DRAFT · SPECULATIVE

Popsniplish: what a band says to itself

Version 0.1.0 · Status: speculative draft · Updated 2026-11-10

Speculative draft. No Pop Boll hardware has shipped, and nothing on this page has been built or validated on hardware. Names, kinds, fields and moves will change without notice, and nothing here is an offer, a commitment or a promise of compatibility. We would love to hear about partnership, OEM and dev-kit ideas: use the contact form on this site.

This page is Popsniplish as its one text says it (edition 0.1.0, revised 2026-11-10), told the way a MiniCOSM is documented on cosmoes.org: the text itself; the reference, generated from its manifest and its programs; and its atem, an outline and a glossary. The overview page introduces the rest of the Pop Boll ecosystem.

Edition 0.1.0 · revised 2026-11-10 · home: Pop Boll's private repository, until the owner calls it stable and it gets a cosmoes.org host of its own

This edition describes the popsniplish/1 MiniCOSM and the moves it declares for thym 1.

Popsniplish is the language a Pop Boll's band speaks: what its sixteen virtual musicians, its seven judges and DJ PB say to one another about musical intentions and results, and what they keep on their cheat sheets. It is a MiniCOSM of MacroCOSM OES (https://macro.cosmoes.org/): every message and every entry is a constructed fabula, a standalone fabula/1 file of flavour fabulan built item by item by rules, and told as a short, plain English with each claim's stance in words and the footer line that says it was compiled by rules, without a model. Its moves are declared for Thym (https://thym.cosmoes.org/) and every one transcodes, so every Popsniplish program plans and runs agent-free: there is no model on a Boll, ever, and a song generated twice says the same things twice, byte for byte. The owner named it on 2026-11-09.

Status. This text is normative for Pop Boll's own code. Its reference implementation is the popsniplish package there; the talkback package (the channel inside the song factory, the Studio Cheat Sheet and the personal public cheat sheets) has a specification of its own, not published, and uses the language. Where this text and the package disagree, one of them is in error, and the Changes section records which was corrected. MacroCOSM's words (volume, catalog, module, kind, item, envelope, reference, check, lens, atem, short, fabula, dialectic) and Thym's (move, contract, morph, holomorph, isomorph, reading) keep their meaning here.

Contents#

1. Provenance and the name
2. The model on one page
3. The design rules
4. The volumes
5. The modules and their kinds
6. Entries: constructed fabulas and their shorts
7. The dialectic, applied: the vote
8. Morphs: holomorphs, isomorphs, voice and readings
9. The knob lexicon
10. The moves
11. Checks
12. FEED on a Boll
13. Conformance
14. Changes

The page adds, generated from the manifest and the programs: the reference, generated; the atem, an outline and a glossary; a colophon.

How to read this#

Must and may. Must is a rule the package keeps and a check enforces. May is a permission. Should is advice.

The family of words. A holder is who owns a personal sheet and speaks on the talkback: a musician (m01 to m16, the riff book's ids), a judge (j1 to j7) or DJ PB (djpb). A call is a musician's message before a take, a response a judge's after a lock vote, a notice the house's message of an event. The Studio Cheat Sheet (SCS) is the band's sheet, a page per band day, unanimous; a personal public cheat sheet (PPCS) is one holder's own. An entry is one item of a sheet: a constructed fabula file and its short. A knob is a factory input an agreement may name, from a closed lexicon. Holomorph, isomorph and reading are Thym's.

1. Provenance and the name#

Popsniplish was drawn on 2026-11-09 for the Bollawax Talkback: the owner asked for an original system, living inside the Boll, that lets musicians and judges communicate in a structured way about musical intentions and results, with the underlying language based on MacroCOSM and Thym and the entries written as constructed fabulas told as readable English, so that the holomorph and isomorph ideas could be tested on a band that writes every day. Popsniplish is Pop, snip and English: the language of the Pop Boll, as the Snipler is its instrument. It is stewarded by the owner, Graham Smith: the language and its name are his, and this specification's text is published under CC BY 4.0 (the colophon).

