iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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cindy @bloomedwings.bsky.social · 5h

10% off 868-BACK is crazy, it should actually increase its price during sales. ... go buy 868-BACK.

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

blog post - 868-BACK: steam reviews mightyvision.blogspot.com/2026/09/868-...

mightyvision.blogspot.com

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neighborhood01.bsky.social @neighborhood01.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I legit think 868-BACK is GOTY as much as I’ve enjoyed some other games this year. Crazy amounts of strategic depth and so many interesting interactions among the various devs and progs.

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I am now keeping this on speed-dial

Edited old IBM printout in black caps on off-white paper.
'A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must always do the hacking haha what are they gonna do, put a computer in jail? Haha "oops it's alive" lmao'

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"i haven't written a line of code all year!" as though that's something to be impressed by and not an admission that you can't navigate the slop you're pouring out so instead you've just completely surrended your creative capacity

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Official Electric @officialelectric.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

RUIN: 35th Anniversary - Definitive Edition A Point-&-Click Adventure game set in a cyber-fantasy world of kingdoms and ancient relics. Journey through this mysterious land, behold its wonders, and ponder 35 years of mysteries. Wishlist on Steam Now: store.steampowered.com/app/5012260/...

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Aysha U. Farah @ayshaufarah.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

We’re getting closer and closer to Peak Environmental Storytelling

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✧ SkyMagpie ✧ (left my ❤︎ in Undermine) @skymagpie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I was worried if my comic is perhaps too self indulgent, but then I remembered the words of Björk and now I need to make it even more self indulgent 🥰

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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

rip annie dillard

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

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Gustavo Chico | Clovelt @clovelt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Ayo! I added external keyboard/controller support to @smestorp.bsky.social 's amazing Cinco Paus: youtu.be/ndgm-qDXB3I Works in all game builds, including the ios version on M-Chip macs (which plays super smoothly) + optionally, Automancia built-in! @raiganburns.bsky.social might like this :)

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adamatomic @adamatomic.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

accordingly i think you should seriously mistrust and esseentially *fear* the fundamentalist capitalist instinct to simply go fast now and if you dont go fast now we'll find someone who will profoundly self-destructive

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adamatomic @adamatomic.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

you have to slow down first, you have to find joy in improving your technique, somehow deeply trust and value have essentially faith that you WILL be fast EVENTUALLY, understand that progress is nonlinear, and that your goal is not to be fast once, it's to be fast for YEARS. its a different project

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adamatomic @adamatomic.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

as your running form reverts, hopefully, to a more kind of natural, light, smooth, kind of fundamentally mammalian pattern, the amount of ground you can cover, and how fast you can cover it, for EXACTLY the same energy expenditure, is kind of mind boggling

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adamatomic @adamatomic.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

appreciating today this thing i learned from distance running, which is that you can't actually train yourself to run fast *directly* you will hit a ceiling, hard, get injuries, etc instead you have to train yourself to run LIGHTLY and run SMOOTHLY at SLOW speeds. directly against your instincts

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Ulfsire @ulfsire.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I may have taken the wrong lessons from path of achra in now thinking every UI element needs a little accompanying poem

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

what really gets me looking back at my blog is this 2020 post of “ok i spent yesterday in bed with a sore throat but i’ll definitely get these 7 projects done soon” and then no posts for two years mightyvision.blogspot.com/2020/05/defi...

mightyvision.blogspot.com

definite plan

Imbroglio: Mizzenmast is now unambiguously released and working. This was a stressful few days. Yesterday I completely crashed and spent ...

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daryl "rupert pumpkin" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

children dancing around the house singing RAIGAN BURNS at maximum volume @raiganburns.bsky.social

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Douglas Wilson @doougle.net · 09/09/2026

In prep for our Imbroglio episode on TSLOG, I spent a while re-reading all of @smestorp.bsky.social's old blog posts. Legit some of the best, most useful writing ever done about making videogames. Check out this nugget from May 2016, sooo good mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/05/imbr...

"tools:
- steal ideas from another game and try to fix them
- always make the grid smaller
- save up weird ideas until they naturally fit somewhere
- write down all different ideas and then fit them all into a consistent structure
- simplify the design to avoid work you don't want to do
- abandon your original idea, it was just scaffolding"

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

barrier to entry for making videogame was once Very High,, we would spend entire weekend figuring out how to use Rpgmaker thankfully now for low price of PLANET NOT INHABITABLE you can instruct mr computer to copy someone’s code from github and put your name on it and He will tell you did a good job

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Jack @jackturps.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

wrote some stuff about the level generation and its different relationship to novice and expert players

jackturps.com

A Deathless Roguelike

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videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

snatcher, screenshot, sega cd (1994) www.mobygames.com/game/7524/sn...

green caps text on a black background:
this story is dedicated
to all those cyberpunks
who fight against injustice
and corruption every day
of their lives.

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adamatomic @adamatomic.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

constraints CAN breed creativity, sort of, but i hate this way of phrasing it, because constraints can also hobble you - dogma can make you miserable and incapable of creating things what we really mean is that SOME constraints function as PROMPTS, specifically in the pre-hell-world sense

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izzy kestrel @iznaut.com · 06/09/2026

fuck ai and fuck you if you use it

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Andrew Doull @andrewdoull.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The two kinds of bearded guy

Bearded guy holding 2 chickens and bearded guy wearing cool shades.

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it.

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

really, rogue ai swarms doing cybercrimes is the only part of this whole business i can get behind

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Brett Codes @brettcodes.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: brettcodes.com/im-done-usin... The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.

brettcodes.com

I'm done using AI

Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.

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itsteaparty @teapartycrasher.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

868 Back makes me think of the scene in Ratatouille where Anton ego flashes back to eating his mother's cooking and realizing what made him passionate about food in the first place. It makes me I did as a teenager first discovering and falling in love with roguelikes. Easily the GOTY

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mcc @dryad.technology · 26/08/2026

Okay now streaming! This second! We are going to give Zandra a crash course in HACKING with the hot game of the summer (I have seriously been playing nothing else this summer) 868-BACK by @smestorp.bsky.social Remember: Their only crime…was curiosity. And wire fraud. And that helicopter they stole

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adamatomic @adamatomic.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

visager.bandcamp.com/album/puzzle... appreciation post this is how this album worked for me (i know you know albums like this) Listen 1: yea this is nice! Listen 2: hm, it's not quite what i expected i guess... Listen 3: whoa wait whoa i think i get it Listen 4: yes YES why am i about to cry

visager.bandcamp.com

Puzzle World, by Visager

20 track album

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gg @ggdg.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

i need more people to talk about my vn where i can see it or i'm going to die. we're not going back to forums i know we're not going back to forums we're never going back to forums. but i'm about to start auditing discord servers

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

another post that pretty well says what i'd been thinking of writing, please keep this up www.experimental-history.com/p/i-like-em-... (via @flantz.bsky.social)

experimental-history.com

I like 'em thick

OR: an apology to my English teachers

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

conveniently i already wrote my contribution to today’s GAMES DISCOURSE “If you don’t like a thing, don’t waste energy talking about it. If you'd instead written something positive about something you liked .. you’d have made the world a better place.” mightyvision.blogspot.com/2026/06/advi...

mightyvision.blogspot.com

advice on how to write about indie games

Instead of "this game is niche" try saying "i like this game because..." Look, "niche" is not a property of a game. It's a recess in a ...

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

last week i started writing a blog post w thoughts about LLMs, didn’t finish yet because i have actual stuff to do today i saw this distantprovince.by/posts/its-ru... by @distantprovince.bsky.social and now i can leave out my Blindsight section because someone got that written already 👍🏽