The other day I found that my automated job to cross-post to a toy Spring ‘83 board started failing, with the reason being that my last sequences entry was more than 22 days ago. Not good – I’d intended to keep them more up-to-date than that – but I don’t always have anything new to post.

I’ve always like the idea of .plan files, tiny plaintext files that live in a user’s home directory and which would be dumped using the finger command on a target user. Famously, John Carmack published them for more than a decade. Here, in a similar spirit to .plan, introduce “atoms”, tiny multimedia particles that are fast and easy to write. Along with sequence entries, they’re cross-posted to Spring ‘83, and will also live at /atoms.