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News Archive

Everything that was ever announced on the home page, newest first: tools, games, releases and articles. The three newest items also stay on the home page.

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October 4, 2026

New Tool: Bowie Lyrics Cutter - Cut-Up Lyrics on a Workbench

A new tool in the box: the Bowie Lyrics Cutter. It does what David Bowie did on a hotel floor in 1974: cut text into strips, shuffle them and glue a lyric together from the pieces. Poems from the public domain, your own notes or a PDF, all cut up in your browser. Free, no account.

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.

October 3, 2026

New Game: 2048 Override - Fuse Signals, Overload the AI

Game number five: 2048 Override. It is the year 2048, the AI NEXUS-9 owns every network, and you fight it from a hacked CRT terminal with the rules of 2048: slide data signals, fuse equal ones, build a 2048-bit pulse and take the local core down. Free, no account, with a worldwide hall of fame.

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).

October 2, 2026

New Game: Patch Bay - Stack Synth Modules Into a Eurorack Case

There is a fourth game in the arcade: Patch Bay. The classic seven falling shapes, except here you are a sound engineer whose runaway master clock keeps shipping synth modules into a Eurorack case. Mount them, close signal paths, and keep the magic smoke inside. Free, no account, with a worldwide hall of fame.

The rules are the ones Alexey Pajitnov wrote down in 1984: ten columns, twenty rows, seven shapes. Here the well is a Eurorack skiff with brushed aluminium, wooden cheeks and rails with screw holes, and the seven shapes are modules: a MULT, a quad VCA, an envelope, a VCO, a ladder filter, a clock divider and a wavefolder, each with its own panel, knob, jack and blinking LED. Every module you mount gets patched to its neighbours with a cable, so a full case turns into cable spaghetti. Your score is Total Voltage in millivolts, the speed is the master clock in BPM, there is a Buffer to park a module and a Pending Shipments queue of the next three.

The sound is effects only, so your own records can keep playing: each module type answers a landing with its own click, sweep or wobble, a drone thickens as the case fills, a voltage pulse runs through a closed row, a Master Patch of four rows triggers a strobe and a bass drop, and when the rack overflows you get a short circuit, a feedback squeal and a cloud of magic smoke. Voltage adds up across games and unlocks the Rack Customizer: black anodised, brass or neon cases, neon or braided cables, and soundbanks that route the row clears through the 808 samples of this site's drum machine, an acid 303 or West Coast FM blips. Plus three achievements for the real patchers.

Play it here: Patch Bay. The code is based on Jake Gordon's open-source JavaScript Tetris (MIT licence).

August 26, 2026

New Release: Lloyd Stellar - Corporate Electro EP

My new EP Corporate Electro is out now on Bandcamp. Six tracks, a little over 31 minutes, and it is free. Pay what you want if you want to, or take it for nothing.

The artwork is a magazine advert that never existed. A man in a suit sits in a convertible with a car phone the size of a brick against his ear, and the offer next to him is $125.00 including a free suit and telephone. The small print warns that good looking hair and the convertible are not included, and that the deal runs until December 21, 1989. Call 555 and the rest of the number if you want to try.

The track titles are in the same mood: Do You Like Me Now?, Destroy Data Centers, Cherry Vanilla, Ban The Algorithm, Slingshot and Ruinerwold. Six tracks of electro, self released, no label involved this time.

You can play the whole thing below or head to Bandcamp to download it in whatever format you prefer. Following me there is the easiest way to hear about the next one.

Official Bandcamp transmission - free to stream, pay what you want to download
August 2, 2026

New Article: I Gave the Voynich Manuscript a Lie Detector Test

After decades of fascination with the world's most mysterious book, I finally put the Voynich manuscript through a full statistical interrogation: entropy tests, word correlation curves, and a ghost writer program that produces convincing Voynichese. The strangest finding: inside the words the text has the texture of a real language, syllable by syllable, while between the words it carries almost no information at all.

The Voynich manuscript is a 600-year-old book written in an alphabet that exists nowhere else, full of plants no botanist can identify. The best codebreakers of the twentieth century failed to crack it. Instead of trying to translate it, I measured it, comparing its statistical fingerprint against Latin, Middle English, Hebrew, Arabic and medieval Italian.

The short version: the words refuse to talk to each other the way words in every real language do, the text echoes what was visible on the page while it was written, and the building blocks are syllable-sized and lean Romance without matching any language I could test. There is also one kind of cipher that survives all of it, and I explain in the article why my own strongest result is no argument against it. The long version, with manuscript images, the charts and the technical paper, is in the full article.

Read the whole investigation here: The Book Nobody Can Read.

June 19, 2026

New Album: Warriors of Kagh - Music for Liminal Spaces

Music for Liminal Spaces is the new eight-track album from Warriors of Kagh, the ambient and soundscape side project of Dutch electronic producer Erik Griffioen, known for his work as Lloyd Stellar. The album is out now and you can listen to it and download it for free on Bandcamp.

The album functions as a musical backdrop to liminal spaces, those transitional, solitary places that feel frozen between the past and the present. The release offers eight instrumental pieces that sit at the intersection of dark ambient and liminal music.

The album explores the unsettling nostalgia of environments that now exist only within our memory. It is an exploration of isolation and the persistence of things left behind.

Released June 19, 2026, with production by Erik Griffioen. Besides Bandcamp, the album is also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music and other major streaming platforms.

Official Bandcamp transmission - free to stream and download
June 10, 2026

New Release: Lloyd Stellar: More Lasers - A Free VST3 Laser & Zap Generator for Windows

Say hello to Lloyd Stellar: More Lasers, a new free VST3 plugin built for one thing: making electro lasers and zaps. It is a sound generator with a pitch sweep at its core, a resonant comb filter that can overdrive, and built-in chorus, delay and reverb.

The generator section handles the pitch sweep, curve and timing that give a laser its character, with a sub oscillator and output drive for extra weight and grit. From there the sound runs through a resonant comb filter with damping and key tracking that can be pushed into harsh, metallic overdrive, followed by a low-pass filter with resonance.

The effects panel adds a chorus, a bucket-brigade style delay with tempo sync and wow, and a space reverb with a metallic character control. Together they take a simple zap and turn it into something that cuts through a mix.

More Lasers is available for Windows only. I build and test everything on Windows and do not own any Apple hardware, so there is no macOS version for now. Head over to the More Lasers page to download it for free and read the full feature list.

October 31, 2025

New Release: Lloyd's Online Commodore 64 - A Nostalgic Journey Through Retro Computing

We're thrilled to announce the launch of Lloyd's Online Commodore 64, a fully functional emulation of the legendary Commodore 64 computer with a curated selection of music programs and music-related software.

This new addition to Lloyd Stellar's Homepage features an authentic C64 experience with a variety of music programs including SID-Wizard, The Music Shop, and Music Machine. Each program comes with keyboard reference guides located at the bottom of the page, ensuring you know exactly how to control these classic music production tools.

Beyond music software, the platform showcases C64 games created by Legowelt (Danny Wolfers) and a collection of C64 demos featuring music. All programs can be easily selected through the dropdown menu on the site, making it simple to explore the rich history of Commodore 64 software.

The Commodore 64 holds a special place in my heart. It was my first home computer that my father bought when I was about 6 years old. This computer brings back wonderful nostalgic feelings that I'm excited to share with all of you. Whether you're rediscovering the C64 or experiencing it for the first time, Lloyd's Online Commodore 64 offers a perfect blend of retro computing nostalgia and musical creativity.