Artificial Brainstem With Custom RGB LEDs

Operating At Scale

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:01:36 -0700

How large is the set of every possible video game? What can express the magnitude of that number? Contemplating this for more than a brief moment is humiliating. You must try to articulate what it would mean to step incrementally through every permutation of every genre, every instantiation of every potential design, every variation on every arrangement of art and sound and letters. It is not enough to say a person could go mad attempting to make sense of this. Everyone here is long past that, swimming in signs and symbols, grasping at fragments.

Matthew Seiji Burns, The Steam Library of Babel

Matthew’s post is not particularly serious. It is turning The Library of Babel towards a different topic. However, the feeling of drowning in possible games is something I experience on a regular basis. Possibilities pour down and flood the earth. How can I choose one thing, one feeling to chase after?

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of incremental games. These are games mostly focused on obtaining a steady drip of resources that you marshal to increase the frequency and quantity of those resources. Eventually, you are producing absurd qualities of whatever. Numbers so large they don’t have names, only notations indicating their incredible scale. I find this steady progression into the incomprehensible relaxing. The universe might be vast, but I can alter and reap material benefits from it on equally vast scales.

Playing these games can also feel empty. They are largely about clicking the same buttons over and over, increasing scale but not increasing your scope. Now I have 1e300 mana (Scientific notation: The “e” means “10 raised to the power of”, so a 1 followed by 3000 zeroes), but there’s nothing I accomplish with 1e300 mana I wasn’t accomplishing with 1e200 mana. Growth for growth’s sake.

Sometimes all games feel empty. Open world games are checklists, multiplayer games are transient, narrative games feel like a worse version of a book I already read. This is normally a sign I need to take a break from gaming and do something else for a few weeks.

Beware Microgenre Names Bearing Gifts

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:39:59 -0700

I recently called a book series I was on book 7 of, “bad”. In response, my wife said, “I’ve tried to stop insulting things I enjoy”. She reads romance novels (and writes them! Buy her books!) and is sensitive to the ways her hobby and her profession are taken as a joke. She doesn’t want to contribute to the atmosphere of mistrust that comes with only enjoying something through validation of another’s conception of quality.

I struggle to get through dense, challenging books with the limited time and attention I have. Instead, I head towards easily digestible novels full of familiar tropes and imagery. I read maybe twenty Warhammer 40k novels (thanks to my local library!), full of things like Space Marines and their guns and their mechanized armor. I’ve read lots of books about dragons and magic. It’s not highbrow stuff. You could call it “genreslop”. However: I will not.

Slop is the stuff you feed to livestock. It is commercial, undifferentiated, and unappealing except to the most pressing needs. When generative AI images are used in posters, that’s slop. When LinkedIn posts using corporate buzzwords flood your feed, that’s slop. When you read a Warhammer 40k novel, there is sometimes an afterword from the author talking about how excited they were to participate, and the people they were thrilled to collaborate with. The novels tend to be filled with purple prose and repetitive plot elements, but there are ones that leave a lasting impression even as there are forgettable ones that I have accidentally re-read. If I called the various series I enjoyed “genreslop”, it would be an insult to the authors who wrote the books I read. It would also be an insult to myself. My tastes might not satisfy the most stringent gatekeepers, yet I am still capable of reading and evaluating a text for myself. The Horus Heresy still sits with me as a enjoyable tragedy full of blood and betrayal. It is corporate, but it is differentiated both from other books I have read and other books in the series. The care the authors put into the work comes through, and I enjoyed reading them and sometimes recommend them to others.

“Friendslop” is not supposed to be a derogatory term. It’s used to describe “disposable”, “cheap” multiplayer games that you play through with a friend a few times and then move on from. However, the fact that “slop” is at the end sits heavy with me. When I had time to play multiplayer games with my friends, they were games distributed for free on floppy disks. Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem 3d. If the world was around back then, would they have been called “friendslop”?

I don’t play multiplayer games anymore. I can’t even get to biweekly repair nights at my local pinball co-op. Trying to coordinate a single game with friends is not something in my wheelhouse right now, let alone a regular session that churns through different games. However, I have seen clips of games in this genre around social media. They seem fun, and the people playing them seem to be having fun. Streamers seem to like them, and people seem to enjoy watching streamers play them. Calling a good time “slop”, even if it’s used affectionately, seems like the unthinking arrogance of the young who think their domain (friends with free time) will last forever. Calling games “slop” because you only play them a few times seems like calling an ice cream cone or a cookie “sweetslop” because they’re gone after you eat them. The derogatory connotation of “slop” hangs over the entire thing.

