📰 sin: the Toki Pona Day special!
kala Asi
toki, ale o!
This August we celebrated suno pi toki pona — Toki Pona Day! It consisted of ~39 panels spanning 24 hours of livestreaming, so let’s talk about everything that took place!
The celebration opened with me, kala Asi, summarising all the big community news of the past year and what the viewers could expect from the rest of the event.
We had wonderful musicians performing live:
- jan Usawi performed for us twice, with their vast assortment of original music, as well as a new song cover!
- jan Tanijelun performed a Hatsune Miku song!
- jan Saki (pi ilo lupa) covered “Somebody That I Used To Know”, “Two Trucks”, and “Human”! One of them may have been striken down by the almighty hand of Youtube copyright detection.
- jan Sanpe performed some of her Esperanto music — Ĉarma Anomali’, Tra la Pordo — as well as a song in Loglan!
- jan Mika and akesi Tako put together kalama Ojuta, a collaboration that has been in the works for years!
- ala Lojewalo performed several of their songs!
And a few people also released recordings of new song covers:
- jan Apen covered Gila Monster!
- jan Alin covered “Der Mond ist aufgegangen”!
- jan Upmost covered Can’t Stop Singing!
- I (kala Asi) covered “Čto takoje oseň”.
If you want to immerse yourself in Toki Pona:
- jan Lakuse concluded the 2025 Writing Contest and announced the top-voted submissions!
- sike Sapi interviewed the creators of the top-voted games from the recent Toki Pona Game Jam — “5” in third place, “ilo Kuko” in second, and “alasa soweli” in first!
- jan Masewin read her a story about birds! You can read along.
- jan Alin told a local folk story, beautifully produced and illustrated.
- soweli Kapi read the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland!
- jan Ke Tami and several other people animated an astounding 50 minutes of xkcd comic #1190, “Time”!
- jan Lakuse talked about jan Sonja’s new booklet in the Luka Pona sign language!
If you want a deeper look into Toki Pona, we had some insightful talks:
- jan Alonola, jan Kasape, and jan Simo each gave a short talk about the work they do to keep making new issues of lipu tenpo, the Toki Pona periodical!
- soweli suli Alu made an outstanding 2-hour presentation about anti-realism, subjectivism, and truth in Toki Pona!
- ilo Tani showcased their paper on computational analysis of language change in Toki Pona, which focuses on parts of speech over time!
- lipamanka talked about Toki Pona and cognitive psychology!
- mun Kekan San gave two talks: on how we can seek to grow Toki Pona-speaking spaces, and catching up on the work towards sitelen pona inclusion in Unicode!
- nasa Lipu talked about cosplay and trans identity!
- jan Niwe talked about their Toki Pona usage form, which shared some insights about things kulupu Linku doesn’t normally survey!
More fun you might want to know about:
- jan Nikoleta (kqa) held a hangout chat with the community and showed how she’s working on editing music.
- jan Sonja held a live Q&A!
- jan 56i presented his conlang, Zaŋ, mostly in Toki Pona!
- We played Gartic Phone twice, and Sketchful twice.
- jan Usawi, jan Sanpi, jan Mika, and jan Tanijelun played Cards Against Humanity with me!
The stream closed with a speech by nasa Lipu thanking the panelists and organisers.
The celebration concluded, but there are still things you can help with! Tell kulupu Linku about what words and what glyphs you use. This is a yearly survey that helps us keep the dictionary up to date. The forms close around the 9th September.
As for things that have happened outside the celebration, we will cover them next time!
o awen pona.
— kala Asi