iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

the fallen fell beast falls mainly on The Falls

Reposted by Nathan Leigh || labRats

Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 08/10/2026

This picture will always be iconic. RIP Margaret Hamilton who wrote the software that successfully guided NASA’s Apollo missions through the moon.

Margaret Hamilton with printed computer code in 1969. Credit: NASA/Alamy

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

incredibly lukewarm take: Da Vinci's Demons is basically just TV-MA Doctor Who.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

it's always a good time reorganizing the tapes. as long as you find someone with working knees to do the heavy lifting...

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm dyslexic and literally did not see the difference at first!

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

we do have significantly overlapping obsessions...

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

my cat in a box of cassettes, in case you needed that, which you did.

a white cat with brown spots in a cardboard box full of cassettes

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Jordan Mychal Lockhart (Lemos) @extrajordanary.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There could be zero new media made for the rest of my life and I STILL wouldn't be able to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song, watch every youtube video, and play every game that I'd want to. So why in the world would I ever need to engage with AI content?

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Chris Malone @chrisdamaddog.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Deep Space 9 (sang to the tune of Copacabana) His name was Sisko, A Starfleet commander. Stationed with his son named Jake, on a station in outer space. Orbiting Bajor, The Federation, Was trying to nurse them back to health, After they had been through hell.

static.klipy.com

ALT:

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I have never known a cat who was good at the marshmallow experiment before. But Commodore Welcome is fascinatingly patient when she thinks there's a reward coming. And then obviously you have to reward it because it's adorable. So both of us are trained here and it's fine.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Of all of my cat's behaviors that are endearing, the thing in the morning when she sits patiently next to me while I finish my coffee (sometimes for an hour), poised to pounce the second I stand, to entice me to play with her is the most endearing.

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Raj Patel @rajio.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You will never finish all the work.

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Rob Donoghue @rdonoghue.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The problem with using “good game design” to back up your personal taste is that it tends to rely on the idea that good game design is somehow singular, which is more wrong than I can fit on the screen.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I can't stop thinking about how there's a bunch of full grown people so obsessed with the idea that their computer program has a soul that they lobbied the church to validate it, and these are people our society takes seriously on any subject at all.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

really? i would never have guessed, truly. it's very insightful!

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

this is a really fantastic piece of writing that hits at something kind of deep about class and culture "How much are CEO memes impacting our lives? Did we get forced to return to the office because they heard a little story about productivity being better at a dinner party?"

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Lee Scheinbeim @lee.scheinbe.im · 03/10/2026

actually the funniest part about this feeble attempt to rename "AI" to "SI" is that the entire reason it's called "AI" is to create a false link to fictional depictions of AI and the term "SI" doesn't mean anything to anyone

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

right? you can just see the modulation modulating! it's remarkable. it's perfect.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

meep meep

Trolley problem but the roadrunner is on the track. When the coyote pulls the lever, the streetcar lurches sideways off the track and flattens him instead.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It's really distressing to consider that I'll probably never make any work of art as completely engrossing as an oscilloscope view of a chiptune. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgz...

youtube.com

C64 Jeroen Tel's "Cybernoid I and II" Oscilloscope view

YouTube video by Rolf R Bakke

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

a little 4 color pixel art light and shadow study i just finished of a hand rising up from quicksand. i'm not sure what this is for, but i like it!

a pixel art hand rising up out of the quicksand

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

so I heard you liked sprawling semi-autobiographical semi-surreal 175,000 word interactive fiction stories about indie rock bands in the 90s, so I made 9 Days In A Van With Your 3 Best Friends just for you! And you can even vote for it in IF Comp if you're cool! ifcomp.org/ballot#entry...

ifcomp.org

The Interactive Fiction Competition

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I suspect all trends boil down to "a novel technology allows folks to produce this at scale" but then a tiny handful of the glut are produced by hand and with care and are good, which reinforces the trend. Think disco, punk rock, cgi heavy sci-fi films where a small cast wakes up on a ship.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

this resonates so deeply. the religion of speed is at the heart of basically everything bad right now across all sectors of our culture.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

pros of making your own game engine: "that esoteric feature that I would use all the time didn't exist, but now it does and I benefit forever!" cons of making your own game engine: "that essential feature that I would use all the time doesn't exist, so I can't do anything at all until it does."

