iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 16h

That Valkyries game was unbelievable. I can’t believe they pulled it off after being down 16 in the 3rd.

The inside of Chase Center, with a huge standing crowd, all wearing violet. Kaila Charles is on the Jumbotron and gold confetti is falling from the ceiling. The score is 77-73 for the Valks win!

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 27/08/2026

Full disclosure, but I was a thought leader on the "R* makes games that are tedium simulators" beat.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
The best the PS2 has to offer ain't all that good
Grand Theft Auto Ill was the first game that offered a city in which you could explore every single path and alley in every single neighborhood. We loved GTA III when it first came out, but after a while the game-play--running errands for low-life scum--proved to be either too easy or too difficult as the plot wore on.

The follow-up, Vice City, drops you into Miami Vice-era Miami. Supercars are everywhere, cigarette boats cruise the bay, Blondie is on the radio, and you can buy slick pastel suits on every corner. But an excellent setting does not a good game make. Despite numerous additions-including explorable indoor areas like malls, hotels, and even a demolition derby arena—Vice City suffers from the same tedium that ultimately made GTA III less than what it could have been. Vice City does provide a wide-open, nonlinear world, but to advance the story and unlock new areas of the city, you must follow a linear series of missions. Same problem suffered by GTA IlI--a problem that should've been addressed in the follow-up. Bottom line: It's a hassle to spend so much time running around town, collecting everything you need to complete a mission, only to fail the mission and start all over again from scratch. But, thankfully, the game is cram-packed with side missions to keep you interested when the plot missions drive you crazy.

Vice City uses a slightly upgraded version of the GTA Ill engine, but the overall level of detail is just slightly better. Texture quality is still craptacular, car models still pop in and out, and most of the buildings are only slightly more complex than standard GTA III cubes. Improved graphics would have at least mitigated our issues with gameplay.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 07/08/2026

Meta and Google: another flawless collab. Unless Star Wars really is redefining what it means to be a bitly link.

A picture of a Liam Neeson as Quigon Jinn holding a green lightsaber. The caption reads: Star Wars Officially Redefines What It Means To Be A: bit.Iy/4hi8|xw
View on Threads

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 22/07/2026

I don’t understand why the mouse is there, just hanging out.

A TV hung about 12-feet high on the wall of a bar. There’s a wooden roof, a security camera and something suspicious dangling below the TV. You can’t see in the picture, but I assure you motion smoothing is on.

A close up of the thing dangling below the tv in the previous picture. It’s a computer mouse. The TV is roughly 12-feet in the air.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 20/07/2026

I took Toby on a long walk yesterday. He liked the trail above the beach best, I think.

A corgi with huge ears sitting on a trail, looking down on a long, crescent-shaped beach below.

A tricolor corgi, sitting on a trail looking to the right. His ears are the size of the rest of his head and there is a beach and ocean in the background.

A tricolor corgi poking his head over the sea wall at the beach. He’s watching people walking and playing on the beach.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 13/06/2026

The funniest part is that this is exactly the same relationship Ripley had with Chloe when she was a puppy.

Ripley, a black and white Boston terrier puppy, in the play position, next to a tri-color corgi (Chloe) who is completely ignoring her.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 13/06/2026

We’ve had Ripley for the last week, and Toby is 100% convinced that she’s his very best friend in the entire world. She would kill him in his sleep given the opportunity.

A Corgi (Toby) and a Boston terrier (Ripley) laying side-by-side on a couch. Ripley is unconscious and Toby is side eyeing Ripley.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 31/05/2026

This is Toby. He’s about six months old and a very good boy! We’re stoked to welcome him to the family ❤️❤️❤️

Toby, Pembroke Welsh Corgi with a white chest, black back, and reddish-brown face and ears, looking to the right side of the frame. He’s laying on his side on a concrete patio in the afternoon sunlight.

A red-headed tri-color Corgi looking at the camera. He had a white blaze partially his head and his ears are enormous. He’s holding an orange toy with his paw.

Toby, the Corgi chewing on his orange rubber chew toy. He’s holding it with his paws and is resting on a carpet inside the house. He’s looking at the camera but it looks like he’s giving lots of side eye because of the angle.

A sleepy corgi, resting his face on a walking pad.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 23/05/2026

Well, this is officially how I'm thinking of the titles that @bradshoemaker.bsky.social comes up with for the Tech Pod now.

