The Adventure Log

The December Adventure is a low-pressure alternative to yearly programming challenges like Advent of Code. Instead of solving puzzles in tandem with others and racing to be the first, December Adventure just invites you to explore the joy of programming every day in December! It encourages you to share your progress with others and keep track of it in your "adventure log". This is my log, year over year.

2025

The Theme

I'm using this December Adventure to reset my creative impulses, so I'll be exploring things that are both physical and digital.

Ideas:

• Visual notation design for Nova rules and state.
• Tabletop game design with Nova.
• Nova zine illustrated w/ pixel art.
• "Virtual Console" w/ Quasar and PyGame/SDL/etc.
• Tote-like IDE for Nova.
• Explore Typst, LaTeX and other typesetting systems.
• New syntax(es) for Nova.
• Low-fidelity art, text art.

Day 1

Couldn't do a whole lot today, as I spent it in a doctor's office.

Things I did:

• Got this page up, that's a start!
• Ripped out the parser from Serpens for use in compiling to Quasar VM instructions.
• Got symbol interning working for the Nova -> Quasar compilation.
• Doodled some Nova visualizations.

Day 2

Lots of running around today. But I had time to have fun! I spent the final portion of the day stress-testing my diskless Alpine Linux setup.

I managed to get it booting across 3 different devices:

• A re-purposed Framework motherboard.
• A Steam Deck.
• My laptop.

It's very nice being able to transfer the soul of my machine to another shell.

I wrote a small solution to Day 1 of Advent of Code in Nova. Though, I can't verify that it works for the full input (there were no authentication mechanisms available for me), and I left off the parsing because I didn't have the time. It was a cool exercise!

Things I did:

• Solved Day 1 of Advent of Code in Nova.
• Stress-tested booting my diskless Alpine setup across three devices.
• Wrote a bit of Nova to explain some core "idioms".

Day 3

Not much to report today. The past two days have exahusted me. Still kickin'.

I did add an idea that I'd like to follow up on: my Alpine Linux configuration is pretty.. lazy right now. I'm just mirroring my /home directory every time I do lbu commit, which means I boot into the exact same system no matter what machine I'm on.

Ideally, I'd have the following options:

• Load a configuration from a removable device.
• Load a configuration from the network.
• Boot into a sane default.

This way, I could use the same boot key to load up multiple different kinds of machines. If I just need a temporary workstation with network mounted storage, I could do that. If I needed a media PC, load the right config. If I needed a quiet writing environment, it's just another config.

I might not get to it this month, but it'd be cool to do it sometime in the future. Go Alpine!

Day 4

Had a lovely conversation with someone I'd call a mentor today. Got me thinking about my relationship with.. a lot of elements of my life, work included. Some passive trauma processing occurred. Overall, good day!

Things I did today:

• Modeled an example Alloy/TLA+ problem in Nova.
• Started visualizing Nova rules using Graphviz.
• Half-finished a linear time search algorithm for Nova using 3 stacks.

The last part was a shower thought that evolved into an interesting idea. Linear search in Nova is, worst case, 1.5 times the number of items you have in a collection. I'd like to get that down to.. actually linear time. ;)

Day 5 - 21

I had to stop at this point because life got hectic in the ways that life tends to. Some medical news hit my close family and I didn't have the time for computer whimisy.

Day 22

Today I got a bit of a breath. This month has been filled with hazards. But I'm hoping it slows for the holidays.

Spent a bit of time working with Taenite, a Nova interpreter/assembler/compiler by Sierra that also supports inline C code. I managed to open a window!

Day 23

Took a crack at writing the "simplest possible" Nova interpreter (until I think of something simpler), which threads parsing and interpreting together. Need to do a writeup on this later.

Day 24 - 26

Relaxing with family.