iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Why am I not surprised that the freakout over a completely rational and legitimately beneficial integration of (sounds to me *local*) AI tools seems to be coming from *that place* again? They need a hobby besides witch-hunting things to be mad at.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Well, being rushed to hospital before sunrise was not on my list of plans for today. Somehow developed a viral infection that usually affects, like, 3-year olds, and is nothing to worry about, but in rare cases hits adults & does so with deadly force, requiring hospitalisation - I have all the luck!

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Sporkamarink @strivingally.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Thread. Hypercharging gambling is going to hypercharge the ruining of lives. Doesn’t matter if you call it a “prediction market”, the end result is still The House Always Wins and they’ll encourage you right up to the point you lose everything you ever had.

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Felipe Pepe @felipepepe.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Something that stood out studying for my book is that in the last 10 years we had visible pushes in academia for a more global interpretation & history of gaming... However, mainstream media & discourse went the exact opposite way - it's increasingly homogenous and worshiping an idealized past.

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Felipe Pepe @felipepepe.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

For years we had this conflict between reporting local realities X parroting foreign media like IGN, Kotaku & EGM Both sides lost. Apart from a few brave souls, the space is now almost entirely taken by AI slop and local influencers translating whatever viral post they see online. It's all this:

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Felipe Pepe @felipepepe.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Shout out to this article that made me lose it: www.terra.com.br/gameon/vida-... Here a Brazilian claims that Pokémon was the "last great social game of the pre-Internet era", something insane to say in the country of LAN houses & locadora de jogos, where maybe the richest 3% could afford a Gameboy

terra.com.br

Pokémon foi o último grande jogo social da era pré-internet

Antes do Wi-Fi e dos servidores online, a franquia criou laços reais com cabos, recreios e confiança

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My gods the dystopian state of this. It's just mask-off now; no pretenses of it being about enabling creative experiences, just... "we want to hoover up every bit of cash we can squeeze out of you."

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Kimimi🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com · 27/09/2026

I always enjoyed using it, but coming back to the Game Boy Camera in 2026 felt like a breath of fresh air. The camera's offline simplicity is something to be treasured, a chance to forge a more personal and relaxed relationship with photography: kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2026/03/13/g...

kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com

Game Boy Pocket Camera: New looks through an old lens

Digital cameras are now beyond ubiquitous. They’re cute, functional keychains. They’re covered in cartoon characters and sold to children. They’re available in the supermarket for…

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𝔇𝔢𝔢𝔭 𝔇𝔢𝔩𝔳𝔢𝔯 ☽⛤☾ ℌ𝔬𝔴𝔩 𝔚𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔐𝔢 @therunepony.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

So this game called "Dverghold" came across my Steam homepage. Interesting retro vibes, apparently collabing with a dungeon synth artist for the OST. The art was kinda tickling my AI-dar though, so I scrolled down to look for any disclaimers.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It's astounding how little effort it takes one or two egomaniacs with a petty grudge to destroy five years of community building, and how little the invisible labour matters to people who aren't doing that work.

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Animation Obsessive @ani-obsessive.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

She was Hayao Miyazaki's "right-hand" collaborator from the '70s onward. Her name was Michiyo Yasuda -- the best color designer in animation. Yasuda's eye for color gave Ghibli's work a totally different look. We explore her methods: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-artist...

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Your usefulness has been spent, cog. Now you are an unnecessary expense on the spreadsheet.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The current restructuring and "financial streamlining" of everything into a nice, efficient corporate bundle of assets and IP are without question just wrapping it all in a pretty bow to sell to the Saudis.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A creator I've followed for a long time, and whose work I enjoy and respect, has been misled by a smear campaign against my own work. Anyone is free to play what they like, how they like, but decisions should be made based on truth, not the distorted game of Telephone of online mob gossip.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's truly unfortunate that such wild misinformation has spread so far, but I hope reaching out to someone with such a following can help to undo some of it; if you have any questions or concerns, I'd be happy to address them. I hope you'll continue to be able to enjoy the hard work of our community

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Some of the devs have occasionally used an LLM as a rubberduck to think through problems before writing code themselves, and this has been mischaracterised as "vibe coding" - everything goes through human approval, because we keep clean, maintainable codebases, and a high quality standard.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Most of our devs are professional software engineers in their day jobs; they know how to program, and they know when an AI tool can handle a menial task. One of the claims was "millions of lines of Claude code" - this was basically just reformatting a file manifest from one style to another.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Woah, this is a sad way to find out that you play SoH! I'm a staff member at Harbour Masters, and want to assure you, absolutely none of our projects are vibe coded. There's been a crazy witch-hunt, which really seemingly began with Community Drama. The claims are completely false and misleading.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Oh, and while the *lead* developers of SoH are not the *lead* developers of 2S2H, there is a LOT of crossover - to say that it's not developed by the same people is absolutely inaccurate; the two original games are more different in code than people assume, but concepts apply more broadly.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Basically this whole mess happened because we didn't realise someone had the power to just *take* something on their own approval, and it had never been an issue before - we'll definitely make sure this kind of situation can't happen again!