The Star Trek: TNG title screen with the Enterprise-D and the words "Billionaires vs. Dinosaurs" in the font and style of the TNG episode titles.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 08/04/2026

My daughter is not a fan of the stupid Super Mario Wonder flower I bought.

A text message thread. The other party sent a message that says “the flower just woke up” and I responded “This is how you know the day has truly begun.”

The background is my stupid face with a yellow filter over it.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 16/03/2026

NVIDIA: What if we introduce ray tracing so you can have really high quality real-time lighting, models that cast shadows on themselves, and game lighting that looks _really_ real? Also NVIDIA: What if we do that, and then throw out that lighting to run the yassify filter so everyone looks HOT?

Two images of Grace from Resident Evil Requiem. Both pictures feature a blonde white woman looking at the camera wearing a red jacket, grey tank top, and black zip up shirt. The left (DLSS 5 Off) image shows relatively flat texture to her skin, eye makeup, and hair color. The right image (DLSS5 On) shows more realistic skin texture and removes all of the shadows that are created by her hair and browline.

It also changes the character's presentation of her own appearance. In the DLSS off image, she's wearing understated makeup, with some light eyeliner and eye shadow and a neutral tone lipstick/gloss. In the DLSS on image, she has highlights in her hair, a fuller, darker red lip, a more defined eyebrow, and a much more intentional looking smokey eye makeup.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 13/03/2026

I didn't get to GDC as much as I expected this week, so I didn't get a chance to wear the Skin Deep fan shirt I made. I'll just share it here because I really loved the space station designs that @blendogames.bsky.social's team made for the level selects.

A dark grey T-shirt with 5 space station designs from the game Skin Deep. Each one is a different primary color (green, purple, red, blue, and yellow) and each one has a different key identifier (one has an observatory dome, one has a large antenna, etc)

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 26/02/2026

One time, the AI order taker hit me with a "You Rule!" after I gave it my order and I automatically responded "You Rule too!". With the absolute clarity of hindsight, this is one of my life's greatest regrets.

Two shots from The Simpsons episode where Bart gets an elephant. It shows two DJs from KBBL. One says "Man, that thing's great." The other says "Don't praise the machine." They're talking about a robotic DJ that the station manager is threatening to replace them with.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 05/02/2026

TIL that I can change the speed and springyness of most of the animations in Niri and I've done a crime.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 20/01/2026

I’m just gonna leave this here. cottonbureau.com/p/ACS2EP/shi...

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 16/01/2026

Well, now I have to tell the therapist that I’m making bread again.

A dark brown loaf of banana bread in a ceramic bread pan, sitting on a wire rack.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 05/01/2026

I made a t-shirt last night after I read that Satya Nadella post about how mean we're being by calling AI slop slop. I'm sad I couldn't get it here in time for the CES keynotes tomorrow.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 15/11/2025

I snuck up on an Anna’s hummingbird in the maple tree in my backyard this morning.

A small hummingbird with an olive green back, black chin, and long straight bill sitting on a bare branch. There are crimson maple leaves I. The foreground and a blue and white sky in the background. The bird is slightly puffed up for winter.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 22/10/2025

Look, the gun should just look like this, it’s easy. Put it in the game.

A hand drawn picture of a thing that vaguely resembles a semi automatic handgun. It might have been drawn by a child.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 13/10/2025

It's a pretty rare glimpse inside a cutting-edge fab. Here's a few pictures of me in the bunny suits that they let us try on in the waiting area (we weren't allowed to bring cameras into the areas where we were wearing the actual real bunny suits, so you don't get pictures of me wearing a beard net.

It's a man wearing glasses in a clean room bunny suit. He's wearing a white overgarment and a white hood with his mouth covered. His eyes and nose are poking through. He's standing in front of a backdrop that looks like the inside of a cleanroom.

It's a full body shot of a man wearing glasses in a clean room bunny suit. He's wearing a white overgarment and a white hood with his mouth covered. His eyes and nose are poking through. He's standing in front of a backdrop that looks like the inside of a cleanroom, which you can see the edges of

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 07/10/2025

Secure Boot up and running on the desktop linux box. This feels good.

An image of a terminal output from a Linux machine. It says

"sudo sbctl status
[sudo] password for will:
Installed: sbctl is installed
Owner GUID: <redacted>
Setup Mode: Disabled
Secure Boot: Enabled
Vendor Keys: microsoft

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 27/09/2025

I took the kiddo to Bay Area Maker Faire yesterday and had a lovely time. We learned about making fireworks, took a felting lesson, saw R2-D2, and saw what it’s like to be inside an enormous beach ball. You can still go today and tomorrow!

