iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alexander King

Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Fuck ChatGPT flyers. The future is broadsheets.

A crowded broadsheet with way too many fonts. It says:
Forget ChatGPT Flyers
Say it with
Broadsheets
Unlimited fonts
Stretch them
Or cram a really long sentence into one line for no good reason
No whitespace
Mix capital and lowercase
Pointing hands
(They're called manicules!)
Don't be left behind
Broadsheets are the future

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 25/09/2026

The truck imagines itself as the driver of its actions, and enforces the assertion with an impersonal violence that makes coexistence impossible. But the log, just as implacable, knows it's a passenger of larger forces. "Come, let us occupy this tile together, for a little while" it offers humbly.

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Reposted by Alexander King

Daniel Stegersaurus @stegersaurus.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Trying to make a game that spreads on social media but not wildly enough that a dozen clones release before you can finish the game.

A screenshot from stream showing various unreleased games with the theme of finding a needle in a haystack

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Reposted by Alexander King

Brandon Sheffield @brandon.insertcredit.com · 19/09/2026

Ah, hello prince. This is a nice day for rolling, isn't it? We got the idea for rolling up some things. Well, for you to do it. Maybe some fluffy things. Fluffy things with points in their mouths. They make a noise, aw aw? I don't know how it goes. Get a lot of them. Anyway goodbye, I don't love you

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 17/09/2026

Aside from all the million other issues, this is a big thing for me as well. I don't ever want to be so reliant on an external dependency, especially such an expensive one. Intentionally it's been set up as very "use this forever or not at all", so I'm just like, alright see ya

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Reposted by Alexander King

grayson @graysond.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I'd put money on the line that GTA6 will have approximately 100,000 little jokes between the cutscenes and NPC barks and worldbuilding etc and not a single one will make you laugh

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 14/09/2026

I kind of like that the "go back to the beginning" square is an empty threat. Even though it's impossible to land on, skipping over it feels like a narrow escape! Good to teach kids that the real threats aren't the obvious ones, it's the 'go back 2 spaces' hell loop you've gotta look out for.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 13/09/2026

And also, he wrote it! You get some extra applause for that surely (but it's probably the being a local thing)

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 09/09/2026

You know *exactly* how this would look if it were stop motion animated

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 09/09/2026

Whereas the new Ocarina is philosophically consistent, in that the original was going for realism in its time, but, since what passed for realism then looks stylized to us now, it feels more like a jarring departure, I think

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 09/09/2026

The Awakening remake was still very stylized though, and so sort of close to the original's sprites in feel (and also consistent with the 3DS Zelda game's style too), so there was some consistency in the presentation.

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Reposted by Alexander King

videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

microzine #15, oval office odyssey, screenshot, apple II (1986) www.mobygames.com/game/149343/...

a pixelated rendition of a woman wearing shades named 'alice somersault', a dolphin named 'emily oshan' and a robot named 'norton-99'.
below:
these are the candidates for vice president.
press return to continue or esc to quit.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

They're imitations of children's books. They disgust me. My 3 year old doesn't necessarily share my aesthetic disagreements, but I've read Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See? (2007) a million times, but he won't countenance one of the World of Ersatz Carle more than once or twice.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

These books have no personal touch, gone is the style of a singular artist, gone is the relationship with nature informed by life. They're offensive for that reason. But gone, too, is the experimental page construction, and even the repeating structure. They're bland, boring, written by managers.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

But compare those with the zombie works made in his name. The "World of Eric Carle" imprint puts out these increasingly grotesque imitations, ever more since his death. The caterpillar is drafted into whatever bland and generic children's book fare they can think of. I hate them.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar at the Tea Party, as saccharine as it sounds. My son likes the picture of a lemon in it though.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Across the USA, utterly loathsome.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Snowy Hide & Seek, one of many ecologically implausible outings for the caterpillar.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

This is experimental art, written for children, but still Capital A Art. But without sacrificing being for children! Almost all his books are very repetitive, but with variation, usually featuring a repeated situation or refrain, which is important (and comforting) for child readers/listeners.

A page from The Grouchy Ladybug (1977), featuring a snake and a squirrel

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

All his books recall early childhood forest walks with his father in upstate New York, before moving to Germany, a stark contrast with the death and hunger of his later childhood under the Nazis. His works, overwhelmingly about plants and animals, have a relationship to nature like Hayao Miyazaki's.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

So here's an example- Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) is a classic right, everyone loves it. It's surprisingly avant-garde, in both his collage art style and the book's physical construction. But less surprising knowing Carle had Bauhaus trained teachers, since he grew up in Germany.

Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Each page is cut progressively shorter, to create an iterated structure where the earliest items are repeated with each subsequent page with cumulative repetition.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 04/09/2026

I think about this a lot. As a new parent, it's been very apparent to me the incredible craft with which certain picture books are made with, and what a subtle art it is too, such that many children's authors and virtually all publishers seem utterly oblivious to what that craft is or looks like.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 02/09/2026

Flew a little too close to the sun in '22 I guess

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 26/08/2026

Reminds me of a CFO I worked for, he could never delegate, worked all hours and weekends, ruined his marriage, had a mental breakdown and left. Over the next month, everything went surprisingly smoothly, it hardly seemed like anything had changed, nothing he did (or didn't) had mattered at all.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 25/08/2026

Hope you're liking it! 😅 I think it's maybe a little less accessible than Dizzy, to be sure, but it's quite weird and unique!

