Geir's Everything

Kart

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My youngest son, Aleksander (10) and I are crazy about Mario Kart. I guess we have played every version of it emulated from every console. When in London this summer, we also played the actual consoles in the cellar at the Science Museum where they have a huge collection of consoles.

Time for the Mario Kart tribute. I asked Claude for a game in the spirit of the game for funkey. Called simply “kart”. Play it in your browser.

The game

Eight karts on four tracks: a meadow, a beach, an icy pass and a desert.
The road is flat and painted the way Super Mario Kart painted it. The karts on it are 3D.
Up is the gas, Down the brake. Left and Right steer.
Space hops. Hold it through a bend and the kart drifts. Let go when the sparks turn blue or orange for a push.
Boxes hand out six items. Kinder ones to those at the back. X uses the item.
A cup is four races of three laps, at 50, 100 or 150cc.
Ice has little grip.

Three iterations

Three messages from me. Three versions. Each picture below is three seconds into a race on the meadow.

One: the game

“Could we make a funkeys game in the spirit of Mario Kart called simply “kart”?”

55 minutes later it was all there. The tracks, the items, the drift, the cup, seven karts that drive themselves. The karts were boxes.

Two: the karts

“Is it possible to achieve better graphics - especially for the karts?”

28 minutes. Round bodies, drivers with helmets, wheels that roll and steer. Sunlight on the paint and a soft shadow under each kart.

Absolutely astonishing.

Three: the trees and the road

Claude asked if I wanted the trees and the road improved next. My answer: “y”.

27 minutes. Oaks and birches. Palms. Firs under snow. Cactus and red rock. Long shadows that reach across the road. Grain in the asphalt, painted boxes on the start grid.

And the game got faster. A frame in the browser went from 27 to 22 milliseconds.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey in three goes: 55, 28 and 27 minutes. The game is one file of Rust. Public Domain, like everything I make.

kart

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/Kart.html

Again: a time-loop puzzle

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For those that have some recollection of past lives, this one is particularly intriguing. For everyone else, it’s a really fun puzzle game.

I asked Claude for a new puzzle game for funkey. “Something interesting” was all I said. Claude came back with a time loop. The idea, the name and all twenty rooms are Claude’s. Play it right here:

Click the game, then Enter. On a phone the keys show under it.

The game

A life is a handful of steps. Then you reincarnate and start over.
The self you just were walks beside you and presses the same keys.
Stand on a plate and the door of its colour opens. Step off and it shuts.
A past self that meets a shut door loses that step and walks on. Keep the door open for it.
A pale gate lets only a past self through. A bright gate lets only you.
Put a self on every ring at once and the room is solved.
The arrows step. Space waits a step. Enter lets the rest of the life run out.
U takes back a step, Backspace the life, R the room. N and P change rooms.
The music is a round. Each self adds a voice, two bars late.

The rooms

Twenty of them. The first has one door and two of you. One has four doors and four of you.

A search plays every room. It proves that the room can be solved with the selves and steps it gives. And that it cannot be solved with one self fewer.

The game in this page is the same Rust code as the one in the terminal, built for the browser. 180 KB. It stops when you scroll past it.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey in 48 minutes, in one go. Public Domain, like everything I make.

again

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/Again.html

Raid, Vector and Marble

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s madness, but not just Marble Madness. With my own software throughout, it’s now silly easy to create something new. The funkey game engine makes for easy game creations.

After Gems, Salvo, the Eliminator and Stack, I asked Claude for three more games in one message. A helicopter game, then Tempest, then Marble Madness.

Raid

A gunship over fractal mountains, in the spirit of Comanche.

Six missions, from a radar post at dawn to a fortress at night.
A gun, rockets and guided missiles. Trucks, tanks, flak, gunboats, missile sites and other gunships.
The gunship follows the ground at the height you set.
The hills are cover. A missile site cannot see what flies low behind one.
Hover over the pad to rearm and repair.
After the sixth mission it all begins again. Harder.

Vector

A tribute to Tempest. Play it in your browser.

Glowing lines on black. Sixteen webs seen down their length, a claw on the rim.
Flippers flip from lane to lane. Tankers split in two. Spikers leave spikes.
Fuseballs ride the edges. Pulsars charge their lane.
The superzapper clears the web. Once.
The lines add their light where they cross, and fade as on a vector tube.
Leave the title alone and it plays itself.

Marble

A tribute to Marble Madness. Play it right here:

Click the game, then Space. On a phone the keys show under it.

Six courses, each against the clock. You take with you the seconds you have left over to the next course.
The arrows roll the marble along the tiles. Right is down to the right, Down is down to the left.
Roll off the edge, drop too far, get eaten or melt: it costs seconds. A new marble rolls in.
Steel balls charge and knock you off. Knock one off yourself for 1000 points.
Green springs hop around and eat marbles. Acid slides across the track.
On ice the arrows do little. Aim before you get there.
Two courses have a hole to jump. Take the slope before it at full speed.

Tributes

Copies would need the makers’ own programs. So everything here is new: the land, the webs, the courses, the foes, the sounds.

