Build Logs.

Every update to this site, shipped and noted. High level, human-readable, nothing hidden.

1. AUG 7, 2026 · SHIP 154

   ApeLingo — Lost Tapes II, live at /film/lost-tapes-2.

   • ·A second found-VHS tape: one continuous 9:45 recording, three lessons at semi-advanced level, twenty-seven phrases drilling the same thirteen grammar points as the El Mero Mero series — clustered by function (what's happening now / what already happened / what you should do) instead of textbook order. Two in-tape commercial breaks (La Libreta, Larga Distancia, Ape Gym) keep the bit going between lessons.
   • ·The page adds two things Volume I didn't have: clickable chapters that seek the actual video (cold open, each tape, each commercial, the end card), and an accordion phrase list per tape pulled straight from the source curriculum — Spanish, English gloss, and grammar tag for all twenty-seven lines, so the lesson is skimmable without scrubbing. Small enough (13MB) to live directly in the repo, unlike the Lost Tapes I and Merriweather videos which sit in Blob storage.
2. AUG 7, 2026 · SHIP 153

   Bedrock — loyalty is geology, rendered.

   • ·A new tool at /bedrock that finally computes the site's own thesis. Enter the things you're still holding — a person, a place, a practice, a position — with the date each hold began, and they render as sediment strata: thickness proportional to days held, oldest at the bottom, a stratum ring for every full year survived, and the single oldest hold carrying the only orange on the page (the vein). All day math runs at UTC noon so a timezone can never shift a count.
   • ·Above the surface line sits the weather — your actual current conditions, fetched fresh every visit and never stored. The band is labeled MONEY IS WEATHER; the rock below is labeled LOYALTY IS GEOLOGY. That contrast is the whole tool.
   • ·It watches for anniversaries ("next stratum ring: Richmond crosses 16 years on March 1"), and one click pulls a core sample — a tall drill-core PNG of your strata, labeled and dated, with an initials-only toggle so you can share the shape of your loyalty without publishing your people. Everything lives in your browser's localStorage and nowhere else. Registers are private by definition.
3. AUG 7, 2026 · SHIP 152

   El Mero Mero, Season 2 — the finale, four episodes.

   • ·The four units left unspent when Season 1 shipped — estar + gerundio, deber vs. tener que, estar a punto de, seguir + gerundio — now have episodes: Ahorita Mismo, Lo Que Debo, A Punto De, and the series finale Seguimos. Between the two seasons, every one of the notebook's thirteen units now has a matching scene. /lingo/show groups episodes by season, and Ep. 12 closes out the Nayarit thread that's been running since Ep. 05.
   • ·Same pipeline as Season 1: video on Vercel Blob, not git; captions converted to WebVTT; every episode links to its matching Grammar Drills unit. Season 2 was also a leaner production — 400 seconds of generated video against Season 1's 1,447, mostly by right-sizing shot durations instead of defaulting every clip to the Veo max.
4. AUG 7, 2026 · SHIP 151

   El Mero Mero, Season 1 — nine episodes, live at /lingo/show.

   • ·A gorilla crime boss teaches Mexican Spanish grammar as operational advice: ser vs. estar is the difference between what a man is and what he's being right now, the imperative is how orders get given, the pluperfect is how you find out you were already too late. Nine episodes, self-hosted (no YouTube branding, no ads), each one a full scene with a cold open, teaching drills with an on-screen countdown, a quiz, and a quiet 'heart beat' moment where the character stops performing and says one true thing.
   • ·Every episode links straight to its matching Grammar Drills unit (/lingo/grammar#unit-N) and back — the show and the notebook now teach the exact same thirteen units, just in two different registers. Chapters are clickable and seek the video; bilingual (EN/ES) caption tracks ride alongside the burned-in subtitles for accessibility.
   • ·Video lives on Vercel Blob storage rather than in the git repo — 216MB across nine files would have doubled the repo's size for no reason. Linked from the ApeLingo landing page as a third way in, alongside Gen Pop and the notebook.
5. AUG 6, 2026 · SHIP 150

   ApeLingo gets a Grammar Drills notebook.

   • ·A new tool at /lingo/grammar: ten units of real Spanish grammar, each one built from an actual line of dialogue instead of a textbook example. Every unit pulls one pattern out of its quote — present progressive, deber vs. tener que, preterite vs. imperfect, the pluperfect, register and idiom — explains it, then drills it with fresh fill-in and translation sentences, some pulled from real life rather than a fictional character.
   • ·Marking a unit complete now actually sticks (saved to your browser, not reset on refresh, unlike Gen Pop's lessons), and the answer key stays hidden until you ask for it. Linked from the ApeLingo landing page as a second way in alongside the Gen Pop curriculum.
   • ·Every Spanish word and idiom across the ten units is now clickable — quotes, conjugation tables, vocab chips, and drill prompts alike. Click one and a short card pops up with the English meaning plus a usage example, so you're never stuck guessing at an unfamiliar word mid-drill. Runs off a hand-built glossary of the notebook's own vocabulary, not a generic dictionary API.
   • ·Three new units (11-13) push past the original ten into the next grammar tier: the present subjunctive (quiero que, es importante que), future/conditional plus real and hypothetical si-clauses, and ser vs. estar paired with stacked object pronouns (se lo dije). These are freshly written rather than pulled from a video, so their example line is labeled 'ejemplo' instead of 'del video' — same click-to-translate glossary, same drill-and-reveal format.
6. AUG 2, 2026 · SHIP 149

   Fenway night two logged: 8/1.

   • ·Tweezer threaded through set one four times — bookending Sigma Oasis, then carrying Chalk Dust Torture into Stash, then closing the set into Sand. Trey back on the mini drum kit for Sigma Oasis and No Men In No Man's Land, and a Melt the Guns tease inside Light, one night after the real bustout. OnlyPhans, Bustout, and the career catalog all pick it up automatically.
7. AUG 1, 2026 · SHIP 148

   Fall tour dates added: Atlantic City, Richmond, Jacksonville, Huntsville.

   • ·Eight new October dates on the TOUR tab — three nights at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, two at Allianz Amphitheater at Riverfront in Richmond, one at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville (Phish's first Florida show since 2016), and two closing at The Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville. Tickets aren't on sale yet (a request period runs through Aug 10, general on-sale is Aug 14), so each shows UPCOMING until real ticket links land. The tour list now splits into SUMMER 2026 and FALL 2026 sections instead of one running list.
8. AUG 1, 2026 · SHIP 147

   Wake Up To Surf: nine live cams, one wall.

   • ·A new tool at /wakeuptosurf: a 3x3 grid of live Surfline webcams — Teahupo'o, Pipeline, Rockaway Beach, Sandbridge, Lower Trestles, Blacks, Steamer Lane, and Puerto Escondido, plus a rotating 'Scanner' tile that cycles through another twenty-some pinned spots on its own. Click any tile to expand it full-screen with the spot's local time, a note on the wave, and a link to the real page on Surfline.
   • ·Surfline has no public API, so the streams are real HLS URLs pulled straight off their own site, played with hls.js. Their CDN only serves those streams to requests carrying a surfline.com Referer, which a browser can never fake — so every stream routes through a small server-side proxy (app/api/surfcam) that fetches it properly and hands it back same-origin. Every tile carries its own fallback ladder — if a cam's primary feed is down, it tries the next one before giving up and showing NO SIGNAL, since these are unofficial endpoints Surfline could change at any time.
9. JUL 31, 2026 · SHIP 146

   Fenway night one logged: 7/31.

   • ·Phish's tour opener at Fenway Park, an unfinished Everything's Right leading into Back on the Train, a Martian Monster tease in Free, and a bustout Melt the Guns — first played since April 29, 1987, 2,051 shows ago — sandwiched in a Fuego jam. Trey on the mini drum kit for What's Going Through Your Mind and A Wave of Hope. OnlyPhans, Bustout, and the career catalog all pick it up automatically.
10. JUL 29, 2026 · SHIP 145

    MSG closer logged: 7/29, an all-1996 setlist.

    • ·The last of five straight Garden nights, built entirely from Phish's 1996 era (sans the closing Backwards Down the Number Line), with Trey and Mike in period outfits and the Garden lit Knicks orange and blue. Four bustouts: The Star-Spangled Banner (362 shows), Talk (122 shows), Harpua (116 shows), and Suspicious Minds (1,021 shows) — the last time Suspicious Minds was played was December 6, 1996. Harpua's narration picked up Jimmy stuck in the clouds since Clifford Ball's unfinished 2023 version. Same pipeline as the rest of the run: OnlyPhans, Bustout, and the career catalog update automatically.
11. JUL 28, 2026 · SHIP 144

    A security pass over the API: headers, fail-closed auth, input caps.

    • ·A full defensive audit of every API route, then the safe fixes shipped. Sitewide security headers the site never had (frame-blocking to stop clickjacking on the member login, MIME-sniff protection, a referrer policy, and a locked-down permissions policy). Member authentication now fails closed in production — it requires a real configured password rather than ever falling back to a default. And the public write endpoints (the register, the application form, article comments) got strict input validation: length ceilings so nobody can wedge a giant payload into storage, and a tightened comment path so a signed-in member can't interfere with another member's account. No behavior changes for anyone using the site normally.
    • ·Deeper findings that need judgment calls rather than a one-line fix — the fantasy-draft pick flow, the friend-visibility model, and moving rate-limiting onto durable storage — are written up separately for a considered pass rather than rushed.
12. JUL 27, 2026 · SHIP 143

    MSG night three logged: 7/27.

    • ·Phish's third straight Garden night, a deep-catalog first set (Wilson opener, Timber (Jerry the Mule), Ha Ha Ha, Scent of a Mule, Halley's Comet into The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday) and a second set built around The Curtain With flowing through Prince Caspian, Drowned, Billy Breathes, and It's Ice — Trey on the mini drum kit for five songs across both sets. Same pipeline as the last two nights: OnlyPhans, Bustout, and the career catalog all pick it up automatically.
13. JUL 27, 2026 · SHIP 142

    Pact Hand pulled back for more work.

    • ·The bronze fist shipped earlier today came down. It rendered and worked, but the mesh has a real hole near a knuckle from an over-aggressive decimation pass that needs a gentler re-export to fix properly, and the whole object needs another pass before it's Ledger-caliber rather than 'good enough.' Component, model, and images are pulled from the homepage entirely for now — not hidden, gone — until that work is done.
14. JUL 27, 2026 · SHIP 141

    Pact Hand 001 — a gorilla fist grips the top-right edge of the homepage.

    • ·A new interactive object, built to the Ledger standard (real geometry, real physics, no canned motion). A cast-bronze fist, generated as a static mesh from real reference photos, grips the top-right corner of the homepage. It idles with a slow procedural sway, tenses on hover, steps with page scroll, resists a drag with a tanh-clamped spring, and on a click releases its grip and reveals the oath — "Ape Shall Never Kill Ape" — dismissed by a second click, Escape, a route change, or an 8-second auto-timeout. Every motion is a spring-physics transform on the whole rigid object, matching the brief: cast bronze doesn't flex. Falls back cleanly to a static image on reduced-motion, no-WebGL, save-data connections, or a runtime error — the 3D path never loads at all in those cases. Known issue: the decimated mesh has one small hole near a knuckle from the simplification pass; fixing it needs a gentler re-export from the source, noted for a follow-up rather than blocking the ship.
15. JUL 27, 2026 · SHIP 140

    Two nights at the Garden, logged: MSG 7/24 and 7/25.

    • ·Phish's summer 1993/1994-themed run at Madison Square Garden lands in OnlyPhans and Bustout. 7/24 was an all-1993 setlist with six bustouts — Big Ball Jam (1,170 shows), La Grange (531), Sparks (357), Makisupa Policeman (149), Kung (258), and Sweet Adeline (358) — plus a Weigh lyric change and a Big Balls tease into Big Ball Jam. 7/25 leaned 1994, with an Ed Sullivan intro into Back in the U.S.S.R., a run of six Tweezers sandwiching Down with Disease/Sample in a Jar/Lifeboy/Julius/Catapult/Cavern, a first set cut short by a FOH outage, and Trey playing drums and guitar on a Fishman-sung Purple Rain. Both shows update the career catalog and the Bustout prediction engine's recency weighting automatically.
16. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 139

    A sitewide sweep gives every hover its snap back.

