iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

One of the greatest video game stories ever written is about piloting a deeply hungover, divorced, schizophrenic detective through an Estonian DnD group's strange mid-apocalyptic game world and trying to get him to dance with his partner, a closeted petrolhead. AI can never generate a Cuno.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 16h

Which is wild, because if you look at them strictly as fights (imagine pitching them to a producer) they kinda suck, but the actual experience of piloting your chunky main character into the pixel perfect combat dance is so beautiful

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 16h

Or a subscription to a game that looks and sounds like a lower end mobile game

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 16h

The only way it survives long term is a vast number of purchasers who drop off very quickly.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 17h

People talk a big game about the la-mulana puzzles but I think the extremely specific, *slow,* platforming where one pixel makes all the difference was the genuine highlight of that game

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 18h

So in order to keep this game alive it's going to need to bring in $1000 net per day forever. This cost scales up per user.

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Kayin @kayin.moe · 09/10/2026

Someone just reblogged this on tumblr with this tag and I just fucking died I've been on this shit for over a decade and it's only getting worse

kayinnasaki

written about this before but whatever.

Videogames as an artform have a problem with nostalgia. Not that people shouldn’t have nostalgia. Or that games shouldn’t draw from the past. But instead the weight we give to nostalgia.

When people go back to enjoy old games, we assume it’s a nostalgia thing. Do people assume that with books? Or movies? Or music? People certainly do go back in time with those mediums for nostalgia! It happens! I know when my sister is listening to certain cheesy old boyband pop or punk she’s often having a musical nostalgia trip! That’s cool! But we still don’t ASSUME, CONSTANTLY thats why people go back to stuff.

People like old stuff because it’s cool and interesting. It’s historic. People go watch Metropolis still, but how many people alive could even be nostalgic for a movie like that?

I almost want to see the word Nostalgia excised from discussions about video games – not because nostalgia is bad but because we over use it to the point where it’s actually harmful I think.

I mean I made IWBTG and am making an NES style game right now and even for me, the obsession with ‘nostalgia’ seems crazy.

Old stuff is cool. I know this because I see a lot of you kids on my tumblr feed talking about games I know you didn’t grow up with. It’s like finding your parents record or CD collection. Thinking the primary greatness of old games is bringing back memories of eating cereal and playing games on a saturday morning is a great injustice, even if those memories for some are perfectly worthwhile things.

#this post is 11 years old and still holds true

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Geralt: Behold, the Useless Dipshit, a card that sucks and is only good as a sacrifice bluff Random Guy: Hey, that's me Geralt: Probably a coincidence

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"studio head" or to be more accurate studio only employee

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I don't know if folks know this, but the thing Bier is describing is a felony.

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is the most baffling quiz I've ever seen. So many questions that are so deep in the sauce they don't realise that they are entirely nonsensical.

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Molly White @molly.wiki · 06/10/2026

“You are infringing on the time and brainpower of people by pushing "your" content that little/no of your brainpower went into” is such a banger

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Guy who sees schools as The Place Where He Can Find Children

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We could solve so many problems by just imposing a rule "the statements and works produced by a chatbot are, legally, the personal statements and works of everyone with voting shares in the company controlling that chatbot."

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I heard this one two god damn years ago

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shaunt @shaunvids.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

it was smart of jacob geller to only post about what he did to his 50k followers on here instead of to his 1.5 million youtube subs or on his patreon. that way fewer people know about it and he limits the financial hit

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Her name is Buck and she likes to Party

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

There is a variety of small C conservative guy that is a genuine selfish hard worker asshole and those guys are predictable, understandable, and usually have a startling amount of individual empathy. Union Man types.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Now I'm wondering if my extremely unusual last name (~6 people have it in the entire world and it is so Ellis Islanded that it no longer has a cultural origin) is why I don't get scam calls

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Listen I've talked to enough AI adherents about their output to know that Claude Whining is very common

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J. L. Westover @mrlovenstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So grateful I get to include this comic in my book as a way of saying thanks ❤️ kickstarter.com/projects/mrlovenstein/mr-lovenstein-presents-fun

