iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Brough

Mahdi Bahrami @bahrami.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

super excited to solve 1000 puzzles about pushing boxes and opening doors. I love what the civilized world is offering us

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

HM an interesting thing to hear while I'm in the middle of trying to figure out what the heck to do with my life, thank you.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 08/10/2026

the reason “AI will create so much abundance we will have a utopian society” rhetoric falls so flat is that the people building it will never, ever share their bounty unless it is taken from them and we all know it

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

weird how there's the same signs everywhere now. kinda dull imo but i guess the guy drawing them must be making bank, good for him

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Eddie Robson is at Fantasycon @eddierobson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

“It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.'” Yes. Because the usual thing is to PAY YOUR ESSENTIAL SUPPLIERS, NOT STEAL FROM THEM.

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cindy @bloomedwings.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

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 · 01/10/2026

almost everything that someone is play-acting with LLMs they would do with people given the chance :(

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

thank you for saying nice things!

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

a lot of them see themselves as being in the ceo class is the thing, who are they gonna solidar with

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

well i thought 868-back coming out pretty hard against ai corps would be in its favour but suddenly the former indie scene loves that shit

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

i try not to judge people for being really insecure, but sucks when they’re in a position to take it out on others

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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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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

also relevant: Y's scifi story about aliens eating babies, followed by him claiming that he irl believes that babies are not conscious. people will tell you who they are if you listen!

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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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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

i’m sure i made a videogame about this

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

watching babies figure it out is fantastic, i’ve seen a few different approaches but the general idea seems to be to form a desire and then break it down into line segments

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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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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

i’m gonna do it! meant to ages ago but kept preferring to make expansions than make my hardcoded ui landscape. unfortunately i expect “mobile smell” will limit sales, but just personally i am not happy about having something i put so much into stuck only on phones

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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

it is very normal to Delight in Things

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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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Michael Brough @smestorp.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

tao (finally) says HACK THE MEGACORPS terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a...

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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

yeah exactly, maybe a better way to put it!

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

nice to look back at! interesting to think: i talked about the description language for weapons mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/06/imbr... - would never work for the superficially-similar devices in 868-BACK because each one inserts unique code at different points in the game script. different games!

mightyvision.blogspot.com

imbroglio notes 4 - when this

Most of the ideas I had for weapon effects could be phrased "when X, do Y". When this hits an enemy, stun them. When this kills an enemy, ...

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

question for raigan imo, i'm happy for you to but it's his Unique Personal Artwork

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

(the reason is: raigan made a large donation to the 868-back crowdfunding, so last year i made him a song. today i was finally getting around to another one of the backer rewards, which reminded the children of the song, which they love to an intimidating degree.)

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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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