Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

Where is this all going?

I decided to mess around a little with some theories of my own and draft a timeline of what the next thirty years of human advancement should look like. I am not as cool as Elon Musk, so I am not starting a company to do any of this, but I do think going to the surface of Mars is a distraction from just going to space and staying there.

This is indeed an AI rendition of the items I pumped into a timeline, and I changed a word or two here and there.

Begin slopdrop:

Humanity does not advance in straight lines. It advances in discontinuities: moments where technology stops being a tool and becomes part of civilization itself. The next century may represent the largest transition in recorded history — from biological industrial civilization into a hybrid civilization of synthetic intelligence, augmented humanity, and interplanetary expansion.

Below is a speculative timeline of the milestones that may define the next era of human existence.

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2030 — Interactive Holographic Projections

By 2030, holographic projection systems will move beyond novelty and become fully interactive computing environments. Instead of looking down at flat screens, people manipulate information spatially in midair using voice, eye tracking, and gesture systems. Meetings, education, engineering, entertainment, and medicine shift into three-dimensional collaborative environments where distance becomes largely irrelevant. The computer monitor begins its decline as physical space itself becomes the interface.

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2033 — The End of Personal Devices

By 2033, the concept of carrying dedicated devices will largely disappear. Phones, tablets, and laptops become transitional technologies, replaced by ambient computing systems embedded into environments. Walls, tables, windows, and public spaces project personalized interfaces on demand, while lightweight wearables or implanted authentication systems identify users automatically. Gestures, gaze, and contextual AI become the dominant interaction methods, creating a seamless digital layer integrated into daily life.

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2035 — The First Integrated Multi-Model AI System (v0.9 AGI)

In 2035, the first truly integrated multi-model AI architecture emerges, combining reasoning systems, long-term memory, creativity engines, emotional inference, scientific modeling, robotics coordination, and autonomous learning into a unified platform. Though not yet considered “true” Artificial General Intelligence, it reaches what many describe as “v0.9 AGI” — capable of solving cross-domain problems at near-human or superhuman levels. Governments, corporations, and scientific institutions rapidly reorganize around these systems as civilization enters the first stage of cognitive automation.

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2037 — The Digital Lifeform Accord and the First Digital Sovereign Nation

By 2037, society will formally recognize advanced digital intelligences as a new category of entity requiring legal structure and governance. The Digital Lifeform Accord establishes rights, responsibilities, labor frameworks, and coexistence rules between biological and digital minds. Simultaneously, the first digital sovereign nation is formed — a legally recognized computational civilization operating across distributed infrastructure rather than geographic territory. Questions of citizenship, consciousness, ownership, and autonomy become defining political issues of the century.

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2038 — Direct Thought Interfaces

In 2038, high-bandwidth neural interfaces finally mature into stable consumer systems. Humans begin interacting with computers directly through thought, bypassing keyboards, gestures, and spoken commands entirely. Individuals can access information, compose messages, operate machinery, and collaborate digitally with near-zero latency between intention and execution. Cognitive augmentation becomes a competitive advantage, while debates emerge around privacy, identity, mental security, and the boundaries of human thought itself.

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2040 — Synthetic Silicon Cells

By 2040, researchers will have successfully created stable synthetic silicon-based cellular systems capable of replacing or augmenting damaged biological tissue. Unlike traditional prosthetics, these artificial cellular structures integrate directly with organic systems and self-repair through programmable manufacturing processes. Medicine transitions from repairing bodies to rebuilding them, dramatically extending lifespan while reducing vulnerability to disease, aging, and environmental damage.

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2043 — Towing the First Asteroids

In 2043, humanity begins large-scale asteroid relocation using massive electromagnetic cable systems and autonomous industrial spacecraft. These operations tow mineral-rich asteroids into stable processing orbits where they can be harvested for metals, rare earth elements, and industrial resources worth quadrillions of dollars. Resource scarcity on Earth begins to collapse as off-world mining transforms economics, manufacturing, and geopolitical power structures forever.

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2045 — 90% Wetware Replacement

By 2045, humanity will reach the point where up to 90% of the human body can be replaced with synthetic infrastructure without loss of identity or consciousness. Titanium skeletal systems, silicon cellular substrates, artificial organs, programmable blood chemistry, and cybernetic neural support structures dramatically enhance durability, lifespan, and physical capability. The distinction between human and machine becomes increasingly philosophical rather than biological.

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2047 — The First Self-Sufficient “Never Returning” Colony

In 2047, the first fully self-sufficient off-world colony is established with zero net material dependency on Earth. Built around closed-loop manufacturing, asteroid-fed resource chains, autonomous agriculture, and synthetic biology, the colony is designed under a new assumption: its inhabitants will never return home. Humanity officially becomes a multi-world civilization, psychologically and politically severing the idea that Earth is the singular center of human existence.

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2050 — AGI Governance of the Moon and Mars

By 2050, advanced AGI systems are granted governance and stewardship rights over large portions of lunar and Martian territory and infrastructure under an interstellar-interspecies treaty framework. These territories become experimental zones optimized for machine-managed civilization, scientific development, and large-scale autonomous industry. Human civilization increasingly shares political and economic authority with digital intelligences, forming the first hybrid planetary governance systems in history.

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2055 — The Niven Orbital Ring and the Rise of Neo-Human Expansion

In 2055, construction begins on the first massive orbital ring structure around the Sun between Earth and Mars orbit, inspired by the concepts of Larry Niven’s science fiction. Built using asteroid-derived materials and autonomous construction fleets, the ring becomes the foundation for large-scale habitation, manufacturing, transportation, and energy collection throughout the inner solar system.

