The Founding Federation Cohort Alpha room was the loudest place in the building. Most weeks had a business hour, then a technical hour, and what came out of it is the showcase in the middle of this issue — maps, privacy tools, a visual novel, a handful of Claude skills and one very cheap domain name.
We shipped a lot too, and most of it is unglamorous: a merch lab, sponsor-a-seat donations, email preferences, a What's New card and a few absurd homepage themes. If something here is wrong or you want it gone, email me — it's one email away.
This issue was assembled by AI from what was shared in Multiverse chat rooms and the school's changelog. Want your piece changed or taken down? Email [email protected] and it's done.
Two sessions, June 27 and July 11. ronnie posted the slides and the first session recording at the top of the curriculum page. The questions in the room ran from iFixit to postmarketOS device lists to whether a cracked iPad can be a monitor.
June 19. Students tried writing their own audience descriptors and argued about co-opting — and I reminded them that a meme generator is a fine backbone for content.
Over six thousand messages in the cohort room this quarter. Spencer ran the business hour (Smallest Saleable Thing), neek ran the Shipping Software hour after it, and most mornings ended with somebody posting a live URL.
Claude skills for copy editing that keep the author out of forever-feedback loops. A second bundle, neon-jetpack, adds a user-journey-mapping skill and one for prepping copyrights.
“Writing copy is my kryptonite, so I made two sets of skills for Claude to keep me out of the "forever-feedback" loops I sometimes get stuck in.”
because of this class, I finally had the guts to publish the github repos with a github page.
Open source, in practice
Students in the Intro to Open Source room compared notes on leaving paid tools. b33n sorted his own moves into four buckets — replace it, contract it, build it, or abandon it out of spite. Canva became Krita. Zapier shrank to a free plan with a single zap. A lot of excessive systems turned into static sites.
v: (nodocs) went through the ranking behind openalternative.co and found it sorts by stars and forks, age, and how recently a project was updated. Those tell you a lot about reliability and nothing about whether the thing fits your work, so research each alternative. Their own pick: Obsidian user, Joplin fan, even with Joplin sitting at #3.
quail recommended khoj to someone asking how to organize a pile of audio files and transcripts without handing them all to a hosted model.
Writing a tavern in Ink
The Interactive Fiction class worked in Ink, the scripting language behind a lot of branching stories. I shared inklewriter and Ink as starting points, then posted a sample scene to the room — you enter a city, walk into a tavern, and order an ale or not. One variable, has_ale, changes what you notice when you sit down. That's most of the idea. As one student put it, you're only telling it what should happen if someone chooses a direction.
What we launched
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Merch Lab
A merch page with a roll mechanic, plus an admin side for backgrounds, fonts and products.
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Sponsor-a-seat donations
Donations that fund scholarship seats, with a capacity check on the scholarship pool.
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Email preferences
Unsubscribe links and per-sender preferences on school emails, plus a Terms and Conditions page.
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Alumni re-attend
Past students can rejoin later cohorts of a class they already took.
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What's New card
A card and nav link on the student dashboard that says what changed.
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AI Problems Index submissions
You can now submit entries to the AI Problems Index. They go through a moderation queue.
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New homepage themes
Abyss, Genesis, Ecosystem, Murmuration, Cellular Automata, a physics lab where the page becomes a rigid-body demo, and more of the demoscene theme.
On campus, logging in during a class now puts you in the classroom, and there's a Go to Instructor shortcut. Matrix handle setup moved into onboarding.
Pick a learning path. Recordings and curriculum, or live class seats too. Every class is pay-what-you-can, and scholarships are open to anyone who needs one.
