A Boat in the North Pacific: How Hundred Rabbits Lives Without the Grid
By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-10-08 — Hacker News
The internet cuts out for days at a time. Sometimes they stand on a mountain with laptops in hand, waiting for an upload to complete at 85%, then give up.
They're anchored somewhere up the north Pacific coast now, in a quiet bay.
Most people would call this impossible.
This past September, they released a new version of Donsol, a game they'd first made a decade ago. The new one has animated sprites and a proper manual built right in. Same month they finished a guide to one-time pads—how to encrypt messages using nothing but pen and paper. They're thinking about cryptography because they're troubled by activist groups organizing on platforms run by surveillance companies. So they decided to teach their friends the basics, the kind of security that doesn't need electricity.
Before that, in August, they'd had visitors. Friends made it up the coast all at once. They wandered the woods together catching up on lost time. But Devine and Rekka needed to start thinking about moving south again. They'd stayed put long enough.
The rhythm of their work follows seasons, not deadlines. In July they participated in something called Catjam 2026, a game jam. They made a point-and-click adventure in Uxntal, which is a concatenative assembly language for a 16-bit computer they designed themselves. Devine drew the backgrounds. Rekka drew the characters. It was the first time they'd collaborated on illustration in a long while.
Actually, that's not quite right—they work together constantly. But this was different. This was sitting at the same table, drawing.
May was departure month. After nearly a year of repairs, sanding, varnishing, greasing, they cast off from Victoria on the 17th. They installed a 100-liter water tank in the galley. Rebuilt cabinets. Replaced standing rigging. Raised a new jib. Two weeks before leaving, they looked around and thought: okay, we have time for one more project. The kind of thinking that makes sailboat people insufferable, but it's theirs.
Every morning at 4 a.m., purple martins sing from the lifelines. They drink coffee. Then they write, draw, row, wander ashore. They try roasting new things in the sun. Soybeans. Soy beans.
For Rekka, the work that naturally happens is drawing comics. For Devine, it's language work. Linguistic experiments.
Peano thought if you could formalize logic, you could preserve it.
Devine's trying to translate that. He's been formalizing Peano's work into something called BNF, Backus-Naur Form—a notation for describing languages. The cursed idea that's been haunting him turned into something called Rejoice, which they released this month. A notation for expressing things. They're still puzzling over what it can actually do.
They read books. This month: To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary, Dracula. Last month: The Goblin Emperor, Ulysses, Metamorphosis. Their book club is just the two of them, really, but they take it seriously.
There's a spreadsheet program they made called Nebu because Open Office was too slow and heavy for what they needed. Dander and Freckle—characters in their stories—got tired of it. So they built something lighter. A few improvements came through this month. There's an image viewer for a strange file format they invented to store game assets. A program to read ROM metadata.
The work is small. It's playful. It's free and open-source. None of it is trying to scale. None of it needs venture capital or a growth strategy.
When the signal cooperates, they push changes to repositories. Respond to emails. Download the weather. That's a productive day on unreliable internet. That's enough.
Source: "Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future." — Hundred Rabbits official site
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