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

An aspect of it might be people looking to the past for a time when things were "better" and then having to grapple with finding stuff that was, in fact, worse. The bravery is in facing that and deciding to make art out of it instead of power washing the grime off.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I respect them as "oh my god my wife is so hot" movies. Not in any other way.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Hey you better also be hacking random servers and pretending to mine Bitcoin in there young man, or I'm going to have to take away your vc funding

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 29/09/2026

I think it's pretty neat that one of the legit breakout indie success stories this year is a game about painstakingly designing and sewing opulent ballgowns store.steampowered.com/app/4019220/...

store.steampowered.com

Dressmaker on Steam

Become a dressmaker! Choose fabric, cut out patterns, and sew them all together to satisfy (or sabotage!) townsfolk in this cozy crafting game inspired by real dressmaking.

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Collie Cariad @colliecariad.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Seeing the ease and beauty of farm to table game development behind the bars of my industrial Jira hell.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I've been describing him as "little brother energy" in that he's a big sweetie and a cascading series of fuckups and anyone who raises a hand against him deserves everything they get

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Drop the well, it's cleaner

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Eniko Fox @enikofox.com · 27/09/2026

i posted an epiphany i had about why i hate AI so much on fedi and i wanna post it here but it won't fit and i don't wanna cut it down to size so fuckit i'm just posting a screenshot

Eniko Fox
@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place

OH. right! i get it now!

i get why AI is so depressing to me. because covid already shrunk my world to almost nothing, where almost all of my life revolves around socializing and watching videos on the internet (which is being ruined by AI) and creating creative works through coding (which is being ruined by AI), often using open source tools and libraries (which are being ruined by AI)

i already had so little and now even that is being rotted away before my eyes
Sep 26, 2026, 06:16 PM
288 boosts
2 quotes
593 favorites

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

As a universe it is too earnest and straightforward to be ironic or sarcastic, but vicious self-critique is an avenue it can still use, and should.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Star Wars is best when it is about something applicable to the real world, it is worst when it is about other Star Wars stories (KOTOR 2's Kreia being the exception)

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In Otter News @in-otter-news.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

After a long day at the aquarium, the otters help tidy their toys away. Payment is made promptly and entirely in ice cubes.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I found the opposite- you sometimes can't pursue a specific theory because a setup doesn't happen, but you can always push something interesting forward until well into the postgame

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

What about the other one?

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Christ, Resident Evil is such a fucking good time at the movies. Funny but not insistent on it, knows how to do terror and horror. Bloody, meaty, boney, but it isn't fascinated with gore. The protagonist is radiating little brother energy in the best way.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is, as far as I can tell, the only use of an em-dash by Reuters in its entire posting history on bsky. Their standard for this would be to either break the headline into two sentences, or use a semicolon, or a normal hyphen. The em-dash is being deliberately deployed here.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

People are saying you have AI side projects that you don't want to talk about. What's going on there?

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

speaking as a gameplay programmer, I'd be like "hell yeah it does dude"

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

one of the first games I ever had to put down because while it was fun it was also gigantic on a level I wasn't quite vibing with. Absolutely value for money there.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Literally the inverse of the Cybersmith Beard, if they kissed it'd make one roadie

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Osaka, we 🐇 @osaka.zone · 17/09/2026

boring people should be exposed to ideas and art that make them uncomfortable only when someone becomes some sort of esoteric pervert, are they really complete to ignore the libidinal is to be half a person

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Rush the stage. He's right there.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's art that people who aren't in the space have trouble seeing as such, much like poetry, noise music, and dada

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Did you read the comments and check for sarcasm?

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

So starting with seven means that the games just get better and better if I keep going? Fabulous

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Also there were some pictures of monkeys involved, but they're not as important as the wet jeans pushup guy, who is the reason half of the country has diarrhoea. Also a bunch of twenty year old Nazis were allowed to reprogram the bank computer and we're all hoping they didn't break it.

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somf @somfin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Man, Luxon has really mistaken ignorance for power hasn't he

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