iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hrm. Greek yogurt appears to be too sour for me, even with a good couple handfuls of blueberries in the mix. The lifelong experiment continues!

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 1h

yeah, Lufia 2 has some wild holes you can drive a truck through. even in casual play there's obvious graphical glitches in the menus. people are fools about their own memories, sometimes

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 8h

The thing about a con is that once someone successfully cons a person, you enter a shame and blackmail scenario. What was a mistake becomes an albatross, a trap, a definition of the very self. You can't be evil, and you have no choice but to continue. This is about MAGA.

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 11h

it's just one of those things that happen when you repurpose stuff. you don't rethink how you implemented 'the monster is dead' in the previous game because the monster appears to be dead and that works! and larger dungeons, yay! no possible side effects

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 12h

it's easy to repeat once you know it's there, because you can just go straight up or down, right, and the maps are all fixed it's also easy to fix in a myriad number of ways

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 12h

it seems like, in general, it is simply very uncommon to experience it. it's kinda not on your radar and it's not really useful except in how it lets you get drops, and it interplays with the dungeon cache-ing system in a kinda weird way. and not every floor has it.

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 13h

the upshot of the concept is that it's an array, which is stored in memory linearly. so what is 100 x 100 in moraff's world (the 10000th element of the array) actually ends up at dungeon of the unforgiven's 10000th position, linearly, which is a real position on the expanded map!

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 13h

I did a whole speedrun route around it a few years back www.twitch.tv/videos/10076...

210

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 13h

I saw it in a friend's play, ran it down, and later looked at another site that had some work written down, maybe moddingwiki (which is currently nonresponsive) explained what happened on monster death in previous versions.

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

You can't just guard against the LLM with test driven development or contract testing because those specs are written by humans and they are almost never sufficiently covering. You can lie to yourself about it, but that's not new. At best, the work shifts. Fewer devs, more BAs. At worst... well.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

We glue a lot of stuff together nowadays in software development, and that glue all sounds basic and boring and anyone can ever do it and then you understand an enterprise stack and realize every bit of glue is a business requirement, crystalized, and the LLM can't get you there.

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

GenAI is, functionally, being treated as the same sort of cost cutting thing. And I don't see how GenAI even matches human performance there. 'Looks correct, but is actually incorrect in a way, and every time you discover the issue, you roll the dice on a new incorrect integration.'

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Others who have experience with said retailer talk about how they are ruthless with their software contractors re: cost. You will do business with them at their costs or they will find someone who will. And in doing so, they ended up with integrations having 'how do I Java?' level errors.

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

My thoughts wind back to this and like... a very large retailer once gave me a SOAP XML spec for selling on their website. It was not accurate. I need you to understand that the process of making a SOAP interface in Java produces that spec and vice versa. It takes special effort to fail like that.

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Someone reminded me of the Witness recently and while it is an overwrought pile of puzzles that does not respect the player in the slightest, it had one truly transcendednt moment for me and so I can't completely hate it. Those moments are not that common.

020

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

GenAI lets you hire sub-intern quality contractors, let them loose on your most mission critical development, have them tell you that it's all tested, have them write the docs and artifacts, and then it'll solve every problem when it comes up. It promises the moon and delivers a money pit.

110

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The world does not stop moving. Your LLM-generated code does not simplify any of this. Such systems trend to push all of the problems you can have into the most expensive-to-deal-with domain, and give you none of the expertise necessary to address those problems in the process.

120

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Software functions simimlarly. It's possible to get something that 'works' but which nobody understands enough to maintain, or figure out what to do if it stops working. Or maybe you didn't understand what 'works' meant from the start. Whether it's art or not, it does require maintenance.

120

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is important to understand: much like how a house can do what houses are supposed to do, or look like they can, if the house is fucked up under the surface, your maintenance costs to deal with the fucked up-ness of the house are orders of magnitude higher than if the house were just.. good.

120

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

HAMfest still lives on in Fort Wayne, I went there a number of times as a teen for similar purposes.

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

had something in my teens that was 3 months of coughing for 5 minutes every morning to the point of barely being able to draw breath. my sympathies

020

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You can't ask to volunteer by the time runs are accepted. Sigh.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I want to volunteer at in person marathons I am going to be at, but can't often justify taking a week off to pay another 1k to volunteer if I don't do anything else there. It remains frustrating.