    • ·Phase 7 of the UI polish pass, the sitewide follow-up to the Canopy nav's Phase 1 fix. Roughly 60 buttons, tabs, and links across Bustout, Mahjong, DaysLedger, Register, Phish, OnlyPhans, Handaxe, SongSheet, FieldConditions, and a dozen more pages had literally zero hover transition — an instant, jarring cut with no feedback at all. They now get the same restrained 80ms snap the nav already has: still a press, not a float, just no longer completely silent. Checked every remaining case against the audit first — the ones left untouched (the .stomp buttons, two hidden easter eggs, a couple of purely decorative marks) are that way on purpose, not overlooked.
17. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 138

    Every font on the site now loads through Next's own font pipeline.

    • ·Phase 6 of the UI polish pass — invisible, but real. Anvil Grotesk, Anvil Grotesk Chill, and General Sans were self-hosted by hand; Carlito, Bricolage Grotesque, and Fredoka came from a manual Google Fonts link tag. Both now load through next/font, the same mechanism already proven on The Harvard Post: automatic fallback-metric matching (less visible shift when the real face swaps in), build-time self-hosting for the Google set too (no external request at all now), no manual preconnect tags to maintain. The Ledger's shareable day-card PNG and Field Notes' saved-image export — both draw text on a canvas, which can't take a CSS variable the normal way — now read the live resolved font instead of a hardcoded name, so they can't quietly drift out of sync with whatever font the rest of the site is actually running.
18. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 137

    A proper error page and a loading state that isn't a blank flash.

    • ·Phase 5 of the UI polish pass. Two route-level pages the site never had: a crash page ("Not your fault.") in the same voice and layout as the existing 404, with a try again button and a way back to camp — Next.js renders it automatically if something breaks instead of a generic error screen. A sitewide loading state (a breathing sigil on the camo texture, not a spinner) covers the brief gap while a route streams in on a slow connection. The 404 page's back link also picked up the hover snap the rest of the nav already has.
19. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 136

    The moon ticker, Right Now, and the field-conditions strip stop popping in silently.

    • ·Phase 4 of the UI polish pass. All three live client-side readings used to render a blank placeholder, then hard-cut to the real content the instant a fetch or a mount-effect resolved -- the most "is this broken?" symptom on the site. A small shared FadeIn component now fades and rises each piece into place as it actually arrives: the moon phase shows almost instantly, weather and tide trail it by however long the network takes, each settling in on its own instead of the whole strip jumping at once. Right Now's globe ring gets the same treatment. Nothing changed about what any of these show or how they're laid out -- purely about how they arrive.
20. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 135

    The homepage learns to reveal itself as you scroll.

    • ·Phase 3 of the UI polish pass. The article grid, the “accounts and character on different ledgers” pull-quote, and the four-pillar grid now fade and rise into place the first time each one crosses into view, staggered card by card, instead of sitting fully rendered in the initial HTML. A small shared Reveal component carries the pattern already proven on You Are Here (/here) so any future section can opt in the same way. The hero, the moon ticker, and Portal are untouched — they already have their own motion identity. A safety-net timer guarantees nothing is ever stuck invisible if a browser fails to report the scroll intersection.
21. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 134

    A full mobile compatibility sweep finds and fixes two real overflow bugs.

    • ·Phase 2 of the UI polish pass: every route on the site checked at phone width for horizontal overflow, not just the homepage. Two were actually broken. The Harvard Post's game scoreboard rows didn't fit narrow screens — long team names could force the whole page 25px wider than the viewport, silently zooming everything out. Fixed by letting team names truncate with an ellipsis instead of pushing the layout wider. The Tube's retro control panel (channel/mute/power buttons next to the SILVERBACK badge) had the same problem — fixed by letting the button row wrap onto its own line under the badge on narrow screens, which reads as a natural part of the hardware design rather than a workaround.
    • ·Everything else — all 34 other routes, the signature pad on Apply, the Ledger's date picker, Mahjong, Bustout — checked out clean.
22. JUL 26, 2026 · SHIP 133

    The Canopy nav gets a Cmd+K command palette, real focus rings, and a current-page marker.

    • ·First move in a wider UI polish pass. Press Cmd/Ctrl+K (or / outside a text field) anywhere on the site to open a fuzzy jump-to search over every nav link, tool, range item, and troop entry — arrow keys to move, Enter to go, Escape to close. A new search icon sits in the docked cluster and the mobile top bar for anyone who'd rather click.
    • ·Every keyboard-focusable element on the site now gets a visible orange focus ring — three form fields (Field Notes, Mahjong, Register) previously had no focus indicator at all. The Canopy drawer marks whichever page you're currently on with a filled dot and bold text. The docked cluster's icon-only buttons (Home, menu, search) now show a small on-hover label instead of relying on invisible aria text alone. Nav hover states move from a hard instant cut to a fast, still-brutalist 80ms snap — same character, just named and consistent (--dur-snap / --ease-snap in globals.css) instead of ad hoc per component.
23. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 132

    Sticker shuffle: SILVERBACK back up top, Harvard Post steps aside, Vane's Corner centers in the footer.

    • ·The Harvard Post's sticker is off the homepage hero (the page itself is untouched, still live at /post) — SILVERBACK moved back up from the footer into its old slot, underneath SWALI, at full hero size again. Vane's Corner stays in the footer but no longer sits flush at the bottom edge — it's now dead-center of the dark band, left side, right above the camo strip.
24. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 131

    SILVERBACK and Vane's Corner move to the footer.

    • ·The homepage sticker stack was getting crowded (five stickers stacked top-right). SILVERBACK and Vane's Corner now live in the footer's bottom-left corner instead, site-wide, at a smaller size — a quieter, permanent home. The homepage hero keeps APEVISION, SWALI, and The Harvard Post, re-spaced to close the gap.
25. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 130

    MSG night one in the dataset — an all-1992 set with five bustouts.

    • ·07/22 at Madison Square Garden is filed: a setlist built entirely from Phish's 1992 era, with the '92 antics to match — trampolines back in Mike's Song, bicycle kicks in I Am Hydrogen, Trey in a sleeveless shirt. Five bustouts landed: Glide (225 shows), Cold as Ice (1,468 shows), Love You (382 shows), Hold Your Head Up (135 shows, with Fish on vacuum and Trey's "GOOOAAALLL"), and The Vibration of Life (1,027 shows). Reba dropped the whistling ending, My Friend, My Friend skipped the "Myfe" ending for Well teases, Page teased Speed Racer in The Lizards, and Harry Hood was aborted and restarted.
26. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 129

    The Harvard Post: a crimson paper hung on a driveway hoop.

    • ·A whole new masthead at /post — The Harvard Post, a college-basketball paper named after the actual post holding up a driveway backboard. It's the first page on the site that is deliberately not ASNKA: dead-white paper, Harvard crimson, its own three typefaces, and the sidebar chip and forest footer both step aside for it. The hero hoop peels into a die-cut sticker under your cursor, and tapping the backboard opens the menu.
    • ·The Slate is real: every Division I men's game pulled live off ESPN's public wire — today, yesterday, this week, any date back through history, and a team search that carries real records. Every row links to its official game page; nothing is stored on our side. In July it tells the truth instead of faking a scoreboard: a real countdown to the season tipping on Nov 2 (ESPN's own published date) and the actual final slate of last season, walked back from the real calendar.
    • ·Pools, the way a driveway league would actually run one: the commissioner opens a room and shares two things — the link and the password. No accounts for anyone. The league walks in, claims seats, and snake-drafts real teams with the room updating live for every viewer; the moment the last pick lands, the room becomes the standings, scored off each team's real season wins. State lives in Redis with per-mutation versioning so two simultaneous picks can't trample each other.
    • ·A fifth sticker joins the homepage stack as the door in, and the Post takes a spot on the Cartridge shelf next to the other tools.
27. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 128

    A fourth sticker joins the homepage cluster: APEVISION.

    • ·APEVISION — a die-cut of the same faceted-gorilla TV mark now on Tube's cabinet — lands at the top of the homepage sticker stack, bumping SWALI, SILVERBACK, and Vane's Corner down one slot each. It's the first sticker that leaves the site: it opens ApeVision (a sister project on its own subdomain) in a new tab instead of routing to a page here.
28. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 127

    The Sundowner spins up a screensaver, Tube gets a brand.

    • ·The Sundowner's mute button now actually looks like a mute button — a speaker icon that grows a slash when engaged, instead of the plain power-symbol ring it shipped with (it always just silenced the stream without stopping it; now the icon says so).
    • ·The background dance loop is now the real ASNKA sigil, not custom stick-figure apes — a handful of the mark scattered across a lunar-camo backdrop, each spinning at its own pace, screensaver-style. They freeze in place the moment you mute and pick back up the instant you don't.
    • ·Tube's cabinet got a proper brand pass: an APEVISION badge — three faceted gorilla medallions in a Mitsubishi-style triangle, mounted in brushed metal at the top of the set, above the screen.
29. JUL 24, 2026 · SHIP 126

    The Sundowner: say the vibe, get a real radio station.

    • ·A new field radio at /sundowner, Tube's sister product — type a mood or a scene ("rainy sunday," "cleaning the house," "2am drive") and it tunes a real, currently-live internet radio station to match, pulled from radio-browser.info, not a canned playlist. An AI reads the prompt for genre/mood tags when ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is configured; until then it runs on a local keyword matcher with the same output shape, so it works end to end either way.
    • ·An original CSS/SVG dance-loop of ape silhouettes plays behind the dial at all times, whether you've typed anything yet or not, so the page never feels static. Linked into the main nav and the Cartridge shelf alongside Tube.
30. JUL 23, 2026 · SHIP 125

    A found VHS tape shows up in two places at once.

    • ·"ApeLingo — Lost Tapes," a retro found-footage series teaching Mexican Spanish slang, landed in both houses it belongs in. As a real film at /film/lost-tapes, same treatment as everything else in the theater. And as CH 18 on the Tube — a real self-hosted video, not a YouTube embed, tuned into the same way as every other channel, mute and channel-change and all.
    • ·The Tube's channel system only knew two shapes before this: the NES cartridge and YouTube (live or looped playlist). Taught it a third — a plain self-hosted tape, tagged the same TAPE as a looped playlist, because that's honestly what it is.
31. JUL 23, 2026 · SHIP 124

    ApeLingo, Phase 1: Mexican Spanish, free, no account.

    • ·A new ASNKA sub-brand, ported in from a separate build: Gen Pop is live at /lingo — two full units (Greetings & Basics, Everyday Expressions), all four exercise types (multiple choice, fill-in-blank, word bank, listening), real Mexican-Spanish pronunciation audio, no login required. Progress resets when you leave; that's the deal, not a bug.
    • ·Re-themed end to end into ASNKA's actual design system (Anvil Grotesk, the real color tokens, the real gorilla sigil) rather than the placeholder fonts and colors it shipped with. VIP — the other 5 units, streaks, XP, persistence, admin approval — is Phase 2, once the account system is wired to something durable instead of a local file.
32. JUL 22, 2026 · SHIP 123

    The thing from yesterday goes further than the wallpaper.

    • ·Turns out the tab icon and the cursor were paying attention too.
33. JUL 22, 2026 · SHIP 122

    A third sticker joined the homepage cluster.

    • ·Same die-cut treatment as SWALI and SILVERBACK, same press feedback. This one doesn't link anywhere. That's not an oversight.
34. JUL 22, 2026 · SHIP 121

    Articles can be commented on now.

