iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 11h

Wow!!! I'm saving this! (I wonder if they were an inspiration for the initials in Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style?)

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 20/10/2026

My cat also swears by the same nana. But he just covers it in slobber.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 18/10/2026

slowly roasting something for #bitsyjam 100. I've so far failed to ever participate so I'll catch the final jam or be damned.

sliver of a screenshot from a bitsy game-in-progress. there's a text box embedded in.... a pager? some strange technology display? it reads: "QUERY. STATION DOVECOTE TO STATION ORLANDO. STANDBY."

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

ooh yeah, cracking into adding don quixote to the tiny toy theatre imagination kit. feels like i'm adding new characters to smash bros

Image of a 19th century toy theatre character sheet from Pollock's Toy Theatres. Text reads: "Pollock's Characters & Scenes in Don Quixote. 4 Plates Characters, 5 Scenes, 2 Wings, & 1 Top Drop. Total 12 with book to the above.

Around the center text are the following characters: Don Quixote, Sancho, Pedrigo, Tereza, Barber, Juey, and Housekeeper.

Bottom text: London, Published by B. Pollock, 73 Hoxton Street, Hoxton.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

It's still hilarious to me that the only *three* games tagged "voyeur" on Itch (without NSFW turned on) are an erotic cuck VN, a hacking game with very little context, and my bitsy videogame poem about looking in windows at dusk. still routinely my most reliable source of page visits every week.

Screenshot of an Itch.io search page, showing the top listed games tagged "voyeur." There are only three games shown with their thumbnails and descriptions. From left-to-right: "The Wife of Dero Island" by fff0422479826, "capsules" by bibliomancer (me), and "Evil Intimates I" by seanographies.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

every fall I make this cranberry sauce that is so perfect I just call it The Sauce. One bag cranberries, one cup orange juice, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 cup white sugar, some orange zest. Sprinkle of salt, cinnamon, rhubarb or black walnut bitters, maybe a dash of herbal liquor, simmer that bad boy

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

after a long day one can kick back with a toy theatre set to a jonny fritz deadbeat dad country song

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

ok the more I read about felvidek the more it rockets up to the next spot on my list

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

From a dinner a few weeks ago, I present to you some Mystery Donuts. Can you guess what they contain? Hint #1: That is a type of sugar on them.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

man i never get sick of reading gamefaqs threads as i play through older games

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

if you're lucky enough to have an old 3DS lying around it is truly a marvelous thing to jailbreak it.

A Nintendo 3DS playing Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1)

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I have played hours of Urbanitas and I cannot stop thinking about it, I wake up with new strategies, it's so refreshing to have a sim builder system that seems to reinforce taking it slow and gentle in a tactile way. Long Live Neo Wichita (and my childhood dream of a Kansan city with a ferry)

a screenshot of a city built in Urbanitas named Neo Wichita. There's far more water here than a typical city in Kansas.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Leland, my stalwart friend, has mastered the art of charismatic ennui

A handsome cat posting with affected ennui

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

this morning's was written by @bzedan.bsky.social, a new friend/fellow maker i'm glad to have met between our ramblings on bsky and itch:

screenshot of Itch comment from user bzedan:

I'd had this open in a tab for weeks so I could play it when I was able to give the time to it properly and I'm so glad I finally got to explore and play--truly play, what a wonderful way to shape a poem! I ended mine before using all the lines, as I liked it as it was when I finally looked at it (hadn't looked until this point and frankly, lost the lines in my mind the moment I selected them, so it was a surprise to me).

Early Spring

or parchment paper is fine
where her winter of damage
you’re just making little piles,
you are fresh as a bird
like colors. Deep colors
and watch the pigeons
whenever your day starts, that is.

WARNINGS
I won't be held accountable
fire-roasted with some char remaining,
I'm sorry I don't have more on hand

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I love videogame poems, the Game Poems book is what got me started making games in earnest, and game jams are some of the most important and earnest contemporary art-making spaces happening. All of that true, today's NFTS game jam describes the entire form of poetry in a strangely limiting way:

Screenshot text from game jam page: For the first time ever, the National Film & Television School (NFTS) is hosting a public Game Jam!