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Name your favorite cover song is quite hard. But I'm going to take the chance to mention The Protomen's full album of covers, including this one which made me love a song I can't even remember existing before I heard this version. youtu.be/dDJIZkZ7L3I?...

youtu.be

I Still Believe (Great Design)

YouTube video by The Protomen - Topic

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

a solid and respectable division of labor

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Those are domains that involve in depth long term understanding of complicated underlying mechanics with significant consequences of failure. You can't just wave your hands at things in any of those problem spaces and have it work, even if you know what you're doing. Unicode _might_ be closest.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Heh. Just had an LLM thought: what are the odds that a LLM could produce code that could correctly handle 1) tax concerns for multiple municipalities 2) geospatial data 3) unicode encode/decode 4) cryptography 5) codec development All 5 of those are things I would put at 'soft 0%' to 'hard 0%'

100

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This isn't to say that language is unimportant. Language is super important! It's just not sufficient to encapsulate the underlying system: all models are wrong, some are useful.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Someone who cares about the creation and maintenance of something needs to sweat the details, because the details are all there is. The higher level abstractions are more language than implementation, and language is always a negotiated medium.

110

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

this is why i have 2 saturns, 2 controllers, and 2 virtual hydlide disks. couldn't bear flying to rpg limit break without backups

120

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

that was my exact mental response seeing that today

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

oop, there's the anti-click, we're in anhedonia time

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I have a right wing work associate who was joking about this for years. I know we all know it's not logic, but this is also old eliminationist shit, like the liberal hunting permit.

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It really was good and the ending got me choked up, but fuck I was staff/admin on a squaresoft MU* for 15 years and I had to run face first into a lot of the oldschool discourse.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This happened last night and I'm self-retweeting because it's the last post in a long thread of attempts. Not that _many_ attempts, but each one takes a real amount of time.

030

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I have this problem so often with video games. People will say things like 'FFX is universally beloved as a game' and pages upon pages of 'sphere grid is shit, blitzball is shit, voice acting is shit' from 15 years ago echo in my head

240

Reposted by Mechalink

Anatoly Shashkin💾 @dosnostalgic.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Ummm... Anyone asked for a commercial remake of Moraff's dungeon crawlers? Because one is apparently coming. WHAT?! 😲 Trailer: youtu.be/tz7hKcmgEVI Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/5139260/...

youtu.be

Moraff's Dungeons Release Trailer

YouTube video by Jimbly

54614

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

1575, no near misses, TRUE ENDING WE'RE DONE.

Steam interface cropped to include the header of Unfair Flips. Play time 19.8 hours, Achievements 14/14, meaning I've finally gotten all the endings. Freedom!

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

AGDQ 2027 Submission slate. From kusoge to niche to games which deserve a wider audience, we'll see how it all goes!

A GDQ submission set of orange boxes around text. 'Golgo-13: Top Secret Episode 1 category', 'Legend of Mana HD Remaster 1 category',' Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style 4 categories', 'Home Alone 1 category' (gameboy), 'Crystal Project 1 category'.

020

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

yes, because non-union immigrant labor, paid under the table well below minimum wage, with the threat of 'we can call ICE on your ass at any second', is known for its... goodness

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Yeah, it's closer to, like, scarab god? A wild as hell card.

120

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

10 years ago, I wouldn't have recognized my life now, just because it wasn't engaged with Magic (and I'm in St. Louis.) 20 years ago, I wouldn't have recognized my life 10 years ago, because it WAS deeply engaged with Magic (and I was in Chicago). Not sure how I feel about these facts.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It is difficult for me, often, to decide what to do. There's no flow, no reason, no structure. Subsuming myself into functional defaults, like 'Magic all the time' or 'MMO all the time' makes that easy. It's not always the best.

000

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

'thankfully' I was so disconnected from any structure or friend which could have drawn me into going deep on dev early, and was shaped right for doing well at high school

010

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

i ended up so immensely in the negative money playing that game, heh

110

Mechalink @mechalink.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

printers, even moreso at the time, were a nightmare of bad hardware and software both!

010