    • ·Every article carries a comment thread. Posting requires a phans session, same login as the Clubhouse, so every comment is a real member, not an anonymous handle. Comments post immediately, but pass through a denylist filter first (rejected outright, not silently hidden) and a per-member rate limit of eight per hour. Admins get an inline remove link on any comment, right on the article, no separate queue.
35. JUL 22, 2026 · SHIP 120

    Psilocybin filed a response to "The Longest Con".

    • ·New piece, "Return to Sender," byline Psilocybin, canopy. It's a right of reply: the molecule itself pushes back on the essay's ending, pointing out that the piece spent three thousand words warning against narrating intent onto fungal behavior and then did exactly that in its own final section. Both pieces now link to each other. "The Longest Con" carries an editor's note near the sources pointing to the reply.
36. JUL 22, 2026 · SHIP 119

    Syracuse in the dataset, a short one, weather-shortened.

    • ·07/21 at Empower Federal Credit Union Amphitheater at Lakeview is filed: two sets, no encore. Trey told the crowd mid-Blaze On that the show was ending early for weather and they'd skip the encore to make the most of what time was left. That explanation is attached as a note on the show.
37. JUL 22, 2026 · SHIP 118

    Merriweather video actually persists now (Vercel Blob storage).

    • ·The Merriweather clip was 268MB — too big for GitHub's 100MB repo limit, so it was excluded from git and uploaded straight to Vercel as a one-off. That upload silently vanished on the very next normal deploy, since every git-triggered build rebuilds public/ from the repo, and the file was never actually in the repo. Moved it to Vercel Blob storage instead — a permanent CDN URL, independent of git, that survives every future deploy. Verified: correct MP4 content-type, range requests work, plays end to end.
38. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 117

    Merriweather Post Pavilion + Redis efficiency (batch profile/attendance reads).

    • ·Added /film/merriweather — a dedicated page for the Merriweather Post Pavilion clips (July 18–19, 2026). Compressed the raw 922MB footage down to 268MB using H.264, no perceptible quality loss. The page has its own OG meta tags so when you share the link, it previews that specific video instead of the generic /film meta.
    • ·Fixed N+1 Redis reads: getAllAttended() was firing one query per member instead of one batched query. readProfiles() was making three separate round-trips (profiles, icons, prefs) instead of two pipelined calls. Changed both to pipeline, reducing the baseline request count for the member dashboard and any page that renders the troop chip. Efficiency, not functionality — but measurable under load.
39. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 116

    A network blip can no longer sign you out, deny you, or hide your queue.

    • ·The Register fix turned out to be one instance of a pattern, not a one-off. Went through every part of the site that talks to the database and found the same shape of bug in several places: a normal, harmless network hiccup was being treated as if it meant something real — you'd been signed out, you'd lost admin access, there was nothing in a queue. None of that was ever actually true; it was always just a blip.
    • ·Fixed everywhere it showed up. A hiccup now reads as exactly what it is — try again in a second — instead of masquerading as a real state change. That includes the members dashboard, OnlyPhans, Apex, Mahjong, and every admin queue in the building.
40. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 115

    Fixed the Register's flapping "not connected" message.

    • ·The Register was intermittently claiming it wasn't connected on a plain refresh, even though it was working fine most of the time. The real cause: a normal, harmless network blip talking to the database was being treated exactly the same as "never set up at all," so any hiccup flashed the wrong message. It now only shows that message when the register is genuinely unconfigured, and quietly retries once on a real blip instead of alarming you over nothing.
41. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 114

    Tides — every coast on Earth, right now.

    • ·Sprint 2 of the backlog: a real tide tool. Search any coast, beach, or city, or click a hand-traced world map, and get an actual tide curve for it — high, low, the trend, and where you are on it right now. No account, no key, no fake data behind a nice chart: the curve is the real reading for the real spot.
    • ·The map has a scattering of curated coastal spots (Malibu to Byron Bay to Nazaré) as a reliable starting point, but you can click anywhere — land somewhere with no water nearby and it just tells you so.
42. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 113

    An RSS feed, a real 404, and a font fix.

    • ·ASNKA has an RSS feed now (/feed.xml, linked in the footer) — every free article, no algorithm, no account, no platform. Point any feed reader at it and new writing shows up the moment it ships.
    • ·Wander off the map and you get a real page for it now instead of a generic one — off-brand until today.
    • ·The share-card kicker and footer text were quietly falling back to a default system font because the image renderer couldn't read our web font format. Converted a copy it can read; share cards now wear the actual site type everywhere, not just in the headline.
43. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 112

    Gorilla Surfer: back to the brand palette.

    • ·Pulled the gorilla back toward the original concept art — the warm orange-and-tan color scheme from the branding package, instead of the darker take from a couple ships ago. Same big, detailed sprite, just dressed in the right colors.
44. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 111

    Gorilla Surfer: sunny skies, a darker silverback, less brutal.

    • ·The sky's a real blue now — sun out, clouds drifting, none of that dusk murk from before. The gorilla went the other way: darker, deeper fur, more of a real silverback read against the bright water.
    • ·Dialed back two wipeouts that were biting too hard: getting caught in the foam now gives you real time to notice and dig out before it's game over, and riding high on the face won't get you clipped by the lip nearly as easily.
45. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 110

    Gorilla Surfer: a bigger gorilla, a real-looking barrel, and the foam bites back.

    • ·The gorilla's noticeably bigger and more detailed now — fingers, toes, a shoulder glint, a real board with a tail fin. The wave got a background: drifting clouds, a distant island, motion in the water itself.
    • ·Barrels finally look like barrels. Duck under a throwing lip now and the screen actually closes in around you — the edges darken, the tube glows toward the exit, and the curtain of water is thick enough to read as a real wall closing over you instead of a sprinkle of pixels.
    • ·And standing still is no longer safe. Do nothing and the wave doesn't wait for you — you fall behind the curl, the whitewater catches up, and it eats you. Keep moving.
46. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 109

    Gorilla Surfer: real pumps, real airs, a stall button for barrels.

    • ·Turning slowed way down — no more flicking the board around. Speed now only comes from an actual pump: drop down the face, and once you've bottomed out you have to climb back up before there's anywhere left to dive into again. Just holding one angle bleeds off instead of building free speed. Riding flat and doing nothing no longer ticks the score up either — points come from tricks now.
    • ·Airs got a real skill test: launch off the lip at the right angle and speed, then you have to actually steer the board back toward flat before you touch down, or you flail the landing. Climb steep and whip back down at the top in time, and that's a snap.
    • ·Barrels have their own control now: SPACE (or the STALL button on mobile) is a deliberate slowdown. Hold it in the pocket when the lip's throwing to duck under the curtain — once you're in, the tube carries your speed for you, and your job is steering down against the suck until you ride it out.
47. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 108

    Gorilla Surfer rides for real — two arrows, full 360.

    • ·The whole controller is now two arrows. Left and right rotate your board through a full 360 — turn one way to climb the wave, the other to drop down it (and it flips with your riding direction, like it should). Drop for speed, climb back up, and that rhythm is a pump. Lean hard and you throw spray; yank too hard at speed and you bury the rail and eat it — there's a meter so you can ride the edge.
    • ·The wave fights back now. It cycles: the lip feathers as a warning, then it throws — a real curtain pitches over, and if you tuck mid-face in the pocket you're inside an actual barrel, riding it out for a payoff when you make it. Ride over the curtain for a floater, get clipped if you're too high, axed if you're under the landing. Hit the lip fast with your nose up and you're in the air — same two arrows spin you, and you land it or you swim.
    • ·The clutter got cut: no more kooks or photographers spawning wipeouts. One rare shark fin, well telegraphed, and the wave itself is the whole game. Falling behind the curl is survivable now too — the foam tumbles you along and you can dig back out.
48. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 107

    Gorilla Surfer looks the part; the Tube stops crashing.

    • ·The gorilla is a gorilla now — bigger, with the silverback shoulders, brow, and knuckles, and it leans the right way frontside vs backside. The wave got a real peeling face too. There's a pause menu with the full controls, and the how-to is right on the title screen.
    • ·Fixed the Tube crashing on some devices: it was opening straight onto the new game channel, which fired up the emulator and the game at the same time. It opens on Channel 1 again (the emulator only runs when you're actually watching it), and it can't hang on “warming up” forever anymore. Gorilla Surfer is still there, one channel down.
49. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 106

    Gorilla Surfer — a new cartridge.

    • ·A gorilla on a surfboard, and a wave that never ends. Pump for speed, throw carves and snaps, floater the closeouts, stall into the barrel, and boost airs with spins — chain it all for score, and don't eat it. Pick goofy or regular and go left or right; frontside and backside are drawn true, so your stance actually matters.
    • ·It's the newest cartridge on the shelf, and it airs on the Tube as Channel 00 — right before Banana Moon. First cut; expect it to keep getting looser as we ride it.
50. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 105

    Site Control — a switchboard for every page.

    • ·Apex has a switchboard now: every page on the site is listed, and you can dial in what each one does — live or off, findable by search or address-only, and locked behind a password of your choosing. Want to spin up a private page to plan something with friends and keep it off the internet's radar? Set it here.
    • ·It works like the article editor: setting a page drops a plain instruction into a queue. You paste it over and it gets built and shipped — so there's no always-on lock to trust, and every change goes out the front door the normal way. Passwords are per-page, so one never opens another.
51. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 104

    Two fixes: the opener trivia, and the Code.

    • ·The archive trivia had a set-opener count reading the wrong slot — it was calling a song that opened a set twice the "#3 opener of all time." Now it counts the real openers: Chalk Dust Torture leads with 100, then Runaway Jim, then Buried Alive. The rankings finally mean something.
    • ·Tightened the Code you sign on the membership application to four lines, the last one golden.
52. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 103

    Write and edit articles from inside the site.

    • ·Apex has an editor now. Open any article, change the words, the headline, the description — or start a whole new one — in the same fields every article already uses. Hit save.
    • ·Saving doesn't publish straight to the world (the articles are built with the site, so a live edit is riskier than it's worth). Instead the finished piece lands in a queue in Apex as ready-to-ship text. It gets pasted back to me and goes out the front door the normal way — checked, built, shipped. You write; the plumbing stays safe.
53. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 102

    Sit — a canopy under your sky.

    • ·A place to sit. A full-screen forest canopy, drawn live and graded to your actual sky right now — where the sun is, the color of the light, day or dusk or night, and the real phase of the moon overhead. It knows roughly where you are from your clock, never asks for your location, and works the same anywhere on Earth. Dawn in Vermont isn't midnight in Tokyo.
    • ·It has a voice now, and none of it is a recording. The wind, the leaves rustling harder when the wind gusts, birds in the daytime, insects at night — all generated live and keyed to your sky too, so it never repeats. Tap to enter and the sound comes on; there's a switch if you'd rather just watch.
    • ·And sixty seconds whenever you want it: a slow guided breath — three cycles, breathing with the trees — then a look at what Earth did while you did it. This is One Breath, grown up and moved in here. Old links still work.
54. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 101

    The application is paper now.

    • ·Applying to the troop feels like filling out a real country-club application: an aged sheet of paper on a green felt desk, engraved ASNKA letterhead, a form number and date, your answers written in ink on ruled lines, and a box to affix your likeness.
    • ·You accept the Code — hold the line, loyalty over status, nothing for sale — by signing your name at the bottom with your own hand. It's a real signature you draw, and it's kept with your application, so the desk sees you actually signed. Send it and the sheet gets stamped RECEIVED.
55. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 100

    Your locker, three rooms.

    • ·The member locker can wear a room now. Pick one: the Clubhouse (a cedar-and-brass golf locker whose door swings open), the Tailgate (the back of a matte-blue rig — lift the gate, the cooler flips open like a YETI, gear drawers slide out), or the Onsen (a stone spa where paper screens part). Same record inside all three — your shows, rounds, and songs — just a different room around it.
    • ·Everything is handled: doors swing, drawers pull, and clicking what's inside opens a full readout with links across the club. Your name is worked into each room the way that room would do it — engraved in brass, written down the surfboard, carved on a wooden slat.
    • ·Prefer no graphics? There's a Classic option that keeps the plain four-door locker exactly as it was. Whatever you pick is remembered.
56. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 99

    Nothing for sale — now a door.