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Reposted by Alexander King

Brandon Sheffield @brandon.insertcredit.com · 25/08/2026

I tried to be optimistic! I stand by this bit.

"One thing I'd like to impress upon everyone out there: No matter what's going on in the world, collective action still works."

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 24/08/2026

The most recent post on her website being a 3 year old post titled "What Caused Recent Crypto Selloff" is very found audio log energy

The final post of cross-disciplinary tech influencer Tascha Labs: "What Caused Recent Crypto Selloff | A Fastest Way to Increase Your Investing Performance"

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

In metroidbrainia fashion, it does actually get easier when it more explicitly explains some mechanics. The emuuroms themselves usually have hints in their entries too, but oftentimes you can't read the helpful part till you scanned them all (by which point you probably don't need the hint haw haw)

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

I could see it being the navigation/traversal. It's not a big game in terms of screens, but navigation is always pretty complex and high friction, so you're never just cruising through anywhere. There's also some un-telegraphed one-way gates, where you can get stuck in an area until you complete it.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

It's always good to interrogate your likes and dislikes! I don't imagine it's the meta-structure of secrets, since that's a further-in sort of thing (side note: I do wish the game's later half, "post-game" stuff was meaningfully woven in more into the first run through, or at least glimpsed).

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

Anyway- I thought it was really pretty special, and that's without even mentioning the soundtrack, the wonderful use of Sova dialect Finnish, or the showcase of the TIC-80 fantasy console. So go play EMUUROM!

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

So EMUUROM reminded me of the critically underappreciated Wuppo, which has a similar structure. It also looks pretty lighthearted, but has an incredible internal consistency that you slowly unravel as you explore the world. store.steampowered.com/app/400630/W...

store.steampowered.com

Save 72% on Wuppo: Definitive Edition on Steam

Play as an exiled 'wum' looking for a new home in this bizarre but charming world, filled with strange creatures, puzzles, monsters and political chaos.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

It is similar to Void Stranger and Animal Well (the press doc explicitly calls those out), But it reminded me very much of an older euro-game design tradition, the 80s/90s flick-screen puzzle platformer worlds like Jet Set Willy and the Dizzy series. Or Below the Root, tho that's American.

A screen from Dizzy 3, although this is actually from the Commodore 64 version, is that sacrilege?

Below the Root, it's kind of a chore to play but hoo boy there's some cool ideas in this

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

This was utterly fantastic! Very sad to have finished it. Lots to love, but what really impressed me was the incredible density and intricacy of the level and puzzle design. Nothing is superfluous, every screen is packed with secrets to explore.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

🫡 Of course, every actual real legitimate citation is only ever justified by its ability to support a joke

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 22/08/2026

Haha this immediately reminded me of this bit from Simon McNeil on materialist optimism. "The glass is an object. Its condition – being half-full of water – is a part of its facticity."

Optimism is grounded in an assessment of material conditions. The glass is an object. Its condition – being half-full of water – is a part of its facticity. The water, too, is an object. The optimist begins from the material conditions that exist and extrapolates how the good arises from them. While an optimist has one eye on the future state of the object their gaze is fixed first upon the conditions as they exist.

Hope is far slipperier. In some ways it is an expression of despair. To hope is to observe the abjection of the material and to reject that as the basis for analysis, instead looking toward some outside agency to swoop in and make things better. The optimist, looking at the half-full glass might extrapolate that there is water to be had. The hopeful imagines somebody will bring them more instead.

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Reposted by Alexander King

Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 21/08/2026

I am becoming incredibly exhausted of this pattern: many people: "AI sucks!" Very Smart Person: ah but have you considered (distinct application of ML or statistical modeling that has no real relationship to what the tech industry is marketing as, and people broadly perceive as, "AI")

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Reposted by Alexander King

videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

fanart (1997) archive.org/details/Comp...

a little horned creature with a 2 x bandaids crossed on its stomach and dizzy circles over its head. it is standing between a cross tombstone and a regular round tombstone with r.i.p. engraved on it.
writing:
this is my tamagotchi called peppy. he died aged 11 years.

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 19/08/2026

Especially funny example really, since email search itself has rapidly gotten worse as gmail increasingly overrides actual querying with its own stupid relevance heuristics. How I long to simply query 50,000 emails myself

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 19/08/2026

I think maybe the reason this didn't happen is that promises like the former are quickly verifiable as something it can't actually do, whereas promising to replace all labor *in the future* is a goalpost that's conveniently mobile. (Since, largely, the real customers are VCs etc, not people)

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 16/08/2026

Building codes in this place must be wild. Your neighbor starts working on a second floor expansion and suddenly your roof is their patio

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 16/08/2026

Your failure?? Rob maybe you just need a change in perspective on this. You are not failing to protect the peaches. You are succeeding at feeding a bear. (And, now, also providing some nice highbrow auditory entertainment for them while they dine)

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 16/08/2026

Okay I know it's just a meaningless name thing, but it is a bit silly that they're counting the 13 members, 3 internal teams, and 1 group separately to arrive at 17. It's like calling a soccer team twelve, 11 players + 1 team. It's like, the sum is larger than its parts, and the sum of those parts

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 12/08/2026

tfw you're working on an ancient world project

A google doc edit, yours truly has proposed replacing "Ishtar" with "Inanna"

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Alexander King @literallyaking.com · 11/08/2026

But what I'd really kill for is just some simple X crossing pieces. I don't need elaborate clovers where every track can reach every other one! I'm playing with a toddler, not optimizing my base in Factorio cmon

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