2. The model on one page#

   the factory                     Popsniplish                            the surfaces
   plan · roster · directives      a constructed fabula (fabula/1,        a short (plain English, by rules)
   verdicts · study · mutation     fabulan, standalone) per message       the film's caption (its atem line)
        │                          or entry                                   │
        └── intend / judge / notice ──▶ fabula ── tell ──▶ short ──────────────┘
                                          │                                a reading, through a morph
                                          └── voice with <isomorph> ──▶ (labelled, never the source)

   a day's talkback ── nominate ──▶ proposals ── question ⇢ every musician votes ⇢ record · adopt ──▶ the studio sheet
                                               (two runs, by rules; unanimity; must → should → may → dropped)

   a holder's own shorts ── measure ──▶ holomorph (private, with evidence) ── release ──▶ isomorph (public, scales only)

• A volume is a studio sheet, a personal sheet or one song's talkback (section 4). Its items index the entries and name the knobs, holders, votes and forms (section 5).
• An entry is a file beside the catalog: <slug>.fabulan.cosm, and its shorts (section 6).
• The vote is the core's dialectic with a bank of one question, answered by rules (section 7).
• A morph is Thym's, measured by rules on the seven statistics scales, with the judgement scales pinned by the holder's persona; voice renders one without a model (section 8).
• Every move transcodes (section 10). The checks are the generic ones and seven of Popsniplish's own (section 11).

3. The design rules#

1. It reads. Every item's summary is a complete English sentence that names everyone, so the rules short, "the ordered outline itself, said in the items' own sentences", reads as prose and not as a database.
2. Nothing is invented. Every call, response and notice is built from structures the factory already makes; every word a voice adds is a FEED headword from a fixed list; every name and number in a reading is in its fabula.
3. No model, ever. Every move is asks: false. What a model would judge (humour, allusion, figure) is pinned by the holder or left {pending: "not measured"}, never guessed.
4. The clock is the song's. Timestamps come from the song record and the band day, never the wall clock, so a regenerated song reproduces its talkback byte for byte. Votes are seeded by the soul, the day, the entry's digest and the holder.
5. Agreements bite, bounded. An adopted agreement names one knob from a closed lexicon with one force; the summit applies at most a few per song, as routines are bounded. A proposal that fails weakens and never strengthens (the stance ladder's rule, applied to force).
6. Private stays private. A holomorph, with its evidence, never leaves the device; an isomorph leaves with its scales, direction, pins and confidence and nothing else.
7. Each smaller scale keeps the order of the larger. Popsniplish adds kinds, fields, closed lists, checks and moves; it changes nothing MacroCOSM or Thym means.

4. The volumes#

The catalog's keys, in order: oes (popsniplish/1), macrocosm, id (popsniplish/<slug>), name, kind, band (the soul fingerprint, never a serial), device, holder and handle (a personal volume), calendar ({edition, day}, a studio volume; the band day, from the longitudinal index), editions (a studio volume: {day, digest, entries} per day with adoptions, appended; the digest is what a song's meta names), releases and morphs (a personal volume, as Ascribe records them), song and day (a talkback volume), nodes.

5. The modules and their kinds#

The envelope is MacroCOSM's: id type name summary provenance required; status, visibility, pending, links (the fabula's nine relations, closed) and Thym's made. Every item a rules pass reads exactly carries {mode: derived, confidence: 1}; what a vote wrote carries {mode: dialectic, sources: [D:session/<id>]}.

Closed lists. kind: on a studio sheet tip, trick, agreement; on a personal sheet Ascribe's ten, affinity belief concern experience interest opinion quale skill understanding yearning, used as the ten kinds of thing a holder can say; in a talkback call, response, notice. force: must should may. role, value, family and feed.origin as above.

6. Entries: constructed fabulas and their shorts#

An entry's fabula is a standalone fabulan: oes: fabula/1, flavour: fabulan, no source:, named <slug>.fabulan.cosm, its derived saying by: rules, mode: rules, completeness: full, chunks: 0, and the program and run that built it. Its items are the fabula's kinds, in their modules: what the holder means to do is N:aim (with measure, how one would know) and N:decision (chose, over, because); what they studied is I:influence naming the track as E:work; what they hold or measured is P:claim with its stance (opinion for a judgement, observed for a measurement) and salience; what happened is T:event; the music words are L:term, grounded in FEED; the ideas are K:concept; the people and parts are E:person and E:thing. A catchphrase the holder's persona carries is a C:device with figure: catchphrase, and an allusion to a studied work an I:allusion: that is where the judgement scales come from, and nothing a voice renders is outside the fabula. N:requirement belongs to the fabulac and is never written in a fabulan: an agreement's force and knob live on its S:entry row (check one-requirement).

Every item's summary is one complete sentence naming everyone. The atem is constructed with the items: the line (15 to 25 words), the focus, the push (the holder's aim) and the pull (what it leans on). Ids follow the Canon slug rule, with the first six hex digits of the name's sha256 on a collision.

