iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 24/09/2026

I feel like I'm missing a trick here. Either I have "overly wordy corpo-speak" or I have "AI-pitter-patter." In general I find writing tough but like to think I'm generally competent; when it comes to LI/resumes though I cannot for the life of me write something I'm happy with

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passivestar @passivestar.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

godot 4.8 exposed mesh buffers to gpu compute. all sorts of cool procedural shit is possible now

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 20/09/2026

I wanna be the very best...

Professor Oak telling Red there are 3 pokemon to choose from

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Evelyn @kandake.africa · 16/09/2026

I recently did a ATprotocol onboarding for some developers that was well received. I've published the entire slide deck so others can benefit from the structure, slide notes in the corner of each contains useful links to dive deeper into each topic. atproto-intro.atverkackt.de#/

atproto-intro.atverkackt.de

ATProtocol: Data Ownership for the open social web

A practical AT Protocol architecture deck for platform developers.

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Adriaan @adriaan.games · 16/09/2026

We optimized draw calls by 99% (lol) in Hidden Folks 2 by writing some tools to find all textures used in a level, generate a level-specific atlas, and replace individual texture references with atlas textures. Thread below 🧵👇🏼 #godotengine

Two side-by-side screenshots showing before and after we applied a texture atlas optimization to our game Hidden Folks two, the before showing 13318 draw calls and the after showing 113 draw calls

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 13/09/2026

As a kid I wondered why anyone would want a present I made. As an adult I find I infinitely prefer them to a random thing someone bought me.

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 10/09/2026

Why is it that every time I try to update my LinkedIn (or @sifa.id!) my bio & bullets always sound like hand-crafted AI slop? Is it because all the LLMs were trained on corporate nonsense like what we've been putting in bios and resumes for decades?

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daryl "crimetime after primetime" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 08/09/2026

Today I wrote 500 words. This breaks a 22-day streak of writing 1,000 words or more; I have not missed a day of writing in 23 days. #wordcount #writing Will try to restart the streak again tomorrow!

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 07/09/2026

Reluctance is such a good word for how I feel about agentic coding and how most devs I run into feel about it.

notes.erlend.sh

Making software hurts now

and hurt people hurt people

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 06/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the twenty-second day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 06/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the twenty-first day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing Three weeks! And it's either general overwork or bad sleep, but we are now in "vomit out the words" mode. At BEST I would expect this stuff to survive as a plot point notecard...

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 05/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the twentieth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Jen , the MT liberal bird lady @liberal-jen.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

A murmuration of starlings above Sardinia, Italy. One of my favorite natural phenomena.

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 04/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the nineteenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 03/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the eighteenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Kieran Lampert @kieranlampert.com · 02/09/2026

Another #PAX West is upon us and we are once again returning with our (in)famous panel, "Let's Make a Video Game: Live on Stage"! Come watch a handful of lovable idiots attempt to make a game live, before your very eyes, in an hour! Will we succeed? Either way, it'll be entertaining to watch!

A flyer for the PAX West panel. The image is a photograph taken during the panel from a previous year. Four developers are accompanied by two MCs. The text reads...

"Let's Make a Video Game: Live on Stage
Friday, September 4
9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
Firebird Theatre"

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 02/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the seventeenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 01/09/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the sixteenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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TW @twesq.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

this is gonna upset so many of y’all

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 30/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the fifteenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing Today was also BY FAR the toughest. It took hours...

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 29/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,800 words. This is the fourteenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing First fortnight down!

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Katy // Genderpunk 2026 @katysaint.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his balls? "No!" Says Lil Jon, "It belongs to the windows! To the walls!"

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 29/08/2026

Bar owner runs into his ex.

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Zi @majormcdoom.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

How to make a digital screen glitch effect... Real VFX artist: You'll need a shader that applies distortion but also samples from a nois- Me: Artificially induce real data corruption in your game's video memory. #gamedev #indiedev #Godot

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 29/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the thirteenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 28/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the twelfth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 27/08/2026

Thanks @ntm.bsky.social , @zzstoatzz.io , @trezy.codes, and everyone else for organizing a great @chicago.at meetup! It was a lot of fun and great to see what everyone was working on!

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 27/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,000 words. This is the eleventh day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 26/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,400 words. This is the tenth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing Double digits!

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 25/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,200 words. This is the ninth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 24/08/2026

Today I wrote 2,700 words. This is the eighth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words, and the first day I wrote more than 2,000. #wordcount #writing

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Kieran Lampert @kieranlampert.com · 23/08/2026

The bee Tamagotchi is finished! This was so much fun to work on. Thanks again to @berrycutepixels.com for the amazing concept and allowing me to model it! More info and higher quality images on my site: www.kieranlampert.com/work/bee-tam... #3D #tamagotchi #gameart #art #unreal #UE5

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 23/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,200 words. This is the seventh day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing One week!

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Heather Flowers (500FF DEMO OUT NOW) @hthrflwrs.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

i think this is a contender for the stupidest line of code i've ever written

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 22/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,100 words. This is the sixth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words #wordcount #writing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 20/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,041 words. This is the fifth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words #wordcount #writing

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Kieran Lampert @kieranlampert.com · 20/08/2026

I've loved the Tamagotchi concepts by @berrycutepixels.com for a super long time so, with their permission, I thought I'd take a shot at sculpting/modeling one. The bee one is my favorite! Still a ways to go but here's my progress so far. #tamagotchi #3D #fanart #WIP

A screenshot of a 3D sculpted, bee-themed fan concept for a Tamagotchi, taken from within Zbrush.

The original concept image by @berrycutepixels.com

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 20/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,005 words. This is the fourth day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words #wordcount #writing

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 17/08/2026

hosted atproto handles should work as a customizable personal homepage by default (eg, PDS acts like blento). huge "show don't tell" for atmosphere/web integration. (I think folks are aware of the juice and working towards this, but I wish it had shipped ages ago)

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 19/08/2026

Hmmmmmm apparently I have a nihilistic streak I wasn't aware of?

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 18/08/2026

Today I wrote 1,700 words. This is the third day in a row I wrote more than 1,000 words. #wordcount #writing

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Ross A. Hersemann @loadinglaw.com · 18/08/2026

Over 100 attendees joined us at @depauluniversity.bsky.social for our train themed game jam this weekend! Our goal was to bring together Midwestern game developers to create, collaborate, and connect with each other. We succeeded! See you next year! #JunctionJam2026

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tao @btao.org · 18/08/2026

I don't enjoy the Internet any more btao.org/posts/2026-0...

btao.org

I don't enjoy the Internet any more

The pale is growing

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 18/08/2026

Throwback to that wonderful time where we were all going to live in a virtual world by 2025, we just had to sort out a few "minor" technical issues...

grahame.fyi

From the Archives: The Vergence-Accomodation Effect

A physical hurdle VR still hasn't figured out how to solve. Originally published 09 May 2020 on grahamewatt.com

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Grahame Watt @grahame.fyi · 17/08/2026

Today I wrote 1100 words. This is the second day in a row I wrote more than 1000 words (yesterday's post at 792 was premature). #wordcount #writing

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