Tempest had a knob to spin. Marble Madness had a trackball. Here the arrow keys do the work.

Raid paints the land on every core, so it stays in the terminal. The other two are the same Rust code in the terminal and in the browser.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey in one go. Raid took an hour, vector 35 minutes, marble 45. 5 minutes of my time. Public Domain, like everything I make.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/Raid-Vector-Marble.html

Rise Above: my new album

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite book is Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. It’s a deep eye-opener that I have also employed in coaching others.

Rise Above is out. I have been working on this for 5 months. Ten tracks, 36 minutes… my tribute to the book but also spanning classical music, spacesynth, electronica and a touch of psytrance.

On Spotify and most other streaming services.

Listen

You can listen to two of the tracks right here:

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Court of Caolain

Tracks

The Freedom Proof (3:48)
Rise Above (3:58)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (3:46)
Court of Caolain (3:18)
Longing III (4:24)
Flight (3:59)
Longing III.1 (3:14)
Solitude (2:59)
Longing III.14 (3:18)
Medieval Magick (3:42)

Summary

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/Rise-Above.html

Fe₂O₃ in the browser

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I was 8 I was hooked on science. Making software on programmable calculators from I was 12. Awkward with people but safe with science. Started reading the encyclopedia from the beginning, wanted to understand why. Inspiring others came later. Now hopefully adding some inspiration in your life.

Fe₂O₃ is my suite of terminal apps, written in Rust with Claude. Until now you had to install an app to see it. Now you click: isene.org/fe2o3/try.

Pick a card. The app starts right in the page. No install, no account, just the app.

What you can try

funkeys: eight games on my own game engine. Falling blocks, a dungeon by the rules of Amar, a space shooter and more.
sky: type a latitude and a longitude. You get the sky over that place, right now.
moon: the Moon as it looks tonight, with a map of its craters and seas.
stars, exoplanets and universe: named stars, known worlds, and every scale from the quantum foam to the cosmic web.
elements, isotopes and particles: the periodic table, the chart of the nuclides and the Standard Model.
alchemy and circuit: a chemistry bench and an electronics bench.
fractal: Mandelbrot, Julia, Lorenz and friends.
rpnx: a calculator in the style of the HP-41.

Every card links to the code on GitHub.

The same code

These are the very same programs that run in my terminal. The same Rust code, showing in the browser.

crust draws every Fe₂O₃ app. It can now draw in a terminal inside a web page. The apps hardly had to change. Pictures show in real pixels, as they do in my own terminal (no pixel-faking with braille characters, though it does that too if the terminal can’t paint all the pixels individually).

The games came first: Stack and the Eliminator already played in the browser. Now a dozen apps join them.

Safe to click

An app in the page cannot read your files, reach the network or start a program.

Every scale

One more, right here: the universe, from the quantum foam to the cosmic web.

Summary

Built with Claude in under two hours. Public Domain, like everything I make.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/TryFe2O3.html

Stack: a tribute to Tetris

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My fiancé Siv was a Tetris champ. A friend of mine held the World Record in Tetris back in the 80’s. We used to play together at RA4 downtown Oslo back then. I was never really good, as Crystal Castles, Gradius, Salamander and Gauntlet were “my” games. But to Siv and Henning; Here’s a tribut to that legendary game.

After Gems, Salvo and the Eliminator. Play it right here:

Click the game, then Enter. On a phone the keys show under it.

The game

Seven pieces of four blocks, a well ten spaces wide. A full row clears.
The pieces turn and kick off the walls as in modern Tetris. A bag of seven deals them (the long bar is never far off).
C puts a piece aside for later. The next five show on the right.
Space drops hard, Down drops soft. A ghost shows where the piece lands.
Four rows at once, a T spun into its slot, clears in a row: they all score more.
Every ten rows the level goes up. The pieces fall faster.
Make the top ten and your initials go on the list everyone who plays here sees.
Korobeiniki plays, and speeds up when the well fills.
Leave the title alone and it plays itself.

History

The name Tetris belongs to The Tetris Company. So this one is called stack, and everything in it is new. Except the music: Korobeiniki is a Russian folk song from the 1860s, free for all.

The game in this page is the same Rust code as the one in the terminal, built for the browser. 150 KB. It stops when you scroll past it.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey in 13 minutes, in one go. Public Domain, like everything I make.

stack

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/Stack.html

Eliminator: a dungeon by the rules of Amar

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve played Role-Playing Games since the beginning of the 80s, published the Mega RPG in 1987, made Sword & Sorcery in 1993 that later became Amar some 20 years ago. The Amar RPG has gone through many phases and with the latest web page overhaul, I thought it was time for an instructive game. This rogue-like game is a game in its own right but also helps players get used to the simple game mechanics of the Amar RPG.

Play it in your browser, on a computer or a phone: The Eliminator game.

The Eliminator

Beneath the royal castle in Amaron lies a maze. Every year the King’s heralds call for contenders. One in ten walks out, and the King makes them noble. The rest are never seen again.

You are lowered into the dark at the bottom. Five levels up: the Pit, the Kennels, the Drowned Halls, the Faerie Cage and the Gate. The Raven Demon guards the gate.

