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Work logs, tutorials, and processes that occasionally need more room.

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O36

vibe deconstruct: cut open an everyday thing and look four layers down

Six vertical shorts running the opposite way from vibe construct: an everyday thing is cut open stroke by stroke, down to the microscopic principle, then pulled back to daily life. Five of them cover how plastic gains functions such as flame retardancy and antibacterial action.

Abstract

vibe deconstruct is the sister series of vibe construct and runs the opposite way: instead of building parts into a whole, it opens a thing up to see why it is the way it is. Of the six shorts, #01 Chaoshan beef and #02 Flame retardancy came early. From #03 on, because the two series looked too alike, it uses a grammar of its own: the opening is an everyday question, each cut opens the next layer, the four depths (object, surface or part, material, microscopic principle) each have their own texture, and the climax pulls all the way back from the microscopic to daily life. The last five form the sub-series Enchanting Plastic, with a five-slot checklist on the end card that unlocks episode by episode; #02's checklist is written differently, and the post compares the end frames. The figures in the films are cited from public sources, not measured. The renderer, scores and checking tools were written by Claude Code; I chose the subjects, watched the cuts and made the calls.

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O35

vibe construct: fifteen shorts that build one thing to the beat

Fifteen vertical shorts and one horizontal cut. Each covers a single object: its parts drop into place on the beat, one at a time, and then the finished thing runs. The picture, the music and the checking tools are all generated by code.

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M03

Suno Beyond the First Draft

Controlled changes, genre expectations, and audio checks for deciding what a Suno iteration actually improved.

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G10

Ember Is Life: A Shared Resource for Health, Growth, and Currency

Watchman development note 09: an optional prototype connects expendable health and currency through channeling, condensation, and a level-based recovery baseline.

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O34

Eight Sins × Sixteen Types: two sides of one card

A 90-second beat-synced main film and sixteen one-minute vertical shorts: the seven deadly sins, an eighth, vainglory, brought back, and their contrary virtues, each given to one MBTI type.

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O33

From one character card to sixteen shorts: a production record of Eight Sins

One tarot-card test, one timing sheet shared by picture and music, two rounds of fact-checking and sixteen dedicated scores: how Eight Sins × Sixteen Types was made, and the places that changed after feedback.

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O32

From Stage to Desktop Companion

Journal entry seven: separating character rendering from content, input, and state while planning a Unity frontend.

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O31

An AI Video Failure Library

A working record of contact errors, reference contamination, mistimed actions, camera problems, and broken explanatory graphics.

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O30

Staff Badge: Before the Handover

A 63-second office conversation driven by a packing box, a staff badge, and a departure story that does not hold up.

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O29

Keep Rework Ahead of the Final Render

Three review stages for AI short drama: verify inputs, test the risky passage, and inspect the final delivery independently.

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O28

Hanabi: No Rain Today

A 101-second AI short about a meeting, sudden rain, and an umbrella too small for two, with production notes.

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O27

Before Nine: Across Rooms and Languages

Four characters and five generated passages in a 116-second short, moving from a morning walk into a meeting and back outside.

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O15

Building a Digital Companion: A Journal and Reading Map

Two weeks after starting from an open-source desktop companion, the result was a wholly self-owned system. This account also indexes the technical records and a later migration review.

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O02

AI Presenter Workflow: Coordinating Codex, HeyGen, and HyperFrames

From one assignment to an English virtual presenter, Chinese subtitles, and a social-ready master—including the revisions and two unresolved defects.

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G08

Watchman's Opening Cinematic: Silent Narrative and Production Workflow

A record of Watchman's 59-second silent opening cinematic, from concept keyframes and segmented image-to-video generation to editing, OGV conversion, and Godot integration.

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O26

Desktop Sprites: Keeping Small Actions Readable

Paired desktop sprite studies for Vela and the knight, using seven states, a shared foot baseline, and distinct proportions.

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R26

Why factories avoid the middle: fixed freight charges and end-point location

Freight has a charge you pay however far the goods travel, so longer hauls are cheaper per kilometre; a factory halfway between material and market pays that charge twice.

