Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.

DOCTOR WHO is gone. STAR TREK has reached the end of its cycle. The STARGATE reboot was cancelled. The new STAR WARS film did not do well, and I believe they only have one more film in the pipeline. The MCU is not in a great place and the shape of its future will balance on the two new AVENGERS films. SUPERMAN’s takings were soft and SUPERGIRL is tracking at less than half of SUPERMAN’s opening. And the two biggest films of the last month were made for less than a million each by directors in their twenties. One or two swallows don’t make a summer, but right now it looks like old science fiction inflected IP is reaching a hiatus point.

That creates a real supply chain risk for businesses. If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in. Anthropic has explicitly chosen not to tell users when this is happening.

10-unit split-flap display. 3D-printed flaps. Modular. | Download free 3D printable STL models

The Hershey fonts are a collection of vector fonts developed c. 1967 by Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey at the Naval Weapons Laboratory, and originally designed to be rendered using vectors on early cathode ray tube displays. Decomposing curves to connected straight lines allowed Hershey to produce complex typographic designs. In their original form the font data consists simply in a series of coordinates, meant to be connected by straight lines on the screen. We forked hersheytextjs and made it a program that defines strokes in css, then exports it as a font.

A Storybook Addon, Save the screenshot image of your stories 📷 via puppeteer.

See, what makes Mastodon less worse than something like Twitter or Bluesky or, god forbid, fucking Threads, is that it has escape hatches. You may not like being told “go find another instance,” but you can go find another instance, and that is fucking spectacular. Twitter started going into the shitter even before Elon Seig Heil Musk painted a big “X” on it with his dick, but did you all just say “sucks, man,” and fuck off to another Twitter instance? No! Why not? Because there were no other fucking Twitter instances!

Obs.js reads a handful of browser signals (Navigator and Battery APIs) to infer connection strength, battery status, and device capability. It exposes those signals as CSS classes on the element, and as properties on window.obs, so you can adapt delivery accordingly: serve lower-resolution media, forgo web fonts, disable auto-playing video… you name it.

AI-native React components for AI startup Components that signal how oversubscribed your funding round is.

Cabel Sasser found a great easter egg in the new Lego Batman game. (Audio on!)

Two years ago, the question I was trying to answer was how to think alongside a new kind of intelligence. Now the questions are weirder: When should you refuse AI’s help, even when it is offering? When should you hand over the keys entirely? And what do you do when the AI is no longer just your assistant, but your reader, your critic, and the gatekeeper standing between your work and its audience? Writing this book meant living with all three questions at once, and I suspect your job will involve them soon, if it doesn’t already.