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Joseph Hewitt @gearheadrpg.com · 25/09/2026

The model of most of these content platforms- webcomic platforms, YouTube, various streaming things- is to push risk onto the creators and keep rewards for the platform. It's endless spec work where maybe you'll get paid someday.

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REwadent Evil @ewacat.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

if you ever struggle with names when worldbuilding just remember there's a whole massive mountain range called The Rockies

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Andrew | BUY INDIEPOCALYPSE ➡️ PRGE @pizzapranks.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The 6th annual Indiepocalypse Pledge Drive is live with the ever present goal of Breaking Even! (and more so supporting the whole catalog of contributors) Any support, whether it's contributing to the drive or spreading the good word, is very much appreciated! pizzapranks.itch.io/indiepocalyp...

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

we just had a couple folks have to cancel their tickets to tonight's performance of labRats, so we've got a couple seats open now if you're in the mood for causing a little free mischief in a live co-operative game/theatre unholy union! www.tickettailor.com/events/cirqu...

tickettailor.com

cirqueSaw

cirqueSaw – cirqueSaw explores the intersection of art and technology, co-founded by partners Nathan Leigh and Nicole Orabona in 2020. They...

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

it's only taken me 2 hours, but I've successfully recreated functionality that already existed before I started trying to fix something and broke everything!

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I was able to read it off a printed piece of paper and decode it using zbar! Thanks for the tip on ditching the zip header. I bet that could get me another pattern or two in there. Each pattern is 1024 bytes, so even if you're hyper minimal about waveforms, that's the cost of musical complexity.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I thought of a few ways I could've made more interesting artistic choices once I understood the process, so I'm gonna try again in a couple weeks and make a video of the process.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

it's not the best piece of music I've ever written, but it IS the most optimized for ZIP compression piece of music I've ever written!

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

it's a .ZIP of a .MOD file with all samples generated off a single 512 byte waveform with different offsets (redundant data = better compression in zip) and then the patterns had to be written specifically with how they'd be compressed in mind.

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Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

holy shit, this is the whole ballgame in a single paragraph gAI systems require mass theft of copyrighted works, for the explicit purpose of replacing the market for the people they stole from, and the people in charge knew what they were doing ahead of time, and did it anyway

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

well that was the single most (gloriously) chaotic labRats performance of all time! usually things end one of about 4 ways. that was a new one for sure...

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

to be clear, I'm not at all justifying the sprawl, just explaining it!

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

oh there absolutely are! One could program with more balance. It's more a matter that without the ticking clock of 60 fps forcing you to think in 16 ms increments, there's not much motivating folks to try. There is no obstacle to making a speed tactics game. Just a lot of reasons to not bother.

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

one of the advantages of turn based games is that you can have some really sophisticated enemy "thought" processes because you're not trying to cram all thought into a single frame. This is great because complex strategy and nuance! But it also enables sprawl in a way that real time games cannot.

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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I keep seeing videos of a guy who catches crabs and lobsters, cracks all the barnacles off them, puts a shrimp in their claws and throws them back. can you imagine. abducted by aliens but they just give you a spa day and hand you two hot dogs and let you go

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Tristan Willis @tristanbwillis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

www.1319press.com/bookstore/p/...

Trade Offer - obnoxious looking guy in a suit steeples his fingers. On one side it says "i receive: proof that there's a market for "unproduceable" theatre." On the the other side it says "you receive: a beautiful copy of my newly published play The Great Impresario Boris Lermontov Would Like To Invite You To Dinner"

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Nathan Leigh || labRats @nathanleigh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I just created a 3 minute song that can fit losslessly inside a single QR code just to prove to myself that i could and now I'm done making art for a while.

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