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R25

When roads open, small towns empty: falling transport costs and concentration

With a fixed cost per plant, two plants make sense when freight is dear; once freight falls, one plant can serve both towns and jobs concentrate on the larger side.

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O25

On having a crush: premium, threshold and being needed

Does other people's approval change a relationship? What if the exciting one feels risky and the suitable one feels flat? Three vertical films turn findings from relationship research into concrete scenes.

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O24

Two ledgers of marriage

Among people aged 35–39, why are the most unmarried found among women with doctorates and men with no schooling? Six short films and a compilation check the marriage market's accounts with survey data.

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O23

Policy ledger: is high-tech enterprise status worth it

Income tax falls from 25% to 15%, but does recognition always pay? Can products of R&D be sold? Two vertical films work through the accounts with hypothetical firms.

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R24

A carpet town left by one accident: lock-in

Where an industry first lands is sometimes an accident; once it lands, staying is cheaper than leaving, so it stays.

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O22

How MBTI sorts people

Why does a type change after years of retests that move one letter? Why does a description always feel personal? Two vertical films on the measurement behind MBTI.

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O21

The matchmaking ledger: filters, bride price, rings and ladders

Why does a list of five modest requirements leave almost no one by the third? Bride price, diamond rings and education mismatch, each worked out with one picture.

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R23

How wide is a border: estimates, corrections and natural experiments

In 1988 a Canadian province traded an estimated 22 times more with other provinces than with a US state of the same size and distance; a border acts like an extra freight charge.

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R22

Ice-cream stands on a beach: the Hotelling model and Nash equilibrium

Why two ice-cream stands end up side by side in the middle of the beach, and why a standoff in which neither dares to move is called a Nash equilibrium.

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R21

Footloose factories: freight, wages, and why plants move

For light, valuable goods freight is often under 1% of value, so location follows wages; parts, skills and customers then hold the plant in place.

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O20

Feel vs data: dating markets in three cities

Are there really more women than men in New York? Do young people in Tokyo not date? Four one-minute vertical films check common claims against data.

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O19

Explainer films drawn in code: a production record from picture to score

Pictures, caption timing and music for these explainers are all generated in code: the rendering pipeline, the review rounds, and the style trials that replaced the diorama look with the night model.

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R20

Eight models of regional economics: an overview in one film

Agglomeration, bid-rent, von Thünen rings, gravity, central places, Schelling segregation, Weber's location triangle and the rank-size rule, each explained with one picture.

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O18

The Photoreal Lip-Sync Wall: Testing and Abandoning wav2lip, MuseTalk, and LatentSync

A complete test record of three open-source lip-sync routes on a 16GB consumer GPU: measurement methods, hidden failures, and the evidence behind abandoning real-time lip sync.

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O17

Treating the Browser as a Display: A Host-Agnostic Stage and Three Infrastructure Battles

An architecture that lets one AI companion inhabit a browser tab, a standalone window, and a desktop wallpaper: move all logic into the server and reduce the page to a display.

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O16

A Homegrown Brain: Four Memory Layers, Fast and Slow Models, and a Catchphrase War

From borrowing an open-source dialogue engine to a fully independent brain: one relationship timeline, four memory layers, a self-reinforcing style infection, and latency-based model roles.

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O14

A Selfie System That Chooses Its Own Outfit: Controlled Randomness and Image–Caption Consistency

Designing an AI companion that sends selfies in tune with a conversation: a layered outfit engine, explicit image–caption constraints, restrained proactive sharing, and two image-to-image API failures that returned success while ignoring the reference.

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O13

Valves and Redaction: Content Isolation for a Two-Context Companion

How an AI companion isolates two content contexts structurally: a fail-closed valve, segment-level memory masking, constant bridge text, and three isolation failures.

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O12

Contact Is the Boundary: 228 Prompts and Ten Failed Experiments

Across 228 prompts from five published AI-video workflows, not one described physical contact between characters. Ten subsequent generation tests reinforced that boundary from the other side.

