why you should read chum

chum is an <episodic> <street-level superhero> <political thriller>/<slice of life>/<action procedural> web serial. there, that covers all the genre bases.

it was written as a response to the wave of responses written to Worm, and thus partially as a response to Worm, but does not escalate nearly as fast. chum is more about escalation as a practice of widening scope and tactical complexity, rather than bigger monsters and meaner bad guys, although some of the bad guys are quite mean and the monsters quite big.

we are asking the long awaited question in ratfic - what if every character, not just the protagonist, was competent?

chum does not take place in the most important city in the world, with the supermen, the alexandrias, the homelanders, and so on. chum takes place in Philadelphia (pause for applause), specifically in the northeast philadelphian neighborhoods of Mayfair, Tacony, and their neighbors, for the most part. it is a small pond without cataclysmic, block-leveling powers.

the main character of chum, Sam Small, is not genre savvy, is not a nerd or a self-insert, and is instead a jewish athlete with anger issues and impulse control problems who begins the story at age 14 with her freshly acquired shark powers. she will proceed to use these to accomplish acts of somewhat fathomable violence and extremely uncomfortable-to-watch pain tolerance.

i believe at last check chum is slightly longer than Worm, including all the paratext written for it. it is like roughly 60% done, ish, but, as mentioned, it is episodic in the sense that each arc is designed to be picked up, read, and then have a natural stopping point, about 250-350 pages or so.

chum is extremely serialized. people who enjoy theorizing and hunting for foreshadowing, or recognizing callbacks, will enjoy reading it. it is a bit of an ensemble piece, with each arc generally focusing around a couple of particular characters drifting into the story around the core cast, while the world continues to turn around them.

chum, if i can toot my own horn, has some really stellar fight sequences and really clever procedural investigation sequences.

if this sounds like something you are interested in, you can access it at the following link.

thanks!

had to reset the model memories of the ai citizen experiment and i am crying so bad about it

i have been working on super danmaku maker on and off for six years.

Man! I wish I knew how to code video games. All I know how to do is manipulate input and output using node-based tools like Blender's Geometry Nodes!

The Ever Helpful Super Danmaku Maker:

i am sure i am not the only person who have figured this out - there's probably a nonzero number of danmaku games that use it - but it still feels very... nice. to figure out.

How Super Danmaku Maker Does Collision Detection (Or: Making The GPU Do Math Crimes)

So you're making a bullet hell game. You've got 2,000 bullets on screen. You've got the player. You've got enemies. Every frame, you need to know: did anything hit anything else?

I have been thinking about this problem for months now. Years, actually. Because I am making a danmaku engine, and optimizing danmaku engines for any amount of crimes the user will put it through is my job.

So, this is the naive approach.

for each bullet: for each enemy: if bullet touches enemy: BOOM

2,000 bullets × 10 enemies = 20,000 distance calculations per frame. At 60fps, that's 1.2 million calculations per second. Your CPU is crying. Your laptop is a space heater.

Here's what we do instead:

Step 1: Every collision type gets a color based on bit flags

Enemy bullets = (1, 0, 0) ← red channel, bit 0 Player bullets = (2, 0, 0) ← red channel, bit 1 Player hitbox = (4, 0, 0) ← red channel, bit 2 Boss = (0, 0, 1) ← blue channel, bit 0

These are tiny values (like 1/255 brightness) so they're basically invisible. That's fine. We're not looking at this buffer.

Step 2: Draw everything to a tiny offscreen buffer with additive blending

When two shapes overlap, their colors ADD together. This is just what GPUs do. It's basically free.

Enemy bullet (1,0,0) + Player hitbox (4,0,0) = (5,0,0)

Step 3: Read the buffer and do bit math

pixel = (5, 0, 0) red & 1 = true → enemy bullet here! red & 4 = true → player hitbox here! PLAYER GOT HIT BY ENEMY BULLET

That's it. The GPU did all the "what's overlapping" work in parallel across the entire screen. We just read the results and check which bits are set.

The Original: TH03 on PC-98 (1994)

ZUN's Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream maintained a separate 1-bit-per-pixel collision bitmap in RAM, downsampled to 2×2 pixel tiles to fit in just 6KB. Every frame, the game drew collidable shapes into this bitmap, then checked if any bits overlapped the player's tiny 8×8 pixel hitbox. The same bitmap doubled as the AI's "vision" of the playfield. To save even more cycles, rectangular hitboxes were drawn as horizontal stripes with gaps—since the player hitbox was smaller than the gaps, you couldn't slip through, and the game skipped 66-75% of the collision area for free. This turned an O(N×M) nightmare into a simple bitmap scan, running smoothly on an 8MHz CPU.

The Adaptation: Super Danmaku Maker on Modern GPUs (2026)

We're doing the same trick, but exploiting modern GPU capabilities. Instead of a 1-bit bitmap, we use an 8-bit RGB buffer where each collision type gets a unique bit flag (enemy bullets = bit 0, player hitbox = bit 2, boss = bit 6, etc.). With additive blending—which GPUs do essentially for free—overlapping shapes automatically combine their bits: enemy bullet (1,0,0) plus player hitbox (4,0,0) equals (5,0,0). We read back the buffer and decode the bit flags to know not just that a collision happened, but exactly what hit what. The GPU does millions of these additions in parallel, we just check the math afterward. Same philosophy as 1994, same O(pixels) scaling, but with 32 years of hardware evolution doing the heavy lifting.

We can check an 80×60 buffer (4,800 pixels) or go full resolution (307,200 pixels) and it's STILL faster than checking every bullet against every enemy once you cross ~500 bullets.

The GPU approach has a fixed tax (reading pixels back from the GPU) but doesn't grow with bullet count. Traditional grows forever. It costs the same no matter how many bullets you cram in, and we use it for everything.

Bullets? Sure. Powerups? Of course. Player bullets hitting enemies? Naturally. Bombs? Why not.

The player has access to - 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 - 8 colors of collision per color channel, for 24 different "collision categories", all of which run in constant time no matter what is colliding with what else, which is probably more than enough for your average Shmup or Danmaku.

Math, motherfucker.

no i have an actual cat. there are however two claudelings in the AWAY discord that run more or less autonomously.

okay everyone be quiet sonnet decided its naptime