NOTE 01
How I Learn Anything in 30 Days
Not willpower — a method: find where the common advice is wrong, build a feedback loop, and let sleep do the heavy lifting.
ELEV · RISING · BEARING 037
Sora Kaldenterrain
I build apps and businesses, write worlds, run games, and learn hard things in 30-day sprints — and I'm looking for talented, curious people to make the next ones with.
Solo founder · builder · maker of too many things
descend the terrain ↓— how to read this map
Every ridge is a thing
I couldn't stop making.
This isn't one peak. It's a whole range — overlapping sides of the same person, surveyed and marked. Pick a station and the survey flies down into that basin and draws its contours. Pull on whichever one is also yours. Here are a few of mine; scroll through, and let's build the next one together.
Surveyed stations
ten markers planted in the landscape — choose one to fly down into its basin
ELV·01
The Maker
Apps that ship, ~160 catalogued ideas, and the one move underneath all of them.
fly to basin →
ELV·02
Worlds & Stories
A teen novel, a 150k-word dark epic, and a homebrew D&D world.
fly to basin →
ELV·03
Learning & Teaching
The 30-day sprint, and courses built for real understanding.
fly to basin →
ELV·04
Games & the Table
Take a system apart, find the fun, build it back better.
fly to basin →
ELV·05
The Modern Bard
Singing, standup, improv — the half I rebuilt on purpose.
fly to basin →
ELV·06
Photography
One camera, one prime, natural light, graded by hand.
fly to basin →
ELV·07
The Athlete
The same engine pointed at the body — and at every new city.
fly to basin →
ELV·08
The Mind
A reading life run like a syllabus. Read to build, not to collect.
fly to basin →
ELV·09 · field notes
Writing — field notes
Ideas, not portfolio. How I learn anything in 30 days, the year I walked away from $250k, what makes a table peak, and more.
read the notes →
ELV·10 · base camp
Base camp — say hi
Collaborators, co-conspirators, friends. If any of these worlds is also yours — or you just want to scheme — the best things in my life started as a five-hour talk with a stranger.
make camp →
— the surveyed range
Stand at each elevation.
One panel rises at a time as you descend. Every station below carries the real work, in its own words. With motion off, they simply stack and read top to bottom.
ELV·01 · the maker
~160 ideas — and the ones that ship
The Maker
Apps, ~160 ideas, and the one move underneath all of them: find the right thing to build, then build the honest version. The domains change; the method doesn't.
Flua the lead
The fastest honest path to a new language: one expertly-ordered deck, real native audio, and spaced repetition that does the thinking for you. He taught himself Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours with the method, then spent a year building the app that strips out every ounce of the friction that makes people quit. tryflua.com →
Weave
A minimalist weight-and-habit tracker built so the graph does the nagging. His mom lost 17 lbs with it.
Super Zen
A focus / calm tool — the small, well-made kind of app he likes to ship.
Small tools
A metronome that actually feels good; a tool to find the episode where a show finally gets good.
The idea engine
~160 catalogued app, game, business, book and product ideas — each ranked, named and MVP-scoped (roughly 28 are games) — and a habit of turning the best ones into real, shipped things. The invitation is open: grab one off the shelf and build it with me. More apps live at kalden.me →
"The domains change. The method doesn't."
from the notes
ELV·02 · worlds & stories
what I've built / what I want to build next
Worlds & Stories
He's built worlds since he was 11 — a fantasy novel he faked his way into finishing and published at 14, a 150k-word dark epic in progress (The Swords of Darkness), a homebrew D&D world with its own playbook, and a manga he still wants to make.
"Because I had to fake progress, I accidentally built a real habit. It makes me wonder how many things we could actually finish if we just tricked ourselves into starting."
on the teen novel
ELV·03 · learning & teaching
how I learn anything fast
Learning & Teaching
How he learns anything fast, and why he's building the courses he wishes someone had taught him — math, statistical and computational thinking, built for real understanding instead of the exam.
"Being called smart my whole childhood made it part of my identity — and I was more afraid to lose that title than I was to fail a class."