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O11

Let the storyboard follow the image: keyframes and animation for a painterly pilot

Building a pipeline for a 90-second dialogue-free animated pilot: why locking composition into the storyboard failed, and where painterly texture was lost during video generation.

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O10

Claude Fable 5 Route: Rebuilding The Vigil with Human Keyframes

A Claude Fable 5-driven Flova restart: the creator owned visual judgment and Midjourney keyframes, while the Agent drove the CLI, per-shot review, and orchestration to produce a 14.2-second atmospheric film.

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O09

Codex 5.6 Sol Route: Why the Five-Shot Sylas Greenfield Film Failed

A Codex 5.6 Sol-driven Flova experiment completed its storyboard, per-shot generation, sound, and export, yet the finished film still scored only 3–4/10.

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O08

Flova End-to-End Test: The Project Ran, the Film Still Failed

After shot-by-shot generation failed, the same action sequence was handed to Flova for director audit, storyboarding, keyframes, four-shot generation, sound, and export. The system delivered a 38.24-second film, but character contamination, style drift, weak contact logic, and false-positive self-review meant the workflow still failed.

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O07

AI Action Direction Failure Log: Shot-by-Shot Generation and the Shift to Flova

A stone-giant combat sequence becomes a test of Niji, Image2, Seedance, Dreamina, BytePlus, and Kling—and of why action causality, spatial continuity, and three-dimensional distance ultimately broke the shot-by-shot workflow.

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O05

Web Combat Specimen: From the Main Game to a Deployable Demo

A record of extracting Watchman's movement, attacks, evasion, poise break, and execution loop into a web demo, including asset boundaries, feel calibration, Web export, and loading interaction.

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O06

Rebuilding a Company Website: From Technical Decisions to Asset Handoff

A structured account of a company-site rebuild, covering requirements, stack selection, localization, deployment, domain and ICP work, and final transfer of control.

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M02

Ableton Cover Project: A Modular Workflow for Filling Missing Parts

Using Make Me Wanna Die as a case study, this article documents how a three-piece band used Ableton Live to supply missing drums, bass, and rhythm guitar while preserving the parts played live.

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R19

Building the Data Before the Model: a Spatial-Regression Pipeline

Most of a spatial study happens before the regression: turning raw points and boundaries into one clean layer with real distances, then the OLS → spatial → local modeling ladder that sits on top.

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O04

From Irregular Orders to Structured Records: Building an AI Intake Tool

A reusable method for parsing orders sent as messages, spreadsheets, images, or scans, then routing uncertainty through confidence checks and human review before writing to a shared table.

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O03

Building Alias Archive: Multi-Agent Collaboration, Astro Migration, and Static Delivery

A complete account of Alias Archive, from its anonymous content boundary and four-field trilingual model to agent handoffs, Astro migration, Impeccable-led interface refinement, and Cloudflare Pages delivery.

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G09

AI-Assisted Pixel Boss Production: The Stone Giant Pipeline

A production note on moving from incompatible high-resolution concept art to a game-ready pixel boss, including style anchoring, animation constraints, and iteration failures.

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G07

Asset Pipeline: Repacking, Manifests, and Management Tools

Purchasing assets is only the beginning; the real cost of hundreds of packs lies in atlas repacking, manifest generation, and long-term management.

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G06

Balance Tools: Data-Driven Tuning and Assertion Checks

Move values out of the code and into balance.json, tune them through a web console, and use assertions to preserve the underlying logic.

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G05

Night Sail Workflow: Autonomous AI Development Behind Test Gates

A record of an unattended development workflow built from written task briefs, automated tests, adversarial review, and delivery reports.

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G04

World Structure: Hub, Bonfire Return, and Regional Transit

A hub-and-spoke world built around bonfire saves, death returns, regional lamp transit, and the linear pacing of Chapter One.

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G03

Combat Feel Design: Stance Breaks, Executions, and Pacing

How Watchman uses stance, stance breaks, executions, and parry windows to establish the weight of Soulslike combat.

