Creative Storm

Sector Unknown is officially out of Early Access. Full release is live now with a 30% launch discount. Seven months of iteration, feedback, fixes, and polish led to this moment. Grateful to everyone who played along the way! Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/2734270/Se…

Penguins trainer gets hit by a stray puck on the bench. Needs medical attention. Who’s there making sure he’s okay and assisting him to get help? Sidney Crosby. Another example of him being a first class human.

So how tf did anyone win

Went down the rabbit hole on this. Your brain treats a physical book like a landscape. It builds a spatial map of the text, the same way it maps trails, rooms, and city blocks. When you scroll on a phone, that map breaks apart. Seven large-scale research reviews and direct brain scans confirm what you already feel. A 2023 study in PLOS ONE attached brain-activity sensors to children’s heads while they read the same text on paper and on screen. Paper reading produced fast brain waves, the pattern linked to focused attention. Screen reading shifted the brain into slow waves, the pattern linked to mind wandering and daydreaming. Same kids. Same words. Measurably different brain states. A separate 2022 study from Showa University in Japan scanned the front of the brain, the area that manages focus and comprehension, during phone versus paper reading. Smartphones sent that region into overdrive, meaning the brain was straining just to keep up with basic processing. Paper reading produced a moderate load that triggered natural deep breathing, which helped regulate brain function and sustain focus. The phone suppressed that breathing pattern entirely. Since 2017, researchers have published seven major reviews combining hundreds of individual studies. Six of seven reached the same conclusion: people understand less on screens. A 2018 review of 54 studies and 170,000+ participants, literally titled “Don’t throw away your printed books,” found paper outperformed screens across the board for non-fiction. A 2024 follow-up with 49 more studies confirmed it. The gap has grown steadily every year since 2001. Being a “digital native” doesn’t help. The best explanation is how your brain tracks where you are. Your short-term memory can only juggle about 7 things at once. A physical book gives you constant location cues: the weight shifting from right hand to left, where a paragraph sits on the page, how thick the remaining pages feel. Your brain hands off the “where am I in this text?” job to those physical signals, leaving more room for actually understanding what you’re reading. On a phone, every screen looks identical. Your brain has to track position and process meaning at the same time, and something gives. A Norwegian eye-tracking study analyzing 25,000+ individual eye movements found screen readers processed text more shallowly. The students had no idea they were reading differently. In 2019, nearly 200 reading scientists from 30+ countries signed an open letter warning that screen reading was degrading deep comprehension. Since then, Scandinavian countries, among the most digitized school systems on Earth, have started putting physical books back in classrooms.

If you want to Live the Life again 😎 Sid Meier’s Pirates! (2004) for 2.71$ on the GOG gog.com/en/game/sid_me…

The invisible Glass experiment Scientists once placed a transparent glass barrier inside an aquarium. On one side was a fierce pike, and on the other side were several smaller fish swimming freely. When the hungry pike saw the smaller fish, it immediately rushed forward to attack. Bang. It slammed straight into the glass and bounced back. Confused, the pike kept trying again and again, but every attempt ended the same way. The repeated collisions injured its head and knocked off some of its scales. Eventually, the pike became frightened and retreated to a corner of the tank. After some time, the scientists quietly removed the glass barrier. The smaller fish now swam freely throughout the aquarium, even brushing against the pike’s mouth. But the pike never tried to eat them again. Even though it was hungry, it refused to attack. In its mind, the invisible wall was still there. A few days later, the pike reportedly died of starvation, surrounded by food. This phenomenon is often referred to as the Pike Effect or Pike Syndrome. It’s often used as a metaphor for how repeated failure can create invisible limits in the mind.

