no beautiful things
There’s this line in The Hobbit that haunts me. For one thing, it is part of a wider problematic habit running throughout all of Tolkien that, moving in the mythopoetic space, leads to these sweeping statements that define or collapse an entire culture into a single stroke. It seems to me to be like the most damning thing you could say about a culture, though:
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.
Emphasis my own, and the quote continues on, really chest-out, to double and triple down on its thesis…
They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.
Whenever I make a web toy or game I toss it on to the url [smallandnearlysilent.com](https://smallandnearlysil…
no beautiful things
There’s this line in The Hobbit that haunts me. For one thing, it is part of a wider problematic habit running throughout all of Tolkien that, moving in the mythopoetic space, leads to these sweeping statements that define or collapse an entire culture into a single stroke. It seems to me to be like the most damning thing you could say about a culture, though:
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.
Emphasis my own, and the quote continues on, really chest-out, to double and triple down on its thesis…
They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.
Whenever I make a web toy or game I toss it on to the url smallandnearlysilent.com — I like keeping the root of that domain name a kind of mysterious listing of what lives there without any other context.
This week I made an about page for small and nearly silent. I’m not super duper sure why I did it, but it was a fun activity to draft it while running at the gym. I kept saying it out loud to myself because I didn’t have anything to write on.
I abhor fiddling with text editors and IDEs. They’re not things that interest me any more. My ideal one would stay out of the way, and would let me use a mouse as much as I please because I’m not a 10x vi person, nor a powerful emacs emoter…yet, this week, I grew furious — not wanting to have to work through something so painfully ugly any more I threw VS Code (which I use at work) away.
Needing something in its place and not yet ready to wander out to sea, away from work, I jumped through the hoops and set up acme-lsp. I think that it is mostly working? Time will tell. I find that I struggle to use Acme within very large projects, so I’ve also been using helix. It is fine. It doesn’t like that I want to use the mouse, but it doesn’t seem to demand finicky configuration and plays nicely with what I need it to do. It is also not heinously ugly.
I added a tiny bit of complexity to my broughlike. It now has multi-step exit doors that require you to collect 1 or 2 keys before they’ll open and it also has collectable zappers that let you attack a level’s worth of enemies all at once.
I started on another variant of my bicross, picross-a-like game, too. This one will be a daily puzzler where everyone who plays it on a given day is presented with the same set of levels. It is still cooking.
I’ve been reading the docs for ink and doing some experiments with it. One of my goals for 2026 is to make a more narrative focused game, and I think I’m going to do that with ink. I started to build out my now thing, built around minikanren but I realized that was gonna be a whole new kinda rabbit hole, and would likely keep me far away from my actual goal of…you know…making a game with a story in it instead of making a game engine to potentially, maybe, possibly, house a story.
Tolkien, on small websites in The Lord of the Rings,
“But it is not your own Shire,” said Gildor. “Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot fence it out.”
As is likely embarrassingly obvious from this very week notes, I continue with my project of reading a whole bunch of Tolkien stuff.
I’ve also had Mark Fisher on my mind lately, so started to read his essay, “The Weird and the Eerie.”
The world and work remain existent. The world, especially, seems precarious these days.
I wanna make beautiful things.
Published January 9, 2026
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