A short is compiled by rules (MacroCOSM OES 18.4.4): by weight for a standalone fabula. Popsniplish tells, in order, the claims (by salience, grouped by the concept they lean on, each with its stance phrase: the reference implementation's), what it sets out to do (aims, audiences, decisions, exclusions), what it came from (influences, allusions, occasions), what happens (events in before/after order), how it is built (voices, devices, parts), who made it, how it can be read, and the terms. The footer is the spec's: *a short of <slug>.fabulan.cosm, a standalone fabula, told by weight, compiled on <day> by rules, without a model*. The file is <slug>.short-<YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM>.md beside the fabula, -2 on a collision; the fabula records it in shorts: without a byte of the rest changing.

7. The dialectic, applied: the vote#

The bank holds one question, put to every active musician holder for every proposal, in no one's voice: "Does {name} agree to this for the studio?" (kind: yes-no, to: holder, why: intent). The two runs are the core's: nominate lands the proposals and their questions with the studio volume; each holder's vote answers by rules, seeded, with a says line in their own voice; record appends the answers; adopt settles. An entry is adopted only when every active musician said yes (check unanimous); judges and DJ PB propose and comment but hold no vote. A proposal that fails weakens one step, must to should to may, and is put again the next day (weakened-from, check weakens-only); a may that fails is dropped, and the proposal stays on its proposer's personal sheet, marked not adopted. "I don't know" is unknown and blocks adoption as a no does.

8. Morphs: holomorphs, isomorphs, voice and readings#

Thym's ten scales are measured as its section 13.3 says, with the reference implementation's thresholds and word lists, FEED's bands and the nine-letter rule; under 300 words or three paragraphs a statistics scale reports a confidence of at most 50. The null telling of a fabula is its rules short; measured with the fabula's own words exempt, its register is 1. The three judgement scales are pinned by the holder's persona (H:holder#pins) or left {pending: "not measured"}.

A holder's holomorph is the scale-wise median of the morphs of their own shorts and says lines, its confidence rising with the count (the median confidence plus five per further text, at most 95), kept as <holder>.morph.cosm beside the personal volume with its evidence, which never leaves the device. Their isomorph is the same shape marked shared, released to public/isomorph.morph.cosm with scales, toward, pinned and confidence and never evidence or derived.from (check isomorph-bare).

voice renders a fabula in a morph by rules: it takes the rules outline as paragraphs of sentences and applies the morph scale by scale, re-measuring after each pass, until every statistics scale is within one step (scales-met) or no move is left, and says which scales it could not meet. Its moves are listed in the package: the stance phrases said in the first or second person; an item whose holder is the reader said as I, the verb agreeing; a hedge from the 13.3 list put in front of a sentence (a hedge reads as the weakest stance, so it never strengthens); contractions and casual heads, or Latinate stand-ins from a fixed table of FEED headwords; a rarer or commoner synonym from FEED's pairs for an adjective or an adverb only; sentences joined with ", and" or split at one; sentences dealt into even or uneven paragraphs. Nothing is invented (nothing-added). The output is a reading whenever the morph is not the author's: read_through: <morph> in its front matter, the reading footer, saved as <stem>.read-<morph>-<YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM>.md, never at an input's path (never-source).

9. The knob lexicon#

An agreement names exactly one knob, so it can only bite where the factory can feel it. The lexicon is closed and generated from the factory itself: every directive code the judges issue, the part writers' knobs (wildness leap sync quirk solo) and the persona appetites they read (density syncopation chromatic_spice velocity), the summit's plan choices (form key_changes tempo_band hook_source), the study choice (study_first) and the roster choice (bench). A studio volume copies the lexicon into its K module when it is made, so an old sheet keeps the knobs it was written with.

10. The moves#

Declared in the manifest's moves sidecar, popsniplish.moves.cosm, for thym 1, every one asks: false:

The 1 to 16 Music Notes a judge gives leave a response banded, by Thym's band move, as [rough, working, tight, soaring], four bands of four. voice is the language's; the other seven are the Talkback's, specified in the plan.

11. Checks#

A Popsniplish volume runs the generic checks of MacroCOSM OES 12.2 and the dialectic's own, then seven of its own:

fabula-checks on an entry's fabula is the fabula's own contract, run by popsniplish.checks; the reference reader, enough, lints the same files with zero errors (section 13).

12. FEED on a Boll#

The register scale, term grounding and voice need the dictionary. A trimmed FEED ships in the image: every word's band and part of speech, the synonym pairs, the 13.3 word lists, the edition and its digests, and the dictionary's notice; no definition, example or translation. The full FEED is kept privately, and the trim can also be built from it. The data is the owner's, all rights reserved, and ships only inside Pop Boll's own images.