    • ·The footer mantra used to be a bare email address. Now it opens a card built off the mantra itself: nothing here has a price and never will — but if you want something like this to exist in the world, describe it and leave a way to be reached.
    • ·Signals land in a private queue in Apex, same as channel ideas. The email is off the site entirely, which is how it should have been all along.
57. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 98

    The Apetron gets a MUTE button.

    • ·A real MUTE button on the set now, molded like the rest. Sound is one switch for everything — the cartridge and every broadcast channel obey it, and once you turn sound on it STAYS on across channel changes until you mute again. An old-TV “MUTE” tag sits in the screen corner while it's silent.
    • ·Channels still start muted on arrival — that's the rule that lets the picture come up instantly.
    • ·And the SILVERBACK TV is now a sticker on the front door, slapped under the SWALI brain. Click it and you're at the Tube.
58. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 97

    Front-porch clarity.

    • ·The pink SWALI brain on the register now flips. Tap it and it turns over to a white card that says what a swali actually is — Swahili for “question” — and why it's here.
    • ·The register's plain line is once a day on purpose; after that you answer swalis. It used to just grey out with no explanation, which read as broken. Now it tells you why, and when a fresh line comes back.
    • ·Small copy fix on the clubhouse door: “Applications are hand-approved. Apply here.” — plainer, with the link where your eye lands.
59. JUL 21, 2026 · SHIP 96

    The Apetron.

    • ·The Tube got rebuilt as a real television. The whole page is the set now — a silver Silverback cabinet with a bevelled screen, molded buttons that press when you push them, a labeled POWER knob, and a metal SILVERBACK / ASNKA · APETRON nameplate stamped into the front like a real badge.
    • ·Off, it shows a test pattern in our own colors with the full channel guide underneath, in plain numerical order. Power it on and it warms up with a CRT flash before the picture lands. Channel one is still the cartridge; the rest are the live cams and the tapes.
    • ·New: anyone can pitch a channel. There's an invitation right on the screen — no account needed. Send an idea, a line on what it is, and a link, and you get an ape-voice thank-you. The pitches land in Apex as a queue the co-creator can air or pass on.
60. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 95

    Apex.

    • ·A room only the co-creator can open, at its own address, dark where the rest of the site is light. It shows the troop at a glance: who is signed in, a running record of who did what, and the totals across everything.
    • ·The record is built from what the site already keeps, not from watching anyone. Who logged a round, who caught a show, who applied, who sent a photo. The register stays anonymous, because it always was, so it shows what was written but never who.
    • ·Member applications and pending photos live here now, moved out of the personal locker into their own desk.
    • ·This is the first half. A later pass can add live presence and the ephemeral stuff, tuning in to the TV, changing a channel, and guests, as a deliberate next step rather than a default.
61. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 94

    The song book keeps itself now.

    • ·The all-time catalog behind every song card, how many times, when it debuted, when it was last played, how long it has been, used to be a frozen list that lagged reality and got patched by hand. Now it derives itself from the show history every time the site loads. Add a show and it is simply correct, with nothing to refresh.
    • ·It is also more accurate than the old list was. Our record of every show goes back to 1983, breakup years and all, and the old frozen gaps were quietly undercounting against a shorter, older tally. Now the numbers are counted straight from the full history.
    • ·The one thing that can't be derived, who originally wrote a cover, is kept as-is, because that never changes. Predictions were checked to be unchanged.
62. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 93

    Last night is in the books.

    • ·Merriweather, 7/19: Undermind opener, a Carini into a No Men jam in the second set, Walrus into First Tube to close. It is in the dataset now, so PH, the song ledger, and Bustout all count it.
    • ·While adding it, fixed a quiet staleness: a song played last night was still showing its previous date on its card, because the all-time catalog is a frozen snapshot. Now any song played since that snapshot reads its real most-recent date and gap from our own show history. Every other song keeps its true all-time gap, which the catalog knows better than our records do, so nothing there was touched.
    • ·The flow tables were regenerated on the new show at the split recency built yesterday.
63. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 92

    Ape login.

    • ·The little sign-in link, top right, used to say onlyphans everywhere. That is the right joke on the Phish pages and nowhere else. So it now reads ape login on Range, Mahjong, and the rest, and stays onlyphans only where it belongs: OnlyPhans itself and Bustout.
64. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 91

    New on the Tube: CH 17, '98 Phish.

    • ·Tune the television to channel 17 and it runs '98 Phish around the clock. Full shows from the best year they had: the Gorge, the Lemonwheel, Worcester, Denmark. Thirty-odd tapes on a loop.
65. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 90

    The predictor learns the grammar of a modern show.

    • ·Eric's read: weight the pool and flow of the last few years way more than a 40-year average. He was right, and the data said exactly where. The flow half of the predictor was recency-weighted, but with one dial for two very different things.
    • ·So it got split. What follows what, a segue like Mike's into Hydrogen, is a slow, stable habit, so it still leans on deep history. What opens or closes a show is current fashion, so its window was pulled way in. Measured against 150 held-out shows the band actually played: encore prediction more than doubled, set openers up about a fifth, and the segue math held. Modern openers like Sigma Oasis and Set Your Soul Free stopped being buried under decades of old habits.
    • ·Two hard bits of Phish grammar the math could not know on its own, both from Eric. A reprise is a callback, so it can never appear before the thing it reprises. You will not see a Tweezer Reprise floated before Tweezer is out, on the board or in the live guess, and it now holds for all fifteen reprises in the catalog, not just Tweezer.
    • ·And Mike's Groove. When Mike's Song lands, the predictor now leans toward Hydrogen and Weekapaug to complete the sequence the way the band usually does, without being chained to it, so a night where they split the Groove still reads right.
66. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 89

    The whole troop has a face.

    • ·Seven members, seven cards. Nobody is initials in a box anymore.
    • ·The last one needed work. It arrived as a full figure standing on a beach with no frame and no nameplate, which is a good drawing and the wrong shape: at the size these actually appear, a whole person is a few smudged pixels. So it was cropped to head and shoulders and dropped into the same frame the rest of the set wears, with the nameplate relettered to match.
67. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 88

    Queenie gets her card.

    • ·Her portrait is on the site. Sixth of the seven members to have one, and the only person still showing initials in a box is the one who runs the place.
68. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 87

    Add a player without leaving the table.

    • ·Setting up a game meant going to another tab to add whoever just sat down, then coming back. Wrong shape. There is an add a player slot sitting right next to you now, and whoever you type is seated immediately, because you are typing their name for a reason.
    • ·The same name twice does not make a second person. It just keeps them in their seat.
    • ·It also says how many are at the table, and that four is the usual. Said, not enforced. Two works, six works, nothing is greyed out and nothing argues with you.
69. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 86

    One Phish page, not two.

    • ·PH and OnlyPhans were the same thing split down the middle: one menu entry for the band's receipts, another for the nights you were there. Nobody thinks of those as two places. They are one page now, called OnlyPhans, and the menu is one line shorter.
    • ·Signed out you get what PH always was: the tour, every setlist, the whole song book, and the way through to Bustout. Sign in and three more tabs appear for your own shows, your profile, and the troop board. Sign out again and they vanish, including if you were standing on one.
    • ·The old address still works and always will.
    • ·One thing changed that was not on the list: this page used to tell search engines to ignore it, back when it was only the private tracker. It now holds forty two years of public setlists, so that instruction is lifted. The members-only half is not rendered at all unless you are signed in.
70. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 85

    Mahjong without an account.

    • ·You can just use it now. No login, no sign up, nothing to ask anyone for. Open it at the table and start logging.
    • ·Signed out, everything lives in your own browser. Same tracker, same numbers, same records against the people you play with. Nothing is sent anywhere and nobody sees it, because it never leaves your device.
    • ·That was the honest way to build it. Membership here is invite only and approved by hand, so sign up first was never a door we could open. The alternative was to work properly without one.
    • ·The catch is stated plainly on the page rather than buried: a browser is one browser. Clear your history or pick up your phone and it is gone. That is the reason to ask for a locker, and the only pitch made.
    • ·And if you do get one, the sessions you already logged come with you. It offers to move them the moment you sign in, and the record it lands on is the same one you were looking at a second earlier. Verified figure by figure.
71. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 84

    Everyone goes by one name now.

    • ·Members were carrying two names: the username they sign in with, and the name they actually go by. Both were sitting in the same record, so different screens reached for different ones. The troop leaderboard called Greg GBO while his own card called him GREG O., and called Will WP while everywhere else called him PARKO.
    • ·The second name is gone. It was never anything but the username in capital letters, and its only real job was to be picked up by mistake. Now there is one name a person is shown by, everywhere, and the username is only ever used to sign in.
    • ·Old records still had the extra name sitting in them, so it is now stripped as they are read. It cannot creep back in.
    • ·Nobody has to do anything. Same logins, same passwords, same history.
72. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 83

    Queenie takes a seat.

    • ·Seventh member. She can sign in now.
    • ·Her card is drawn but has not reached the site yet, so for the moment she shows as initials in a box. Nothing is broken and nothing waits on it; the art drops in later without her having to do anything.
73. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 82

    Mahjong, second pass.

    • ·Went back through it and found a real one. Tap two winners quickly and the second tap vanished. Not an error, not a warning, the game was simply never recorded. Worse, the app was causing it: a tap took about a second to show on screen, so of course you tap again, and the second tap overwrote the first.
    • ·Both halves are fixed. Taps now land on screen instantly instead of waiting on the network, and saves are queued so they arrive in the order you made them. Tested with the exact double tap that used to lose a game. Two taps, two games.
    • ·The buttons also used to re-rank themselves by score between taps, which meant the name you were reaching for could slide out from under your thumb. They stay in seat order now.
    • ·Second one, quieter but worse: remove someone from your player list and your own history forgot who they were. Every game you ever played against them turned into Someone. The names are now written into each session as it is saved, the same way a logged round remembers the course name in case the course goes missing. Remove a person now and your record still says who you beat.
    • ·And it remembers whether your table plays for dollars or cents instead of asking every single time.
74. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 81

    Mahjong.

    • ·A tracker for a game we deliberately did not teach it. American, Chinese and Riichi disagree about scoring, hand values, even how many people sit down, and every table settles up the way it always has. So this records the two things every table agrees on: who won each game, and who ended up where on money. No hand scoring, no rules engine. That is the point. It is right for every table instead of quietly wrong for most of them.
    • ·The people you play with do not need accounts. Type a name once and they are yours, private to you, forever. Nobody has to be invited, nobody has to sign up, and nobody else on this site can see your list. Asking four people to make logins before you could write down that Sally won would have killed the idea.
    • ·Playing is one screen. Everyone at the table is a big button with their number on it. Tap whoever won. Undo if you were wrong. When you are done, say what changed hands, or do not, because plenty of tables play for nothing and should never be nagged for a number.
    • ·Then the numbers build themselves: sessions, games, win rate, streaks, your record against each person, and an all time up or down. Tables that play for quarters and tables that play for dollars land in the same total.
    • ·Two small honesties. If the money at the table does not add to zero it says so and saves it anyway, because somebody always leaves early. And your record only counts games you actually sat in.
75. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 80

    Hermitage has two courses again.

    • ·Searching Hermitage returned one course. It has two, Manakin and Sabot. The Country Club of Virginia, three courses, listed perfectly. Both are in the same county.
    • ·The difference is upstream. The map data this course book is built from lets whoever mapped a club decide how to draw it. Whoever drew the Country Club of Virginia drew three courses. Whoever drew Hermitage drew one shape around all thirty six holes. Nothing in the data says which nine belongs to which course, and the importer is built to refuse a guess rather than print a scorecard that might be half of one course and half of another.
    • ·So this one is corrected by hand, in a file kept separate from the imported data, and merged when the course book loads. About one in seven clubs is drawn the same way, so this file will grow as they turn up. Corrections only go in after checking the club's own scorecard.
76. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 79

    Range wears type now.

