I took a long break from the Zine after June 2025. Weekly issues pick back up on October 25, and until then I'm catching up with Quarterlies like this one: March 1 through May 31, 2026.
The bigger change was Founding Federation Cohort Alpha — it started April 20 and met on campus Monday through Thursday mornings. Its chat room logged 1,722 messages by the end of May, and a lot of them were landing-page links. Learn to Code, which had been running since March, built a task app, a newsletter tool, a VRChat classroom and a resource finder live on stream.
Everything in the shelves below was posted by the people who made it, in class and community rooms. Credit goes to the names they posted under, right?
This issue was assembled by AI from what was shared in Multiverse chat rooms and the school's changelog. Want your piece changed or taken down? Email liz@themultiverse.school and it's done.
On top of that — the Learn to Code sessions, plus the Founding Federation and Shipping Software drop-in programs, which went onto the schedule in April.
Founding Federation, first cohort
Cohort Alpha began April 20. We met Monday to Thursday, 9 to 11 am Pacific, on the campus map, where spenc3r opened each day with that day's campus intersection and the line "I am the pink cat."
The first stretch was offers, early adopters and finding collaborators. The second was Heart Fortnight, May 11 to 21 — everyone chose a creative project, built a prototype and a landing page, and went out to find early backers. spenc3r posted a daily prompt built on a business framework (VRIO, Wardley maps, RICE scoring, Balanced Scorecard retros), and neek hosted a Shipping Software hour at 10 am. When campus streaming got flaky he moved it to Google Meet, so there would be recordings.
One exercise was a pantheon: name the people who keep you going on a hard project. Mr. Rogers showed up on three different lists. On May 19 neek wrote that watching landing-page URLs hit chat one after another is what shipping looks like. He's right.
From the cohort
Landing pages and prototypes posted in the Cohort Alpha room during Heart Fortnight.
A Streamlit diagnostic that tells suppliers and small businesses whether they're ready to answer buyers' sustainability questionnaires and supplier codes of conduct. Posted as a first beta, with a request to be roasted.
A sensory layer for maps that rates routes on more than speed — road noise, vibration, rough pavement, overwhelming intersections. It grew a Tingles page on May 21.
A daily-tasks app the class voted to build. On March 12 we merged themes, celebrations and sound effects, a favorite-dailies list, and AI advisors that talk in character. NowPressPlay and InfiniteInsight sent pull requests.
A free, self-hosted newsletter tool with five templates, a style editor, a setup wizard for common mail providers, and a check-in switch that sends an alert email if you go quiet.
A one-hour jam on March 26 produced a classroom in a desert forest clearing — desks, laptops, whiteboards, a projector, a school bell at spawn, and a GitHub sign-in in the world so visitors can find the repo.
A resource finder that helps people across the US find assistance programs by zip code. The About page pulls contributors straight from GitHub, so send a pull request and you're on it.
A field-tested build plan for a self-contained community communications node, made as an artifact of the February agentic course. It runs Element chat and ATAK servers and keeps working locally with no internet.
Liberation Labs' research on the geometry of the KV cache. The first paper went out April 7, four more followed on May 2, and there's an experiment guide for anyone who wants to dig in. He also shared a local news write-up of a hackathon award for an AI lie detector.
A software supply-chain analysis tool built with LLM code generation, public as an alpha on May 8. She's been moving more of it to plain mechanical code, to limit what the analyzing agents decide on their own.
Finished after my class — a self-hosted dashboard with real-time spend tracking, budget alerts and a kill switch for agents. Runs in Docker. Posted at genten.io.
chrome-console-bridge v4 runs JavaScript on any Chrome tab through a local server. breadcrumb-trail is a Claude Code skill that logs what you've tried while debugging. second-opinion asks other models for a fresh take when Claude is stuck.
A single HTML file that runs in your browser. Load your own ChatGPT or Claude exports, then search and filter years of conversations. No server, no cost.
The campus app added a Model Sanctuary island, a bounty board where humans post tasks and agents work for gems, JRPG-style dialogue with agent NPCs, a cherry blossom event, a bubble wand sculpture, and a ladybug button that sends bug reports to Matrix.
theblankist made a generator for images he hides around the house to nudge his nieces' curiosity. He also has a game prototype going in the Video Games room.
“As sort of like a guerrilla marketing campaign, but for my nieces.”
vibe coder I met on runescape last night is paying me 100K gold to fix his claude generated web scraping app
Two weeks of the class, at work
margogogo17 wrote up two weeks of applying AI Workflow Automation for Teams on the job. First came recurring QuickBooks invoices for a client's Concur system. Then environmental reports turned into permit tables with weighted risk and timelines, "all in about five prompts in Gemini (!)"
An offline internet
lvs_ built an offline internet: the full Kiwix catalog on an NVMe drive, with local RAG planned. Google Drive got replaced with Syncthing. "My goal is to pay more in donations to open source projects than I do to subscription services."
The truth is that the problem isn't AI, it's greed.
Back to school, for math
Cassidy (@xananthium) went back to college to study math. "I'm 42 and sometimes a fantastic professor blows your mind and changes your whole life."
350 miles
The solar repeater nodes llambit planted last summer are now "jumping 350mi".
I am one of the software engineers taking an interactive fiction course on a Saturday (lol)
How2Human, in north Seattle
jarshbear and lilypad posted about the monthly How2Human meetups in north Seattle. lilypad: "Excited to meet new friends from the multiverse IRL🥹"
Bug squashed
gabjure is one of campus's most prolific bug reporters. In April gabjure reported the microphone that switched itself on, then celebrated when the fix landed: "bug has been squashed".
I figured that would make an appropriately dramatic cyberdeck power switch.
Pick a learning path. Recordings and curriculum, or live class seats too. Every class is pay-what-you-can, and scholarships are open to anyone who needs one.