13. Conformance#

A reader of Popsniplish must read every .cosm file in the COSM YAML subset and refuse the forbidden constructs by name; run the generic checks under the manifest; run the seven own checks; and build, tell, measure and voice as sections 6 and 8 say, the same bytes twice from the same inputs. The conformance evidence this edition ships is the reference implementation's test suite and, when an enough checkout is at hand, enough's own reader: it lints the spec's example fabula, a constructed call, a morph volume and a studio volume with zero errors, and identifies a Popsniplish volume by this manifest (python -m enough.macrocosm identify …, given the manifest).

14. Changes#

• 0.1.0 (2026-11-09). First edition: the MiniCOSM, its moves, the knob lexicon, the trimmed FEED, the builder, shorts by rules, measurement, voice and readings. An agreement's force and knob live on its S:entry row, not on an N:requirement, because the fabula's manifest gives that kind to the fabulac alone (its flavours).

The reference, generated#

DocOES joins a document's items to the ones it generates from the manifests: the format, its modules and kinds, its closed lists, checks and lenses (MacroCOSM OES 18.5.3, "The reference, generated"). These tables are read from the MiniCOSM's manifest, its moves sidecar popsniplish.moves.cosm and its knob lexicon, and from its programs. The words for each volume, kind, list, move and check are the text's, in sections 4, 5, 10 and 11, joined by the id in the first cell. Nobody edits a generated row: its words are changed where they are written.

The MiniCOSM#

The catalog#

Its keys, in the manifest's order, with what the manifest says of each.

The envelope#

Modules and kinds#

The reader adds the core's module D, the dialectic's questions and sessions, to these 5.

Closed lists#

The bank#

The dialectic is applied; the core's questions and sessions in module D, beside the modules (section 7 of the text). Its questions go to holder, write S:entry, and what an answer writes carries {mode: dialectic, sources: [D:session/<id>], confidence: <the vote's confidence>}.

Checks#

The generic checks the manifest selects, then Popsniplish's own; their words are in section 11 and in MacroCOSM OES 12.2.

Lenses#

The moves#

Declared in the sidecar for thym 1 (moves-of: popsniplish/1): 8 moves, none of which asks a model.

The knob lexicon#

41 knobs in 5 families (26 directive, 9 writer, 4 plan, 1 study, 1 roster), generated from the factory itself; a studio volume copies them into its K module when it is made.

The programs#

9 programs, each thym 1, each built from the moves above.

What they keep, and what was decided when they were written:

The atem#

The document at its atem density, as DocOES tells it: one line per section, the text's own where it sets one and the first sentence of the section's first paragraph where it does not, cut at a clause break when it runs long; then the terms the text defines, each with its definition.

Outline#

• How to read this — the rule words and the family of words: holders, calls, sheets, entries, knobs
• 1 Provenance and the name — where Popsniplish comes from, and what the name says
• 2 The model on one page — the factory, the fabula, the short and the vote, drawn once
• 3 The design rules — seven rules every part of Popsniplish answers to
• 4 The volumes — studio, personal and talkback volumes, their files and their catalog keys
• 5 The modules and their kinds — six modules, their kinds, the envelope and the closed lists
• 6 Entries: constructed fabulas and their shorts — an entry is a standalone fabulan, told as a short by rules
• 7 The dialectic, applied: the vote — one question, every musician's answer by rules, unanimity or weakening
• 8 Morphs: holomorphs, isomorphs, voice and readings — ten scales measured by rules; the holder's morph, private and shared; voice
• 9 The knob lexicon — the closed list of factory inputs an agreement may name
• 10 The moves — eight moves declared for Thym, every one transcoding
• 11 Checks — the generic checks, the dialectic's, and seven of Popsniplish's own
• 12 FEED on a Boll — the trimmed dictionary the image ships, and where the full one lives
• 13 Conformance — what a reader of Popsniplish must do, and the evidence this edition ships
• 14 Changes — what each edition changed, newest first

Glossary#

Colophon#

Popsniplish is © 2026 Graham Smith. This specification's text, as published on this page, is licensed CC BY 4.0: it may be quoted and shared with credit. The name Popsniplish and the FEED data (§12) stay the owner's. The reference implementation is closed today. A core subset of it that needs no FEED is to be published under Apache-2.0 in the Bollard SDK, with a JavaScript twin; that is decided and not done. Voice, morph and the FEED dictionary stay closed.

This page is generated from the specification's one text (edition 0.1.0, revised 2026-11-10), which Pop Boll keeps, and a check holds the page in step with it. The text is given word for word, with its HTML comments removed and its Contents linked, but for 11 places where it names a file in Pop Boll's private repository: there the page says the same thing without the file's name. The reference, the outline and the glossary are made from the manifest, the programs and DocOES's rules, and nothing else is written here.