Jonathan Lahue

A photo of the northern lights and a stand of trees casting their silhouettes against it.

Digital Aurora 🌌

Dust and cobwebs on old posts, but also an ornate ostrich feather duster hanging off a brass hook on the side of the page.

A GameBoy camera hooked up to a GameBoy advance. I took a selfie that came out weird with a bunch of horizontal bands.

The GameBoy scientists on Reddit helped me to revive this poor cart 🙌

Now it runs without applying constant pressure, but the photos come out with horizontal bands… and new photos don’t save! Debugging hardware is tough 😅

🐝 bzz bzz 🐝

Ok but like what if haptics when digging on JCLaHoot.com? ⛏️

Finally our websites can have BEES!🐝

Using a webcam microscope thing to zoom in on a GameBoy camera cartridge.

A GameBoy Camera cartridge circuit board, full of chips and pins and with a big battery on the board.

Attempted surgery on the GameBoy Camera today and did not succeed. 🥲

It does work when I apply pressure to the top-right corner of the board though, which feels like an important hint for GameBoy scientists.

What if we just made a big non-profit / coop that made all the same stuff that the for-profit companies make, but made to last and sold at cost?

Idk this is the kind of shit I'd be doing if I was a billionaire.

the AI labour stuff is never going to be liberationist / humanist. it’s very stupid to believe that. the entire premise is a built off of stolen materials. like, a 3 day work week ‘due to AI’ would require the owners of any business to do something they have literally never done: say ‘I have enough’

I just want them to wake up and fix whatever protocol they’re using to work with photos and maps. There’s no way the current model is effective.

Just donated to Trans Continental Pipeline🏳️‍⚧️. It feels good to redirect some of the anger into action!

tcpipeline.org

Just learned that you can get the CAPTCHA wrong on purpose and it'll still work.

Do with this info as you please...

I'm sitting on 4 blog posts about environmental design (talking about cities, trains, treacherous terrain, and cities again). They're good posts, and deserve their own links!

I think I need to do a little side questing before starting the next dev arc...

Was feeling wistful thinking about how I've never had a roadtrip without a smartphone telling me exactly where I am...

then realized...

PAPER MAPS STILL EXIST. There is literally nothing stopping me from having this experience. 😆

What did we lose when we gave up getting lost? 🛰🗺🧭

Cause of divorce: AirPod noise isolating mode.

The wazeing witch 🚗🗺️🧙‍♀️

A photo of a woman at the very foggy Tottori sand Dunes in May of 2025. She's looking out towards the choppy sea, that disappears into the mist.

Some say she's still out there, gazing at the sea... 🌊

I wonder if the Als of the world have been going by Alvin more lately?

New Yorkers: if you can do so safely, take a moment to step outside (even on your front stoop) for a moment and appreciate how quiet the city is right now. ❄️

Cities aren't loud. Cars are loud.

Bubble bath and GameBoy Advance time while Khoa was at the concert was the right call 😌

I've made a Project Plan™️ for this and on top of the new tooling it looks like I have about 480 illustrations to make 😳

🔥✨This is fine.✨🔥

OK I'm ready but my website is not (yet).

⚒️ I shan't be building out huge areas one voxel at a time. 🙅‍♂️ I must carry the homo-sapien torch that is Crafting One's Tools!

(also I need to be able to support infinite world sizes first, lest this become a one way ticket to Memory Leak City)

lol the back of the napkin math says that this would be 30 minutes of *just* walking. 😆

Honestly would be pretty cool if I could pull it off (with points of interest along the way), and would make the whole experience (including towns and landmarks) about 1 - 1.5 hours.

Am *I* ready for that tho?

A map of Japan with pins in the locations that I'll be developing and lines showing the different paths that will be developed. A screenshot of my current website is shown, for scale.

An enlarged view of my current website, including the cat mountain village (main site that is on a mountain shaped like a cat) and the dev blog. It takes only 15 seconds to cross the cat mountain area.

One silly little problem to figure out is the scale. I want this to live on my personal website (first mistake?), which means I need to figure out how big to make everything. A smol Mt. Fuji is not the vibe! 🗻

But how far is an acceptable distance to *walk* on a website? Uncharted frontiers of UX!

Khoa and I in front of Lake Tanuki (and Mount Fuji!). We were blessed with a perfect sunny day.

🗺️ Today’s plan is to map out the biggest area yet on my website: a photo diary of my trip to Japan.

Not content with simple photo carousels, I want you to join me in a cross country trek that pushes the very limits of what a travel blog can be.
🧭🏔️🌾🌨️📷

Visual journal documenting a trip to Kusatsu and Nikko. On the Kusatsu page there's sketches of onsen and traditional wooden buildings, along with the surrounding mountains. On the Nikko page there's a big steam train, an onsen, a waterfall, and a Honda Cub scooter.

And my favourite journal pages: Kusatsu and Nikko. I really let loose and just filled the page with sketches.

Sketches of three different Frixion stamps and what the stamp actually looks like below it.

A scrap of paper pasted in a notebook. The paper has a green bear on it, with an apple around its head as a hat.

A step count in a notebook, highlighted in grey with a pictogram of footprints next to it.

Some of the journaling techniques I loved:

- 🖍 Little stationery previews. I really like the 💥 stamp!
- ✂️ Pasting in paper scraps. Look at this lil guy! 🍎
- 👣 Highlighting recurring elements to make them stand out.

Screenshot from my website, with a paper on the left that says "on visual journaling". In the centre there's a desk with a pink iMac G3, a yellow lamp, and a yellow stool. There's 2 yellow poofs off to the right.

I wrote a blog post about my experience keeping a visual travel journal while I was in Japan! 📖

(Also just added this little writing nook to my website 💖)

jclahoot.com?position=%7B...

It’s to keep the hosting fees low