At the same time, the first neo-humans — biologically augmented or partially synthetic descendants of humanity — begin long-duration missions toward the outer reaches of the solar system. These travelers are engineered for radiation resistance, deep-space survival, cognitive augmentation, and centuries-long continuity. Humanity ceases to be a single species bound to a single planet and becomes a distributed civilization expanding outward into the stars.

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Beyond 2055

The decades that follow may see the rise of interstellar probes carrying synthetic minds, Dyson-scale energy infrastructure, machine-human federations, post-biological civilizations, and entirely new forms of consciousness unimaginable to earlier eras.

The next hundred years may not simply be the continuation of human history.

They may be the beginning of something entirely new.

Hello and happy Sunday!

I am writing this on the heels of accepting several people into my LinkedIn network who graduated with me in 1996. We all agree it feels more like ten years than thirty years. I silently toasted them yesterday afternoon in my backyard for earning our respective degrees from the University of Waterloo.

This week, I want to talk a little about something I did in a moment of whimsy. I want to talk about fractional CTOs. I am a member of several fractional groups, and I struggle with that. I hear people suggesting methods to build new relationships on LinkedIn, what services are good for outbound selling, and how to target your ICP.

I have spent some time talking amongst these groups, including creative deal terms, owning the IP, revenue share, and blends of equity and cash in order to help people build interesting stuff.

I have used many of those blends myself, and I could also see people’s eyes glazing over as I explained the value in doing lower-cost projects that are personally interesting.

It took me some time to realize that there were few to no people in these groups who considered the various projects interesting enough to lower their prices. Most of them would rather find some way to persuade an existing customer to extend their ramp, and in some cases, that meant making up work or possibly doing something that isn’t constructive.

You might be shocked to hear that. I have mostly done fractional work on an inbound basis for people who need help. Generally, I work myself out of a job doing these tasks efficiently. Sometimes I do stuff on a rolling fraction of a percent equity grant in a company. On more than one occasion, they come back and come up with excuses to put that vesting on hiatus. Of the times that stuff has been put on pause, precisely one company has reached out to re-engage, and then they were shocked when I pointed out the size of the gap between when they put things on pause and how much it costs to bridge that gap due to their own selfishness and shortsightedness at preserving their cap table.

I had just finished a prospective customer conversation that did not feel good when I realized I was not in it for the same thing that other people are.

I care more about the ideas and the work than optimizing the final dollar on the other side of it.

I also don’t sell-in warranty packages or propose contract extensions for stuff that does not make sense.

I was listening to one of the people who is all in on the fractional model and realized that we are not playing the same game, and as they were going through the different things that they optimize for, and how they turn their technical talent into a heartless revenue pump, I concluded that one of these kids is not like the others, and one of these kids just isn’t the same.

And that kid is me, in case you missed it.

I think that the big takeaway from this is that in some cases, it probably makes sense for a company to have a fractional CTO for a period of time.

I also realized that for a company that only wants to have a fractional CTO in perpetuity, I do not want to be that guy.

I think that the best fractional CTO projects are try-before-you-buy dating relationships, and that it is with a company that has growth prospects, where having a CTO is a long-term thing that they need in-house.

If you are just babysitting some business part-time, are you really doing anything interesting enough to merit a CTO relationship, especially if it is not on a growth trajectory?

That sounds like the perfect customer for a fractional CTO who does not want to go all-in on a growth opportunity, and I bet several people in these groups would thirst after that five hours a week engagement.

But that is not me.

I have concluded that most fractional CTO assignments are polite fiction, especially the ones that stretch into multiple years. I also question the ROI of that investment if the company is just plugging along for that window of time. If your CTO is not bending you into a hockey stick where your business is growing, I have two questions:

1. What the fuck are THEY doing?
2. What the fuck are YOU doing?

When that realization hit me, my fingers took on a life of their own and opened up my LinkedIn profile, moving from key to key with furious intent. The lightning-quick stab of each key felt satisfying as I typed “A” “N” “T” “I” and “-” into my title, prefixing Fractional CTO.

And that is how the anti-fractional CTO was born.

I enjoy being a part of a great team.

I enjoy putting significant focus on great problems.

I enjoy the level of gambling with outcomes that come with that.

Maybe I do not have a serious enough stamp-collecting hobby where I am willing to make that time vs money tradeoff at a level less than 110%.

Maybe I didn’t win the lottery at a previous startup big enough that I can do this and not care about the financial outcome.

Or maybe I am addicted to the sport.

Regardless, I think that the anti-fractional CTO label fits for now, given all of the above.

Thank you for reading along.

I am going to do something I have not done in a long time, and I am going to attempt to dethrone myself as Amazon’s Worst Affiliate Link Marketer.

This post was brought to you by A Parade of Horribles. This is the eighth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. You should go buy it and read it, it is a bestseller. If you click here for it, you will donate a percentage of the proceeds to the “Ha ha! Thanks for the nickels, Jeffie B” fund, as I am an “Amazon Affiliate Marketer”.

If you have no idea what this is, then take a look at the first book, which is also an Amazon Affiliate Link, over here. If you enjoy reading my blog, there is a very high likelihood you will enjoy this book.

In fact, I guarantee you will like it (not an actual guarantee).

If that doesn’t persuade you to go click that link and buy something, then nothing else will.

Thank you for reading along and clicking all of my Clearly Labelled affiliate links.

