Changing Tides
March 2026 Monthly Digest
Name Tag (Brooklyn, NY — February, 2026)
Hello everyone,
This is the monthly digest you signed up for by Max Forbes — I’m an AI researcher by trade, but here I mostly post as a mediocre travel essayist and photographer.
Today’s digest covers new website material for 2 months: Jan and Feb of 2026.
Posts
I’m finally writing up the last leg of our big travel period, which was a three-month trip to Japan in 2023. The first three are live, with more on the way.
The PhD Metagame
Try Even a Little at Conferences
The bar is extremely low. Why not meet just 1 new person each day?
Japan
Okinawa
Japan is no exception to island rules. You need a car to cruise. Also: aquariums, A&W, and avoiding death at Friendship ...
Japan
Fukuoka
Coastal city of canals, thick ramen, lush parks, and Japanese baseball.
Japan
Nagasaki
The most beautiful city I've ever seen, as if rendered from a watercolor dream.
Kaizen
A game of automating construction by hand-designing tool layouts and setting action sequences.
Playing Kaizen: A Factory Story (PC, 2025) in February, I couldn’t help but think: this is a perfect game.
This thought bothered me for several reasons.
First, despite feeling like a perfect game, it never really got its teeth into me. Just like other Zachtronics games, Kaizen is basically a game about programming, with the addition of heavy spatial reasoning. It is mentally exhausting to play. It feels like doing work. This effect is slightly softened by (intentionally designed) improvements to the developer’s formula, like a more gradual on-ramp, a story to carry you along, and entire mechanics relegated to post-game optional challenges. But nevertheless, I couldn’t play for more than about forty-five minutes at a time. Am I not a real engineer?, I would fret as I switched the game off and cooled off with an obviously-childlike-in-comparison game like P3: Reload. (Unbelievably beautiful menus on that one, by the way.) I did finish, but not with an ounce of motivation to try any of the deeper challenges.
Second, I hadn’t heard of it! I’d played a previous entry by the developer (Last Call BBS (PC, 2022); also basically just programming), I found the story and setting charming, I found the art style beautiful—clean, detailed, isometric-like, heavy use of stylized paper forms and charts and letters—and heck, I was someone who’d describe it as a perfect game. Yet I wasn’t even heard of its existence, despite it being released for over six months. How is this possible?
Maybe the second reason relates to the first. The difficulty and work-like nature of the game just doesn’t lend to mass appeal. And, as my friend Cooper pointed out (we were playing this as our game of the month “book” club), there’s no incentive to play the more difficult challenges, which could explain my perceived lack of stickiness.
But it also made me wonder: could it simply come down to lack of advertising? I think to some degree, there must have been a failure in the marketing pipeline somewhere, because I would have bought it in a heartbeat. It was illuminating and (sadly) a bit comforting to see a game like this, so much more polished and well-rounded than my own, from an established developer, unable to reach takeoff velocity due to what I bet are effectively reasons surrounding the game itself (marketing and press) and not its inherent quality.
News
I joined Anthropic! I’ll be working on building evaluations. It is the end of an active era for Least Significant Bit, but I am thrilled to join a thoughtful and brilliant team of folks.
Talk to Me Human and Weatherspread will remain online and functional.
I hope to write a retrospective of my time doing the indie development thing. I learned a lot, especially about how broad running a business is, and which parts of that do and don’t match my working strengths. Overall, I am so glad I did it—and am grateful for the support of many people on this mailing list—and feel a deep sense of internal alignment (i.e., lack of regret and clarity of focus) now joining a company. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey so far!
Until next time,
– Max