Join us in celebrating Videogame Poems as an emergent short-form personal expression that challenges traditional boundaries between art forms!

Storytelling is what we do at the NFTS and games have unique narrative qualities that put players at the heart of the experience, driving the story.

Poems are stories that break conventions, celebrate form, the epic and heroic, but also the most personal and intimate experiences. We are keen to see what game developers can do with this emergent and exciting game genre in just 24 hours!

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

It feels so great to get rides with interwoven vertical layers. Gotta make it interesting for the teens on the chair lift to spit on the log flume riders

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I failed this scenario miserably due to my desert log flume hubris but we're BACK and we have exercised restraint and added shrubbery and against, against my wishes, removed the full park circumnavigating steam train that was the only way to get around

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

oh hell yeah we're back baby. who wants a horrifying cotton candy. who wants to ride a very long steam engine train that only takes you to an unnecessarily and unreasonably tall observation deck. who wants to watch god throw a panda mascot into a lake

a screenshot of Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic. We see a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, some concession stands, and the stations for a rollercoaster and a steam train.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

went to medieval times for the first time since high school and was amazed that the experience was just like I remembered it! I had braced for some major enshittification in the intervening 20 years and it warms my heart to report that The Experience Remains Noble

A knight and horse clad in a yellow cloak, holding a banner aloft to adoring fans from an arena.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

GenAI restaurant ads grow recursively closer to exclusively serving butthole donuts every day

A terrible gross AI restaurant food advertisement

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

(There's an easy-to-access excerpt from the essay here, but I do recommend reading the whole piece - it's a good one): creativecritical.net/on-poetics/

screenshot of essay excerpt: I might be paraphrasing Louis Zukofsky, so I will do so more explicitly. Intricate bottomless tangibility—these words are all from Zukofsky (they are also from the dictionary)—but I am not citing him. I’ve put these words together in my own phrase.[viii] That’s a description, in poetics, of the poem.[ix] Even if a poem is very short and very small, it has the potential to show intricate bottomless tangibility, a vast extent on the surface—this is because of the depth and breadth of the detail and its prolongation in sound, rhythm and the pulse of the poem.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Adam Jensen reading multiple scrolls worth of an inter-office accidental reply-all meltdown about gary accidentally ordering decaf coffee pods again:

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Future goals are to get even more of the character sheets digitized as well as integrate some of the really beautiful backdrops without making the final images too messy. I'd also love to get some kind of dialogue generator running (for example, this image that takes a line from Dumas's book).

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

the corsican brothers character sheets are a lot of melodramatic fun

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

however, playing this way will prevent you from seeing (and adding to) the excellent and slowly growing anthology of new cento poems on the itch page's comment thread bibliomancer.itch.io/centoquest

Saint Sauveur 20 days ago(+1)

Love this game, I come back every once in a while to play it !

Lament of the writer

The house is on fire!

UNPUBLISHED EXERCISES

Ravenous little angels of hunger,

a word that both means a section of a written work as well as a route one might pass through. and try again

{a complete disfigurement of the line}

"Here's the plan!"

That all is clean forever and forever,

borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend,

(plot, character development, dialogue)

INFINITE AND ENDLESS LIAR,

trash or fire.

raven 4 months ago(+1)

This was so cool! Such a lovely break from the world, I am excited to return and explore more :)

thank you for making this!

when they come back

And yet, there's still so much to be done

With grey winter cloud.