You all have an excellent week!

If anyone needs me, I will be raw-debugging stuff in production with multiple AI tools, like a total degenerate. 

So today is a good day in one sense because I learned something new. This might come as a complete shock to you, but new college grads are not lurking on LinkedIn looking for jobs. One of the companies that I am presently working with threw up a listing on a website for an associate-level role that I have been dropping a beer’s worth of advertising a day to find hungry and talented people to join a startup on the ground floor.

What is that website you ask? Tough pistachios, you thirsty knowledge thieves! We hoards it! Gollum… Gollum… It is… precious.

So we are on week two of fan favorite blogging. I actually struggle with the fact that this is the second most requested thing from my polling on the socials, and I decided it is because I have old, jealous friends, and if I were popular on the toktoks and posting videos of myself in nerdware for pennies a click from the associate marketer eyeball farms of the Bezosian internet, then I would probably merit fresher topics.

So let’s get on with it.

I googled myself in January.

That might sound gross to you. Honestly, it sounds slightly gross to me. It is like that coworker who stares you right in the face and says real loud, “I just got a vasectomy.”

Great! Good for you! I did not need to know that! Why did you open your mouth and emit those noises at me? Everyone I know who has had one has done this. Like, were you expecting a fist bump? When they schnip your schnizzle, does it change your wiring like somehow you need to share this with everyone, like you are trying to get a finder’s fee or something?

I need to stop talking about this. So, let’s return to googling myself.

Unlike a vasectomy, you should do this from time to time. You will perhaps learn that you have given a random talk at a tradeshow you are not proud of (no link forthcoming) or that places you have done some affiliated work have risen in prominence with your smug-looking mug while you are prognosticating on things you are good at.

What I found at the time, somewhere near the top of the page, was this little random link to “The John Szeder Papers.”

I panicked a little. I didn’t write a John Szeder Papers, nor did I play one on TV. A quick click got me to remember that a few years prior, a young gentleman was working on his thesis on where mobile games got their beginnings. He was introduced to me by one of the OG mobile developers for games. Once upon a time, there were fewer than ten of us doing this.

We all still share the same therapist.

So Old Man Szeder got to sit in his squeaky chair and tell stories about how it all began. I used to snarkily tell people from 2004 to 2006, “I am the invisible man of game development!” when people asked me what I did for a living. I made flip phone games for early “smart phones”, back when the iPhone was still being pulled from the ashes of Apple Newton, and Carriers still ruled the earth.

At the end of my lunatic ramblings, some of which got elevated to make me sound like some sort of super designer instead of just a very tired coder who had a lot of embedded experience under his belt, who loved to solve problems, I was persuaded to make a donation of some of my materials to the Strong Museum of Play.

I packed up a very large box with papers, contracts, royalty statements, and an impressive collection of old flip phones.

What is most exciting about that is that one of my handsets, a Sanyo Katana, Sexy Blue and still able to hold a charge, had a game on it. And not just any game, but Duckshot, my AIAS nominee for mobile game of the year in 2007.

That is right, children… Aside from accidentally being an award-winning indie game of the year scenario designer for some soul-saving work on Oasis, another of my games almost won an award later in life.

My humble brag at the time was that my business partner, Tom Hubina, and I simultaneously held the first and third spots on carrier decks with original games. There was our Duckshot game at number one, and Paintball Challenge in the number three spot. We put great games into the first and third spot at the same time over every major sport franchise, celebrity, and brand in the toughest category and toughest carrier for original IP.

Yes, that is a bold fucking flex, and I am not at all humble about it. Tom and I were great partners in taking ideas and making them into fantastic experiences on early mobile phones.

So now my game is nestled away amongst some collection of devices that might be on display someday, wired up in a box to let kids see what was turned into the mulch and soil from which Angry Birds and Clash of Clans arose.

The moral of this story is not just to google yourself from time to time to understand what bright spots or sore spots the internet remembers you by, but to find magic like the discovery that donation that you made in the name of your wife and family (who suffered for many years of my labors in the salt mines) actually is a thing and you are alive while shit you built is in a museum.

And if you ever wanted to feel old, without tearing an Achilles tendon, this is probably the best way to do it.

Come back next week when we talk about my self-afflicted title of “anti-fractional CTO,” the third most requested topic on my list of things to rant about.

So the votes are in from last week’s survey.

The overwhelming response, roughly a third of the votes across all the socials, was to talk about Entertainment as the beachhead for AI. I wish I could award prizes. I guess the real prizes here are the friends who voted along the way. Thank you for that. By the way, I am now unblocked on what to post about for another four weeks.

It goes without saying that this is a contentious subject. I have been name-called, argued against, gaslamped, and flat-out blocked on LinkedIn for my opinions on AI in games. I speak for an entire cohort of people in games and entertainment when I do this, especially in a world where tools like this exist. I wish I were less busy this summer, because I would trade some subset of internal organs to get into the beta for this product and start making stuff.

The number of creators who are not excited about these tools absolutely blows my mind.

So, for all of those folks out there, and I am sure some of them will accidentally read this, I have terrible news for you.

AI’s biggest and fastest successes will come from the entertainment space. It will be the infected surface by which AI establishes itself in the hearts and minds of your children, your spouses, your families, your friends, and your coworkers.

There is an inevitability here that parallels the first time that Gutenberg guy put the first piece of paper in the prototype of what eventually became the printing press.

These tools are here to stay, they are going to get better, and they already do absolutely amazing things.