A white guy with a beard and glasses in a bright green room with a halo of light green lights around his head.

A series of multicolored lights making horizontal streaks across a dark room.

An underwater landscape (seascape?) with fish, corals, and what looks like a vent. The colors are pastel yellow/greens and it’s all in a large 5 foot by 5 foot frame.

A sculpture hanging from the ceiling of a warehouse. It looks like a flock of jellyfish that are blue, dark blue and green, with LEDs on the tentacles and illuminating the bells of the jellies.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 17/09/2025

I wonder if the celebrity flavored Oreos are like the McRib. They only appear when the celebrity is famous enough and then once their star wanes, they go back into the vault.

An empty pack of Selena Gomez-flavored Oreos on the top of trash in a kitchen-style trash can.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 20/07/2025

Playing this is a metaphor for parenting a pre-teen.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 20/07/2025

I'm playing Peak with my daughter. I will be roasted. twitch.tv/notthatwills...

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 17/07/2025

It’s really fucking hard to make games that create Looney Tunes-ass moments like this with your friends. These work because of a million simple-seeming things like figuring out the right timing on the geyser gurgle > eruption event in these games. Every single one of them are hard-earned.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 15/07/2025

I'm late, but here's a photo match. That was Tempest. We had a black version at my arcade. www.aceamusements.us/tempest-arca...

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 15/07/2025

It helps that he has a more-than-passing resemblance to Chloe Bananas:

A red-headed tri-color Pembroke Welsh Corgi, with a black back, red and white legs, and a big white stripe down the middle of her face. She looking straight at the camera and looks like she's smiling, but her face is just shaped that way.

She's sitting outside, on the lowest step of a brick patio. There's a large plant in a 1/3rd of an old wine barrel on the right side of the shot.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 15/07/2025

I've been slandered here, and I will not stand for it. If I do this kind of crime, it's always v3_final_final_final_frfr, not this _1_1 amateur hour business. This is the last version of that folder I checked in:

A clean folder for end credits with just a single prproj file.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 15/07/2025

The only file in my backup of that folder is End Credits_2023.prproj, from the last time I synced at the start of 2024. Seems like you're the one who did the crime, Chet.

A folder from a UE project that just shows a folder, and 3 files, one of which is End Credits_2023.prproj

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 09/07/2025

If you're looking for more peak Peak gameplay, I'm playing with my 12-year-old tonight. I expect to get fully roasted. twitch.tv/notthatwills...

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 09/07/2025

This is the nonsense I'm talking about. When you search for Update, making Discord the first result and Windows Update the fourth is bonkers.

A Windows 11 Start screen showing a search for the word "Update". The top result is a link to Discord, followed by apps buried in the Program Files directory with "Update" in the name. "Check for Updates" is the 4th option. It would have been first on the last version of Windows.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 03/07/2025

I loved the Three Investigators books as a kid. They were hard to find in the 80s, but a bunch of nerds who had a secret hideout in a junkyard and solved crimes by building machines was my jam.

The cover of The Three Investigators in The Secret of phantom Lake. The cover features the title and three young men being menaced by a spooky-looking anthropomorphic tree.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 26/06/2025

If you look at concurrent player charts for successful, long-lasting co-op games, they grow over time. They rarely pop on day 1, instead they're slow burns over months or years. Deep Rock is a classic slow burn, but it's a much more accessible game than GTFO (Note: GTFO launched without matchmaking)

The steamdb concurrent player chart for Deep Rock Galactic. It shows gradual growth over 7 years, with spikes on sales and free weekends.

The steam concurrent user chart for GTFO, which shows a pretty consistent playerbase over 5 years. No huge launch spike, not a ton of growth, but no decline either, which is interesting for a game that has 62k mostly positive reviews on Steam.

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 26/06/2025

And your SteamDB numbers will be terrible, because they won't reflect the Game Pass players. Then you'll get this lovely interaction in your Steam forums (where people who want to spend money on your game actually go to decide if they're going to spend $$).

Two Steam forum posts right next to each other. One says "1 million players" and the other says "Officially dead?"

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Will “Available for Contracts” Smith @willsmith.fun · 05/06/2025

Nintendo Switch 2 launch at the new Nintendo store in SF!

Me, a middle aged white dude with a beard, standing in front of the Nintendo San Francisco store sign in the basement of the store.

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