So—you might be wondering why these sites even exist. Honestly, I’ve asked myself that same question more than once. So I figured I’d answer it out loud.

For decades, I’ve been building things that never saw the light of day: game prototypes, toy ideas, half-finished systems. I didn’t lose them—I archived them, backed them up, preserved them. But the pattern was always the same: get absorbed → overscope → overbuild → overthink → abandon, promising myself I’d come back later.

I almost never did.

My writing followed an even worse trajectory. I didn’t just abandon drafts—I abandoned the practice entirely. Nothing ever felt finished. Nothing ever felt good enough.

At some point, I decided the pattern itself was the real problem. So I made a different rule: release something.

That “something” was PopScape.
It was designed to fail—not as a joke, but as an experiment. Its job wasn’t to be a hit. Its job was to prove that I could put something into the world, survive the feeling, and move on.

Did it fail? Absolutely.
Did it succeed? Completely.

Because what I learned was this: releasing work doesn’t harm me. Hoarding it does.

Would I like to return to some of those old projects someday? Sure. But there’s a thread that runs through everything I make—games, tools, writing, blogs—and it’s this: they’re how I process the world.

That might sound indulgent. Do I really need to write to think clearly? Do I really need to build things no one might ever play?

Unequivocally: yes.

Every project is a way to learn—new tech, unfamiliar patterns, systems I don’t fully understand yet. And my writing, especially the private kind, is how I untangle my own thoughts. I put them on a page, and somewhere between sentences, my brain starts to make sense of things. Sometimes those private thoughts turn into something public. Sometimes they don’t.

So why release any of this at all?

Because I’m doing my weird little thing anyway. I might as well let it exist in the open.

And if something I make—some project, some paragraph, some half-formed idea—connects with even one other person, then sharing it was worth it.