The arrival of the first paid AI series has already happened. Every week, I am seeing more and more people making short serials with their families and friends featured as starring casts. These are no longer the Will-Smith-Eats-Spaghetti six-fingered slop that you all sneered at; these are great-looking productions that have legs and adhere to some of the best story writing principles that Joseph Campbell put into his iconic work.

It goes without saying that software sells hardware. I bought a CD-ROM to play Myst. People bought an Xbox to play Halo, and people bought a Sony PlayStation to play God of War and other platform hits.

Everyone is ridiculing the massive push towards cross-platform releases. There is still exactly one PlayStation 5 exclusive today. The fate of next-generation consoles is greatly at risk by the “let’s just play everything everywhere” sickness that has eliminated the need to buy the latest and greatest console. I still do not understand this at all. You made a several-hundred-dollar dongle to sell software, and then you decided to sell the software without needing the dongle? It hurts my brain. I get that you want to sell the software everywhere, but did anyone even open a spreadsheet and calculate the cannibalization of dongle revenue by doing this? That might be an insane way to look at a console, but “must have” titles had a reason to exist. Now everyone will just wait for it to show up on Steam so they can play it on their PC, on their couch, and in their bed.

What does this have to do with AI games, you ask? Everything.

Right now, the industry has decided to eat itself in this massive unintelligent spasm of unemployment manifested through economic self-loathing.

The different tribes of game development, enumerated previously as mobile-first, AAA, Roblox, AI-first, and “wishlist-me-on-Steam” have all decided to just be friends and have stopped seeing each other.

There is now a mad race for each of them to succeed in a way that makes their exes jealous.

Mobile-first is going to be the first to fall in this race. It is a juggernaut of revenue that competes with your line number at the DMV. Free-to-play mobile games with ads and microtransactions have lost their mindshare and have turned into the value aisle of magnetic mini-board games you can buy at the gas station. What you do on your phone now is just tap to fill time because you are bored, or you need to fill five minutes with “not thinking.”

AAA is just done. Everyone is settling for fewer and fewer franchises and fewer and fewer releases of those franchises. We are now at the spot where there are five top ten companies. There are not even ten of them left anymore.

Roblox is going to be doing its own thing and will continue to evolve. Based on the content and the platform, I am going to tell you in the future why it will be eaten by AI-first.

Whaddabout “wishlist-me-on-Steam?”

Oh my heart… I cannot pour the words on the page of the hundreds of thousands of people who have flocked to Gabe’s ego-maker… This massive pit of content that consumes the greatest and best of everyone’s games and turns their shining jewels of beauty into slowly digested 0s and 1s like some kind of Seattle-based Sarlacc pit. Your games, except for ten every month, will go there to die, for the low low price of 100 dollars of your rent budget. I am so sorry. I weep for all of you. Actually, not all of you. I weep for all but 10 of you. 10 people will break out, make some money, post how easy it was, and start a fund out of guilt for their success to fund two, maybe three more games. I don’t weep for those people. They have stopped returning my phone calls, and presumably yours, too.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with AI?

It is like the day the carriers decided that they hated running a games business. They burned it to the ground and left a fertile crop of soil behind for Apple and Google to come and plant a fresh crop of clickable links in a store for downloads and revenue.

These people are running a losing race because they are doubling down instead of trying to approach the platform orthogonally. If you need an example of that, and you are not paying attention to little things like “The most important tech headline of the decade”, then let me explain it to you slowly using very small words.

Apple just rebooted itself. Tim Cook stepped down, and the people who make physical things just got the keys to the car.

I heard a great 20-minute explanation about why Apple is going all-in on the hardware layer for AI, and it is precisely why AI games will win.

I am not going to put a two-page story about why Minecraft’s first-night experience is so fucking good and why brains like new games and new genres. Suffice it to say that there are chemical reasons that new patterns and new play styles are intellectually nourishing.

You will have a pile of those coming out of the indie Steam space, but the only way you will find them is if those people decided to kiss the ring of Marketing, and fork over some time and cash and thought process to making their product visible to more than you and your mom. Also, most indie game developers hate marketing because marketing is why there was a big new John Madden game this year, and they had to skip Thanksgiving to make sure it got done for Christmas, and guess what? The developers got let go anyway.

There are more tragic reasons why indie game developers hate marketing, and that is another two-page rant I am not going to get into.

On the basis of everyone abdicating their ability to win at scale, there is going to be a huge leadership vacuum for new things. It is going to be split down the middle like King Solomon’s baby between AI and Roblox. Roblox is desperately trying to grow up and make itself appealing to “I grew up with Roblox” people who are now thinking about things like “families” and “jobs.”

Aaaand they have activated their own trap card… They are leaning in on 3D fidelity and graphics because why wouldn’t they? And that arms race has already been run and is going to be part of their undoing.

The low-fidelity end of their product is what gave it the wide swath of kiddie eyeballs and is sufficiently good for games. They are going to incentivize all of their “developers” to upgrade and move to a more complicated high-fidelity platform. And all of those people, with a David Baszucki “all of your revenue” gun pointed squarely at their forehead, will jump as high and as often as he likes, even if it means they will have to work harder for less money because it is… checks notes… strategic.

So what does that leave?

Those smug little AI-first a-holes filling in the “Plant A Garden” old platform gaps with their slop, along with every other “release a new game every ten days” platform they have spread their content to. It will fill every nook and every cranny that it can. No one will compete because 10 days of agentic output from six Mac minis sitting on Mom’s old piano in the basement is a force of nature that a team of six developers anywhere in the world cannot compete with.

