michiglyph Static

1 · The grid is made of boxes

Every STATIC mark is made of boxes. The 3×3 grid is the numpad: 7 8 9 on top, 4 5 6 in the middle, 1 2 3 at the bottom. Press a key and its box fills. A Tolu is the set of filled boxes, not the order you pressed them, so there are exactly 512 Tolus.

A filled box is a solid square. The gridlines are the same colour as the boxes, so a filled box blends into its lines. Four states follow from that:

Press the boxes, or use the numpad keys 1-9 while the pad is focused. Backspace clears.

2 · STATIC 4, the four-box input

STATIC 4 is a 2×2 square of boxes. Four boxes make 16 marks. Each mark is one character and exactly one hex digit, a Tolth, so a byte is two Tolths: the high half first, then the low half. John: "that is what I will use for compression."

Read the bottom row first, left to right, and count up like the numpad: bottom-left 1, bottom-right 2, top-left 4, top-right 8. The boxes sit on the numpad keys 1 2 (bottom) and 4 5 (top), the bottom-left corner of the 3×3 pad. So “S”, byte 0x53, is mark 5 (4 + 1, the left column) then mark 3 (1 + 2, the bottom row). John, 2026-09-22.

One key at a time (the default): press boxes to fill them, then commit. A bare commit writes EMPTY. Chord: hold the boxes together and release to commit.

3 · The letters (Tier 0)

Each letter is a set of boxes, drawn in a stroke order. John drew the first one himself: a = 628. A numeral 1-9 is its own box, a one-character digit: a Tolth. A space folds into the Tolu before it, drawn as a bar under it (SPARK v2). Anything outside the alphabet, like capitals, 0, full stops and other scripts, goes on the byte plane, drawn in amber.

The letters tier is a cipher: readable, and about 9-10 bits a character against UTF-8's 8. The source is the 26 letters and 11 marks of PASSPORT.html (2026-08-28) and the SPARK v2 numerals. Since 2026-08-29 the full box is the seal, so the full stop is written on the byte plane.

4 · Box count is the band

Count the boxes before you read the Tolu. The number of filled boxes tells you what kind of word it is, the way a radical does in Chinese. Five boxes is a concrete noun. Seven is John's own working vocabulary. The one exception is the brand glyph: 2486, the plus, is "static" and the Static Systems logo.

5 · The meaning tier (Tier 1)

One Tolu is one whole word, and the same Tolu reads in English, Chinese and Spanish. There are 491 concepts on disk (semantic-layer.json, 2026-08-29). Type a sentence and read it back in three languages:

This is the short form: function words are dropped, and words outside the 491 are spelled between two escapes (the full box). The meaning survives but the exact wording does not, so the Convert page also has an exact form. 245 of the concepts still carry English as a stand-in for Chinese and Spanish (i18n_pending in the source).

6 · The byte plane: any file at all

Every byte 0-255 has a Tolu. Byte b fills the boxes of its bits in reading order: 7 = 1, 8 = 2, 9 = 4, 4 = 8, 5 = 16, 6 = 32, 1 = 64, 2 = 128. Box 3 is never used. A ring bit says "this is a byte, not a word", and here it is drawn in amber. This is what makes STATIC lossless for any file (byte-plane.json, verified one to one).

7 · STATIC as sound

A STATIC 4 Tolth is one hex digit, so it maps to one of 16 tones. Played one at a time they are tones. Played two at once, both Tolths of a byte sound together as a chord: the low bank carries the high Tolth and the high bank the low Tolth. That follows John's input 471, "2-bit audio written in chords". Every transfer carries Reed-Solomon error correction and a CRC, so a decode is exact or it says it failed.

Practice