Game designers figured this out decades ago and it cost millions in failed launches. Will Wright built SimCity with a fully accurate traffic simulation. Testers hated it. The cars behaved realistically, which meant nobody could build a functioning city because real traffic is an unsolvable nightmare. He had to make the simulation dumber before the game became fun. The tension is permanent: the more accurately you model a system, the more it punishes the participant. Real medieval economies kept 90% of the population in subsistence farming. A historically accurate fantasy world doesn't produce heroes. It produces serfs. Tolkien solved this by making his economy deliberately vague. No one knows what a gold coin buys in Gondor. That ambiguity is a design choice, not a shortcut. The Reddit post is funny. The lesson underneath it is one of the hardest problems in simulation design: fidelity and fun are opposing forces, and you have to pick which one wins.

@CoffeeBeansDev Stick with it. Full launch, if done within a reasonable time, might surprise you!

I hate to admit this but I launched my first video game and it actually FAILED. And I want to be honest with you, and with myself about the reality of it 🧵

Willem Dafoe learned that he had a distinctive face during a subway ride. “I heard one guy say ‘Yeah, it’s got to be him. Nobody looks like that motherf*cker’. That's when I knew.”

Ebert!

Heat wasn't even nominated for a single Oscar. Never take these "awards" too seriously, folks.

I’m friends with a Hollywood veteran, a guy who’s traded lines with greats, generated an incredible body of work and earned a shelf full of Emmys. We were talking about a showrunner we’d both worked for, a guy of adequate talent who’s notorious for breaking writers, credit-jumping and holding grudges. A petty, genuinely evil guy. And a yeller. Yeah, one of those. My friend told me how much he admired me for just letting this guy’s bullshit roll off my back. I said, “Dude, everyone comes into this world with a bucket of fucks to give, and sometime around when I turned 50, I ran fresh out. Seriously. I don’t give a fuck. Somebody yells at me, I just look at them like they’re from Mars. It’s like, ‘What’re you? My Dad? My wife? Get out.’” I told him I don’t give a fuck what they want. I’m gonna do what I do, and the only thing I DO very much give a fuck about is the quality of my work, because my only REAL boss is the guy at home holding the remote. “Otherwise,” I said, “I’m fresh out of fucks to give. It’s like a superpower. They don’t scare me.” He gave me a somber look and said, “Danny, that’s your problem. That’s why you don’t work nearly as much as you deserve to.” “Because I don’t give a fuck?” “No,” he said, “because you don’t fear them. And they know that.” “So if I want to work more, you’re saying I have to simulate being afraid of them?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Otherwise, they think you’re dangerous and they hate you.” More than anything, I suspect that’s why the Academy snubbed Robert Duvall in the memorial section.

"I calculated that civilization needs just 50 machines to build everything from scratch. And what people can't believe, is that I posted the full plans, designs, instructions and how anyone can build these machines for themselves."

Dennis Ritchie created C in the early 1970s without Google, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or any AI ( Claude, Cursor, Codex) assistant. - No VC funding. - No viral launch. - No TED talk. - Just two engineers at Bell Labs. A terminal. And a problem to solve. He built a language that fit in kilobytes. 50 years later, it runs everything. Linux kernel. Windows. macOS. Every iPhone. Every Android. NASA’s deep space probes. The International Space Station. > Python borrowed from it. > Java borrowed from it. > JavaScript borrowed from it. If you have ever written a single line of code in any language, you did it in Dennis Ritchie’s shadow. He died in 2011. The same week as Steve Jobs. Jobs got the front pages. Ritchie got silence. This Legend deserves to be celebrated.

Game dev isn’t just "make a game." It’s: - Late nights no one sees - Learning 15 jobs - Fixing one thing, breaking five - Panic attacks - Wondering if anyone will even care And still showing up the next day. Keep going, indie devs, I believe in you.

