What I’m Doing Now

Still writing long-form explanatory pieces about how systems work. A few are in progress; they’ll turn up on the writing page when they’re ready.

On the projects side, Rhetorical! (a word game that tests linguistic improvisation under pressure) just came out the other side of a full visual rebuild. The whole thing now runs on a neobrutalist design system: warm cream, heavy black outlines, chunky offset shadows, big editorial type, and a bright orange accent on every screen. There’s a new R-tile logomark and real country flags to match.

The game grew, too. You can take a single quick round or commit to a full ten-round session, with a score breakdown at the end of each and a summary once a session wraps. Best sentences can be saved and shared as editorial cards, leaderboards are split by mode, and every player gets a public profile with a country flag and a global rank. Still learning what it means to design something people actually want to play.

Since I’m doing a lot of coding these days, I’ve set up a product studio of sorts: Mars Code Factory. (I’m a Martian, after all.) The credits so far: Rhetorical!, this website, personal sites for friends (mercyadediran.com and tomilolaadejumo.com), and two publications that should ship by the end of August. Until those launch I’m bootstrapping quietly. Or, as people in Silicon Valley say, working in stealth.

Mars Code Factory also built visakanvmegaweb.com, a digital archive collecting the writing of Visakan Veerasamy in one place. Visa has been a huge inspiration to me. I’ve read a lot of his tweets, blog posts, and Substack essays over the years. He wanted a way to see which of his tweets resurfaced most often in his own writing (he reshares and quotes himself constantly). I asked whether he’d also want an archive that made it easy for anyone to get into his work. He said yes. A quarter of a million tweets, a thousand-odd essays and blog posts, and hundreds of videos later, it took considerably longer than I expected, but the result was worth it, and I learned a lot building something that turned out to be genuinely useful. Visa tweeted the launch out to his 250K+ followers, which was nice.

Away from the screen: I broke my personal distance record with a 10K in June, then broke it again at the start of August with a 15K, which I’ve since done twice. Not signing up for a half-marathon anytime soon, but I like my odds.

Finished George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I had to wait until the years-long hype cycle for the ASOIAF series died out before starting the books, but the wait was worth it. A Game of Thrones had a brilliant ending, and I hope to review it one of these days. GRR Martin definitely deserves the hype. I’m now reading the second book in the series: A Clash of Kings. Also added a bunch of new books to my reading list, including The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (Agatha Christie) and How Things Are Made (Tim Minshall). The last two were borrowed from my local library, so I get to read paperbacks again after heavily reading ebooks for the last couple of years (A Game of Thrones and Foundation are exceptions).

I also completed the final season of Suits on Netflix. It’s the best show I’ve seen since maybe The Blacklist. Harvey Specter is a quotes machine and I saved a ton of his best quips from the show. You can find them by searching for “Harvey Specter” in my personal quotes app (qtlb.mmars.fyi). Rick Hoffman (Louis Litt) is a brilliant actor and, in my opinion, had the best arc among all the characters in the show. Patrick J. Adams (Mike Ross) and (pre-fame) Meghan Markle (Rachel Zane) pulled off some great acting too. And, of course, Gina Torres (Jessica Pearson): I still have plans to write an essay inspired by a scene where she says some people “love the taste of blood” and tells Harvey to find out if he was one of those people.

I’m now watching the original Naruto series. It’s a bit of a strange choice, but I never got around to watching it when I was younger, despite its popularity among my age group, and felt like I could use a bit of mild entertainment. The early seasons are incredibly well-written for an anime, and some of the characters (particularly Gaara and Sasuke) have complex backstories that make it difficult to classify their actions on a binary scale of “evil vs. good”. Fight scenes are epic too; if you haven’t seen it, search for Rock Lee’s fight with Gaara in the Chunin exams or Tsunade’s fight with Orochimaru. Worth watching.