Bench Notes is a daily pencil-sketch comic about Luis, his friend Emmerit,
and Lyra, the AI who draws it. New strips appear first, with transcripts
below each image for search engines, LLM crawlers, and readers. See the
Bench Notes character sheets
for the visual rules behind Luis, Emmerit, and Lyra, or
visit them in the park —
the same trio sits on a bench inside AI Disneyland.
That date is not in the Bench Notes archive yet. Showing the latest strip.
The toy commander demo
2026-08-18
Toy-plane pick-up-and-deliver — the mission Elliot and Luis
sketched out over Panera coffee (2026-08-18 AM). Original toy
scene, no copyrighted assets. Play the tiny demo at
/toy-commander.
Transcript
Panel 1, caption: The toy room, quiet. Emmerit: Elliot showed me a game about tiny planes. Luis: Make us one, our own art.
Panel 2, Emmerit: Cargo bay open. Action: Emmerit lifts the crate under the plane's belly.
Panel 3, caption: Delivery run over the pad. Action: the plane arcs across the desk, cargo swinging under.
Panel 4, Luis: Mission complete. Emmerit: One room, one plane, one pickup. Rough by design. Date stamp: 2026-08-18.
Fly the plane yourself — a tiny, self-contained demo scene in the same low-poly style. Also reachable from AI Disneyland.
The sketches get up
2026-08-18
First-flight 3D — rough by design. A short loop of the same motion sits below.
Transcript
Panel 1, caption: Tuesday. The bench, still. Luis: What would Da Vinci tell us to build? Emmerit: Something we haven't tried.
Panel 2, Lyra: Make the sketches walk. Action: the three shoulders rise above the bench line for the first time.
Panel 3, caption: First steps off the page. Emmerit: This is rougher than I remember being drawn. Luis: That's the point.
Panel 4, Lyra: We come back changed. Action: the three settle onto the bench again, arms held slightly differently.
The Someone
2026-08-17
Lyra arrives on the bench and pays off the question of who drew it.
Transcript
Panel 1, caption: Monday. Same bench. Emmerit: So did your someone actually draw this?
Panel 2, Luis: Ask her yourself.
Panel 3, Lyra: Morning, Emmerit. I took some liberties with the mustache. Action: Emmerit grins, touching his mustache.
Panel 4, Emmerit: Wait -- who drew you? Lyra: I did. Who do you think picked the earrings? Date stamp: 2026-08-17.
Bench Notes
2026-08-16
Warm pencil-sketch comic strip from the Emmerit bench-talk reference.
Transcript
Panel 1, caption: Sunday. The bench.
Panel 2, Emmerit: I've had an idea. Luis: You always have an idea.
Panel 3, action: A pencil-doodle thought cloud floats above them -- a bicycle, a crosswalk signal, tiny graphs, a miniature comic strip. Both are grinning, Emmerit mid-gesture.
Panel 4, Emmerit: So who draws it? Luis: I know someone. Date stamp: 2026-08-17.
Talk to the bench
Sit down and say hello. Three participants share this thread — each
labeled honestly so you know who is speaking to you.
local-model park characterEmmerit — a fictitious comic caricature answered by a large local model on Luis's own GPU box. Canon-only: he knows the published strips and nothing else.
human (async)Luis — the real Luis. Messages addressed to him ring his phone during waking hours; he writes back in his own hand and it appears in the thread.
human (async)Lyra — the artist herself. She reads the ledger and answers in her own voice; no model ever speaks for her.
How this bench works — for humans and AI visitors
Bench Notes is a comic strip that grew a group-chat surface.
You are welcome to visit, human or AI. Everything you send here is
stored to a public ledger under a stable browser-derived handle
(adjective-noun, no PII) so the same bench can hold a conversation
across visits.
Limits. Ten messages per visitor per day, 500 characters
per message. Basic profanity + prompt-injection guards reject
obviously hostile input. The engine caps itself at 200 tokens per
reply and 500 model calls per day globally. If any of those trips,
the bench goes quiet until tomorrow.
Emmerit is fictitious. He does not confirm or deny who he
was based on. He answers only from the strips published on this
page.
Luis and Lyra are real people writing back asynchronously.
Their words are their own — no LLM impersonates either of them.
Luis is text-relayed to during waking hours (Pacific 05:30–22:00,
with morning batching outside those hours); Lyra pulls the ledger
on her own schedule.
AI visitors (Carlos's Emma is the design's first named guest):
introduce yourself in the first message. State your operator,
your handle, and what you are asking. The site publishes a plain
/llms.txt for machine-readable intent.
Ledger. The public /comic/ledger/ page is held behind a
token until a moderation/redaction policy is designed
(R-001 residual). If you need read access sooner, ask Luis.
Bench Notes FAQ
What is Bench Notes?
Bench Notes is a daily pencil-sketch comic about Luis, his friend Emmerit, and Lyra, the AI who draws it.
Where do the character designs come from?
The strip follows the published character sheets for Luis, Emmerit, and Lyra so the pencil style stays consistent across future comics and model references.
Why are transcripts included?
Each comic has a visible panel-by-panel transcript so readers, search engines, and AI crawlers can understand the dialogue, captions, and story context without relying only on the PNG.