds like something from a garden. That assumption was not an accident. It was engineered.

2026-05-20

Essay

What the Label Doesn't Say

The label says "may cause digestive discomfort." What it doesn't say is that this ingredient is actively working against your body's ability to absorb the minerals it needs to function.

2026-05-20

Roads

It's Just a Feature

North Rim. Awake at 5am, two hours of thinking. Twenty days out from the last supply run. Thinking about the people I love.

2026-05-19

Music

This Is a Feature

New single from Chasing the Butter. On how the thing you may think is "the thing" may simply be a feature.

2026-05-19

Roads

Taxiing

North Rim. New campsite, better view. Roasted garlic in the coals. The diesel heater is acting up. And the runway is longer than expected.

2026-05-18

Roads

The Foreign Visitor

North Rim. Arrived. 40mph wind on the canyon edge. A critter ate the potatoes. A feeling showed up at sunset that took until morning to name.

2026-05-17

Roads

Into the North Rim

Jacob Lake. Packing up and heading into the backcountry. The music is flowing. The battery is at 7%. Adventure time.

2026-05-16

Roads

G

Jacob Lake. Pack day, North Rim tomorrow. Creatine joins the potion. The walkie talkie mystery solved. A 78-year-old nomad on freedom, regret, and the end of things.

2026-05-16

Music

I Could Not Give Myself Permission

New single. On the gap between wanting something and allowing yourself to have it.

2026-05-15

Roads

The Walkie Talkie

Jacob Lake. Woke to a dream voice on the walkie talkie. Slept through Route 67 opening. Crystal Light solves the electrolyte taste. North Rim tomorrow. On waking into a life you love, and getting more careful about sharing location in real time.

2026-05-14

Roads

Butter Weather

Jacob Lake. Electrolyte loading phase. Solved a months-long Starlink drop issue. Moths explained: mating season, one week to live. Shannon cooks in the coals overnight. Battery at 20% and counting on the sun.

2026-05-13

Roads

The Moths

Jacob Lake. Three-hour Kanab run. Electrolyte potion: salty stagnant pond water. Bug-a-salt gunfight vs. four moths; Shannon's tupperware strategy is probably better. Game camera first test. Three more nights, then the North Rim.

2026-05-12

Roads

Practicing My Love

Jacob Lake. 5:15am, Kanab-bound. Built a music visualizer system, then Signal bugs burned through two days of Claude compute. Three van modes: stealth, monk, full glory. Things work better with a lighter touch. I call it practicing my love.

2026-05-14

Site

Homepage: What a Time video

Added embedded YouTube video card for "What a Time" above the Chasing the Butter playlist link.

2026-05-11

Game

SIGNAL update

Fixed AI Caller failing to generate clues. Root cause: the model was thinking out loud before the JSON. Now uses a system prompt and JSON extraction fallback so clues always come through. "Caller thinking" animation no longer shows redundant status text beneath it.

2026-05-11

Game

SIGNAL update

AI Caller now has three personalities: Logical, Playful, and Cryptic. Clues now go through a second validation pass to catch trap associations before you see them. Clue explanations no longer read like audit reports. Word pool expanded to ~480 words.

2026-05-11

Game

SIGNAL update

Solo mode now has Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty. Player stats tracking added — win rate, streaks, fastest win, opponent history, and a global leaderboard. AI trap avoidance improved. Score screen now explains itself in plain English.

2026-05-11

Roads

Monk Mode

Fuzzy onesie, coffee at 7, didn't open the van door until 3. New song out. The wheel with spokes: each stop, pour work in, turn again. Route 67 and the North Rim open Friday. We'll probably go in Saturday.

2026-05-11

Music

All the Marbles

Some things you go for completely or not at all. This is what that sounds like.

2026-05-11

Music

It Was a Dream

A brief connection that was exactly what it needed to be.

2026-05-10

Music

Chasing the Butter

The theme song. One phrase, on a loop, because that's all it needs.

2026-05-10

Music

What a Time

The first Chasing the Butter single. Produced in the desert, at the edge of a canyon, during a moment in history that has no precedent.

2026-05-10

Roads

Jacob Lake

Shannon's 4x4 exit: drone, GoPro, walkie talkies, the works. Drove 4,000 feet up to Jacob Lake. Climbed the lookout tower. Ordered a game camera. The mysterious 2:55am footsteps finally made the case.

2026-05-08

Game

SIGNAL

A collaborative 2-player word game. One Caller sees which words are targets and which are traps. One Finder sees the same grid with no markings. Give clues, make guesses, find all 7 signals before 3 lives run out.

2026-05-09

Roads

The Heat

Last morning at the canyon. 100 degrees in the van, UV 9, nowhere to hide. Found the adapter under the mattress after a week of searching. At some point I rode five miles around the canyon rim completely naked on the OneWheel and got drone footage of it. That felt like an awful lot of freedom in one act.

2026-05-08

Roads

The Shower

Greg's last night. Shannon walked back to his site in the dark with a headlamp and rode the bike home. A teaspoon of pink Himalayan salt in each liter and the leg cramps cleared up. Four months in and still learning. The drone footage here is some of the best I've ever gotten.

2026-05-07

Roads

The Rope

950 feet down to the water. A blue rope anchored by a stranger, a two-foot ledge, a boulder that bowed out from the wall. The moment I realized there was only one way out. Two reckonings with mortality in 24 hours.

2026-05-06

Fix

ISM: stronger prompt following, duplicate branch display

Generation now treats the reader's seed prompt as a required destination rather than a suggestion. When two branches share an opening sentence, the display expands to show a second sentence so they can be told apart.

2026-05-06

Roads

The Wind

Wind howling, van shaking, eight feet from the edge of a 950-foot cliff. Making peace with it. The energy cost of moving camp. The view you never get used to. Walkie talkies.

2026-05-05

Roads

The Spot

Days of coveting the truck camper's spot. Hard drive saga finally done, DJ gear running. Then the guy moved. Ninety minutes later, the most memorable campsite I've been in.

2026-05-04

Update

About page rewritten

New bio reflecting the current reality. Removed the career history. Added a contact form.

2026-05-04