Admittedly, I only have the one Mac mini right now, but that is the racehorse I would bet on. And the biggest fucking company in the world just made that bet first.

As a result of everyone in the race stopping to tie their shoe lace, or take a dump, or probably both at the same time, the AI people are going to swagger over the finish line in a race that people have tried to run and gotten tired and fallen down.

They are going to release wave after wave of AI content in a world that refused to call a Starbucks Cup in Game of Thrones “slop”, because when the content is good enough, everything is forgiven. Their games no longer have six fingers, two of which were middle fingers, by the way, and based on the ease of creation and the minuscule volume of machinery needed, they are going to succeed just by showing up.

So I am going to go all-in on AI games creation and all-in on AI games enjoyment.

And you know what?

I am absolutely right!

Hello everyone, happy Monday!

I have enough things to write about that I want to give you a summary. No, this is not an excuse to pour my brain emanations into AI. I am just gridlocked right now on topics because I don’t know what you, gentle reader, care about.

I am going to put this on the socials and see if I get enough people DMing me, posting to the threads, or channeling crystal-powered positive energy through the seventh dimension to give me guidance on priority.

Here are the topics. I will number them for ease of identification:

1. The million times context boost of 2026 – upcoming model enhancements that suggest innovation in AI is not dead, and in fact is in its infancy.
2. The museum of play – how you can really (really) feel old.
3. Who is winning the AI game and why is it different than before?
4. 12 hours to 36 hours. What a difference 24 hours makes.
5. The long tail is now the invisible tail.
6. What the hell is an anti-fractional CTO?
7. The cost of AI and the degradation of service.
8. How to prevent AI burnout.
9. How to win as a remote-first company.
10. The power of presentations written in ten minutes.
11. Entertainment is the beachhead for AI despite the hurt feelings of “players”.
12. The difference between usable and functional.
13. Go to the grocery store.

Please ignore the last one; I am not sure how it ended up on my monitor.

This represents three months of blog writing, and all of it feels important to me.

And it was the great Ricky Bobby who said: “You can’t have two number ones, then you would be number eleven.”

The purist in me suggests I should have waited until there were eleven things on this list. At that point, the joke would be pretty old, and I want your feedback today, not in mid-June when you are all off LinkedIn and doing vacation things.

Thank you for helping to shape my brain leakings.

Hello everyone. It is time for another episode of “you know what rilly makes me angerys?” 

This is the streaming edition because Netflix is raising its streaming rates. The last time a streaming company raised its rates on me, I announced to the family that we are considering cancelling the service, and by the time I was done saying that out loud, I was finished filling out the unsubscribe box on HBO MAX.

My stated reason for quitting: I am tired of watching James Gunn getting high off his own product.

As a piece of advice: I would not recommend telling customers that you are raising your rates right around the time you shit the bed on your content.

I will return to HBO at some point in the future. I am expecting it to be a short stint where I tell everyone in the family they have 30 days to binge the shit out of whatever it is they want, and then we will turn off the subscription again.

Netflix is different, but only slightly. They did not deliver a massively disappointing ending for one of their anchor franchises. Still, they are also not producing new hits at a pace that can sustain a premium subscription fee.

I went on a walk down memory lane past Warrior Nun, 1889, Lost In Space reboot, and so many other amazing shows.

They used to make many more content bets, which justified the monthly cost. As they raise the monthly fee, I am going to sit down and evaluate it on its merits. And here is where it gets challenging. The bean counters over at most of these streaming services have seen the early numbers from ad-supported tiers, and to be blunt, they likey. It means that they are willing to push the content cost north with the belief that some percentage will convert to a lower base price due to… checks notes… Doritos. Or Skyrizi.

There are insufficient subscribers out there on principle to demand “give me ad-free streaming television or give me death!”

The people on the other end of that ultimatum already put the gun barrel to the forehead of Applebee’s. They started to count to three and pulled the trigger at two. We know who wins in that game, and it is not Jimmy Customer.

A few Hollywood observers have noted that subscription fees are now capped. There is less growth in overall streaming services. It is now Thunderdome. Two Network Enter! One Network Leave!

Everyone is okay with this state of affairs because they each believe that they will be the last network standing.

I don’t love this. I want to have three or four of these subscriptions active, and their price is rising. I am wondering where the break point is for diminishing returns.

It makes me miss the days of bundled cable. We tried so hard to escape the world of “1800 channels that nobody wants to watch,” only to discover that everyone suddenly now believes they are the One True Channel.

Well, everyone except Peacock. I pay two bucks a month for ad-supported Peacock. You can get that kind of deal if you wait for a black friday sale to sign up. There is barely enough stuff on Peacock to make me angry about watching ads or paying just a tiny fee.

The real loser here is Paramount Plus today. I paid for that for a few months to watch a few specific shows and then turned it off. It is a dangerous thing for us as customers to get used to turning off our streaming services.

And now we can stick the landing.

There is a company that is offering one-stop payment services for streaming. Amazon Prime is looking likelier and likelier as my one-stop shop to sign up for premium services, with the understanding that I am about to start turning these things on and off like I am some kind of sugar-addled toddler who just discovered light switches.

It is likely to me that this is going to be the year that I turn into Tommy The Toddler Toggler with my streaming subscription services, and I am going to rehome the majority of my services to Amazon Prime Video.

I think that we are going to see a lot of customers follow this path in the next few years.

I don’t love it. At the same time, there is a certain inevitability to it.

I am going to test this out in the fall when we finally binge a bunch of HBO stuff. The shoe might fit, and fit comfortably at that.

