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Tess Snider

@malkyne.com
1.9K followers 1.1K following 5.2K posts

Fairy codemother. Free-range veteran game programmer and underground programming teacher. Co-owner of indie game studio Hidden Achievement.

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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 3h
I've been amused by the tinned fish trend of the last several years. In my family, it was a weird holiday treat. We'd find tinned fish in our Christmas stockings. I have no idea if that's an older family tradition, or if my parents were just being odd.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 11h
I have held and continue to hold the belief that there are more great artists alive today than at any time in human history. We are surrounded by riches. We should be celebrating this, instead of making their lives harder again and again.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 29/09/2026
When you see a chainsaw, you understand, intuitively, that it is not for dentistry. The problem with tools that aren't well-understood is that people lack that intuition. They'll do chainsaw dentistry, because they don't know any better.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 29/09/2026
My malware monitor just blocked GitHub. So that's fun.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 28/09/2026
Scrolling? I was programming. I was logging into BBSes. I was building peripherals...
A scare image snipped from Facebook. The text reads:
DID THE SCROLLING START BEFORE 16?
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Reposted by Tess Snider
Tanya D. || Writer || Narrative Designer @cypheroftyr.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
I’m available for work. Currently available for: Narrative Design Writing (video game & tabletop) Consulting (narrative/DEI/editing) Review and Executive Summary of playable builds Recruiters welcome to get in touch. linkedin.com/in/tanyacdep...
linkedin.com
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 28/09/2026
My eyelashes are turning white on one side of my face, and not the other. This is going to be very strange.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 26/09/2026
Sometimes, your news feed serves up a perfect pairing.
Two news articles.
The first one is illustrated with a photo of Jensen Huang. It is from the Verge. The headline reads:

"Jensen Huang talks about AI and climate change like a supervillain."

The second article has an illustration of two people walking past each other. One is glancing back. There's a tall clock between them. This one is from the New Yorker. The headline reads:

