my name is connor This is my personal and professional journal logging my creative endeavors in the world of tech. See more of my work here. latest posts...
My pet project for a month has been a web toy based on the idea that people love collecting badges. I thought that if I created a small website where people could make, share, and collect badges, it had the potential to be a fun, addicting game that could earn me a little bit of supplemental income. A screenshot from itsbadger.online The core concept: Make badges, collect badges, core base game is…
I have been anxiously awaiting the release of "Tomodachi Life - Living the Dream" on Nintendo Switch. It came out yesterday, and I have been lucky enough to spend the past 48 hours playing the game, making Miis, and discovering what is possible. There are already immediate reactions: IGN released this review highlighting that the game is delightful, but lacks social media sharing capabilities. The…
Three years ago I wrote this article about curation as a business model. The idea is that we are saturated with content - videos, websites, Reels, TikToks. We live in a time where virtually any product is available to us, and ironically it makes it so much difficult for us to make a purchase. Decision fatigue and decision paralysis is a very real problem - think about the appeal of omakase at a…
A couple years ago, my friend L and I took a road trip down to New Orleans. We stopped in towns along the way and played album after album across long stretches of the open road. After returning from the trip, I exported my Spotify listening history to capture all of the music I listened to from the moment we left Detroit, tracking our progress to the bayou and back. Each song had a timestamp,…
After watching a YouTube video about what makes Roblox games addictive ( link ), I decided to try to make a game that hit all of the design requirements for maximum user retention. Here were my goal posts: Progression - the game should feel like the player is advancing along a clear growth trajectory. Status - players should be able to show off accomplishments. Mastery - over time, players should…
Roblox was once described to me as the "YouTube of Video Games". It is less of a game and more of an ecosystem where creative game developers can put their niche, weird, often poorly-produced experiences on the internet for world enjoyment. Some of the most popular Roblox games today involve just standing in train terminals, waiting for something to happen. If we examine the history of YouTube,…
The rise of AI and LLMs has created fertile soil for smart Tamagotchis to emerge. I've seen both celebration and derision on the internet. Personally, I like the idea of giving my computer programs the ability to talk. Similar to how we talk to droids in Star Wars, I think it would be delightful to have a chirping robotic companion that can understand the world in a way that is comparable to mine.…
There was a time I believed in magic - I could whisper a spell and then something physical would manifest itself. The inner workings of the magic are a mystery (it's what makes it magic) and that's what Claude feels like to me when I use it. Artificial Intelligence and LLMs are such a hot, divisive issue. I don't want to waste water. I don't want people to get taken advantage of. I believe that…
When I worked as an online community specialist, I managed to see roughly 200 servers a day. Many of these servers were Roblox servers filled with tens and thousands of users. My co-workers and colleagues mostly disregarded the Roblox communities as slop. The ecosystem had a unique set of rules and the user base was mostly children, creating huge barriers of understanding between the people using…
Being a "citizen" is belonging to an organized community. Every day, we participate in a non-physical space that has its own forms of governance, social climbing, and culture. Many of us are citizens of the internet - whether we realize it or not. While working at Discord, I met social workers from Germany whose job it was to mediate conflict on the internet. It inspired me to conceptualize…