iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 17/08/2026

My YouTube channel was created 20 years ago today... 🧓 I still remember the day I begrudgingly moved on from Windows Movie Maker (lol) to Sony Vegas (v6?) for the silly machinima videos I was creating back then (and which I've since gotten rid of)... I guess I've come a long way!

A close-up, dark-themed photo of a YouTube channel's "About" page with a radial motion blur effect, sharply focusing on the text "Joined Aug 17, 2006". Surrounding information is streaked with motion blur.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 15/04/2026

I did that games grid thing that's been going around... really hard to make choices in most categories, but it is what it is:

A grid titled "About Me: Video Games" featuring twenty categories with their respective game covers. FAVORITE GAME: Outer Wilds —— BEST STORY: Planescape: Torment —— FAVORITE ART STYLE: Rime —— BIGGEST PERSONAL IMPACT: Garry's Mod —— BEST COMBAT: Remember Me —— OVERHATED: From Dust —— UNDERRATED: Final Fantasy XII —— OVERRATED: Control —— NEEDS A REMAKE: Unreal —— CRIMINALLY OVERLOOKED: Zeno Clash —— FAVORITE PROTAGONIST: Roadwarden —— FAVORITE ANTAGONIST: Signalis —— BEST SOUNDTRACK: Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future —— BEST MULTIPLAYER: Divinity: Original Sin —— NOT USUALLY MY THING, BUT...: Before Your Eyes —— TURN MY BRAIN OFF: Ultrakill —— BEST WITH FRIENDS: Final Fantasy XIV Online —— BEST RETRO GAME: The Longest Journey —— NOSTALGIC CHILDHOOD GAME: Sword of Mana —— GAME EVERYONE SHOULD PLAY: Half-Life: Alyx.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 12/02/2026

I always tell people that if light mode hurts your eyes, it's a sign your monitor's brightness is too high. You can use software like Twinkle Tray & set up hotkeys rather than fiddle with the monitor's buttons... but I just bought a macro pad, so I had to set this up: Physical brightness knobs!

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 01/07/2025

I added a "grab stance" with 4 actions (three swipes & one "button push") to all of our first-person weapons. Inspired by what "Left 4 Dead" did when you looked at item pickups. sbox.game/news/july-2025 #animation

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 17/04/2025

That part has to do with what Scott Benson (Night in the Woods) dubbed the "wikification" of narrative, the tendency to see every little detail in the story as the piece in a puzzle to be solved. OG thread: twitter.com/bombsfall/st...

We need a name for a thing I'm about to describe. *I* need a name for it at least. I'm sure there's a name for it. There's a modern (or at least louder in modern era) tendency in both fiction and the interpretation of fiction that every narrative be some sort of very specific kind of hyper-literal puzzle box that can be "solved" by wikis and lore and clues

and that this is in fact the goal of fiction, to create such a thing, the raw materials for this after-the-fact puzzle solving. All aspects of a work must be read hyper-literally so that they can all be made into puzzle pieces. Metaphors can't really exist except to further the puzzle-solving. All parts are gears, locks, or keys, essentially. I saw someone refer to this as wiki-culture, but that's already a term. It's a good one for this, though. There are a lot of stories that follow these assumptions that I like, btw! Not like saying it's "lower". Just that it is often assumed to be the "correct" way to do or interpret narrative and that leads to very specific kinds of storytelling and story reading

The replies are really great on this already and I'll RT some in a bit. First, some context: After we released our game I was really blown away by how large the hunger for really concrete literal explanations were for things that were by design shadowy and vague and open to interpretation. But like, not in the sense of "hey I'm curious", but "hey, you left this out, when are you going to finish it or write the backstory lore etc" Or, for example, we spent a lot of time on in-world fiction. Stories about constellations, fairytales, religious narratives. And I'd get emails asking if Mae was the descendant of an in-world fictional character. B/c what was the point of the in-world fiction otherwise?

The fairytales have to have a literal fact basis that directly drives the literal facts in the primary plot. They need geneologies. Birthrights. Gear A needs to turn Gear Q. etc And again, let me stress, there's nothing wrong with stories that do this kind of thing. I like a lot of them! But this mode of /analysis/ just doesn't lend itself to discussing themes, or metaphor, or subjectivity. And those are to me the most interesting parts of stories. And it leads to seeing things that aren't written like that as incomplete or broken or full of "pointless" bits. It's like reading Watchmen and trying to figure out how Tales Of The Black Freighter literally fits into the literal history of not just the world, but the main cast. Like Ozymandius needs to be the great great grandson of the guy from Freighter, a thing that actually happened, or else it's just a vestigial pointless frustrating addition.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 18/03/2025

A month ago, the annual GDC survey had the responses at a staggeringly low "13% feeling positive": www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dev...

Specifically, developers are much more pessimistic about tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and MidJourney than they were the prior year. In 2024, 21 percent of game developers thought generative AI would have a "positive" impact on the video game industry. In 2025, that number has dropped to 13 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of survey respondents who think it will have a "negative" impact on the industry increased from 18 percent to 30 percent. This change comes even as more developers report using generative AI tools, with the number rising from 31 percent in 2024 to 36 percent in 2025.

But one eye-opening slide shows who is adopting AI tools in game development—and for the most part, it's not the people programming or creating assets for games. The heaviest AI use showed up for those working in "Business & Finance," at 50 percent of respondents. Next up were those in "Production & Team Leadership" and "Community, Marketing, & PR" at 40 percent of respondents each. Developers in all other departments reported less use.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 16/03/2025

It's a shame that USB-C cable manufacturers don't label their products, given the wide variety of specifications. Gotta do it yourself.

A photo of 3 USB-C cables that were labeled with their specifications. A label maker machine can be seen behind them.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 25/02/2025

I found out today that Firefox has a "compact" interface mode, and it's so much nicer! Especially if you've got folders with dozens of bookmarks... support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/com...

Comparison screenshot between the regular and compact interface modes of the Firefox browser. The regular mode is on the left, the compact mode is on the right. The latter showcases a substantial reduction in height taken up by menus, especially bookmark folders.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 20/02/2025

A mildly-amusing edge case I fixed today while adding support for speed-scaling parts of our weapon animation graphs; prevent an awkward pause if someone decides to set the shotgun to reload really, really, really fast... (the solution was to define the transition point by the cycle progress)

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 07/01/2025

It looks like it has the same issues as deep fakes have had for years (destroying expressions when animated). And yeah, the face changing just reminds me of this:

Neural network turning a low-res, pixelated photo of Barack Obama into a white man

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 30/10/2024

Great article! But this bit here is a factual error: character shadows in all Half-Life 2 games are render-to-texture and not shadow maps.

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 26/10/2024

A few recent bloopers from my time working on first-person shotgun animations... #gamedev #animation

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 22/10/2024

You've seen the beach that makes you old, now here's the slope that makes you long

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 22/10/2024

I have three years worth of #gamedev / tech anim blooper clips like this one... I should compile them all into a single video one day, but for now, I reckon I'll start sharing some of them here 🤠

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Max Lebled @maximelebled.com · 22/10/2024

Hello Bluesky! Here are a few things I've worked on up to 2021; a lot of 3D animation, and some other disciplines...

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