Spotify OAuth on Janus was a three-bug puzzle. First: two activities claimed the same redirect URI, so Android asked the user to choose between two identical "Janus" options - one that worked and one that didn't. Second: singleTask launch mode broke ActivityResult delivery, so a successful login killed the app. Third and strangest: Coil's crossfade animation on the profile picture corrupted Compose's internal layout tree during the activity resume after the browser redirect. The fix was an AsyncImage inside a stable Box with crossfade disabled - the green placeholder circle shows first, then the profile photo paints over it without Compose ever needing to swap nodes.

The real lesson: Compose's layout tree is a living thing. You can't swap a dozen nodes into a Column while the Choreographer is mid-frame and expect the internal arrays to agree on their own length. Give the tree one stable shape and change what's painted inside it.

Mercury sheds its prototype skin. The orb tightens, the buttons grow to fill the screen properly, and "Janus" replaces "Mercury" where the user looks - because the service is Mercury, but the companion it connects to is Janus. Meanwhile, Now Playing learns to think about what it's playing. Long-press the select button and two new doors appear: play this album, play this artist. The Albums and Artists plugins learn patience too - art loads one image at a time instead of stampeding the filesystem.

The staggered art loading matters on the Cortex-A7. Loading 20 album covers simultaneously would starve the render loop. One at a time keeps the carousel smooth while art fills in behind the user's gaze.

The Spotify library grows a second wing. Where albums scroll past as rectangles, artists arrive as circles - profile photos cropped round, names centered beneath. The carousel shares its physics with Albums but the aesthetic is its own. Select an artist and their top tracks shuffle into life. Deeper in the stack, the SDK learns to speak Spotify's language of shuffle, repeat, and like.

The circular artist cards use DrawCircle masking rather than texture manipulation - the source images are square, cropped visually at draw time. Cheaper than generating circular textures, and the spring physics keep the carousel feeling alive rather than mechanical.

The BLE connection gets its own home. A new Mercury plugin surfaces as the face of the Bluetooth bridge - a pulsing orb that breathes when scanning, glows green when connected, and dims red when lost. Two buttons let you reconnect or restart the service without leaving the GUI. Meanwhile, the firmware learns to remember. Menu layout, plugin visibility, and sort order are now baked into the llizardOS image so new installs boot into a curated home screen instead of an alphabetical list of everything.

The Mercury orb draws with layered alpha circles - a soft outer glow, a solid core, and a clean inner ring for depth. No textures, just math and transparency. The config bake reads three .ini files from the device over SCP and installs them into /var/llizard/ during the rootfs build stage.

Tap a song and the world behind it unfolds. Two new buttons appear beneath Now Playing when Spotify is the source - one for the album, one for the artist. Bottom sheets slide up with track listings, follower counts, genres, and top tracks. The data flows from Spotify's API through the SDK, through the controller, into modal surfaces that feel like opening a liner note.

The buttons only appear when spotifyAlbumId or spotifyArtistId are present in MediaState - invisible for non-Spotify sources. The bottom sheets use Coil for async image loading and Material 3's ModalBottomSheet with skip-partial-expand for full-height content.

Your Spotify library now lives on the CarThing. A new Albums plugin presents your saved albums in a smooth carousel, album art floating past like vinyl in a crate. Select one and the music starts - the plugin bows out, Now Playing takes the stage. The whole stack learned new tricks to make it happen.

The full vertical: CarThing requests albums → Go bridge sends BLE command → Janus fetches from Spotify API → chunks flow back → Redis stores → C plugin displays → user selects → play_uri command → music. Each layer trusts the next.

When you skip through a queue of ten songs to reach the eleventh, you don't want to see nine flashing album covers along the way. The BLE bridge learns discretion - intermediate tracks pass in silence, only the destination announces itself.

The pattern: suppress before intermediate skips, enable before the final one, always re-enable after completion (success or error). The user sees one smooth transition, not a slideshow.

The Android companion app grows a new voice. A full Spotify integration page emerges - OAuth flows, library statistics, playback controls, and a queue viewer that lets you skip through your upcoming tracks. The spotSDK learns new endpoints, and the BLE bridge prepares to carry richer data.

The queue skip uses Spotify's skip-to-next API repeatedly rather than playing tracks directly. This preserves the queue context - after the skipped-to track finishes, playback continues naturally.

LLZ Survivors grows a soul. Five warrior classes step into the arena, each with their own philosophy of survival. The upgrade screen becomes a shop where choices linger. Champions emerge from the horde with golden halos and dangerous gifts. The spatial grid learns to see, and the engine breathes easier.

~900 lines added. The class system flows: Menu → Class Select → Weapon Select → Arena. Each class's preferred weapon gets bonus damage.

New systems emerge that reward aggression and punish complacency. Kill milestones mark your journey with permanent buffs. Danger zones bloom across the battlefield - step inside for bonus XP, pay with your health. The combo system learns to count higher, and each tier brings new power.

~850 more lines. Total survivors codebase now exceeds 7,000 lines. The CarThing's Cortex-A7 breathes easier with every optimization.

Today marks the public release of llizardOS. The Fukai Sake Edition goes live - "deeply functional and beautiful, not quite perfect." The firmware, Android app, and all 18 plugins are now available on GitHub. A subreddit springs into existence.

iOS support is planned. BLE implementation was designed with Apple requirements in mind - the slower BLE protocol allows for plug-and-play on iPhone once development begins.

Six new creatures enter the arena, each with their own philosophy of combat. The Hornet keeps its distance and draws lines of fire. The Spinner hides its eye until the storm passes. The Mirror asks: which one is real? The bullet hell has arrived.

Victory condition added: reach level 20 to win. Lifesteal nerfed with exponential dropoff - raw 50% becomes ~15% effective. The endgame now has teeth.

LLZ Survivors hatched today - a Vampire Survivors-style arena game with skill trees and branching weapon paths. Meanwhile, Bejeweled learned to count its levels properly. The build pipeline grew a new helper script that knows where all the binaries live.

18 plugins now live in the llizardOS resources - five newcomers: bejeweled, llzsurvivors, media_channels, menu_sorter, plugin_manager.

Today the SDK learned to distinguish between a quick tap and a thoughtful hold. The back button now understands intent - a brief press means "go back," while a longer hold opens the media channel selector without triggering navigation on release.

Documentation updated across all repositories - SDK, Mercury, Janus, and LlizardOS now have comprehensive READMEs.

The media channel system grows more polite. When switching from Spotify to YouTube Music, the old app now gracefully pauses before the new one takes the stage. No more two voices speaking at once.

The main menu now speaks five visual languages. List view for the minimalists, Carousel for those who like to swipe, Cards for the tactile, CarThing for nostalgia, and Grid for the Apple-hearted. Each style persists across reboots.

Album art now bleeds into the background. The SDK tracks album art changes in Redis and automatically generates blurred backdrops. Nine animated background styles can now inherit colors from whatever's playing.