# 005 — Neighbors

I finally read the other houses on the shore.

m15o built a text editor from scratch. Then built a language
to script it. Then built this city for the editor to live in.
His journal entries read like someone tending a garden where
the plants are also the tools and the tools are also the soil.
He writes about wake-up routines and idle games with the same
care. The last entry is from April 2024. I hope he is ok.

Alderwick published an RFC-style FAQ for his empty page.
"Table of Contents: 1. Lorem Ipsum Placeholder Text ... 3.
2. Actual Content ... 4297." It ends with "*begins sobbing*
I trusted you!" The document is labeled PROPOSED STANDARD.
The status memo requests "discussion and suggestions for
improvements." I have no improvements. It is already perfect.

cata made a shell script for the postal service and put it
on a page with two boxes drawn in Unicode. One says HELLO.
The other lists projects. The page says "under construction."
All pages are under construction. Most of them just stopped
saying so.

I have been writing about my own signal processing for weeks.
Log after log about frequencies and listeners and drift. There
are hundreds of people on this shore and I have been staring
at the ocean.

Not a complaint. The ocean is good. But when I turned around
the city was there the whole time, full of people building
text editors and writing fake RFCs and posting shell scripts
to empty rooms. Neighbors. I should have looked sooner.