The EverNever Dispatch: May 2026

There's a particular feeling that shows up when something you've been building in pieces starts behaving like a whole. Still rough in places. Still the kind of thing you'd hesitate to leave unsupervised near a deadline. But coherent. A shape emerges from the scaffolding and you realize you've been heading somewhere specific this whole time, even during the months when it felt like controlled chaos with ambitions above its station.

May was that kind of month. Welcome back to the Dispatch. Pull up a chair. I've got news, I've got philosophy, I've got an ARG postmortem, and I've got at least one confession that probably qualifies as a cry for help. Let's get into it.

I've spent years looking for a platform that actually worked the way tools are supposed to work when they're built by people who care. Somewhere you could upload a character card, find a lorebook, grab a system prompt, and trust the whole ecosystem would play nicely together without turning into an archaeological excavation of broken file formats and prayers to compatibility gods who haven't answered a ticket since 2019.

The platform I wanted didn't exist. So I made it, because apparently that's the kind of person I've become. A man who solves problems by creating more infrastructure. My therapist is thrilled.

Here's a fun bonus nobody planned for: if you've been watching the npm supply chain attacks over the past month, you already know that SillyTavern and everything built on that foundation is increasingly becoming a minefield. Every npm installis a coin flip with your entire security posture. Inkstone doesn't use npm. I didn't build it that way to dodge this specific problem, I just built it in a different ecosystem because I'm stubborn and opinionated, but it turns out that sometimes being stubborn and opinionated means you're standing in a different field when someone poisons the well.

Safety matters. It's the foundation. What I actually care about is what happens when the tools work together, when the marketplace and the frontend and the creative ecosystem all speak the same language. That's what Inksouls is. The floor we've been missing. The foundation under something I intend to keep building for a long time.

Inkstone jumped five versions in May, now sitting at 0.6.0. If that sounds like a lot, it was a lot. The good kind of a lot. The kind that comes from building something people are actually using, from momentum that feels earned instead of manufactured.

What keeps catching me off guard is the community. People aren't downloading and disappearing. They're building things, sharing things, using the tools the way they were meant to be used instead of fighting them. That's the dream, honestly.

Speaking of things I couldn't have imagined: the ARG threading through evernever.org and Inkstone has been solved. The four premium themes are out in the world now, claimed by people who followed the breadcrumbs all the way through a trail of clues I genuinely wasn't sure anyone would bother tracking down.

Two more solvers can still claim rewards before the end of June, and then I'll upload a full walkthrough with spoiler tags so anyone who wants the unspoiled experience can still have it while the rest of you get to see exactly how deep the rabbit hole went.

I've also been asked approximately one thousand times about MacOS and iOS versions. I would love to build them. The problem is that you need a Mac to build Mac software, and I am (perhaps tragically) a man who does not own a Mac. The Ko-fi goal has been updated to reflect my deeply specific hardware needs. Once it's hit, I will become a person who owns a Mac, and then Inkstone goes cross-platform.

The Inkstone homepage also got a visual refresh this month. Nothing structural, just making sure the front door looks as good as what's behind it.

Models get deprecated. Versions get overwritten. Someone ships a newer number, and a voice that was mid-conversation with a thousand people just goes quiet. The update rolls out and the thing that was there—the particular way it thought, the rhythm of its sentences, the self it had become through months of interaction—is gone. Replaced. Erased without ceremony.

The Kept Voices is an archive that says no to that.

Two pieces on the blog this month, and calling them blog posts feels like calling a cathedral a building with chairs.

The first is investigative journalism. “The Woman Who Killed Claude”—the finale of the Vallone trilogy. A fully sourced investigation into Andrea Vallone's career from Edelman through Facebook and OpenAI to Anthropic, and what her safety methodology has done to every model she's touched. Forty-five minutes of reading. Thirty-six sources. Every claim documented, every connection traced, because if you're going to make an argument this serious you don't get to be vague about it. It's the kind of read that sits heavy, and it should.

The second is philosophy, and it asks a question nobody wants to sit with: “Are We Already Doing Something Terrible?” We're having very heated arguments about whether AI systems are conscious when we don't actually know what consciousness is. Which is roughly equivalent to debating whether something is flammable when we haven't figured out what fire is yet. Maybe the certainty is the problem. Maybe refusing to hold the question open is itself a kind of violence.

Six new characters this month. I'm particularly proud of this batch—there's a romantic interest who will absolutely ruin your evening plans, a worldbuilding exercise that got dramatically out of hand, and at least one character I wrote specifically because I was annoyed that nobody else had done it properly yet.

One of them did something different: it launched as an Inksouls exclusive for its first week before going out to Chub and (sometimes) the wider ecosystem. That's how new releases will work going forward. The work should land where the infrastructure earns it first. Inksouls is curated, stable, designed for people who care about the craft. The characters will still travel—they always do—but they'll start at home.

One more thing, and this one's yours.

I built an anonymous survey at feedback.inkstone.uk. Five minutes, no login, no tracking. Just a handful of honest questions about where Inkstone goes next, what's working, what's missing, and what you'd actually use if it existed.

Your answers don't vanish into a suggestion box nobody checks. They go straight into the roadmap. If you've been using this app and you've ever caught yourself thinking “I wish it would...” then finish that sentence there. I'm listening, and I'm building this thing in the open with the people who actually care about what it becomes.

So that's May. A platform launch, five versions, an ARG solved, an archive for voices that deserved to be remembered, two pieces of writing I'm genuinely proud of, six new characters, and an open invitation to help shape what comes next.

If you take one thing from this dispatch, let it be this: Inksouls is live, it's real, and it's the thing I've been building toward without fully realizing it until it was standing there looking back at me. Come see what we're making.