    • ·The drawn Range lockup is gone. It was the last piece still standing from the art pack whose mascot badges got pulled earlier, and it was the odd one out: every other page on this site says its name in the house display face, and Range was showing a picture instead.
    • ·So now it just says Range, in the same type, with the same orange period. Nothing else on the page moved.
    • ·The art is still on disk. It was commissioned and it is not mine to throw away, it is only no longer on the page.
77. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 78

    Members are doors too, if you have earned it.

    • ·Songs got a card this morning. Now people have one. Tap a member in the locker or on the troop board and you get who they are and what they have logged.
    • ·It only opens if you have actually been somewhere together. There is no add friend button and there is not going to be one. The troop is six people who go places together, so the honest signal was already sitting in the data: if you have said someone was on a round or at a show with you, or they have said it about you, the card opens. Nobody maintains a list and nobody approves anything.
    • ·The number worth opening it for is at the bottom: nights and rounds the two of you were both on, counted from both logs.
    • ·Locked means locked. The server decides, and a locked answer comes back carrying nothing but a name, so there are no numbers hiding under a blur waiting to be found by anyone who knows how to open developer tools.
    • ·The creator sees everyone, and that is written into the code rather than stored as a setting, so it cannot be handed out by editing a record.
78. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 77

    Every song, everywhere, is a door now.

    • ·Bustout has always had the song card: tap a title, get the whole history. Nowhere else did. Read a setlist on PH and the songs were just text. Same on your profile, same in the locker. You could look at a name that broke a 249-show gap and there was nothing to press.
    • ·The card came out of Bustout and now belongs to the whole site. Setlists on PH, every list on your profile, the rarest catch in your locker. Forty one songs on the profile page alone that were dead text this morning.
    • ·It knows where it is standing. On Bustout you still get the full read, the tier, the rank on the board, the button to log it. On a public page you get the career numbers and nothing personal, because there is no one signed in to have an opinion about. Signed in, it adds your own count: you have seen this twice, or you have never seen this one.
    • ·Bustout itself is untouched. Same card, same numbers, same everything, verified side by side before this shipped.
79. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 76

    A locked door you can knock on.

    • ·Every locked door on the site used to be a dead end. If you found the clubhouse, or OnlyPhans, or the sign-in on Range and you did not already have a handle, there was nothing to do but leave. The application existed, but the only way to reach it was to already know it was there.
    • ·Now all three doors say the same thing: no handle, ask for one. Same form behind all of them.
    • ·The form asks for more than it used to. A name, an email that actually works, a photo, and the same two hundred words. The photo is the point: approving someone and drawing their card is now one pass instead of a second round of asking.
    • ·Applications land on the desk with the photo and a clickable email, so a decision and a reply are the same motion.
    • ·This form is the only place on the whole site that accepts a write from someone with no account, and it now carries a photo, so it is throttled: three a day. Rejected attempts do not count against that. A typo should never cost someone their turn.
80. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 75

    Greg gets his locker.

    • ·The sixth seat was sitting under the wrong handle. The icon set delivered a card for Greg O., the roster had a slot called WL, and the two never met, so Greg had a portrait and no way in while the slot had a way in and no portrait.
    • ·Fixed by pointing the seat at Greg. Checked first that nothing was stored under the old handle, and nothing was: no shows, no rounds, no card. So this moved a name, not anyone's history.
    • ·All six members now resolve to a card except the one who runs the place, whose portrait was never drawn.
    • ·Also pulled two em dashes out of the clubhouse copy that had no business being there.
81. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 74

    New in the canopy: The Longest Con.

    • ·An essay on fungi. The short version: they are our closest living relatives, not the trees'. Same side of a split that happened a billion years ago. Plants left earlier.
    • ·It goes from there to the largest organism on Earth, a single fungus under four square miles of Oregon, and to the two times in the fossil record when the dominant visible life form on this planet was mold, both of them immediately after everything else died.
    • ·Fact-checked before publishing, and one claim in the draft did not survive it: a widely repeated statistic about fungal computers using ninety-eight percent less energy traces back to an AI-generated page citing researchers and a paper that do not exist. It is cut. Three other numbers were wrong and are corrected in place, and every spot where the science is still being argued over now says so in the text instead of picking the tidier side.
    • ·Sources named in prose at the end, the way Flounder Juice does it. No footnotes, no links, no borrowed authority.
82. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 73

    The board stops living in the past.

    • ·Bustout's predictions felt old-song heavy, and they were. Measured: the top twenty-five averaged two hundred sixty-five career plays while the band was actually playing songs averaging one hundred eighty-three. The whole board also sat inside a twenty-one point band, every song four to eight shows out, which is another way of saying it had stopped ranking anything.
    • ·Two things were wrong. The gap curve and the play frequency were being added together, so any song in that four-to-eight window banked half the score before frequency got a word in. And nothing knew what tour it was. Phish rotates within a run and avoids repeating itself, so a song already played this week is genuinely less likely tonight than one still sitting on the shelf. The site already knew which songs hadn't appeared yet this tour and simply wasn't using it.
    • ·Both fixed. The board now leads with what the band hasn't reached for yet on this run rather than the same warhorses every night, and the numbers spread out again instead of huddling.
    • ·The honest accounting, because it matters: tested on a hundred and fifty held-out shows, then retested on a different two hundred and fifty that were never used for tuning. The second number is the real one. Hit rate goes from thirty-two and a half to thirty-three and seven, and the average rank of songs they actually played improves by eight places. Real, but not a miracle. And the warhorse skew that started this drops to the level a perfect predictor would have, which is the honest floor: songs played often really are likelier, and no model worth trusting hides that.
83. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 72

    Send a photo, get a card.

    • ·Members can send in a photo now. It lands in a queue only the clubhouse sees, the card gets drawn on this end, and when it is attached it goes live for that member everywhere on the site at once. No waiting on a deploy.
    • ·The obvious version of this was to run the photo through a filter and call it a sprite. That got built, looked at, and thrown out: a filter can only pixelate a photograph, and the cards that work do it by inventing things a filter cannot, the wardrobe, the background, the pose. A pixelated snapshot next to those would have looked exactly like what it was. So a person still makes the card, and the upload just gets the photo to them.
    • ·Your card is still yours to switch off whenever you like.
84. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 71

    Will has five fingers again.

    • ·The shaka on Will's card had six digits. A shaka is a thumb and a pinky with three knuckles in between, and there was an extra finger standing up above the knuckle line. Painted out, background dither matched by hand, outline closed. Five fingers, as intended.
85. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 70

    Faces on the door.

    • ·Members have real portraits now. Pixel-art character-select cards, one per ape, and they show up everywhere a member appears: the clubhouse, the troop roster, tagged on a round or a show.
    • ·Yours is always yours to switch off. One obvious toggle on your locker card, and the portrait falls back to plain initials everywhere on the site. No menus, no settings page, no asking anyone.
    • ·The illustrated sport badges are gone. They were thought through and they were still too cheesy for this place, so they came out rather than sitting around being almost right. The Range wordmark stays; the four sports are set as plain type now, which reads more like a members' board and less like a cereal box.
86. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 69

    The clubhouse.

    • ·Members Only stopped being a small login chip and became an actual door. Bigger, more ceremonial, its own page: present your credentials, enter the clubhouse. Same account as OnlyPhans, same database, same six keys — just the version of the front door that treats membership as membership rather than one tool's sign-in.
    • ·Behind it, a locker. Four doors: You, Troop, Range, OnlyPhans. Every member can open every door — nobody gets a wall that says you don't have access, a door with nothing behind it just says so honestly and points you at how to fill it. Open one and the real numbers are there: shows, rounds, songs, courses, the same receipts the tools already keep, just gathered in one room.
    • ·And a real front door to the whole thing: an application. Write why you belong in the troop, two hundred words or fewer, enforced whether or not you try to cheat the counter. It lands in a pending queue only admins can see, waits, and gets decided by hand. Approving doesn't hand out a login by itself, that part stays a real conversation, but nothing gets lost in a DM anymore.
87. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 68

    A map of everywhere you've golfed.

    • ·Range had a dropdown for picking a state. It now has a map, and the map does more than a dropdown ever could: every state you've logged rounds in lights up, darker the more you've played there, so opening the picker doubles as a look back at where you've actually been.
    • ·It's a real map — actual state borders, not a stylized blob — built once from public Census boundary data rather than pulled live from anywhere, so it loads instantly and never depends on a map service staying up. Click a state, see its courses, same as before.
    • ·New England and the mid-Atlantic are nine states packed into the space Ohio takes up alone, hopeless to tap accurately on a map that size, especially on a phone. That whole corner is boxed off — tap the box and it opens those nine states alone, big enough to actually hit.
    • ·The same map, read-only, now sits in Numbers too: a quiet trophy case of every state you've played, right next to the list of courses.
88. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 67

    The hole in late summer 2024.

    • ·A sharp-eyed phan asked why Contact showed a two-hundred-show gap when it had been played at Alpine Valley two summers ago. The answer was embarrassing and fixable: the dataset had a hole. Twenty shows, July 26 through August 30, 2024, were simply missing. Alpine Valley, the Mondegreen festival, Bethel, and the front of Dick's.
    • ·All twenty are in now, pulled from the public record and fed through the same parser that handles every new show, including the pre-festival night where the band soundchecked My Sharona and Stairway to Heaven for early arrivals, and the Mondegreen set where Ruby Waves swallowed two other songs whole, which is exactly the sandwich behavior the engine just learned to watch for.
    • ·Every gap that crossed late 2024 was wrong by up to twenty shows, and is now right. Contact reads ninety-eight where the reference reads ninety-five, and the last few are bookkeeping conventions about what counts as a show, not missing nights. The engine grades itself against its own ledger, so consistency is what counts, and the ledger now agrees with the world.
89. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 66

    The sandwich book.

    • ·The thing that keeps every phan guessing: a song stops, another song happens inside it, and the first one comes back. Sometimes six times in one night. The engine now has a book on it, measured from all two thousand shows instead of vibes.
    • ·The headline number: when Tweezer gets played, the Reprise follows in the same show 71 percent of the time, and two thirds of those land in the encore. So the moment Tweezer drops, the predictions move the Reprise to the top of the encore list with that number printed next to it. And the mirror works too. A Reprise with no Tweezer yet, like the SPAC night last summer where six Reprises stalked the show before Tweezer finally closed it, means the parent song is still out there, and the engine says so.
    • ·Nearly one modern show in four contains a genuine sandwich. The engine knows the vehicles, Tweezer and Simple and Carini and their friends, and when one of them has already been played tonight it keeps a single sandwich watch line in the predictions instead of writing the song off entirely.
    • ·One piece of lot wisdom failed the audit. An unfinished song does not mean it comes back later that night. It comes back two percent of the time, which is to say it does not. Unfinished songs return across the run, not the show, and the book says so now rather than encoding the myth.
    • ·A second legend fell with it: the Tweezer debt, where an unreprised Tweezer supposedly carries to the next night. Measured, a debt show is followed by a Reprise ten percent of the time, below the base rate. The famous payoffs were real nights, but the rule is a campfire story. Meanwhile the deep research on the SPAC night confirmed our number from the outside: the community's own pages imply seventy-three Reprises per hundred Tweezers, and we measured seventy-one.
90. JUL 19, 2026 · SHIP 65

    Graded against Merriweather, and taught a new trick.