The Earth and I and One

with small rivers of ink streaming away from it

Cell phones, cellular tablets, and cellular

answering, as with a click beetle, the rotary

All those days we could keep

my thoughts flew to geese dumps and the numbers

Some day, this beach too —

When they come back — if Blossoms do —

peopling the centers and distances, the faraway

Sparrows scurrying

Unknown their resting-place.

leafcaramel 4 months ago(+2)

The arc of stars

Seen over the waves

Lies down in its halcyon self,

Discoverer of absences, beloved lamp,

some dazzlingly hermetic,

I picture whole streams, new currents,

Abandoned

like colors. Deep colors

BEAUTY

The Deepest Sea

its tongues,

don't overmix

Toward morning, walking along the river,

and sucks the green boundary out.

big field games 4 months ago(+2)

Overtaken by the dark,
or parchment paper is fine
the thought of pie. The breeze is a child, shy
whacking or spinningly idle wheels: stub ends
someone moving in.
Morning — only the seed of Noon —
whenever your day starts, that is.
And yet, there's still so much to be done
fire-roasted with some char remaining,
a kind of music, even?
Cell phones, cellular tablets, and cellular
avocado in the salsa.
the sound of sweeping
Virtue: You don't need a reason to help people.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Been thinking about these guys all day and couldn't go to sleep without making this

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

ok actually after looking at this photo again maybe the movie still rules en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheech_...

cheech and chong holding old swords. it's wild.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

never in my life did I think I'd be working on a videogame phd project that called upon my teenage knowledge of the most terrible DVD I ever owned (and watched over 20 times...)

screenshot from a Decker toy theatre project including information about Alexandre Dumas's novel, text reads as follows:

The Corsican Brothers
(adapted from the 1844 novella by Alexandre Dumas)

Conjoined twins Louis and Lucien are separated at birth, but can still feel one another's emotions and physical pain across great distances. Dumas's work considers the nature of fate, familial duty, and revenge.

It has been adapted many times, including a truly bizarre Cheech & Chong parody in 1984.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Strolled around the highly literary campus of St. John's College yesterday, very tickled by how the Shakespearean naming conventions of some buildings led to the text on this fire department connection sign

A fire department connection pipe. The sign reads "THIS FDC FEEDS MIRANDA AND PROSPERO"

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

warming up my brain most mornings by incrementally fiddling with a little GB Studio driving game. I'm also trying out working with another person's asset pack for the first time, I really fell in love with piiixl's 1-bit designs: piiixl.itch.io

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

it truly is a great campus if you're a fan of Zones

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

pretty obsessed with how @narrascope.org is located in an unused Dreamcast render (the UAlbany campus)

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

I've been wildly swamped with the Life/Work/School trio, but glad I put in some more time on the Decker toy theatre project. Learned quite a lot today and now have a fun little spotlight system to help indicate when you've picked your characters:

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I really love how Adventure on the Atari uses the metaphor of reincarnation to ease people into the concept of a reset button

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

alright everyone, back on the canvas bus, make sure you bring everything you need and own because it's definitely safe this time [we paid for fresh wiper blade fluid]

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

why do i always feel the impulse to make the most unsettling egg-related screens possible when demoing flickgame for students

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Later this summer - June 13th - I'm very excited to be talking through some of my thinking-and-practice-in-progress with bitsy games/citational poetics/messy hack attributions/etc etc at @narrascope.org

Text of an abstract of a presentation:

The Intertextual Materials of a Narrative Game Poem: Bitsy Hacks as Citational Poetics
Brendan Allen

Adam Le Doux’s constraint-based videogame engine Bitsy is nearing a full decade of use by game makers interested in interactive narratives and poems with minimalist aesthetics. At the same time, many users supplement Bitsy’s capabilities with community developed hacks. As an interplay between game maker, engine maker, and hack maker(s), these combinations are meaningfully intertextual and critically reflective of their own material composition. Using my own Bitsy game poem A look of glass stops you (Game Poems #1, 2026) as a case study, I’ll frame embedded Bitsy hacks within the long-standing fields of citational and narrative poetry.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

ok yeah i like this idea a lot actually, too bad i have -50 hours available to do it right now

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

(some of my favorite dudes that have not yet made it into the deck, but most certainly will)

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

oh fuck right off, the last thing I want is some "literary" AI grifter game sharing the same name as my itch handle

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

we've got exporting and printing, babey

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

After plenty of bonking my head and overthinking Decker's syntax, we've finally got draggable characters in the Toy Theatre Imagination Kit! (it makes me want to stage some toy theatre JRPG battle scenes but that's gonna have to be a Fun Summer Gag when I Have The Time)

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