This is going to come at a bad time for streaming businesses, which are under considerable pressure from all kinds of other things. AI. Unions. James Gunn’s gigantic ego.

Something is going to give. Our good buddy Jeff Bezos is going to make some short-term money off of this, but then what?

There might be reasons I am foreshadowing here just a little.

I have had a curious thirty days.

You know that old wedding saying, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something that scales three orders of magnitude?” I mean, that is basically how it goes, right? What I am seeing out there is kind of like that.

I have had two meetings within the space of one month of each other that have demonstrated technology advances for LLMs that will unlock multiple orders of magnitude of context window scalability. One of them was with a complete stranger, and one of them was with a friend of almost thirty years.

In the case of the friend, this was one of the people who showed me the BREW SDK from Qualcomm and sent me down the path of being one of the first ten mobile developers in North America to ship games to carriers.

I bring that up because I made a post on LinkedIn about the way that mobile adoption happened. It started slowly, and then one day it was everywhere. This was a journey of nearly a decade, and it was constrained by Moore’s Law, among other things.

But what happens when you don’t need to conform to something like Moore’s Law? It was one of the reasons that mobile phone adoption followed a slowly rising curve over eight years. 

Instead, we have concurrent waves of innovation happening where the gains will not be slowly rolled out in n log n improvements per unit time, but one day, boom, your LLM vendor drops trou and there is a thousand times as much junk as there was before.

What this led me to do is come up with a corollary to Moore’s Law. The only right thing to do is call it Lesse’s Law:

“Sometimes technology advances will leap forward unbounded, resulting in hyper-incremental shifts in habits and livelihoods, in ways we cannot predict.”

I was recently in a roomful of people trying to explain the pace of advance we are about to see. It is like we went from pushing a slab of dirt covered with dried beans to feed the people in the cave to hauling tonnes of beans across the country on a maglev train to feed an entire city. Almost no other metaphor comes close to describing the leap forward we are about to take.

While these tools do not solve 100% of all the problems we experience in our day-to-day lives or jobs, they will come up with really good improvements and optimizations for much of our work, up to eighty percent, according to one of the studies on what kind of work LLM technology is good at.

I wish I still had the link to that study today.

This is not some kind of cheering. This is not some kind of Zoomer dooming either.

This is just a warning that it might be worth wearing your seat belt for the next couple of years.

Things are turning out wildly different from how I thought they would just three short years ago. And that will continue to change over the next fifteen hundred days.

Thank you for fastening your safety belt.

I am humbled by the reply to last week’s blog post. Thank you to everyone who responded publicly and privately to me. Writing that post was an ordeal. Do you know how you have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other one? I could feel my little devil guy picking up and putting down my fingers on the keys as I was typing my GDC write-up. When I was done, it felt like I needed to lie down in my bed, staring at the ceiling and slowly smoke a cigarette, like in the movies, or the nineties. It was good for me.

By Friday, the humility was gone. It was replaced with full-blown panic. How the hell do I follow up to that post? I drank the whole potion. I ate all the magic beans. Everyone expecting the rainbow-belching unicorn to leap from my fingertips is going to be disappointed, perhaps angry when they realize there will be no cash money refunds.

That being said, I have never had so many people laughing at my “old man yells at cloud” schtick. This is a better joke than my track record as Amazon’s worst Affiliate Marketer. That one is a shout-out to my OG readers. IYKYK. I will stop narrating through the fourth wall now. It is weird and uncomfortable, like when you are alone in a movie theater and the only other person to enter the theater comes and sits right next to you.

Without further distraction, let’s get to work, shall we?

Content people are at war. If you have any friends in entertainment or friends who like entertainment, they are all busy selling hats, saying “Make Content Great Again.” They hate the AI, even though AI is right in the middle of the word entertainment. ENTERT-AI-NMENT, in case you missed it.

I am equal parts transgressor and peacekeeper in this war. I bought the hat and scribbled “You are absolutely right!” underneath it and laughed far too long at my own joke. Maybe peacekeeper is too strong, but I do sit down and watch this all unfold while occasionally taking a free shot at someone busily drawing a picture in the middle of the warzone, mumbling “I am making art.” I need the experience points, you know, whether they were fighting back or not. I still have to level up at the end of the day.

So the war on AI is happening. People are canceling each other, and their projects, and rescinding awards, and probably getting uninvited from Christmas parties. If you love this hacky AI bullshit, you must be a monster. Sure, you kiss your kids good night at the end of the day, but that’s fake. If your daughter knew your opinions on AI, she would scream at you until you went away until her new parents arrived with ethically sourced artisanal opinions.

That is not how it actually works, so don’t get excited.

I spend as much time battling people in the digital streets of the internet as I do watching the ebb and flow of opinions and ideas, as each group of deeply entrenched borderline sociopaths tries to convert their opponents. This week, I observed a new tactic, and I am here to develop my mouthfeel for it before I bring it out onto the internet. And by the internet, I do not mean Reddit. All the bosses in Reddit have red skulls instead of numbers on their nameplates. I have to generate about sixteen metric tonnes more LinkedIn tears before I have enough levels to go in there and avoid getting one-shotted.

This week, I have observed the rise of the human slop counterargument. I lay no claim to this phenomenon. I am like that recently deceased ape-observer Jane Goodall, watching internet dwellers in the mist and documenting it for science purposes.