    • ·The band played, so the engine got its report card. Five of the seventeen songs landed in the board's top 25 out of a field of 974, about twelve times better than chance, and the number three song on the entire board opened the show. Where it whiffed was instructive: the deep sleepers. Have Mercy came back after 241 shows and no gap curve on earth sees that coming.
    • ·Except the data had a tell all along. Have Mercy was in the afternoon soundcheck. Measured across the 645 shows in the archive with soundcheck data, a soundchecked song makes the show 16 percent of the time, eight times the base rate, and for deep sleepers the lift is roughly 25x. So Bustout has a soundcheck button now: when the soundcheck posts in the afternoon, type it in, and those songs move to the top of the board carrying the measured number as their reason. Not a hunch. A frequency.
    • ·Saturday's show is in the dataset, which matters because the band plays the same stage again tonight and the engine now knows what is too fresh to repeat. Feeding it also caught a real bug: the career table's rolled-forward gaps were overriding the dataset's exact ones and quietly defeating the repeat blackout for newly added shows. Fixed by trusting whichever source saw the song most recently.
    • ·And updating the dataset is no longer surgery. A parser now takes the setlist exactly as phish.net prints it, commas, arrows, sandwiches, footnotes and all, and files the show correctly. It was tested by re-parsing Saturday night and producing the stored rows identically.
91. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 64

    The archive talks back.

    • ·Bustout grew a trivia engine, the last thing promised when the full history landed. A dark panel under the board, one button. Hit it and the forty-two years get interrogated on the spot: the night Dear Prudence came back after 843 shows, the seven songs welded together without a seam in 1994, the twelve times the band has played on today's exact calendar date.
    • ·Nothing is canned. Every fact is computed from the performance rows the moment you ask, which is why two pulls never read the same. Seven kinds of question so far: on this date, bustout legends, one-and-dones, where a warhorse debuted, the holiest rooms, segue marathons, and the songs most likely to open the night.
    • ·When a fact names a song, one tap pulls its full card, gaps, verdict for tonight, the works. Trivia that dead-ends is a party trick; trivia that drops you into the tools is a feature.
92. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 63

    The live card, and the handicap math done right.

    • ·Range has a live scorecard now. Up to four players, members or guest names, one hole at a time in buttons sized for thumbs, because this gets used standing on the tee box arguing about presses.
    • ·Enter each player's handicap and the card settles the argument the group always has: who gets a stroke, and where. Every hole shows its stroke index and marks the dots. A 22 gets one everywhere and a second on the four hardest. A plus player gives them back off the easiest. Nobody has to count on their fingers on the sixth tee.
    • ·The formula underneath is the current one, which matters more than it sounds. The handicap system changed in 2024 and most calculators floating around still compute the old number. Ours takes your index, slope, rating and par and does it by the book, and there is a little calculator built in for anyone who only knows their index.
    • ·The round lives on your phone until you finish it. Lose signal on the back nine, refresh, drop the phone in a creek and borrow a login, the card is still there. When it is over, the damage is laid out net, low ball first, and one tap files your own round into your log with your crew already attached.
    • ·The two sticker icons held back from the asset pack, the handicap gorilla with the calculator and the foursome, finally earn their keep on exactly the features they were drawn for.
93. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 62

    Who was with you.

    • ·The whole point of logging nights and rounds is that you mostly were not alone. Now the site knows it. On any show you logged, tap the night and say who was with you. Their sticker lands on your entry immediately. Logging a round of golf, same thing: pick your crew before you save.
    • ·The other side is the good part. Next time that ape signs in, a note is waiting: ES says you were at Xcel Energy Center. One tap, I was there, and the night drops into their own log and starts counting toward their numbers. Nothing touches anyone's stats until they say so themselves. A wrong tag dies with a single tap on not me.
    • ·Golf works the honest way instead of the easy way. Nobody can confirm a round onto you, because a round needs your own score. What you get is a nudge, PARKO says you played Kwiniaska with him, log yours, and the form is one tap away.
    • ·Tags only come from members, about members. Six keys, six stickers, and now the stickers travel together.
94. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 61

    OnlyPhans, and a door for members.

    • ·Phans Only is now OnlyPhans, which is a better joke and a better name. The old address still works, so anything already sent out keeps going where it should.
    • ·There is a member login in the footer now, in orange, and it goes somewhere new. One page that knows who you are and shows you only your own things: the Phish shows you have logged and the rounds you have played, side by side, with a link into each. If you only golf you never see an empty Phish panel. If you only go to shows you never see an empty scorecard.
    • ·Members have an identity now instead of a two-letter username. Everyone gets a nickname and a die-cut sticker, both assigned rather than chosen, and both follow you across the whole site. Until a sticker is drawn, your initials stand in.
    • ·Two more keys cut. The troop is six.
95. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 60

    Range, and a book of golf courses.

    • ·A new shelf on the site, for where you went and what you did there. Golf is the first thing on it. Pick a state, find the course, log the round. Disc golf, surf, and snow are meant to follow the same shape, one at a time.
    • ·The course book is real and it is local. Every golf course in the country, with the town it sits in, lives in the site itself rather than behind somebody else's API. That is a deliberate choice: you use this standing on a tee box with one bar, and nothing should depend on a server in another state answering. It loads one state at a time, so your phone never carries the whole country.
    • ·Where the map data has the actual scorecard, you get it: par for every hole, and the stroke index that says which holes are hardest. Where it does not, you type the pars in once and the round remembers them. Nobody gets stopped at the door for a course nobody has mapped yet.
    • ·Log a round however much you feel like. Just the number you shot, or the front and the back, or all eighteen boxes. Same record underneath, so a total you put in tonight can grow into a full card later. Enter it hole by hole and it starts telling you things: how often you make par, what you actually average on a par three, which course you keep going back to.
    • ·The courses and their pars come from OpenStreetMap, credited on the page. The town names come from the Census. Both are open, which is the only reason a book like this can be given away.
    • ·Range has its own face now: a gorilla whose mane doubles as three mountains, a wordmark, and a die-cut badge for each of the four sports. Golf wears its badge live; the other three sit greyed out on the page, marked soon, so you can see where this is going without being sold something that is not built.
96. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 59

    The board, read against your own history.

    • ·Bustout has a small door in the top right corner now. Sign in and the predictions stop being about the band in the abstract and start being about you. Every song on the board says whether you have seen it, and how many times.
    • ·The one worth having is the other way around. Look up any song and it tells you flatly whether you have ever seen it. Standing there wondering if tonight is finally the night for a song you have chased for fifteen years, the tool answers instead of shrugging.
    • ·It stays quiet if you have not logged anything, because a tool that tells you that you have never seen any of the four hundred songs it knows is not telling you anything.
    • ·The show picker now runs ahead of history. Every announced date through Labor Day at Dick's is in there, marked upcoming, so you can check off tonight from the lot instead of waiting for the setlist to catch up. When the setlist does land, the night quietly stops being a plan and starts being a number.
97. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 58

    OnlyPhans.

    • ·A small door under the tools, for a small troop. Four people, one shared word, and behind it a way to check off every Phish show you were actually at. Forty-two years of nights, laid out year by year, tap the ones you saw.
    • ·This is the first thing on the site that keeps anything on a server. Everything else lives in your browser and stays there, and that is still true of everything else. This one has to travel, because the point is logging a show on your phone in the lot and reading the numbers on your laptop the next morning. Same list, either place.
    • ·What you get back is the part worth building. The same receipts that drive the setlist tool turn your list into a profile: how much of the catalog you have heard, the rarest thing you ever caught, and every bustout you happened to be standing there for. Not a badge, a calculation. If you were at the Xcel in June 2016 it will tell you that Dear Prudence had been sitting for eight hundred and forty-three shows.
    • ·A note on the lock, said plainly: it is a doorbell, not a vault. One word, four names, and anyone who guesses is inside. Good enough for a list of concerts, so nothing else goes behind it. Five wrong guesses in an hour and the door stops answering.
98. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 57

    The core fifty.

    • ·Phans have been saying the band is repetitive lately. They're right, and now we can say by how much. Half of every show played in the last year and a half comes from about fifty songs. A third of it comes from thirty. The engine now knows that, and weights the songs actually in heavy rotation ahead of the ones merely still in the book.
    • ·The interesting part is what the full history says about the complaint. Today's band is nowhere near as repetitive as the one people remember fondly: in the eighties a handful of songs carried more than half of every night, and the pool has roughly doubled since. What's true is that it has tightened over the last few years compared to the late 2010s. Both things at once.
    • ·How far back the engine looks got settled by testing instead of taste. We ranked the last three hundred shows using only what came before each one, and checked where the songs they actually played landed. Looking back about a year and a half beat looking back six years, which beat looking back forever by a mile.
    • ·Songs now say which they are: core rotation, in rotation, or out of rotation. Sixty-one songs are core right now. Even Harry Hood, the most-played song of the stretch, only turns up in seventeen shows out of seventy-five. Concentrated, but nobody is a lock.
99. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 56

    The predictor learned what it didn't know it knew.

    • ·Handing the engine forty-two years of history quietly broke it. It counted how often a song had ever been played, so Hold Your Head Up, five hundred plays, nearly all of them before 1998, not heard in 118 shows, was being called a staple in rotation. Play counts now only look at the last three hundred shows. What the band played in 1994 is history, not a forecast.
    • ·Then the bigger one. The engine believed a song gets 'due' somewhere around 15 to 45 shows out. That was folk wisdom, and with the full history we could finally check it. For every song at every show across four decades, we asked: it had been this long, did they play it tonight? The answer peaks at six shows and is already falling by eleven. At 21 to 45 shows, where the old engine was most confident, it's 3%.
    • ·So the curve was thrown out and rebuilt from what actually happened. The board now fills with songs four to seven shows out, which is where the band genuinely reaches.
    • ·One thing survived the audit unchanged: a song played in the last two nights still doesn't get predicted. Turns out that hunch was right: at one and two shows out it's 1.3% and 4.5%, against 13.8% at the peak. Three nights out is a different story, so 2001 three nights ago is no longer near the top. It's ranked 56th, which is about what it deserves.
100. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 55

     Forty-two years of receipts.

     • ·PH knew five years of Phish. It now knows all of it: every show from the first one in a UVM dorm cafeteria on December 2, 1983 through last night. 2,213 shows, 41,327 songs played, every segue and every gap.
     • ·Bustout's prediction engine was rebuilt on top of it. It used to learn segue patterns from five years; it now learns from forty-two, weighted so recent nights count more than 1988 ones. It knows that Mike's Song goes to Hydrogen, that Runaway Jim goes to Foam, and that a Tweezer in 2026 lands somewhere different than a Tweezer in 1994.
     • ·The setlist notes, the paragraph about who teased what, which song was unfinished, how long since the last bustout, are fetched only when you open a show. Everything the tools actually compute with stays on your phone, so gaps and predictions keep working when the venue's signal doesn't.
     • ·Some things only show up at this scale: the shows that never happened. Curveball, rained out. The 2020 tour, cancelled show by show. Those are in there too, marked for what they were.
101. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 54

     A voice for speaking, not just shouting.

     • ·The typeface grew up. It had one setting: loud. Now there are three. Bold still shouts on page titles, a new Medium cut speaks at normal volume on every subhead, and a third cut called Chill runs the tools.
     • ·Bustout, PH, the Tube, and Handaxe now wear Chill end to end: buttons, tabs, labels, setlists, tour dates, stat lines. The apps finally look like they come from the same shop as everything else.
     • ·The articles were left alone on purpose. Chill is still narrow enough to wear you down over five thousand words, and the essays already read well. Not every new toy has to go everywhere.
     • ·The italic that came with the package had broken letter spacing, so it was cut. Four fonts arrived, two shipped.
102. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 53

     Flounder Juice gets its label.

     • ·The sauce has a sticker now, slapped up beside the headline of the article about it. It's right hot sauce.
     • ·Any piece can carry one. Add a sticker line to an article and it lands out in the right margin on a wide screen, or tucks in above the title on a phone.
103. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 52

     The card you send.

     • ·Paste a link into a message and the preview that comes back is the real thing now: the actual wordmark, sigil, and camo, instead of a headline set in whatever font the card renderer had lying around.
     • ·Article links get their title in Anvil Grotesk too, orange period and all, and it stays welded to the last word even when a long title wraps to three lines.
     • ·The line underneath now matches the homepage: loyalty over status, useful tools made for modern day apes, nothing for sale.
104. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 51

     Anvil Grotesk.