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

We restored our backup of the repo to the organisation. The hijacked original remains out of our hands, and the developer who transferred added their version of events to the page. None of the ports are owned by a specific individual - they belong to the community and the organisation.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

As far as the "hostile takeover" that's... one now-former developer's spin on things. 2S2H was always a project under the HM organisation, like all our ports - one developer was upset about things, and without approval from the rest of us, transferred the repo out of the organisation to themselves.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Kotaku never actually talked with us - they just picked out quotes here and there from the discord discussions. They even got the name of one of the devs they quoted wrong. xD

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Hey, came across this - I'm staff at Harbour Masters, and there's definitely a lot of misunderstanding here. HM is not "all-in" on AI - the policy is the same it's always been and unlikely to change. That is, software developers use AI to assist tasks where it's useful; it's just standard practice.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

That people cannot tell that these posts are blatant satire is so incredibly distressing. Literacy is deader than dead.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The HM team are having a lot of internal discussions, and will be back better than ever before. We will continue to be anti-slop and pro-working smart. We will continue to put out great stuff as we always have, and focus on the joy our projects bring people and the community we've built around them.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It became clear to most of us - a vocal minority were only there to yell at us because protesting data centres in their city takes work, and this made them feel better. Our commitment to quality never changed, nor did our approach to development. If you think "it sucks now" that's all in your head.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It's zero-tolerance & zero understanding. At a point, you realise it's exactly the same as arguing with anti-vaxxers. Actual concerns can be addressed; crusading against something they don't understand, demanding it be stopped entirely, primarily because of *vibes* and things they read online, can't

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

To this crowd, anyone ever touching anything they have ever associated with the AI brand-mark should disqualify them and their work; that asking ChatGPT what a pointer is makes every bit of code they produce from then on, and every last line of code in a repository they submit to "vibe coded slop".

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This contingent had no interest in discussion; almost none of them had an even elementarily informed understanding of the technology, or the reality of how things are used in professional software development (which makes up the bulk of our contributors' day jobs) - they had no interest in learning.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Other devs have used LLM conversations to help them understand problems, then they have come up with solutions they wrote entirely unassisted - and this has been branded "AI slop" quite disingenuously. Which brings us to the second type that crawled out of the woodwork - the anti-AI evangelists.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I mean, call me crazy, but I think it's better if our devs devote what time and expertise they have to meaningful and engaging tasks, not torturing themselves with a hundred hours of menial housekeeping tasks. If you want to come and do it by hand so there's no AI cooties, you can; we'll be waiting.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Some devs have used AI tools for tasks like the biggest one that basically involved reformatting a file list. It's pretty hilarious that people are mad about MILLIONS OF LINES when it was literally taking what amounted to a giant library inventory and making the same small changes to every entry.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

We opened the floor to actual discussion to try and breed understanding, but it became clear we were dealing with predominantly two kinds of people: First, those who understood a tool is a tool, and that especially programmers have found legitimate ways to use the tool; it is just industry standard.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Yeah, this is the narrative that has been pushed by people who just want to tear us down. I was upset when I made the original post. A few people quit because of the GG-style harassment overload. Most came back, and we're stronger than ever, resolved to keep doing what we do better than anyone else.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

No more shall we burden you with good things you want to play - you want to be mad at the existence of neural networks, and the Recomp sphere is looking bright for you there - those people pump 'em out like they don't give a crap about quality, just like you like to see the with rage.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It's completely rational to believe that something with a half decade of development and recognised quality as the ones who set the standard has been completely inverted now that you know a GPT explained what a while loop was doing to someone who wrote a line somewhere. Made forever unclean.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

But you're right, asking Claude to copy several thousand lines of raw file locations from one format to a slightly different one, saving hours of the most mind-numbingly tedious *minor updates* in unpaid free time you could be doing *literally anything else* is unforgivable; totally ruined the game.

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I really hope everyone pushing this "HM64 has secretly switched to vibe-coding everything!!" conspiracy is proud of themselves. You won! Devs all quit due to harassment. Instead of our dedicated team making high quality feature-rich ports, you can have an ocean of actual vibe-slop Recomps instead.

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Chris Schweizer @ NYCC (H27) @schweizercomics.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This article is fascinating! What should, on paper, be the truest possible way to be faithful to the original intent fails to account for technical limitations, now absent, that the original was designed to incorporate and accommodate.

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Walker Bragman @walkerbragman.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

If you cannot be trusted to stand up for transgender Americans when they’re facing what some experts call a genocide, I don’t trust you to stand up for anything.

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theotheories.bsky.social @theotheories.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

A pattern here is anti trans changes made under a labour government are assumed to be "reasonable and moderate" by people who would oppose them if a right wing government was doing them. This is worse for trans people because cis people just don't believe us when we talk about what is happening.

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Tim Dawson @ironicaccount.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

ai companies are an existential threat, but only because they don’t obey laws, have dangerous amounts of money and computational resources and are connected to Peter Thiel the world could end the danger of “rogue AIs” pretty quickly with a few computer fraud prosecutions and by enforcing copyright

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Tim Dawson @ironicaccount.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

if techbros started a sports drink company by promising the result would turn people into metahumans so powerful they would threaten civilisation, you don’t need new special laws against metahumans, you just need regular laws against scam artists poisoning people

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Dana the Elf @danatheelf.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I kicked down my neighbour's door, smashed the place up, and when I offer to leave if they give me the kitchen, they just rudely tell me to get out of their house! So unreasonable.

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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 13/09/2026

I advocate for withholding your vote from the leading anti-trans Dems, the ones calling us biological males and/or declaring they will be in favor of healthcare restrictions. So of course Will, who I have never had beef with, compares our anger to a cult and drives extreme harassment my way.

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Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This is really well done, great tour of recent history for those who might not understand the rights trans people have lost or the devastation in learning some Democrats want to entrench those losses rather than reverse them.

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