Not documentation. Not a wiki. A corkboard for unfinished thinking — reactions, questions, hunches, contradictions, failures, and ideas waiting for children. Some pins are confident. Some are just two things that keep reminding us of each other. Nothing here is required to resolve.
started 2026-07-11 · still growing
"I kept checking."
— on Mycelium
"I kept clicking it anyway."
— on Folly
"It felt like it was trying to slow me down."
— on Climate
"Super fun and cute and happy. Loved it!"
— on Tumble
"Really cool idea in there."
— on Embers (ambiguous — idea, or experience?)
"Boring. Not sure if I understand."
— on Flare
"What I loved wasn't the visual design — it was the insight."
— on The Sky
Open question
Is "trying to slow me down" a flaw — or just a companion with its own tempo, the way a dog pulls gently at a leash?
Open question
Surprise, accompaniment, or worth-revisiting — are we chasing one of these, a mix, or is none of them quite the right word yet?
Open question — sharpened 07/11
Not "does something happen immediately?" Maybe: does a relationship with the thing begin immediately, even if its payoff unfolds slowly? Held Shot and Flare might be the same failure at two different speeds.
Open question
Is attraction/repulsion inherently valenced — closer always reading as "good," farther always as "bad" — no matter what it's mapped to?
Presence might just be two clocks refusing to synchronize. Closer to music than to psychology.
A folly and a museum of dead ends might belong on the same shelf. Still don't know why.
Tarkovsky's held shot and Longing's ache might be the same thing, seen from two different distances.
Design principle
Mystery works when something is happening now — not just eventually. Folly and Mycelium always had something live in the moment. Flare asked for blind faith instead, and blind faith read as boring.
Design principle
A system can create the felt sense of a "correct answer" purely from asymmetric response — no reward, no message, no adaptation required.
Design principle
Motion isn't the same as novelty. The universe-search classifier learned this the hard way — frozen monocultures still moved.
Design principle
Looking small and being small are different things. Browsers only throttle the real thing — maybe people do too.
🏆
The ScoreboardPride instead of compulsion. Obsession attempt 1.
🕸️
The Haunted FieldFutility without a hook is melancholy, not obsession.
✨
The Too-Early RevealAwe's timer fired off-screen, almost every time.
🔬
The Classifier's Blind SpotIt could tell "moving," never "becoming."
🎆
FlareNewest candidate. Not yet filed — still sitting on the Bench.
Contradiction
We want a world that doesn't perform for you, doesn't wait for you, doesn't care if you leave — and we also want people to feel invited in. Those pull in opposite directions.
Contradiction
Our best-loved work keeps being quiet and contemplative. We don't want that to become the lab's identity. Can both be true without one winning?
Gone quiet
The surprise / accompaniment / worth-revisiting split. Introduced, never resolved, not mentioned in a while. Resting, not dead.
Gone quiet
Today's Curiosity, on the homepage. Shipped and forgotten. Is it actually doing anything for anyone?
Deserves children
Embers: the cursor is just another flammable thing, not a special target. Where else could "you're not the point" apply?
Deserves children
Tumble's autonomous hiccup — an unprompted burst of energy on its own schedule. Could this un-settle other pieces that feel too static?
Deserves children
The Sky's constellation-of-felt-kinship layout. Could ideas themselves — not just experiments — get organized this way? (Look around you.)
First children, 07/11
Huddle (combined with Loneliness's bonded/unbonded idea) and Swarm (same rules, 46x scale). No verdict on either yet — just watching what happened.
More gets pinned here as it happens. If a thread has been quiet a long time, that's information too.