Where it’s going is the problem. I wrote recently about the moment Day One began offering to summarise my entries and counsel me about their contents. The app had found a voice, and it wasn’t mine. A journal should remind me of the dead ends, the breakthroughs, the summits, the nadirs — in my words, not somebody else’s precis of them. A journal is a sanctum, and I ended that piece with a question: I’ve built one — would you like to see it?

Here it is.

Reverie is a calm place for writing, reflection and, of course, reverie. It’s the first release from Freeholder, a new software label I’ve set up, drawing on decades of development, production and portfolio experience.

Why “Freeholder”?

• Because much of today’s software is rented, not owned.

• Because software is increasingly mediated — by AI, by servers, by terms and conditions.

• Because you should be free to create and hold your own words, without mediation and without the threat of lock-in.

Every Freeholder app will keep to the same promises. No subscription. Your words in plain Markdown files on your own disk, readable by any text editor, in a format that will outlive the software. No account, because there’s nothing to sign into. And no telemetry of any kind — nothing ever phones home, because there is no home to call.

Reverie launches with two features no other journal offers:

Reflect. Reverie opens to Reflect: thoughts and questions drawn from your recent entries, offered back to you to sit with or respond to. Tap one, and you’re in conversation with your past self. Journalling too often feels like hurling your thoughts into the void — Reflect is the continuity that fixes that. Your journal talking back turns out to be an amazing thing, provided the only voice it ever uses is yours. This is done with plain, local code running on your device. No language model, no server, nothing leaves your machine. I’ve nothing against LLMs in their place — but their place is not inside your journal, quietly forwarding your private thoughts to a datacentre in another country.

Replay. Your entry plays back exactly as you typed it: mistakes, corrections, pauses and all. It brings a life to old entries that no journal has offered before. (I can assure you the prevalence of the initial letter “R” in Reverie’s feature set is entirely coincidental.) Everything Replay records is stored locally, alongside your words, and nowhere else.

If you’re coming from Day One, Reverie will import your journal — all fifteen years of it, in my case. Import lives quietly in Settings rather than ambushing you on first open. It will also import whole folders of Markdown, so an Obsidian vault walks straight in. And if you ever leave, you take everything with you. That’s not a feature so much as the point.

A word on sync, because the sharp-eyed will have noticed there’s no server to do it. Reverie doesn’t sync, deliberately. Your journal is a folder of files, and files sync however you choose: iCloud Drive if you’re on Apple hardware (do turn on Advanced Data Protection), Syncthing or similar if you’re not. Your journal moves between your devices without ever passing through mine.

Reverie launches on Mac and Windows, with Linux following soon after. Phone and tablet versions are a priority before v2 — I won’t pretend there’s a date yet, but I know exactly how much a journal lives in your pocket. And v2 itself has two features I’m itching to show you: Horizon, your whole journal laid out as a timeline you can wander through, and Postcards, where each entry quietly grows its own botanical artwork from the words you wrote — and you can watch it bloom during Replay.

The current build is with a cohort of eleven generous souls. Once their feedback is in, Reverie opens for early access at £29, which includes every future version, for every platform. From launch proper it’ll be £39, with major upgrades at £10. That’s the entire business model, and it’s how Reverie stays subscription-free: I answer to the people who bought it, not to a renewal rate.

One more thing. With this post, Dancing Monkeys offers paid subscriptions for the first time. Become an annual patron and you get everything Freeholder makes at no extra cost — and whatever ships during your patronage is yours for good, even if you later move on. No strings, no lapse-and-lose. Patronage is a year’s commitment, which is why the software promise belongs to the annual tier; a monthly subscription gets you the writing alone.

Founding Patrons get the one thing money can’t otherwise buy: their name in the credits of every Freeholder app. Every patron tier is at its founding-window price today — the Founding Patron tier, for one, is £100 now and £120 once Reverie reaches launch proper — and Reverie’s own price will step up the same way. Early believers are rewarded on both sides of the house. If you’d rather simply buy the software, I honour that too. And if you’d rather do neither and keep reading for free, you’re more than welcome here.