I am aware of the futility of warring against silly category names. However, I will ask you to think about how the words used for your hobby shape the spaces you create. Is it good to refer to the people making you affordable games, which don’t try to occupy your entire life, purveyors of “slop”? Is it honoring the time they spent making something, and the time you spent consuming it?

Irony is a delicate tool. When used too often, it slowly dissolves into the literal. If you want to call games “slop” because they didn’t soak investors and pull out every trick in the Las Vegas playbook: pumping up your time on device, making you a reliable Monthly Average User, bleeding you dry by microtransactions, all in order to guarantee a return, well. I think you might be pointing your ironic apellation the exact wrong direction.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:13:29 -0700

Ultros (2024) - ★★★★★ Played it again, it was just as incredible two years later. Much smoother coming back and remembering how the different rules interact. 100%ing this does seem like a bit of the fiddly nightmare others have referred to. But hey, take the bad ending and call it quits. And if you feel reluctance, maybe that’s the game doing its magic on you…

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:10:55 -0700

Feed The Reactor (2026) - ★★★★ Unique mechanics and a silly story gets you pretty far in my book

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:09:58 -0700

Raccoin: Coin Pusher Roguelike (2026) - ★★★½ 😃 “You can make powerful combos by stacking effects on top of each other”

🫥 “it’s random chance if you can set those combos up or not”

🥴 “You can improve your chances by playing over and over again to progress metagame elements”

i’ve been on this ride before, and much like an actual carnival game i felt like I had a good time but at maybe too high a cost. Instead of corn dogs and motion sickness, I was just left with a sense of 10 hours passing in a haze.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:05:06 -0700

Emuurom (2026) - ★★★★ liked the scanning, knew i was going to hit a wall with fiddly platforming and timing, crashed out when i was trying to find the next area, glitched out, reset and got sent back to a boss fight i cleared an hour ago.

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 22:12:15 -0700

Moonlight Pulse (2024) - ★★★★½ theres a lot of really neat stuff here! the setting is a gigantic organism and you fast travel in its veins, and unlock new fast travel locations by unclogging its veins. every character has a special ability and you switch between them, lost vikings / trine style (sometimes in midair!) that said, theres absolutely some opaque stuff where i floundered for a bit trying to find the next place to go (its fine, i got some upgrades instead), or struggled with a boss or two, including the last boss who i’m probably not going to beat. regardless, great game.

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 22:08:51 -0700

Pseudoregalia (2023) - ★★★★ neat, fairly short metroid-ish platformer. the lack of a map is intentional (what exists was patched in well after the fact) and while its short enough i can respect it, the lack of a compass and fast travel also meant i’m probably not gonna finish it, but i enjoyed the mechanics of it.

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 22:00:17 -0700

Neyasnoe (2023) - ★★★★½ i really enjoyed stumbling around eastern European bloc architecture and finding weird stuff and listening to poetry!

i thought the end monologue was a bit heavy handed and went against my experience of the game. i wasn’t suffering a bleak existence, i was going clubbing and supporting my friends! get off my case, taxi driver!

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:57:06 -0700

The Gap (2023) - ★½ having your game start out with you screaming abuse at your wife as she leaves you sure is a choice. i poked around for a bit, failed a neurology test because i didn’t want to write down answers and then flip back into a memory, and decided that actually i didn’t care about this loser dickhead character and this explosively branching series of puzzles i was being handed.

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:52:00 -0700

Eliza (2019) - ★★★★★ a game that saw the future and positioned itself for a knockout blow.

a deep ambiguity about working in the tech industry washes over everything here. getting your little achievements for telling every client the same thing in their 15 minutes of therapy, leaving them totally unsatisfied and unable to solve their problems, while the people with power rave about the unstoppable power of AI to create poetry!!! and fix our own personal demons!!!! if we could only get one more sip of personal data, please!!!!, is a stark reminder that the world we live in was always something critics saw coming and warned us about well before anyone knew what a GPT or an LLM was. but the villains aren’t Marvel villains, the protagonists don’t smash the servers into pieces, and all we can do is seek out the connections that let us live with the world we made, some of us on accident and some of us (I mean…. not us, us) on purpose.

its also a nice and accurate portrait of seattle, as a little bonus. maybe a bit on the nose but i’ll take it.

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:31:10 -0700

Masters of Anima (2018) - ★★★½ i kind of liked it, but i could tell that even on easy it was going to badly challenge my ability to micromanage troops in another level or two. It wouldn’t run on my PC, only my steamdeck, so mouse and keyboard weren’t an option. i simply don’t care to be challenged in this way at this time.

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:28:51 -0700

City Limits (2022) - ★★ as much as i like small puzzle games about building cities, this one didn’t grab me. i like pixel art but the art here is kind of mushy and indistinct, the ruleset isn’t very interesting, and I just don’t really care to do score chasing.