"Why People Aren't Having Kids."
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 26/09/2026
When “smart” people say stupid things, that doesn’t necessarily mean their reputation was wrong. Smart people are very good at rationalizing their way into a ditch. We need to be wary of that. The real problem is when other people think “Well, he’s smart, so he must be right.” Oh-no-no-no.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 25/09/2026
A story in three parts.
Text from a sponsored Meta post from Meta. It reads:
"We'll restore twice the water we consume at our El Paso data center."Text from the bottom of this ad. It reads:
"Meta has limited the ability to comment."The reaction emoji from this ad.
Laughter: 193
Anger: 52
Approval: 44
Surprise: 6
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Ashley Lynch ✂️🎞️ @ashleylynch.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Heard an interview today where someone said the dumbest thing ever. "When an AI agent hacks a website, there's no law that can arrest the AI." No mf, you arrest the person who pressed "deploy." wtf are we doing here? Did COVID turn everyone's brains into applesauce?
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 24/09/2026
Young folks: All of those annoying plastic seals on every damn thing you buy at the grocery store happened because of the Tylenol murderer. He was like the shoe bomber of retail.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 24/09/2026
Streamer was playing Quake, and the audio was like, boom-chk-chk, boom-chk-chk, boom-chk-chk, and I was like, "It's a waltz!"
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 24/09/2026
Please don’t use fanciful language like “hive mind” to describe what sounds like a relatively trivial piece of software that polls four inputs and selects an output.
…the malware plotted its moves within a target system by polling up to four large language models (LLMs) about what it should do and taking its directives from that hive mind.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 23/09/2026
It was hard re-reading CS Lewis' "Till We Have Faces," as an adult. Child-me remembered a story about a cool, smart, tough woman she strongly identified with. She completely did not at all remember the part where this character was eventually humbled, because this was actually a story about faith.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 22/09/2026
For a couple of years when I was a kid, we went to my grandparents' house after school. Grandma's dog thought we were her people. However, our dog also thought that we were her people. Briefly, the two dogs were in the same house, and their worldviews collided.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 21/09/2026
Most people who think they're playing 5D Chess are really just playing 5D Tic Tac Toe.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 20/09/2026
JPMorganChase has this whole series of ads where they put the word "Growth" over a woman's breasts.
A picture of a smiling woman in a baker's apron. She appears to be in a kitchen with other women. The text printed over her is "Make Growth Happen." The word "Growth" hovers just above her breasts.A picture of two women in aprons. They appear to be working in a kitchen. Superimposed over one of the women is the text "Make Growth Happen." The word "Growth" hovers just above her breasts.
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Matt Hodges @matthodges.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Very quick and dirty Jev test for hiring bias. One resume for a Wall Street job; asked whether the applicant should get a first-round interview. 76 evaluations, changing only the first name. 19 of each: White-associated men/women, Black-associated men/women. console.typesafe.ai/playground?s...
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 19/09/2026
All the contempt about avocado toast was so silly back in the day. My gramps gained a love of avocados as a farmboy on the west coast. For him, avocado toast would have just been ordinary farmer food.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 19/09/2026
One of these days, I'm going to get a burst of hardware-hacking longing, and will try some mad-scientist experiment with making a version of my gaming keypad with analog WASD.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 19/09/2026
It's strange that you can remember the voices of the departed. How in the world is your brain storing that? How many can you fit in there? Do they lose fidelity if you store too many? Do they blur together? Do they fade with time?
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 19/09/2026
Anytime I see a paragraph start this way, I 100% know we’ve got some “AI” conflation incoming. Journalists, please stop doing this kind of equivocation. SUVs and bikes are both “vehicles,” but you don’t use the benefits of bikes as a way to rhetorically balance the excesses of SUVs, right?
But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for…
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 19/09/2026
I see that it's one of those 99 Luftballons kind of days.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 18/09/2026
The Spaceshipper is a great regular for your feed, if you're into sci-fi art, design, and lavish dives into making-of.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 18/09/2026
This may be a controversial statement, but I think that AAA made a mistake when they pushed asset fidelity out past around where BG3 is. Think of all the things you could try if your people weren’t busy modeling nose hairs. It was a moat, sure, but one that is destroying you.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 18/09/2026
This is exactly what I am talking about when I use the word "parasitic" to describe these systems, as they exist today.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 17/09/2026
20 year old me would be like "Hell yeah, indie game dev!" She would also be excited that we finally left the AI winter, and then I would have to painfully explain why she shouldn't be so excited. And then she would start plotting to save a friend of hers from becoming an asshole billionaire.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 17/09/2026
This is just about the most confusing way you could have written this headline, Hollywood Reporter.
Woman Arrested on Murder Charge in Wrong-Way Bus Accident That Led to Deadly News Helicopter Crash
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 16/09/2026
During a play session in one of my old tabletop gaming groups, the party grabbed a bite at a made-up place called "Shawarma King," and it became a running joke. Every universe had a Shawarma King. One popped up in Futurama, much to my delight. Today, I have discovered there's one in Austin.
A picture of a party platter of Shawarma and what looks like a small salad, and maybe some tabbouleh? Underneath it, it says "Shawarma King."
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Kala Paint @kalapaint.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Kala Paint is out! I'm @olawson.bsky.social , professional artist for 15 years, then game dev, now wrote the painting software I wish I'd been using all this time. GPU-run creamy brushes, no subscription, no gen AI crap, hand-coded with ideas from artists in our Discord, and more added weekly!
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 14/09/2026
A lot of work is a process. That process allows you to exercise your ideas, see flaws in your plans, and refine, and make a better work product. If you click a button and the work, based on your original plan, magically comes out, it never went through that process.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 14/09/2026
Sir Isaac Newton had no children, but at the same time, we are all his children. The idea that a childless person has "no skin in the game," when it comes to the future of humanity is a stunningly myopic view of legacy.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 12/09/2026
If any of you are thinking about migrating off of 1Password, but you're hesitating because you're using the SSH Agent, I did some eval on BitWarden and Proton Pass, which both have integrated SSH Agents. Read on.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 10/09/2026
We programmers used to say "Fast, cheap, or good. Pick any two." Apparently, we shouldn't have bothered, because a bunch of people just wanted a shit sandwich and a double helping of Fast.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 08/09/2026
"It's against the natural order of things," is such a silly argument to make about anything. First, it's usually wrong: nature contains varied multitudes. Secondly, humanity has spent our entire history violating the natural order of things.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 04/09/2026
"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with." -- Ada Lovelace
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 04/09/2026
Game design sits at a junction between systemic thinking and empathetic thinking. I think that's pretty well-understood. The thing a lot of people don't realize is that good game programming ALSO inhabits that space.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 03/09/2026
I find it really funny that JetBrains Rider is now positioned so heavily as a game developer IDE. Back when it was in beta, they were somewhat confused about how much game dev interest they were getting, because they didn't think we were their market.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 31/08/2026
Coders and aspiring coders, I'm planning to start up a discord for folks who still like writing their own code, to socialize, mentor, network, and, of course, share humor and frustrations. If you're interested, drop me a DM. I will be keeping it invite-only for now.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 03/09/2026
YouTuber: Can my MOM beat [popular game]? Me: Your mom is my age. We had games. For decades. You know that, right? My grandpa played videogames. I'm a third-generation gamer.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 31/08/2026
I can't even begin to describe to you how rad this screenshot would have looked in 1994.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 31/08/2026
Well, that's one way to clear your walk.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 31/08/2026
Coders and aspiring coders, I'm planning to start up a discord for folks who still like writing their own code, to socialize, mentor, network, and, of course, share humor and frustrations. If you're interested, drop me a DM. I will be keeping it invite-only for now.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 30/08/2026
I've noticed a lot of weird uses of "...if I do say so myself" recently. Traditionally, I usually heard it in the context of acknowledging potential bias, particularly in the context of observations that relates to one's self. "I think my speech was well-received, if I do say so myself."
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PeriwinkleRose 💙🇺🇦 @periwinklerose.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
From the info I have been able to gather, Tarrant (Fort Worth) county, Denton (Denton) County and Harris (Houston) County were hit. All blue or purple areas. Tarrant also has 94 polling site locations on the chopping block as well. Regardless of your county, check your registration NOW!
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 28/08/2026
My Texas folks, please check your voter registration (yet again), because Texas just purged over a million voters. [looks tired]
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 22/08/2026
CSS was one of the worst software engineering screwups in internet history. It was supposed to be friendly to designers, and what they created was the opposite of that. They should have attempted to recreate 50 websites to see if it was easy or even possible to do what people were doing with tables.
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 22/08/2026
Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Indie Game Dev: Oh ****, we forgot to make a cup. Hang on, I’m pulling up Blender…
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 20/08/2026
I was in JROTC summer school one summer, when I was a teen. I had long, thick hair that took forever to dry in the humid summer. No time to blow dry it. Was fine in uniform, because it was tied up tight. When I was in civvies, though, I had it down to try to let it dry, but it was too slow...
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