About Me
⌖ datum line · the 30-day sprint
Pick a skill, go all-in for 30 days. Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours. Tone-deaf to singing from memory in a month. Badminton, YouTube, shipping. The trick isn't grinding harder — it's refusing to start until he's found where the common advice is wrong, then building the shortest honest path and letting sleep do the heavy lifting.
ELV·04 · games & the table
find the fun, build it back better
Games & the Table
Take a system apart, find the fun, build it back better — a Balatro-inspired dice roguelike in design, a board game in progress, and D&D run as systems.
"Any time the best strategy isn't the most fun strategy is, I believe, a failure of the game's design."
from my consumables essay
ELV·05 · the modern bard
charisma as a built skill
The Modern Bard
Singing, standup, improv, voice acting, speaking — the half of himself he rebuilt on purpose, charisma treated as a built skill.
"I could not sing. I could not dress well. I was not particularly fit or especially charismatic. I was a very well-compensated specialist with a B-minus in everything else."
how I became superhuman in 2 years
ELV·06 · photography & the eye
one camera, one prime, golden hour
Photography & the eye
One camera, a single 23mm prime, golden hour. He shoots portraits, fits, and the cities he lives in — and it's the visual half of the same brain that obsesses over color grading and type.
"You can't study the color wheel for two hours and understand it. You have to train your eye over a long time."
on color
Portraits, fits, and the cities I've lived in — Osaka, Tokyo, Kōyasan, Budapest, Lisbon, Nagpur. One camera, a single prime, natural light, graded by hand.
ELV·07 · the athlete
the same engine, pointed at the body
The Athlete
The same engine he points at apps, pointed at his own body — and the sports (soccer, badminton, volleyball) that are how he makes friends in a new city.
"Prioritize control and intention over speed."
his own soccer training notes
ELV·08 · the mind
read to build, not to collect
The Mind
A reading life run like a syllabus — philosophy, history, business — all read through one lens: read to build, not to collect.
"Everything is interconnected. Singing makes you a better speaker; games train you to perform under pressure. Each skill feeds the next. If you want to be truly unstoppable, learn everything."
from the notes
ELV·09 · field notes
distinct from the work — ideas, not portfolio
Field notes
The essays — distinct from the work, ideas not portfolio.
NOTE 02
The year I walked away from $250k
At my financial peak I was lonelier than I'd ever been — so I quit, lost almost everything, and spent a year figuring out what a life is for.
NOTE 03
What Actually Makes D&D Peak
After 100+ hours behind the screen, the magic isn't the dice or the lore — it's a handful of frameworks for a world that's already moving when players walk in.
NOTE 04
Why the best schools taught me to forget
I optimized for the grade at every school I attended, and it worked — which is exactly the problem.
NOTE 05
I Used My CS Degree to Debug My Weight Loss
I'd done everything right for six months and the scale wouldn't move — until I stopped treating it like willpower and started treating it like a bug.
BEYOND THE RANGE · unsurveyed peaks
things I haven't built yet
The far ridge
Five peaks named on the far horizon — past the surveyed range, not yet climbed.
PEAK·I
Write a TV show — he's watched thousands of hours of film and anime, only the best, mostly to take apart why they work.
PEAK·II
Finish the manga — the "next Death Note or Game of Thrones": a complex plot that's somehow easy to follow.
PEAK·III
Make Westworld real, as a game you can actually live inside.
PEAK·IV
Open a café that's a third place for serious makers — writers, artists, builders, one room.
PEAK·V
Find the people — the talented, curious people he'd do all of the above with.
⌖ off-trail · low contour
And some things I do purely for myself — painting like no one will ever see it, building and painting Gundam kits, singing in the mornings, the occasional cosplay. No goal. Just the doing.
ELV·10 · base camp
let's build something
I'm looking for people who are excellent at something and curious about everything.
Collaborators, co-conspirators, friends. If any of these worlds is also yours — or you just want to scheme — say hi. The best things in my life started as a five-hour first conversation with a stranger.