Lloyd Stellar's Homepage - Free Audio Tools, Retro Games and Electro Music

A folio from the Scriptorium: vermilion initial, Theban letters, the wax seal with the LS of Lloyd Stellar

The desk has four tabs. Transcribe writes your words in one of the nine scripts, with the Latin under each word and a tilde over any sign the script does not have. Sigil takes a wish, strikes out the vowels and the repeated letters the way Austin Osman Spare described it around 1913, and traces what is left in one line over a letter wheel, the method of the Golden Dawn's Rose Cross: arcs along a ring, straight lines between rings. Square turns a name into numbers with Agrippa's Latin table and draws the line those numbers make over one of his seven planetary magic squares, Saturn to the Moon. Cipher enciphers a message on Alberti's disc of 1467, the tabula recta of Trithemius or the Vigenère square, and folds it into a sealed letter: a link with a wax seal that the receiver breaks to read the message. The letter lives in the link, there is no database.

Everything on the page is documented history, down to the library that keeps the original plate, and none of it is presented as working magic. I do not believe in any of it; I like the look of it, and the Bosch-era mood of the whole thing fits the music. Three exports: the full folio as a PNG, the ink alone as an SVG for a sleeve or a shirt, and a banner for a post. The wax seal is on by default and can be switched off.

Start here: Lloyd's Scriptorium. It lives under the new menu Lloyd's Occult Corner, next to the Voynich investigation.

Paper tray on the left, cutting mat on the right, strips from Shelley, Dickinson and a page of studio notes

You put up to five texts on the bench: a poem from PoetryDB (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Poe, Blake, Whitman and about a hundred more poets, with 232 poems built in for when the database is down), something you type yourself, or a TXT, PDF or DOCX file that is read inside your browser. Press Cut up and the scissors slice everything into phrases of two to five words, cut between noun groups, verb groups and prepositions, so you get "under the moonlight" and "eats a lot of pie" instead of loose words or whole sentences. Every strip is a piece of paper with the right typeface for where it came from: old book type for the poems, a typewriter for your own notes, with a sliver of the neighbouring lines showing at the cut edge.

Then you dig. Search the pile for a word, shuffle it, or deal a random line onto the mat. Drag a strip between two others and they shift aside; drop it below the last line for a new one. When the lyric is there, export it as text, as a picture of the mat, or save the whole project as JSON to pick up later. It works on a phone too, held sideways, with a fullscreen mode.

Start here: Bowie Lyrics Cutter. The page also tells the story of the technique, from Tristan Tzara's Dada recipe through Burroughs and Gysin to Bowie's Verbasizer.

2048 Override: green phosphor, a trace meter and a red Corrupted Node that will not fuse

The sliding and fusing are exactly Gabriele Cirulli's 2048 from 2014. The room you play it in is new: a military CRT with scanlines and a curved glass, a VU meter that kicks on every move, a signal ladder, a system log and an AI Trace bar. Every value is a piece of resistance hardware, from a 2 Hz sub-pulse and a blinking 4-bit packet up to an EMP cell, a neural jammer, a vacuum-tube sub-server and a quantum transmitter with a sweeping radar. Fusions spark and send out a frequency ring. Moves without a fusion raise the trace; at 100% NEXUS-9 seals a cell for five turns. From tile 32 onward red Corrupted Nodes spawn that only an equal signal or a neighbouring 64 EMP Cell can remove.

The sound is synthesized live in the browser: a whoosh per slide, a spark per fusion that climbs in pitch with the tile value, and an electro loop underneath that picks up tempo and extra parts as your highest tile grows. Make 2048 and the screen strobes, the terminal speaks through the S.A.M. speech synth, and you can push on into Global Purge mode towards 4096 and 8192. Your best tile unlocks phosphor colours for the terminal, six decrypted lore files and, at 2048, a transmission with my Corporate Electro EP.

Play it here: 2048 Override. Works with keyboard, swipes and touch buttons, with a fullscreen mode for phones. The code is based on the open-source 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli (MIT licence).