Life, Comedy, Games, Tech, Marketing, and Community
Draft season is here again, and your team still needs a name that beats Team Smith. I first wrote on how to use ChatGPT for fantasy football team names back in 2023, then enhanced it with a custom GPT in 2024. Since then the AI tools have gotten better and the method has gotten simpler, so this is the updated version for the 2026 season. The templates below still work in any of the major AI…
This post started as a TIL : I was building a little arcade game called Shoot , opened the index.html and the Web Audio API refused to load a single sound because of CORS. (A shooter with no shooting sounds is mostly just pointing.) The fix was a local development server, and the tool I found was the Live Server extension for Visual Studio Code. That problem I had hasn t changed, but the best…
There s a new pinball machine. It is a Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed pinball machine from Multimorphic . This pinball machine was announced a few days ago and had a surprise reveal at Gen Con. I have been attending Gen Con for over 20 years and have watched it grow 10x in size and stretch into all things you could geek out on. 90k people come to Indianapolis, IN, and spend four days gaming, talking…
First, I need to say I love the pinball community. It is a community, and all kinds are there. Since I relocated to New England, Pinball has been my source of creativity and drive, a way to find friends, a place to have randos over to the house, a place to go to a warehouse filled with old pinball machines, and a way to be around people who love this game. On my journey, I met Tasker Smith. Right…
My family was spending the day at the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum in Pawtucket, RI, and stumbled across an Atari Pinball Machine. Yes, Atari made pinball machines for a brief, unsuccessful spell. Atari launched the career of the most prolific pinball game designer, Steve Ritchie . Steve is still designing pinball machines 50 years later, with his most recent game, Sonic the Hedgehog from Jersey…
Before feeds, your town had a channel. You might know the one if you watched MTV when it first came on cable. A flat blue screen, chunky white text, the time and the temperature in the corner. The Lions Club pancake breakfast. A birthday wish for someone named STEVE. Little League signups at the rec center. Headlines crawling along the bottom while a Muzak version of a song you almost recognized…
A pinball machine weighs about 300 pounds. Arcade cabinets heavy. I am always looking to maximize my bonus room space and dream. I built a quick-and-dirty web app to lay out your game room. Add games, rotate, resize, add clearance, add customized blocks. Iterate. What I made It s called Gameroom Designer . It lays out your game room to scale, right in the browser. You set your room s real…
Google OKF for Your House I was standing in the hardware store holding a dead coin cell, squinting at it, trying to remember if the Lutron dimmer in my hallway takes a CR2032 or one of the other fourteen round silver batteries that all look exactly the same. So I guessed. I bought two of the wrong one. Classic. Here is the thing about a house. You slowly learn a thousand tiny facts about it. The…
For two years the move was simple: pick a better model. Then the models got good, and stayed good, and the gaps between them got boring. So the interesting lever is the other thing you hand the agent now. The skill file. Microsoft Research just shipped a tool called SkillOpt that takes that idea literally. SkillOpt is a text-space optimizer that trains reusable natural-language skills for frozen…
Garry Tan, the guy who runs Y Combinator, just open-sourced a toolkit called gstack . It runs on top of Claude Code and turns it into a virtual engineering team. Twenty-three specialized skills, eight power tools, each one playing a role you d normally have to hire for. A CEO that rethinks your product. An engineering manager that locks down the architecture. A designer that catches AI slop. A QA…