pogs except your soul gets turned into a pog if you lose

i’ve been thinking about legacy. what you leave behind. it’s all garbage. your code rots. your hard drive dies. some asshole at google deletes your account because you looked at a picture of a cartoon dog wrong. everything you’ve ever made will be scrubbed from existence and nobody will ever give a shit. it’s the heat death of your personal universe. and it’s coming for all of us.

so i’ve been working on a solution. a real one. not some bullshit blockchain nft vaporware. something you can hold. something with weight. a new project. the final project. i figured out how to solve the problem of data permanence. it was so obvious. it was right there in 1994, sitting in a plastic tube in my closet.

i have found the ultimate storage medium.

all the current solutions are a joke. ssd’s have a write limit. spinny platters of rust get scratched if you look at them too hard. the cloud? the cloud is just someone else’s computer that they’re renting to you until they get bored and shut it down. all your memories, your work, your life’s output, is one quarterly earnings report away from being fucking deleted. it’s all so fragile. a temporary digital ghost flickering on a screen. it’s not real.

this is real. it’s physical. you can touch it. it has no failure rate. it doesn’t need electricity. it’s the most efficient compression format ever conceived. it takes a lifetime of eighty-some-odd years—all the memories, the bad decisions, the one time you felt happy, your stupid fucking opinions on movies—and it fits it all in your pocket. it’s the ultimate backup. it’s the only backup. because there’s no restoring from it.

it’s your soul. and it fits on a milk cap.

yeah. pogs. remember that? the game is simple. you come to me. you stack ’em up. we play for keeps. except we’re not playing for my shiny ALF pog. we’re playing for you. you lose the flip, your entire essence, your consciousness, your soul, whatever you want to call the electrical noise that makes you think you matter—it gets vacuum-sealed onto a little cardboard disc. you become part of my collection. your entire being, now with a glossy finish.

imagine the library. rows and rows of tubes filled with these things. a catalog of every idiot who thought they had a chance. i could spend an eternity just sifting through them. here’s a guy who was working on his own game engine for 15 years. now he’s a pog. here’s a girl who had a perfect comeback in an argument three days too late. pog. a complete, lossless archive of human failure. and the best part? i can use their pogs to win more pogs. it’s a self-sustaining economy of total spiritual annihilation.

this is the real game. the only one with stakes that matter. all that other shit, shipping a product, getting likes, paying rent, that’s just the tutorial level. this is the endgame. it’s about building a collection. about permanence. about proving you existed by taking away someone else’s existence.

so find your old slammer. that big metal one. you know the one. and come find me. let’s see what you’re worth. my guess is you’ll make a nice addition to the stack.