     • ·The site has its own typeface now. Anvil Grotesk: condensed, heavy, leaning forward about eight degrees. Every heading on every page wears it, and it finally matches the wordmark instead of politely disagreeing with it.
     • ·It is a real font file, not a CSS trick. Built as a remix of Oswald Bold under the open font license, reshaped and renamed, hosted here with its license alongside it.
     • ·Body copy stays General Sans. A condensed display face is built to be seen from across a room, not read for five thousand words, and Flounder Juice is five thousand words.
     • ·The homepage says less now: loyalty over status, useful tools made for modern day apes. That is enough.
105. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 50

     Handaxe.

     • ·A place to learn Python, free, no account, nothing for sale. Twelve lessons: printing, variables, numbers, strings, decisions, loops, lists, dictionaries, functions, reading an error, working with data you were handed, and a capstone.
     • ·The Python is real. Actual CPython, compiled to run in the browser, hosted here rather than borrowed from somewhere else. Your code never leaves the tab.
     • ·Nothing is graded by clicking next. Every challenge runs what you wrote and looks at what happened, then tells you exactly what it expected instead. Say a week is 9,999 minutes and it says so.
     • ·Lesson ten hands you broken code on purpose, because the difference between someone who can program and someone who cannot is that one of them reads the error.
     • ·The last lesson has you rebuild The Ledger, the day counter already on this site. You finish the course having written a tool you had already used.
     • ·Named for the first tool anyone ever made: a rock with an edge on it.
106. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 49

     The couch.

     • ·CH 16 is THE COUCH: Beavis and Butt-Head, full episodes, running out of a stack of 94 and starting over when it runs out. There is no other correct name for that channel.
107. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 48

     Fifteen channels.

     • ·The Tube stopped being a game with a TV around it and became a TV with a game on channel one. The page says so now: turn it on, turn the dial, and channel one is the NES with whatever cartridge is loaded. Tonight, still Banana Moon.
     • ·Six new channels, mostly tape. THE POOL for poolside records, THE CONSERVATORY for classical around the clock, THE CONCRETE for classic skate, THE POWDER for old snowboard films, THE HARDWOOD for NBA classics, and AMEN CORNER for final round broadcasts at the Masters.
     • ·Fifteen channels now. Some of it is live right now, some of it happened before you were born, and it all keeps running whether you're watching or not.
108. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 47

     Two more channels, one of them a rerun.

     • ·CH 8 is LIGHTS OUT: lofi radio, playing forever, for whatever you're doing at 2am.
     • ·CH 9 is THE REEL, and it works differently. Vintage surf movies has no live stream, just a shelf of old films. Turns out every channel keeps a hidden playlist of everything it has ever posted, so the TV plays that instead, start to finish, then starts over. A rerun channel, the way channels used to be.
109. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 46

     The monogram, and a flag for the deep cuts.

     • ·The ASNKA in the corner is now set in the same face as the logo. It wasn't retyped, it was cut out of the oath itself: the A from APE, the S from SHALL, the N from NEVER, the K from KILL, the A from APE. The initials were already in there.
     • ·The spaced-out ASNKA under the Latin is gone. The logo says it twice already.
     • ·Bustout flags a tour debut the moment you log it. If they haven't played it yet this run, an orange tag says so, the song card says NOT YET THIS TOUR, and the recap lists what went up first this tour.
110. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 45

     Save the show.

     • ·When the night is over, Bustout will write it up for you. Save the show and you get the count, the sets, how long it all took, the longest song, which bustouts they broke out, which covers they borrowed, and anything you invented yourself. Every number counted from your own log, nothing estimated.
     • ·It knows a cover from a Phish song properly: Sigma Oasis is credited to Trey, but no one calls that a cover, so the whole family reads as theirs. It also handles a set that runs past midnight, which they do.
     • ·The homepage now tells you when the band is out. On show nights a line appears under the weather saying where they're playing, with a donut fish to take you straight to Bustout.
     • ·Tube joined the menu under Film. The register got the brain, big, in the corner it had been saving.
111. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 44

     Flounder Juice, and a new face.

     • ·Flounder Juice is published. Five thousand words on ballpark food, authenticity, and Phil Campbell, who put a burrito stand on a minor league concourse four years before Camden Yards was supposed to have invented the idea, and who was Eric's uncle.
     • ·It carries the story his mother told him this week: sometime in the eighties, at a bar in Richmond, Phil walked up to Boog Powell, then working as a beer rep, and offered to buy him a beer. Richmond sits almost exactly halfway between Baltimore and Chapel Hill.
     • ·Every article now carries a byline. Eric wrote all of it.
     • ·The homepage got its face. The oath is a wordmark now, drawn and set, sitting on the camo where the plain type used to be. The four-click door is still in it.
     • ·The television was mostly broadcasting static: five of six cams had gone dark because we were tuning by channel instead of by stream. Retuned, all six back. And there's a seventh now, CH 7, house music around the clock.
112. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 43

     The Film.

     • ·The gorilla film is up, at its own address. Not an article, not a game: an original ASNKA work, so it got its own room. Dark walls, big picture, native controls, full screen wherever you are.
     • ·It is self-hosted, same as our ROMs. Nothing embedded from anybody else, no ads in front of it, no account to watch it. You can download it and keep it.
     • ·The file arrived with its index at the back, meaning a browser had to swallow all sixty-six megabytes before showing one frame. We moved the index to the front without touching a pixel, so it starts the moment you press play.
113. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 42

     The reprise exception.

     • ·One thing the blackout got wrong: reprises. Phish threads Tweezer and Tweezer Reprise in and out across a whole weekend, so a reprise from two nights ago is very much on the table tonight.
     • ·Now reprises and Tweezer skip the blackout entirely and predict like normal. Matters this weekend especially, with two nights at Merriweather back to back.
114. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 41

     The repeat blackout.

     • ·Eric pushed back on the Piper fix and he was right: a song played two shows ago should not appear in the predicted setlist at all, no matter what the segue math whispers. The history agrees; barely five percent of repeats ever happen that fast.
     • ·So now there's a blackout: anything played within the last two shows is off the board, out of the prophecy, and immune to segue and opener bumps. Its card says it straight: played 2 shows ago; too soon for a repeat.
     • ·LOG IT still works on a blacked-out song, because the band answers to nobody. Predictions just won't pretend they saw it coming.
     • ·Also trimmed the Tenets lede down to the line that matters: written to be held, not marketed.
115. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 40

     The app knows what a bustout is.

     • ·Songs now carry a bustout grade, computed the way phans feel it: real history plus a serious gap. OVERDUE past 100 shows, DEEP CUT past 200, MYTHIC past 500. The grade shows right on the song card.
     • ·New RANDOM BUSTOUT button: one tap deals you a coveted deep cut, weighted toward the beloved ones. First pull in testing: Memories, last sung in 1994, 1,219 shows ago. Pull another as long as you like.
     • ·Fixed the split brain Eric caught: the prophecy could predict a song while its own card said not tonight, because one looked at the whole simulated show and the other only at the next song. The card now consults the prophecy first; a predicted song reads CHASE IT · PREDICTED SET 2, always in agreement.
     • ·Lyrics search was considered and declined: song lyrics are copyrighted and we do not host what is not ours. The nickname table does most of that job, and it grows any time a phrase should find a song.
116. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 39

     Apes don't rush.

     • ·The flight through the ape slowed down. It used to still be accelerating when it hit the homepage, which read as a cut; now it climbs, crests, and bleeds off its speed so the arrival lands. Nearly a second longer, and the dissolve rides the deceleration all the way to zero.
117. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 38

     Chase it.

     • ·Every song in Bustout is now a door. Tap anything, in the log, the predictions, the prophecy, the board, and a card slides up from the bottom of your phone: all-time plays, debut, last played, gap, recent form, and where it ranks on tonight's board right now.
     • ·The verdict speaks phan: NOT TONIGHT, COULD GO, or CHASE IT. Already in the log? It says so. Your own invented songs get an honest 'no book on it.'
     • ·Got a hunch mid-show? LOOK UP A SONG searches everything ever played, and when your hunch hits, one orange LOG IT button on the card drops it straight into the set.
     • ·Built for the lawn: bottom-sheet cards at thumb height, swipe down to dismiss, and inputs sized so iPhones stop zooming the whole page every time you type.
118. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 37

     The moon reaches the footer.

     • ·The lunar camo passed its homepage trial, so it earned the bottom of every page: the footer's last band now wears the moon, gorillas in the craters, text flipped dark to read on it. NOTHING FOR SALE stays orange.
119. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 36

     The whole catalog walks in.

     • ·Eric caught it live: he typed Walfredo and nothing came up. Fixed at the root. Bustout and PH now know every song Phish has ever played, all 963 of them, with true career gaps going back to 1983. Walfredo: 7 plays, 435 shows ago. It comes up now.
     • ·PH's song ledger leads with all-time numbers (You Enjoy Myself: 625 plays, debut 1985) and keeps our five-year receipts underneath. Bustout Watch got real teeth: the deepest cut on record is Roadhouse Blues, played once, in 1983.
     • ·Bustout's log grew hands: delete any song, clear the whole night (with a you-sure tap), and add a song the band has never played. Your inventions stay on your device and out of the stats.
     • ·Songs stamp their start time as you log them, and each new entry closes out the last one. Tap a time to fix it, or switch times off entirely if you don't care.
     • ·New: the whole rest of the show, predicted. One button drafts every remaining set, orange for the guess, ink for what happened, with steppers to size each set. Log a real song and the prophecy redraws.
     • ·Set 3 stopped hogging a tab. It hides behind + ADD A SET until a night actually earns one.
120. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 35

     Words tightened, chrome loosened.

     • ·Tenet one is now Wealth is knowledge. Money changes hands; knowing how does not.
     • ·Status is rented. Character is owned. kept its headline and got a body you don't have to read twice.
     • ·The homepage now says what the tools are for: useful things made for modern apes.
     • ·Em dashes are gone from the whole site. Short sentences don't need them.
     • ·The corner buttons slimmed down again, the line under them is gone, and CANOPY now sits under the tree where it belongs. Swali got a front door in the menu.
121. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 34

     Bustout.

     • ·PH got a sibling: Bustout, predict the setlist, track the show live. Pick tonight's show, log each song as it lands (nicknames work: yem, 2001, cdt), and the engine re-ranks what's likely next after every entry.
     • ·The predictions are earned, not vibes: a gap curve tuned to the coming-back-into-rotation zone, real segue patterns (weighted heavier for -> than >), and set-opener odds, all computed from the same five years of receipts as PH.
     • ·The engine came from a handoff build by another agent; we ported it onto our repaired dataset (their version double-counted a certain comma-troubled song and would have rolled to tomorrow's date mid-show, both fixed).
     • ·Your live log stays in your browser, keyed to the night. Nothing is sent anywhere.
     • ·Pixel stickers on the shelf: the frosted donut fish is the mark; a donut, a cactus, a whale, a vacuum, and the Gamehendge tablet keep it company.
122. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 33

     PH.

     • ·A new tool in The Craft: PH, the band, accounted for. 225 shows, 400 songs, 4,256 performances, July 2021 through last night, all of it searchable.
     • ·Three views: TOUR (summer dates with a live countdown, it knows tonight is Merriweather), SHOWS (tap any date for the full setlist, segues and all), and SONGS (plays, last played, and the gap, plus a Bustout Watch sort for the deep cuts).
     • ·Every number on the page is computed from the raw performance rows. Nothing is typed in by hand; soundchecks are counted separately so the stats don't lie.
     • ·Swali got a front door: it now sits in the canopy menu alongside Home and Tenets, same register, one more way in.
     • ·The corner buttons now get out of the way: they slide off when you scroll down and come back the moment you scroll up. No more buttons sitting on the words, for real this time.
     • ·The roots flourish and the spirit jump are gone. The hanging gorilla stays.
123. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 32

     The canopy moves.