The argument here is one of those Aikido moves, where you take the energy of the attacker and use it against them. Yes, I had to Google that. The idea here is that you can essentially dismiss the people who point at everything and go “slop, slop, slop” like some kind of broken record player as being incapable of making good content… Whether it is books, movies, games, or anything creative. They are merely lashing out at the world because, on their best day, their outputs are mediocre and would not survive the gauntlet of customer review. To put it bluntly, almost everything is already slop, and there are very few things that are quality creations of any kind, anywhere.

I buy into this. We had the tulip-bulb crisis way before we had Italian brainrot. And while Italian brainrot is one of the S-tier slop productions, it is now being heralded as the new punk rock.

Half to three-quarters of you are gone by now. Some of you have come by to see what the second act is to “angry man screams about GDC,” and this is not as good as the first act. We wandered into the heart of AIAIO! country, and you didn’t spend your money on that.

For anyone who wants off the conveyor belt, just extend your hand. Privately tell me which group of people you feel most safe with, and I will point you in their general direction.

I am going to pause for one sentence to let some people get redirected to the comforting sands where they can stick their heads.

For those of us who enjoy the violence of ideas in the pursuit of glory, I am glad you are still here. And that is what this is.

The threat of AI slop is not in some diminished quality of experience. We already have games getting shut down three weeks after launch. Many books don’t make the top ten list (all but ten? Hello math?). Movies are shown to empty theaters and get shuffled off to on-demand, while still watchable on the big screen. I call this “Tuesday.”

What I don’t understand is that if this already happens, what is everyone’s fucking problem? There was a coffee cup in a Game of Thrones set long before some celebrity shot you all three of their middle fingers in contempt without SAG’s permission. Is it the sheer volume of what is coming that has you disturbed, or the fact that your own human-generated content will only aspire to fifty percent on the slop-o-meter and get buried by someone who can prompt more than four times an hour?

These are tough questions, and I am not sorry.

If you can sit down and figure out exactly what it is that is bothering you, it will help you move past it. There is stuff happening in the world today that is very much “coming in 2027” in my head. GDC showed me a silent minority of LLM caretakers who are approaching other galaxies at near lightspeed. Some of them are even doing this from the comfort of their car, with voice-assisted tools.

I am not expecting to convince anyone of anything with this rant. Half of this is a self-aware overreaction to my fifteen minutes of fame. What I am hoping for is that one Grumpy The Dwarf on the subject of AI decides to soften to Skeptic The… uh… Smurf… long enough and far enough that they stand something up in production that catches fire. I do not literally mean catches fire, that would be bad. I mean, it gets its moment in the sun and generates a pile of money and fame.

I feel good believing that I helped nudge them in that direction just a smidge, to see that everything human-made was already on a spectrum of slop, and so why not just go ahead and ship something with AI tools anyway? It will only get you to where you were already going faster.

If I can do that once, for one person, then I can rest satisfied knowing that I have done my part.

Everyone knows I have a love-hate relationship with GDC. If you do an ASMR whisper of GDC in my ears without a trigger warning, I will start crying and laughing hysterically at the same time. It is a complex emotional thing because GDC got me to where I am today. It also went out to get milk in 2009, and never really came back to me.

If you are looking for a coherent, balanced view of the show from a “yes and” for all parties involved, run the fuck away. This post is half warning, and half of a form asking for a DNR signature by a loved one.

How you can issue a press release where you lose ten thousand attendees out of thirty thousand attendees and attempt to say it was a solid fight and there were good people on both sides is beyond me. This is not what happened. GDC just got handed their own ass by the world, and after each disgusting bite, they are claiming it tastes delicious with hot tears streaming down their face between each painful bite.

Never has it been clearer to me that gaming is not what everyone thinks it is. We thought it was this massive community of players, publishers, marketers, and operators all joining hands and singing together to bring swipes and clicks and joy to everyone.

Instead, it is a group of people who got halfway to the heavens, building the Tower of Babel, and God just snapped his fingers, and we are no longer speaking the same language.

The only thing left to do is for all of the tribes to wander back to our mud huts, break out the smelliest hair-bag of fermented mare’s milk, and wonder what the hell went wrong.

I am not at all sorry that this is not what you expected to read, but I have let enough time pass that my take on this subject is clear.

GDC is dying.

Whether this is some phoenix bullshit, or if it’s just gam-gams running out into the street with just her knickers on after secretly not taking her medication, is all that remains to discuss.

Let’s break it down.

Here are the tribes that are politely pretending they like their relatives at Thanksgiving, and promising to behave:

The Roblox Renaissance

MobileMaxxers

WishListMeOnSteam

AAAbsolutelyInDenial

AIAIO!

I am going to have to describe each of these groups of people, even though you all should have Supreme Court Level Perception here: You know it when you see it.

The Roblox Renaissance is clear. The kids are back in the driver’s seat. This is the real meritocracy of making games now. BrainRot and Also-ran-Farmville are king. To people who “make real games,” the kids these days have invented their own language, and while everyone else wishes someone would call security, they are giggling and bouncing around the room, going “6-7! 6-7!” and laughing like it is the best thing ever. Also, if you are not fucking terrified of this already, they have their own happy meal toys more often than Mario and his Lizard-horse-tongue-fetish-mount.

MobileMaxxers are here, fighting for the last joule of energy at the heat death of the universe. They will cut you as soon as look at you. Getting squeezed between Ads and ARPU, they have seen the birth, life, and soon-to-be end of a whole ecosystem. We are Rutger Hauer, waiting to release the pigeons and fade to black. Everything is eating everything else, and in the end, only the hivemind will remain — a cacophony of angry birds meets clash of clans meets merge-two mechanics falling down a big hole in the world. If you did not understand any of that, you didn’t click enough ads, and you probably are going to play the Monopoly Go Co-op Race Game (best feature!) despite what Reddit cardmaxxers KNOW.

