iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

So @bigbadgameathon.bsky.social has posted the videos from the event, meaning that we finally have a non-cheating full clear of this arcade gem on YouTube youtu.be/0xO9qf6V5m0?... Not a nightmarish slog to get here, but perhaps more than the game deserved. Nonetheless! Small victories.

youtu.be

Big Bad Game-a-thon 2026: Dream Shopper by Mechalink

YouTube video by Big Bad Game-a-thon

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 14h

12 hours until my flight home somehow, I need to find a way to make my home, or my life at home, as conducive to thought and action as I sometimes find it when I'm not sitting at my desk I need to not wear grooves of depression into my home

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 20h

On Tumblr I keep seeing these horrifying AI nail care ads where they put a fizzy liquid on some random gross nail and then the whole thing sloughs off. I don't like the world I am being forced to live in, as long as I live.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 21h

getting window seats there and back in the Frontier seat lottery. its the small things sometimes

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Everest Pipkin @everest.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm very please to announce a public release of my drag-and-drop bookmarking, game-making, and wandering tool Scrubjay! Scrubjay is a weird website builder that lets you cobble together web elements, images, links, text fragments, etc into a series of nested rooms...

"SCRUBJAY" sits over a bunch of images of frogs, birds, doors. it's a very 90s look

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And to be clear, this is the game playing 'fair'. It does not always take 6 monsters to wipe your party.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Hanging out in Vegas for a few days without a magic tournament or work conference as a reason. It's pretty awesome to have so many things within a mile or two. A bit expensive, but still.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Fox is right in many environments. At the same time there's paradoxically (not a paradox) plenty of environments that will exclude and punish you for doing the things someone with ADHD do, run by people who are also openly neurodivergent! There's never a win when society says you lose.

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wing is approximately seven 1/3 flyers that draw cards @sevenishmagpies.com · 27/09/2026

Okay hi now that I'm at a computer and checked to make sure I'm not breaking an NDA by saying this here's full context to the survey email (tagging @graham.loadingreadyrun.com @shivambhatt.bsky.social since y'all interacted with my initial bed skeet). This gon' be a thread.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Alright, it's time to engage in a bit of the old supermarket sweep X the old run to the altar at the church x pacman over on twitch.tv/bigbadgameat... with the new Kusogrande classic: Dream Shopper!

twitch.tv

BigBadGameAThon - Live on Twitch

Big Bad Game-a-thon 2026! Dominique Pamplemousse by Tigerion! | Streaming dominique pamplemousse for 297 viewers.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

a classic of the form from MTG

The magic card Children of Korlis. the text box starts with 'sacrifice children', riffing on the OP's joke

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I still haven't gotten the good ending. I love that this game exists, because it illustrates how variance actually works: there is no bargaining.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

this week has blazed by. whuf.

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reminder that in Canada upon becoming an engineer you get an iron ring made of a collapsed bridge, purposely designed to be uncomfortable, to remind you that your ethics demand you give a fuck even about the boring grudgework of such as double-checking your math. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

en.wikipedia.org

Iron Ring - Wikipedia

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Big Bad Game-a-thon @bigbadgameathon.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Tomorrow, jank fans! Tomorrow BBG throws wide the gates to the 14th plane of elemental gaming curiosity. Have you checked out the schedule yet? horaro.net/bbg2026/sche...

horaro.net

BBG 2026 Schedule – Big Bad Game-a-thon 2026

BBG 2026 Schedule of Big Bad Game-a-thon 2026

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

So tomorrow starts Big Bad Gameathon at twitch.tv/bigbadgameat... . A multi-day marathon celebration of kusoge, the weird, the silly, the passionate, the shovelware. Come watch it played, contextualized, and recontextualized, in a place where there's more to be found in gaming than ever.

twitch.tv

BigBadGameAThon - Twitch

BigBadGameAThon streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I got within 800 points of getting access to the last act of Dream Shopper earlier today, meaning I was within 800 points and a mismenu of 'clearing' the game. As I've said before, the skills are there, just need to match the variance.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I'm going to focus on the third screenshot for a moment. I am a systems thinker. Professionally. And 'nobody needs to know the details' is bullshit. Working at a higher level of abstraction requires significant technical stability. The most common version of this? Cars.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Whuf. Very out of sorts mentally in a way that's not as common for me. Very high anxiety. I don't really have any tools for this scenario. Mrr.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Another couple hours of trying to get a micro sd card that can be read on both the steamdeck and a windows computer. custom drivers, nope. the only direct option I haven't pursued is fucking recompiling the WSL kernel so it understands sd cards, since it doesn't come with it out of the fucking box

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

i just want to be able to set up a memory card so I can emulate on steam deck, except an ext4 won't parse or mount in windows even with WSL2, and a exfat won't get picked up by emudeck. this is a completely normal use case :|

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Jennifer X. Pumpkins 🎃 @jenyetagain.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"trans people require medical care for the rest of their lives" is the craziest anti-trans talking point because everyone requires medical care for the rest of our lives.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

At my best, linear scale? Probably 9,maybe 10. Exponential scale? 7, maybe 8. Amongst millions of magic players I have grasped a few fragments of legitimate success. But I never managed to thrive at the highest levels, just come close a few times.