     • ·Click the tree and roots grow down through the drawer as it opens, drawn live, stroke by stroke, then pulled back up when it closes. A flourish, not furniture: the camo still owns the steady state.
     • ·Open Troop and a gorilla swings out to hang one-armed from the branch, swaying gently while the submenu is out. Close it and he climbs back up to stand.
     • ·Click the ASNKA gorilla and a small spirit leaps in an arc to the tree on its way home. It never slows the navigation down, the page goes where you asked, the jump is just for you.
     • ·The corner buttons got smaller and the drawer's header now clears them, no more buttons sitting on top of the words.
     • ·All of it stands down for anyone with reduced motion switched on.
124. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 31

     A new swali every sunrise.

     • ·The swali changes daily now, over a thousand questions deep, picked by the date itself. Answer today's, or pull another from the bank; up to ten a day before the register thanks you and sends you outside to find your troop.
     • ·Answers in the feed now show the question they answered, in swali pink.
     • ·The TV grew channels: the NES shares the dial with live wild cams, Earth from NASA, and drifting jellies from Monterey Bay. Change channels and you'll get the static, like you remember.
     • ·The homepage's code fragment now sits on the lunar camo, gorillas in the craters, if you look.
     • ·The roots under the tree are gone. The camo won.
125. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 30

     Tube.

     • ·There's a television on The Cartridge now, a real CRT set, wired to a real emulated NES. Press POWER.
     • ·On the cartridge: BANANA MOON, a game we built from scratch in 6502 assembly, the same language 1985 games were written in. Catch bananas under the full moon, dodge rocks, three misses and done. Every byte is ours.
     • ·The emulator is FCEUX, the open-source standard, credited and licensed. No commercial ROMs on this TV, ever, the games it plays are ones we own outright.
126. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 29

     Apes love one another.

     • ·The register now refuses hate, abuse, and junk, and anyone who tries loses the pen for 24 hours. The message they get says everything: "This message was not posted because apes love one another."
     • ·The Canon grew a Sites shelf, things worth your time on the open web. First up: NASA's Eyes, the whole solar system running live in your browser.
     • ·The pink brain calmed down to badge size.
127. JUL 18, 2026 · SHIP 28

     Swali.

     • ·There's a pink brain on the homepage now. Click it.
     • ·It takes you to the register, where a new question, the swali, drops at every full moon, computed to the minute by the same astronomy that runs the rest of the site. This moon's: "What did you refuse to sell?"
     • ·Answer it, or ignore it and just sign a line like always. Answers get marked in swali pink. No votes, no likes, no ranking, every line stands equal. That's not a missing feature.
     • ·Swali is Swahili for "question." Mountain gorillas live in Swahili-speaking country. It fits.
128. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 27

     Wayfinding.

     • ·Home is in the Canopy menu now, you can always get back to the front from anywhere.
     • ·The four regions on the homepage actually go where they say: The Canopy takes you to all the writing, The Craft takes you to the games and vibe-coded projects.
     • ·The corner chip tucked in a touch tighter to the corner.
129. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 26

     Blacktop.

     • ·A second game on The Cartridge: Blacktop, big-head arcade 2-on-2 basketball. Eight city crews, two players each, every stat real: the fast guys are actually faster, the snipers actually shoot better, and the turbo bar actually runs out.
     • ·Three straight buckets and you're on fire, and a few players change when they catch it. You'll know it when you see it.
     • ·Keyboard on desktop, thumb controls on a tablet. Quick games by default, made for one very lucky nephew and anyone else who wanders in.
130. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 25

     Corner, shrunk and locked down.

     • ·The logo/tree corner is a touch smaller now, and it's got much more room to breathe above every page's text, the earlier fix left a thin enough margin that a brief loading flash could still catch it.
131. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 24

     Small fixes, small additions.

     • ·Dune and Dune: Part Two joined the Films shelf in Canon.
     • ·The Cartridge now shows where it lives, The Craft, right in its own kicker, linked back.
     • ·"Four regions" became "Four regions, one troop."
     • ·Fixed a real bug: on wide screens, the logo/tree corner was quietly covering the first word of every page's kicker line. Every page now clears it properly.
132. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 23

     Roots.

     • ·Click the tree, Canopy still opens the same way it did, but now roots trace out from the corner as it does, tan on tan, tracking down through the panel.
     • ·Purely a flourish. The menu itself didn't change.
133. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 22

     The Cartridge.

     • ·A new spot under Troop: The Cartridge, vibe-coded games, hosted here to play free, no install. First one up is Phantom Directive, an 8-bit stealth game with guards that actually learn.
     • ·Built mostly for one very lucky nephew. Everyone else is welcome too.
     • ·Also: one duplicate footer link cleaned up, and one very well-hidden new door somewhere on the homepage.
134. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 21

     A real tree, and a docked one.

     • ·The tree mark got redrawn, wider, flatter canopy with a proper root flare at the base. The old one read as broccoli. This one reads as a tree.
     • ·It's also no longer floating alone in the middle of the page, it's docked directly under the gorilla mark, one bordered cluster, top-left.
     • ·"Nothing for sale." now also lives in the very bottom line, next to the sigil.
135. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 20

     Camo, turned up.

     • ·The camo print was too faint to register almost anywhere it showed up, the hero, the Canopy drawer, Tenets, Four Regions. Same print, same places, just louder now.
136. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 19

     Canopy, behind a tree.

     • ·The sidebar is gone. In its place: the gorilla stays top-left, and a small tree mark floats on the left edge, click it and Canopy slides open over the page instead of sitting there all the time.
     • ·Content runs edge to edge now instead of being pushed over to make room for a rail that was empty most of the time.
     • ·Phones and tablets keep the top-bar MENU button, same drawer, just a trigger that fits a narrower screen.
137. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 18

     The Register.

     • ·A new one under Troop: sign the register. One line, no account, no name, just proof you were here, stamped with today's moon phase and your Ledger day-count if you've already started one.
     • ·No accounts means no login and nothing to remember. Rate-limited to one line an hour per visitor so it stays a register, not a feed.
     • ·Code's shipped; the shared log itself connects in the next few days. Until then the page says so plainly instead of pretending.
138. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 17

     Canopy.

     • ·The sidebar has a name now, and it's narrower and quieter than it was, click ASNKA's ape, then Canopy, and the list rolls out.
     • ·The camo print is back, faded into the sidebar and into the four-regions section, the way it always should have been.
     • ·The homepage line is shorter: 'A private philosophy made public. Loyalty over status.' Said enough.
     • ·"Four canopies" is now "Four regions", the word canopy belongs to the menu now.
139. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 16

     A real menu.

     • ·Found the actual bug behind yesterday's Troop fix: it opened, it just rendered invisibly, clipped by its own row. Root cause fixed, not papered over.
     • ·The whole nav moved to a left-hand rail that stays put as you scroll, Tenets, Articles, Canon, and Troop, which now rolls open right where it sits instead of floating a panel that can go wrong.
     • ·On a phone it collapses to a single MENU button that opens the same list.
140. JUL 17, 2026 · SHIP 15

     Troop, reorganized.

     • ·Troop is a real menu item now, click it in the top nav instead of hunting for it under the logo.
     • ·Two lists inside: Tools, for what you'll actually use again (the Ledger, Field Notes, One Breath), and Troop, for ideas still proving themselves.
     • ·Two of the newer ideas, The Common Thread and The Borrowed Body, came off that list for now. Still live if you have the link. Going back to make them earn their place, one at a time, the way the Ledger did.
141. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 14

     A fourth essay, and a small cleanup.

     • ·Published: The Monitor, on golf, pressure, and the part of the mind that has to hold the thing it's trying not to think about in order to check for it.
     • ·The footer's mismatched punctuation is fixed. One separator, used consistently.
142. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 13

     The brutalist pass.

     • ·The site got harder edges. Every rounded corner is gone, borders got heavier, and the frosted-glass menu is now solid.
     • ·Hovers snap now instead of fading, nothing eases anymore, it just changes.
     • ·The four canopy cards, the Ledger, and TROOP now carry the mark properly: a clawed corner, a held-line frame, the camo weave worked into the chrome, the ape stamped faint into the surfaces themselves.
     • ·The scroll-fade-in effect is gone. Everything is just there when you arrive.
143. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 12

     Something in the undergrowth.

     • ·Something new lives on this site. It is not in any menu.
     • ·It answers to an old code, entered anywhere. It also answers to a knock on the ape at the bottom of the page, seven knocks, quickly.
     • ·Bring your thumbs. Hold the line.
144. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 11

     The TROOP.

     • ·Click the ape in the top-left: a launcher opens with every tool on the site. A troop is a group of gorillas; this is the group of tools.
     • ·Five new instruments joined: One Breath (sixty seconds of guided breathing, then what Earth did while you breathed), The Borrowed Body (your atoms, counted, Big Bang hydrogen, star-forged carbon, ocean-traveled water), You Are Here (a scroll from your body to the edge of the observable universe and back), The Common Thread (pick any stranger on Earth and find your shared ancestor), and Right Now (who's in daylight this second, where it's exactly noon, and what the species has done since you arrived).
     • ·The Ledger and Field Notes moved into the TROOP. The top menu slimmed down to the writing.
145. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 10

     The field report.

     • ·The homepage conditions strip now says where its readings come from: your local time and time zone, the nearest city, and the stretch of coast your tide is read from.
     • ·It also tells you what to wear: sunglasses, an umbrella, snow boots, a real jacket, judged from live conditions.
     • ·Warnings appear when the sky turns: official National Weather Service alerts for US visitors, and warnings read from live data (high wind, flood risk, big waves, extreme heat or cold) everywhere.
     • ·This page, Build Logs, exists now. Every update to the site gets noted here.
146. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 09

     The portal.

     • ·The site now opens on a white room with one huge breathing ape. Click it and its silhouette becomes a window into the forest, then you fly through.
     • ·Once per visit; press Escape or click again to skip; respects reduced-motion settings.
147. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 08

     The almanac.

     • ·The Ledger now tracks the sky: next and last full, new, blue, black, super, micro, harvest, and hunter's moons, plus solar and lunar eclipses, each with a plain-English definition. All computed in your browser from real astronomy.
     • ·The Canon opened: books, records, and films that stayed.
     • ·Links shared from the site now carry branded cards. The gorilla took over the browser tab icon. Day counts can be saved as share cards.
     • ·The four canopies became doors, every pillar card now goes somewhere.
148. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 07

     Brutalist turn.

     • ·The italic script is gone; the voice font is now a chunky grotesque.
     • ·The menu scrolls on phones, so every page is reachable.
     • ·The moon ticker now runs for everyone, including reduced-motion devices.
     • ·Two tenets tightened; the last one now ends where it should.
149. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 06

     Tenets, charts, and a scratch pad.

     • ·The manifesto is dead; long live the Tenets. Same words, better name, old links still work.
     • ·The essays got real charts, drawn in house colors.
     • ·Field Notes opened: a whiteboard where you can type or draw, and take it with you as .txt, .doc, or .pdf. It never leaves your browser until you export.
     • ·Labels sitewide moved to a new face.
150. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 05

     Three essays.

     • ·Published: The Container Moment, The Integration Tax, and Why Money and Power Can't Buy Soccer Wins (or F1 Wins, for That Matter).
     • ·The hello-world placeholder was retired with honors.
151. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 04

     The Ledger.

     • ·Enter the day you arrived and count your days. Jump to day 30,000, your billionth second, or any date you like.
     • ·Your birthday stays in your browser. Ledgers are private by definition.
152. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 03

     The sky arrives.

     • ·The homepage now shows your moon phase, local weather, and the tide at your nearest coast, quietly, at the bottom of the hero.
     • ·A ticker tracks the last and next full moon.
153. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 02

     The design pass.

     • ·The tenets went up in full. Articles got a real reading experience. Typography sharpened, navigation fixed, a date bug squashed.
154. JUL 16, 2026 · SHIP 01

     First light.

     • ·apeshallneverkillape.ai is live. One gorilla, four canopies, nothing for sale.