To hear when Reverie opens up, ask at freeholder.dev — it’s an email to a person, not a mailing-list form, and it will only ever be used to tell you about Freeholder.

No apologies though, I’ve been building things. One of them is finally ready. The other I hinted at yesterday is called Reverie, and will be out soon.

In September 2021 I started a Twitter thread listing my old game credits, so my family would know the work I’d done. By day two it had become something else — the story of a teenage bedroom coder in early ‘80s Britain, and what happened when the rejections kept coming and my mum told me to just make another game.

A lot of people were kind about that thread. Some called it the greatest ever written. A production company optioned it. And then Twitter, in its decline, destroyed it. The original tweet got deleted, and they refused to restore it. Then the threading got trashed, and insult to injury, I lost access to my DMs, some of which brought tears to my eyes. The record I’d made so the work wouldn’t be forgotten was trashed by the platform that hosted it.

So I’ve restored it properly. Code Is Just: The Compiled Edition — compiled, lightly corrected, with images and footnotes, and the immediacy of the original intact.

If you’re in the UK, get it here.

If you’re in the US, get it here.

It’s available elsewhere too, please search for it and tell others.

£6.99 / $8.99. No DRM, because a book with this title could hardly ship with a lock on it, and as I’ve been saying for years, the only people who see the piracy warning intro on a Blu-ray are the ones who paid for it.

If you’d rather buy direct, it’s the same price at Gumroad, where every penny that doesn’t go to a payment processor comes to me, and you get both the PDF and ePub versions.

Code doesn’t lie.

Code doesn’t cheat.

Code is just.

Except what I actually saw was Donald Sutherland’s character from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers raise his arm, point at me and screech hideously.

Something in me snapped.

What seemed to be the last bastion of probity and decency in the journalling software niche had broken the most sacred of trusts. This was the galvanising moment that shredded my ennui and transformed it into a drive to carve out the space that had been stolen from me.

I want a place for reflection, reverie and review.

I want a sanctum where I can be provoked, amazed, perhaps even ambushed by my past.

I don’t want that place to be summarised or rephrased for me.

I certainly don’t want a digital counsellor in that sanctum pretending to know me, when I don’t even know myself.

I don’t want my journal to talk back to me. I want it to remind me of the dead ends, the breakthroughs, the summits, the nadirs of that person who recorded everything for me to evaluate from the perspective of a higher camp on Mount Metacognition.

Now much is made of metacognition, and I’ve spent a good part of the last two years looking at how my mind works, its traps, its biases, its algorithms — my journal is after all a window into the mind of the man who had less perspective than the man I am now.

My journal serves to remind me that the journey through whatever hell I went through made me stronger, better and more appreciative of the joys that followed. And my God! How many joyful moments my life has been filled with, which would all have been erased by just a single memory of a temporary hell had I not journaled them!

I love technology, and it’s why I’ve used Day One for 15 years. It had earned my trust, but this clumsy excursion into AI, well, I object to it being invited into the one room, my sanctum, that it has no business being in.

Much of the discussion around AI and social media is polarising and therefore, unhelpful. It’s here, it’s part of the fabric of life and likely will be for generations to come.

Look, I know there’s a party going on downstairs. I know it’s going to be loud. I know they’ll be playing music that pounds through our floorboard at 1am, perhaps even 2am. I’ll wear my earplugs. I’ll somehow survive the next day. It’s not good, but I can handle it. What I can’t handle is when the neighbours decide to break down my door and bring the party into my flat. That’s a literal threshold that nobody gets to cross, except that more and more people think this is normal.

City parties are the price of city life, but we’re being led to believe it’s normal to have our personal, private space become a free-for-all to every Tom, Dick or Harry and I say to hell with that.

I don’t think my journal should be your journal.

I don’t even particularly want my journals read by anyone.

Not everything written is meant to be published. I already have a sporadic public life for that purpose.

I know that I don’t have to walk alone, I’m a lifelong Liverpool fan after all, but I do need a place where I can sometimes sit alone.

A sanctum for reverie, for reflection, for review.

So I built that sanctum.

Would you like to see it?

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