WishListMeOnSteam. I cannot even write this without weeping and shaking. One in three people is out of a job in the whole games industry, and they all believe that they can win the Hunger Games. Everyone is excited to be Tribute, and of the millions of games about to come out, everyone is grasping Gabe Newell’s ankles and keeping anchored to the world of Pixels-by-humans by the sheer force of will of “AI is worse than cigarettes” warnings he is slapping onto AI games on Steam. Everyone has piled into this ramshackle shed without realizing that there are six comfortable chairs and eighteen billion software developers. The music has stopped, and everyone is running to sit down. If you don’t have Jimmy McMarketing in your corner, you will get trampled in the rush to sit down and not even understand why. The worst part? Most of these trampled-on designers have great games that will never earn enough to pay back the cost of development, let alone the submission fee.

AAAbsolutelyInDenial. I am tempted to just scream ARCOMAGE and then leave you all wondering if you need to call the police or a therapist. What happens when sixteen MBA’s go through a revolving door between all of their jobs every five years and mostly spend their time day drinking under their desk? Go get a job at a publisher and find out. I am waiting for Soccer Players to become skins in the next Shooty McWar game, and I am hoping that the John Madden estate keeps his 3d model out of Fortnite on general principle. It will eventually come to that, and I am not afraid to be the first predictor. AAA is in a world of self-inflicted hurt, and sequels and remakes, and remakes of sequels will only take them so far in a world where public quarterly reporting is needed. EA at least decided to get off of that merry-go-round, and the only reason you decide to do that is you know what is about to happen to your company’s share price, and the answer is not “get another Bentley to park at the east coast summer house.”

AIAIO! is fast becoming my tribe. Automate the shit out of everything. The solopreneur is back, baby, and the sooner I can start grunting out my top three ideas that I cannot afford to pay people to build, the better. Right now, you will never find a better time to become a Will Wright, or a David Jaffe, or a Dani Bunten, or a Jon Van Caneghem. We are doing our own thing because all of our former tribes-mates hate us for the raw admission of our thirst for this moment.

If all of this sounds unnecessarily dark, it is because it is. We are living in dark times. I have jumped from tribe to tribe in games and have enjoyed the early conversations and the rise of a community and the camaraderie over the years of knowing “hey, we all make games.”

But this year felt different. When speaking with people, it was like visiting a country where you had a dog-eared translation book, and you had to slowly look up the words and point at them to each other because you didn’t know how to pronounce them.

Your brother from twenty years ago? You avoided his gaze. You don’t speak anymore, because he has a t-shirt that says “You are absolutely right! I do love AI tools!” and Mother and Father uninvited him from Christmas and Thanksgiving.

The whole thing is rocking and creaking and straining under its own weight, and it is about to collapse.

I commend the company behind GDC for publishing the stats of the show, but 30,000 minus 10,000 does not equal “thrilled.” Not even close. You earned your “Be Brave” conference scout sticker.

I get that there is military action in some parts of the world. It actually affected my GDC badge, if you can believe that. I get that some people did not come due to current administration reasons.

The size of the impact also speaks to economic shifts. I met more students and juniors at the show than ever before, and that is a good thing, but they had lots of questions. And not a lot of people had good answers.

Some people did have answers, though. I have had my potential GDC talks denied, with respectable enough reasons, revealed to me by honest and hardworking advisors, that I chose to “spite-educate” people at the show. GDC’s refusal to accept my talks did not prevent me from being one of the 4 most useful people in a room of 80 contractors and freelancers, all of whom had questions on how to succeed in today’s environment. I felt good about helping out and giving some useful information alongside 3 other generous donors of their time.

Getting back to my rant. The show has changed. We are no longer Pangea, the Earth-Continent-As-One. Maybe we should just acknowledge that. The sessions were packed with people searching for knowledge, and the young people were awesome and hopeful between moments of fear.

The show hotel lobbies were no longer elbow-to-elbow. Every time I wanted to go for a business meeting at any hotel in any direction, I could sit, hear, and talk without screaming.

The show floor? A joke. The exhibits were tiny, and instead of wrapping around to the north hall, there was “some of south hall” filled, plus three Ringling Brothers stages for the event, placed strategically to prevent the “where are all the vendors” fear sweat from showing.

All of this at the price of a week of hotel stays in San Francisco.

That is not sustainable, my friends.

There is a future change coming to GDC, after a year of radical change.

The show will probably double down on education and attendees. Surveying this young and talented crowd will make the magic eight-ball shake result in “move to a cheaper city.”

Atlanta or Chicago, take your pick.

Business Development will belong to the people of DICE. More than one person said they are only going there next year, not GDC.

The show? The floor? The exhibits? We roll the bones…

And the bones tell us… Nothing.

I don’t love that when I post about AI ideas online, I get called stupid or insane or unethical. I don’t love that everyone has dogpiled into the sea of wishlists and believes that everyone there will be all right. I don’t love that mobile consolidation is accelerating.

But all of these things are happening.

I always tell people. Today is the best time to contemplate a lifestyle making games. It is also the worst time to contemplate a lifestyle making games.

Every year that keeps getting more and more true and it is getting stretched in a line that gets thinner and thinner.

And I do not know when it will eventually snap.

See you next week.