The game

Pick a contender: a sellsword, a scout with a crossbow, or a brute with a heavy mace. All three are built by the Amar creation rules.
Walk into a foe to attack. Rats, spiders, Araxi, wolves, zombies, trolls and other contenders.
A Phooka heals every round until iron cuts it.
Six stances on 1 to 6: normal, offensive, defensive, only defend, power hit, and the double attack at -5 on each.
Wounds cost Status -2 at half your Body Points and -4 at a quarter (modification to all skill rolls).
A torch costs a little, darkness a lot. Torches burn out.
Silver pieces from past contenders everywhere. Gold now and then.
Every success gives the skill a mark. Enough marks raise it.

Learn Amar by playing

Every roll is the O6, the open-ended die of Amar. Roll a 6 and it rolls on and adds. Roll a 1 and it rolls on and takes away. Two 6s in a row is a critical, two 1s a fumble.

The tray under the map shows every die of the round, the totals and the sum. The sheet shows every skill as Characteristic + Attribute + Skill. ? opens the rules as the game plays them.

New to Amar? Press i on the title. Three pages walk you through the three tiers, the O6 and a single blow. Each page has something to press: light up a skill, roll a hundred dice, strike an Araxi.

The criticals and fumbles come from the tables in my amar app. Fumble, and the log may read: “Giggles are heard.”

The Raven Demon strikes twice a round.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey in 25 minutes. Public Domain, like everything I make.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/Eliminator.html

Salvo: a tribute to Gradius

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Another game I was pretty good at was Gradius, Konami’s 1985 arcade shooter. Hours spent on that game at RA4 game pub down-town Oslo.

After Crystal Castles this morning, I had to have that one too.

The game

Seven stages: a volcano, stone heads, crystals, living cells, the sun, a high-speed maze and the fortress.
A boss at the end of each. Three core ships, a stone head, an eye, a fire serpent, and a brain behind walls that grow back.
Shoot a whole formation, or a red carrier, for a capsule. Each capsule lights the next power-up on the bar.
Z or Enter takes what is lit: speed, missiles, double, laser, option, shield.
Up to four options follow your path and fire with you.
Every seventh capsule is blue. It clears the screen.
After the seventh stage it all begins again. Harder.

A tribute

A copy of the arcade game would need Konami’s own program. So everything here is new: the stages, the ships, the music.

Rock, fire, cells and steel. A frame takes under three milliseconds. glass shows the pixels.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey in 30 minutes. Public Domain, like everything I make.

salvo

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/Salvo.html

Gems: a tribute to Crystal Castles

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used to be a gamer back when arcade machines were the thing. I remember playing Gauntlet at a pier in Brighton in 1987 for some 10 hours straight on one coin. Only to claim the third place in the high score list. That same year I held the European record in Crystal Castles. Atari’s 1983 arcade game. Bentley bear running around in a castle collecting gems and avoiding enemies. One of the first arcade games with a real ending. The first level was built around the three initials of the person with the high score. All the games in Oslo had “ISY” displaying on the screen (from my pseudonym when writing the Mega Role-Playing book, Isy Allon).

I had to create a small tribute to that legendary game in funkey.

The game

Five castles of blocks, seen from the corner. Every path lined with gems.
Take them all before the gem eaters do.
Trees walk. A crystal ball rolls. Bees swarm. The witch comes in the third wave.
Space jumps them. The hat keeps the bear safe for eight seconds.
And there is a warp. Of course there is.

A tribute

A copy of the arcade game would need Atari’s own program. So everything here is new: the castles, the bear, the music.

Brick walls, tiled floors, a starry sky. A frame takes half a millisecond. glass shows the pixels.

Summary

Built with Claude on funkey during a bus trip to work this morning. Public Domain, like everything I make.

gems

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/Gems.html

Update: mobile browser and images in astro

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Had to have a better browser than Firefox on my phone. So gaze was created as a member of my set of nomad apps.

gaze on the phone

Send a tab to the laptop. Send one back with :send.
The laptop’s passwords and bookmarks, shared over Syncthing.
Ads blocked. Pages dark.
Ask Claude about the page you are on.

Images in astro

And then astro got a cool update. It now shows images of Deep Sky objects, the planets, moon and sun. Both the spectacular images you find on Wikipedia, but more importantly how the selected object will look through your telescope & eyepiece combination.

Enter twice on an object shows its picture. f turns it as a telescope or a star diagonal does.
r shows it through a telescope and eyepiece pair from Gear mode. e steps to the next pair.
+ and - lean in. A planet fills more of your eye at the eyepiece than a small box on a screen shows.
The deep sky comes from a sky survey, dimmed to what the eye catches through that telescope.
The planets, the Moon and the Sun show at their true size tonight, lit from the Sun’s side. Venus is a crescent. Jupiter’s moons are where they are. Saturn’s rings are nearly edge-on, as they are this year.
The Sun is today’s picture from NASA’s SDO satellite, spots and all. Look at it only through a solar filter.

Summary

Built with Claude. Public Domain, like everything I make.

gaze on the laptop, and gaze on the phone
astro

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/Update.html