A single ant has 250,000 neurons. Your brain has 86 billion. That’s a 344,000x gap. And yet what you’re watching is a colony solving a category of problem that no computer can crack perfectly at scale. It’s called the Steiner tree problem. Given a set of points, find the shortest possible network connecting all of them. First posed in 1811, proved essentially impossible to solve perfectly in 1972 (the computing time grows so fast with size that the world’s fastest supercomputer stalls on a few hundred points). Still one of the hardest open problems in mathematics. Ants solve it with chemistry. When an ant walks a path, it leaves a chemical trail called a pheromone. That trail evaporates over time. Shorter paths get walked faster, so pheromone builds up before it fades. Other ants prefer stronger trails. The colony converges on the shortest route without any single ant knowing the full picture. Jean-Louis Deneubourg at the Free University of Brussels proved this in the early 1990s with a dead simple experiment: two bridges between a nest and food, one twice as long as the other. Within minutes, the colony picked the short one. In 1991, computer scientist Marco Dorigo took that discovery and turned it into an algorithm (a set of step-by-step instructions for a computer) called Ant Colony Optimization. It’s now used to route wires inside microchips with billions of transistors (one study found an 8% reduction in wire length over traditional methods), plan delivery truck routes, and manage internet traffic. The phone you’re reading this on was partially designed using math that ants figured out 100 million years before humans existed. A 2023 study out of Stanford and several other institutions found that turtle ants in the tropical forest canopy build trail networks across tangled branches and vines that approximately solve the Steiner tree problem with zero central control. No ant has any information about the full network. Each one just follows a rule: at each junction, go where the pheromone is strongest. The collective intelligence comes from thousands of these tiny decisions stacking up. Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon has studied this for decades. She compares it directly to how brains work: no single neuron tells the others what to do, but together they produce thought. A 2024 Rockefeller University study found that individual ants decide whether to leave the nest using the same yes-or-no process that brain cells use to decide whether to switch on. The colony is, in a real mechanical sense, a brain spread across thousands of bodies. In early 2025, a Weizmann Institute study pitted ant groups against human groups on a task almost identical to this video: navigating a T-shaped object through a series of obstacles. The bigger the human group, the worse they performed. Too many competing ideas about which direction to push. The bigger the ant group, the better they got. No ego, no debate, just pheromones and simple rules scaling into something that looks a lot like intelligence. 250,000 neurons each. No leader. No blueprint. Solving problems that stumped mathematicians for two centuries.

I spend a lot of time looking for indie games worth getting excited about. Sometimes the algorithm helps. Sometimes I get distracted by a news event and the algorithm completely changes my feed. So let’s try something. Glizzy’s next showcase is coming up, and I’m looking for devs building something that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Niche, strange, ambitious, half-finished but full of soul - I want to hear about it. Drop your game below. Tag a dev who deserves eyes on their work. Okay algorithm. Show this to the right people. No pressure…

Last month, I shared a bit here about how my 17-year-old son has a passion for video game development and has spent hundreds of hours over the last 9 months creating his first game for release. Well, I want to let you know that Nitro Turtles is now out! It's a party racing game (kind of like Mario Kart) and has 9 courses, a speedrun mode with online leaderboards, and split screen/online multiplayer. My husband and I played all 9 courses against each other last night and IT WAS SO FUN! I'm so proud of him for the accomplishment. He has a really demanding junior year schedule of AP/Dual Credit/Honors classes, has straight As, and somehow managed to develop this all on his own out of pure passion. He started teaching himself programming in 3rd grade and just developed his skills from there. Nitro Turtles in the culmination of all the subsequent years of self-driven learning. If you or your kids play computer games, I would love for you to check the game out on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/3952070/Ni…

Gary Oldman’s “EVERYONE!” in LEON was basically an outtake. He warned the sound guys he was about to go ridiculously loud to make Luc Besson laugh, and Besson loved it so much he kept it in.

@PulpLibrarian "Cheapjack scum". I like it.

Letter from Hunter S. Thompson to Anthony Burgess, regarding an overdue article for Rolling Stone magazine, August 1973.

Expectations Survey: steamcommunity.com/games/552620/a…