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G02

Single-Weapon System: Forging, Transformations, and Iron-Sword Builds

A single iron sword carries the full game, while forging, transformations, scabbards, and whetstones preserve build depth.

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G01

Project Kickoff: Solo Soulslike Development with AI Collaboration

An overview of Watchman's project direction and the AI-assisted production model used to organize solo development from a director's position.

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O01

AI Music-Video Production: From Still Generation to Editing and Release

An eight-stage AI image workflow covering song approval, still generation, animation, quality review, colour matching, editing, and release.

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M01

Producing a Character Theme with Suno: Prompt Structure and Arrangement Constraints

Starting from character design, this article documents practical constraints for Style prompts, vocals, harmony, dynamics, and song structure.

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R18

Monopoly: one seller, and the wedge it opens

Foundations note — why marginal revenue falls below price, the two-step quantity-then-price optimum, the Lerner markup, and the deadweight loss against the competitive benchmark.

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R17

Perfect competition

Foundations note — the four assumptions, why the firm sets P = MC, the short-run shutdown rule, and how free entry drives long-run profit to zero at the efficient scale.

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R16

Cost curves: what marginal, average, and the long-run envelope encode

Foundations note — the short-run cost family, why marginal cost cuts the average minima, and how the long-run average cost is the envelope of every plant the firm could build.

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R15

The production function

Foundations note — output from inputs, marginal versus average product, why returns diminish in the short run, and what the isoquant's slope encodes.

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R14

Utility maximization: where preferences meet the budget

Foundations note — the consumer's optimum as a tangency, the equal-marginal 'bang per buck' principle, the Lagrange multiplier as the marginal utility of income, and when the tangency fails.

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R13

The budget constraint

Foundations note — the budget line, why its slope is a pure relative price, and the difference between a parallel shift and a pivot.

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R12

Preferences and utility

Foundations note — the axioms that let a preference ordering be written as a utility function, and what the indifference curve and the MRS actually encode.

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R11

Fixed effects: letting each group be its own control

The within estimator sweeps out every time-invariant group confounder at once — a lot of omitted-variable bias for free — at the price of discarding all the between-group variation.

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R10

Instrumental variables: when the regressor is part of the problem

If an explanatory variable is correlated with the error, OLS is inconsistent. An instrument that moves the regressor without touching the error restores identification — under one assumption you can never test.

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R09

Robust standard errors: fixing the inference, not the estimate

The sandwich estimator repairs OLS standard errors under heteroskedasticity while leaving the coefficients untouched — what it does, the HC0–HC3 variants, and when to reach for weighting instead.

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R08

Weighted least squares fixes variance, not endogeneity

Inverse-variance weighting is the right tool for heteroskedasticity and the wrong tool for a biased model. A note on what changing the weights does and does not repair.

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R07

What a local coefficient means

Geographically weighted regression gives you one coefficient per place instead of one for the whole map. What that surface says — and the three ways it can quietly mislead you.

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R06

The LM decision rule: choosing between spatial models

Moran's I tells you spatial dependence exists but not which kind. The Lagrange-multiplier tests — and especially their robust variants — are how you decide between a spatial error and a spatial lag.

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R05

The two workhorse spatial models — and the one that nests them

Spatial error, spatial lag, and the Durbin model that contains both: where the dependence lives, whether there are spillovers, and why the coefficient stops being the marginal effect.

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R04

When the average hides the story: Moran's I and its local map

A global autocorrelation statistic tells you clustering exists; its local decomposition tells you where, and of what kind — along with the traps that make both easy to misread.

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R03

Choosing a spatial weight matrix

Before any spatial test or model, you have to declare who counts as whose neighbour. The W matrix is that declaration — an assumption, not a fact handed over by the data.

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R02

Spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity are not the same problem

Two different ways geography enters a regression — a neighbour effect versus a relationship that refuses to stay constant — and why the distinction dictates the whole modelling chain.

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R01

How proximity gets priced: the hedonic idea

Why a house price is really a bundle of implicit prices, and how a log-linear regression reads the market's marginal valuation of things like access to a school or a station.

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