These descriptions are AI generated. The descriptions are accurate, but I haven’t had time to write them up properly yet… since these projects are either not working well or stupid.
Fermi Aperture
Initial attempt here: https://jwbatey.com/fermi/
Fermi Aperture is a strategy game built around the Fermi Paradox. It plays as an incremental (idle-style) civilization builder: you guide a society from early development to a spacefaring stage, with one clear long-term objective, launching a seed ship.
The interesting part is what tries to stop you. The game generates events and hazards inspired by common Fermi Paradox explanations:
- Civilizational collapse or catastrophe (think Great Filter-type scenarios)
- False signals and near-misses that raise hope and then evaporate
- Resource constraints that force ugly tradeoffs
- Powerful technology that solves one problem and creates a new one
Even while the game is idle, your civilization may be accumulating resources and knowledge. At the same time, unattended risks can compound and end the run.
Philosophy
I like games that leave an idea in your head after you stop playing. Here, that idea is simple: progress and risk move together. Turning the Fermi Paradox into mechanics forces the player to treat “survival” as an active strategy, not a default outcome, and to think about which bets keep paying off as the stakes climb.
Superdiff
Superdiff is a document comparison tool built for long, revision-heavy documents. A normal diff is great for code, but it can be miserable on Word/PDF exports where page numbers, tables of contents, and formatting churn can bury the real edits.
Superdiff aims to surface the changes a human reviewer usually cares about:
- Additions, deletions, and rewrites in sentences and paragraphs
- Meaningful edits to clauses, requirements, or definitions
- Updates to figures or tables that change content, not just layout
At the same time, it tries to ignore the high-noise categories:
- Renumbered pages and sections
- Table of contents refreshes
- Pure formatting or style tweaks
The output is an annotated report that calls out substantive edits cleanly. It also computes a simple “change density” score, and can suggest a rough review time based on how much content moved.
Philosophy
This project comes from a practical annoyance: most review time is spent hunting for signal. The goal is to cut the noise so the reviewer can spend attention where it actually matters, on interpreting the edits and deciding what to do about them.
Auto-censor kids’ books for comedy
This project takes children stories and adds “unnecessary censorship” for comedic effect. The idea is simple: pick a few words or phrases and replace them with black bars or symbols, as if the text contained something explicit, even when it does not.
Example:
“The princess sang happily in the forest.” becomes “The princess ███ happily in the forest.”
Nothing truly changed, but your brain tries to fill the gap, and that mismatch is the joke.
The selection logic aims for words that keep the sentence readable while creating plausible double meanings. It is basically a small algorithmic prank: the story reads normally until a censored block appears, then your imagination does the rest. The vibe is close to “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship” (Jimmy Kimmel) and the broader unnecessary censorship meme.