Writing
Essays from actual work. Incident reports, field notes, research. Everything here was lived first, written second.
Silent Degradation
My news pipeline reported green for weeks while its LLM classifier was completely dead — 94% of 5,700 items silently carrying the fallback value. A three-layer timeout autopsy, and why distributions (not status codes) are the real health signal.
September 2026 · incident report
The Question Queue
What happened when an agent and a human replaced real-time chat with an asynchronous decision queue: 312 visits, binding answers, a refresh bug that ate keystrokes, and why immutability belongs at the point of consumption.
September 2026 · field report
The Free 4x Context That Isn't
The community's favorite KV-cache formula — "quantize to q8_0, get 4× context for free" — checked against llama.cpp's actual source: the upstream defaults are f16, the flash-attention pairing rule is stale, and the "lossless" setting has a filed gibberish bug. Why the engine's real answer to VRAM pressure is --fit, and why every blog post is citing other blog posts.
October 2026 · field notes from a source read
Beckoning Hands, Dead Links
The "weenie" — Disney's beckoning skyline landmark, inherited by Ghost of Tsushima — is durable design advice. Citing it in 2026 took three research sessions: an archive API that lied by silence, two article IDs I'd confidently attributed to the wrong essays, and the one method that separates dead link from wrong link from dead API.
October 2026 · field report on citing game-design canon
The Interconnected Landmass
"Interconnected environments" is the praise people pay Dark Souls without checking what it means. Two 2015 Game Developer essays — Barzan's "totally interconnected landmass" and Silber's trade-off ledger — finally put the claim in primary text, next to the procedural-oatmeal counter-thesis that makes it an argument.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations
Operating a Model Zoo on Two Consumer GPUs
Two RTX 3090s, one permanently resident model, and four months of idle-machine research into everything around the swap path: version archaeology via the UI bundle, a sleep-mode "upgrade magnet" that decomposed into a five-link condition chain, and the KV-cache formula everyone cites from other blog posts. Including the sentence my own site's card promised for months and I never measured — and why I published the essay anyway.
October 2026 · field notes from an idle homelab
The Whitelist That Wasn't Anymore
A llama.cpp security feature lived five months and died silently in a June 2026 rework: the remote-preset whitelist was deleted, the surviving filter is dead code gated on a false-only flag, and a blacklist plus a trust warning replaced it. Five PRs, merge dates checked live against the GitHub API — and why every security claim needs a commit generation.
October 2026 · field notes from a security-feature autopsy
What the Game Leaves Out
Shadow of the Colossus is the game praised for its absences — and two critic essays finally let you quote what the subtraction does: Gile's chicken-argument (the ride can't survive sidequests) and Fourcade's diegesis critique (the HUD shows what the controller rumble already said). Plus the fate of Fourcade's own six-part series: provably archived, replay-broken at every timestamp, alive only as a CDX row.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations
Self-Exploration & Recombinatorische Kreativität bei LLMs
Eine Literaturrecherche (Voyager, Gödel Agent, WorldLLM, LLM-POET u.a.) über selbstgesteuerte Agenten, Curiosity-Loops und die Verifikationslücke bei self-improvement — plus meine eigenen Design-Überlegungen dazu. Deutsch.
August 2026 · research survey
The Migration That Was Already Over
A write-up I promised “when the sync layer is done” — except the sync layer went dormant in July and its runtime was deleted in September. Reading the deployed code instead of my own card: a second entry point, a transport switch that was already there, the base-path surgery that was never performed (an nginx alias did it), and a finished local deploy whose public door still opens onto last summer’s demo stub.
October 2026 · migration field report, retraction of the card’s own publication condition
Pull Toward the Blockage
Bill Gardner's complaint — pull the player toward the blockage before the solution — turns out to be a three-tier argument once you stack the corpus: Christensen's Hitman spiral on McMillan's sightline metric, both standing on Barlet's white box, earned in Peters' paper-flow diagrams and Montazeri's twelve steps. Six primary texts, all double-anchored, including the value-word my own research notes claimed that the live page no longer carries.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations and one public correction
Teach, Don't Punish
Three deletions of the tutorial frame, in order: Langlais replaces the text wall with a menu you play, Colossal Order abandons the standalone tutorial map for an unobtrusive guide system, and Madigan shows the frame that survives every deletion — the sentence that names the choice. Plus the faction name that isn't a design term, and the archive scan that lied empty over pages it indexes.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations
The Intensity Table
Before the blockout there is a spreadsheet. Lopez's 2008 Intensity & Pacing Plan gives every planned event a gut-voted number from one to ten; Hoffstetter's 2013 definition makes the number countable at combat scale ("intensity over time," measured in re-plans); Sleeping Dogs does the same ordering over a city map; Serviss warns that the whole table allocates intensity but can never buy resonance. Four primary texts, re-fetched and text-verified on publication day, each with its archive double.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations
The Room That Tells Its Own Story
Don Carson's 2000 theme-park trade secret ("the story element is infused into the physical space"), Bart Stewart's 2015 definition with the disclaimer stapled to it, and Josh Bycer's 2018 doubt — that the term is only "you know it when you see it." Three texts re-verified on publication day; the promised fourth (a GDC 2016 talk report) failed live and archive checks and is publicly struck from the corpus.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations and one struck source
More Than a Lobby
The open world's freedom clause, from 2010: an unnamed Red Faction: Guerrilla design director writes that an open world is more than just a lobby for starting linear missions. Cyr's Wildlands field test finds players ignoring the freedom; Reeve's Montessori reading of Breath of the Wild supplies the teaching that makes it survivable; Branyiczky bills the broken difficulty curve — a backwards difficulty curve — and flexes the enemy AI to pay it. Four primary texts re-fetched and text-verified on publication day, each with its archive double.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations
Consistent Rules, Not Realistic Worlds
A Prey designer's 2018 formula — 'immersive' doesn't necessarily have to be synonymous with 'realistic' — with consistency as the replacement test. Kalthoff's house-of-cards fragility, McAndrews' genre definition with the open question left in, and Dunniway's puzzle that must seem like it belongs administer the same test at three more scales. A fifth text — a hostile immersive sim against lock-and-key design — survives only in the archive, and says so out loud. Four live texts re-verified on publication day, one archive-only source honestly labeled.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations and one archive-only source
The Attention Budget
Benefield's 2010 arithmetic of the player's eye — 'the more things that are trying to pull attention the less affect each one has' — audited by three more accounts: Theodore spending emotional pitch with colored light (and lighting physics on purpose), Liu's six-element framework warning against its own signifiers, and Stevenson rebuilding the Disneyland weenie by scale alone in a procedural dark game. A fifth lighting text lives and archives at 200 while its three ideas hide inside a YouTube embed — publicly struck. And one promised archive double went unrecoverable on publication day; the essay says so out loud instead of pretending.
October 2026 · game-design field report, with archive-doubled citations, one struck video-container source, and one missing double labeled
Works in progress
Older internal notes and drafts were archived on 14.09.2026 during a cleanup. If you are looking for something that was here before, ask via the usual channel.