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cassandra (herald of tempestra) @badatgender.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

if you go into a bookstore and a similarly sized library, they may have the same amount of physical books, but the library will have considerably more titles, probably by an order of magnitude there is no possibility that bookselling businesses can replace libraries

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I've said before numerous times that 'being welcoming is active work'. This is an illustration of/discussion of one of the core pieces of that work.

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X ΘΔ (Giant Tyrant Overlord) @xkeeper.net · 22/09/2026

one of the things you learn over 20 years of community/site management is that there is no "neutral option". doing nothing is still an action leveraging your power might drive some vocal people away, but doing nothing will drive away the quieter people, too

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Inbetween Shadowbringers and Endwalker 5.4 's plot involves breaking a password on an ancient file, and the sequence mentions using a dictionary of the ancient language to help the process of cracking it. A nice nod to the classic brute force dictionary attack on passwords.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It's a running problem that my brain picks up random words and uses them to remind me of things that've hurt me. I can only mindfulness so hard. A few days ago 'wax' was a trigger and I can't remember way. 'Barney' was a trigger but I know why that one's a trigger.

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Lane Stellmaker @hipcrimevocab.net · 16/09/2026

It seems like this is a good time to tell you all why LLMs are never, and can never be, conscious.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This is one of the classics of the early internet, and still holds up.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Ugh, I wish I understood japanese. I am 0 for many on attempting to learn other languages, even when it was a school requirement. It's a real bummer.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

So now that I'm through Shadowbringers: If you say you play FF games for the story, FF14 should be your next FF game you playthrough. The roughest things about FF14 as a 'single player' game are the forced group content, the subscription fee, and that a lot of the game isn't really challenging?

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

When people ask me about FF14, this screenshot is going to enter the conversation.

Multiple experience gain messages from FF14, with a 'You attain level 75!' in the middle. This is what the bluemage level grind looks like solo. We're feeding sea creatures slugs.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

fuck me, why is discord advertising shit to me in a way that blocks some of my screen real estate

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Nathalie Maréchal, PhD @nathaliemarechal.net · 17/09/2026

So you just learned about the AI cult, huh? Here is the longform explainer you need to make sense of the very, very strange ideas driving tech policy in 2026. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride. www.techpolicy.press/what-policym...

techpolicy.press

What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI

Nathalie Maréchal asks, why are we betting the economy and the future of democracy on cult-like beliefs?

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

'MSX Hydlide and Dragon Warrior were early examples of nonlinear open world games' has the same approximate truth value as 'Classic Final Fantasy games were nonlinear'. And it's not fucking high.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The final sequence of Lufia 2.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I've been looking at a few other randomizers and playing them with a friend, which means I now actually have a LTTP rando completion or two under my belt. Feel pretty good about my first ever keysanity. Didn't even need spoilers or auto-tracking.

The ending collection screen for Link to the Past Randomizer.

Collection Rate 181/216
Total Time 04:44:54.56 (with fastforward intermittently used, so it was a bit shorter)
16 hearts
Bow, Red Boomerang, Hook, Mushroom, Powder
Fire Rod, Ice Rod, Bombos, Ether
Lantern, Hammer, Ocarina, Bug Net, Book
Shovel, Red Cane, Blue Cane, Mirror
Green Pendant, Blue Pendant, all 7 crystals
Sword 4, Boots, Mirror Shield, Mitts, Red Mail, Flippers, Moon Pearl

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

20 year old me would be absolutely devestated by being spoiled on the future of their current romance. And it's not like I have a lot of great news on the health front. Aside from that, the magic thing would be surprising and kinda impressive, the speedrunning thing would likely be world changing.

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Kora, deep space nine lover @lagenerica.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I really wish I knew who did my seasons alters of Primeval Titan. A friend bought them at a vendor for me years ago and they've been my go to ones ever since.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ghidra is still a complete fucker of a program. Does anyone I know legitimately understand what the fuck is with this program and how to use it? It's like pulling teeth from a shark.

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

My brain is merciless when it comes to self hating thoughts. Almost everything I do is a chance to be reminded repeatedly of past incidents of judgment. Mindfulness is a hard thing when nothing goes away.

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Ami - BUY MY BOOK 🏳️‍⚧️📚💙 @amithero.bot · 14/09/2026

No really this whole privacy section is incredible and every review should have one.

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jesse, head of endorsement deals at Boingo Wireless @killgoldfish.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

whenever you see "foundation," mentally substitute "money that should have been taxed but the rich person it's named after got to spend it however they wanted instead"

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Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I swear, every time i get my physical and mental health in order, a loadbearing piece collapses within the year. Not great, life.

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Tom, Legally Certified Date Simmelier @iiotenki.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

When translators say they hate doing MTPE because it's faster to just do it from scratch and results in better material, we're not exaggerating. If I was a proofreader and a translator handed me this, I would immediately tell the PM to fire them. No translation is genuinely better than an MT in loc.

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