We sat in a circle around a fire, passing the papaya-shaped cup between us.
If you’ve never had mate, it’s this bitter green tea-like beverage that Argentinians drink from a gourd through a metal straw. They’re obsessed with it. But it’s not really about the drink. It’s the whole experience surrounding it. Someone prepares it, drinks first, then refills it and passes it to the next person. You drink, pass it back, and they refill before passing it to the next person. This continues around the circle, in the same order, until the thermo is empty.
We were stuck in a holiday cabin complex with three other couples during the COVID lockdown. All strangers and from a smattering of nationalities: American, Austrian, Swiss, Dutch, Australian, and Argentinian. The borders had closed. We thought it’d be two weeks. Before we knew it, those two weeks turned into seven months.
The Argentinian guy would bring his mate. We’d sit by the fire for hours. He’d play Rock Nacional —music I’d never heard of— and explain some of the lyrics.
I’d never searched for Argentinian rock music. Check it out: this scene is massive!
We’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. How hard it is to find authentic things anymore outside of your bubble.
Beyond the Algorithm
Let’s talk about music for a second. Not the kind that is fed to you by an algorithm, but the kind you find because someone plays it in a dimly lit bar in a country far away from yours. Or, if you’re of a certain age, you might even remember hearing a track on the radio and going to a store to buy the band’s latest CD.
That’s the thing with algorithms: it’s in their interest to feed you what they think you like, based on what you already know. You like synthwave? Here’s 47 playlists of slop stolen from 80’s electronic glory and blended into generic mush. You watched a video about sourdough? Welcome to bread hell, population: you. And god forbid you decide to quickly look up what that whole flat earth movement is all about.
Our lives are now centered around the internet, channeled through social media and this devices which are seemingly always in the palms of our hands. And this online world is dominated by algorithms, and designed to flatten everything into “content.” To make the strange marketable. To turn discovery into a product, and every recommendation is a sales pitch.
How do you find the hidden worlds when algorithms actively fight against it? How do you get invited in? We have limited time. Limited choices. What do we listen to? What do we look for?
And it’s not just music. It’s everything. Art. Stories. Ideas. Entire ways of living that don’t fit neatly into a content category.
Sometimes it’s forced on you—like being stuck with strangers for seven months. Sometimes you stumble into it because you chose not to fly home. But it takes effort. Intention. You can’t algorithm your way in. Someone hands you mate. You sit by the fire and listen to their music.
So here we are, five years later and we started this blog. And it’s, partly at least, about fighting for things that algorithms, AI, and corporate greed are trying to flatten.
Why We’re Here
We initially wanted to make a dev log, but we realized that’s not all we want to do. And we’re not trying to sell you anything. Not yet, anyway.
We started this blog because we hope people will be interested in our story, maybe be inspired by it. More than that, they’ll be interested in something that is genuine and unique based on our real, lived experience, warts and all. And they’ll be excited to choose something that is real and that matters, in an online world optimized for sameness and commercial viability.
We’ve done volunteer work for years—fighting inequality, working on conservation—and now we’re making something ourselves. We’ve always loved video games and the way they tell stories. The way they make you feel things. We think we have ideas worth exploring. Games that might actually have an impact, make a difference, in some small way.
And we know we’re not alone. We think there are plenty of people out there who crave awesome things made by actual humans, not AI slop. Who want things they’ve never seen before, and to confront the issues that too often go unspoken.What’s Coming
Over the coming blog posts, we’ll share stories from the road. The games we started and abandoned. The adventures, the disasters, the little victories, and the moments we almost quit. We’ll talk about what we’re working on now, the processes we’ve gone through, and the thoughts we have. Some weeks, it’ll be a short story. Other weeks, it might be a rant. But it’ll always be honest.
We’re currently trying to make games that tackle real issues in the world—inequality, conservation, the things we saw working on volunteer projects. We want to show things are not black vs white, left vs right, but much more complex. If this interests you, sign up. You’ll be the first to see what we’re building and decide if it’s worth supporting when the time comes. No spam. No sales pitches. Just occasional updates from two people trying to make something meaningful in a world that’s increasingly… not.
A blog like this will probably get buried under the algorithm. We’re not commercial enough. But if you’re here, you found it. That’s something.
Thank you.
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