I started madebynathan.com in 2010 as a technical blog. Programming, electronics, hardware projects, the usual maker stuff. For about fifteen years that’s mostly what it was.

Then at some point I stopped filtering. I started posting about whatever rabbit hole I fell down that week: simulation theory, wargaming history, the etymology of “Cossack”. Chasing random curiosities turns out to be a lot of fun, and AI gives me superpowers here. I can go from “wait, is Prussia just Russia with a P?” to a properly researched deep dive in an afternoon.

That’s the whole premise of this new blog. So to kick things off, here’s an index of the most random posts from the original site, with a paragraph on each. Consider it my credentials.

The Reflective Universe Hypothesis

If the universe is a computation, could it carry fingerprints of whatever it’s running on? This post separates simulators (they reproduce behavior) from emulators (they reproduce the machinery), builds a taxonomy of simulation types, and works out why a universe can never perfectly simulate itself, though compressed universes with simplified rules are still on the table. It ends with a thought experiment I called the Causal Closure Experiment: a sufficiently advanced civilization could search for structured violations of physical law as evidence of a deeper causal layer underneath reality. None of it is testable, which is sort of the point.

Higher Orders of Possibility

A bacterium has no concept of what an insect is, and a rat can’t comprehend a city. Every jump in complexity opens a possibility space that the level below can’t even represent. This post applies that idea to superintelligence and asks a question I like much better than the usual one: not “can an AI have emotions and morals?” but “what emotions and morals could exist that a human can’t even imagine?” Empathy is real even though a snake will never conceive of it. Something analogous might sit above us.

Why Doesn’t Valve Just Make Half-Life 3?

This one started with Gabe Newell’s yacht. The answer turns out to be boring in a satisfying way: around 2007, Valve stopped being a game studio and became a platform company. Steam’s 20 to 30 percent cut of every sale brings in billions a year, more than any single game could, and Valve’s famously flat structure has no mechanism for pushing a hundred people through a multi-year AAA project they aren’t required to work on. Add the risk of following up one of the most beloved games ever made, and you get the technical term for Valve’s position: “f*** Half-Life 3 money.”

Melée, Wargaming, Prussia

The question that kicked this off: how did “melée” travel from cavalry charges to Counter-Strike knife fights? The answer runs through Kriegsspiel, the wargame the Prussian army used to train officers from 1812 onward, then H.G. Wells’ 1913 wargaming rulebook, and on into D&D and video games. Halfway through I got distracted by a second question, which is the ADHD signature move: what actually was Prussia, and is it just Russia with a P? I weigh the two competing etymologies for the name and reach a conclusion you’re welcome to fight me over. Melée weapons only.

Free Men of the Steppe: Kazakhs and Cossacks

“Cossack” and “Kazakh” name two completely different peoples. One was a frontier warrior culture on the Eastern European steppe, the other is a Turkic nation in Central Asia. Both words come from the same Turkic root, qazaq, a free man of the steppe. English spelling buries the connection; in Russian (казак / казах) it’s obvious. My wife is from Kazakhstan and I’ve been learning Russian, so this one is personal. It’s also a neat example of how a single generic word can fork into two separate ethnonyms within a few centuries.

All the Money in the World

I watched the 2017 film about the Getty kidnapping and got curious about what “richest private citizen in the world” actually meant in 1966. The answer: J. Paul Getty’s $1.2 billion, which is roughly $8.8 billion in today’s money. A few hundred people are richer than that now. Elon Musk alone is sitting on close to $775 billion. The world’s richest man of the sixties would be a footnote on a modern rich list, and that disconnect nerd-sniped me into a much bigger question: how has all wealth evolved, since the very beginning of wealth itself? Which turned into the next post.

World History of Value

The answer to that question. This one isn’t an article at all. It’s an interactive timeline of all value in human history, starting at the first stone tools and running through the invention of coinage, the Great Pyramid, peak Rome, and Mansa Musa’s hajj, up to Rockefeller, Getty, and today. It tracks the wealthiest person and the wealthiest empire of every era, so you can watch the crown pass from pharaohs to the King of Lydia to oil magnates to tech founders. Go drag the timeline around.

Amazing Low Budget Films

Proof that nobody needs $200 million. The Blair Witch Project cost somewhere around $50k and grossed $248.6 million. Paranormal Activity was shot for $15k in the director’s own house and returned about $194 million worldwide. Christopher Nolan made his first film, Following, for $6,000. Kevin Smith put Clerks on his credit cards. The Hunt for Gollum, a fan film that was never allowed to earn a cent, still pulled in 13 million views. As I put it in the original post, all it takes is a camera, a great story, a vision, a lot of dedication, and a talented team of mostly unpaid volunteers.

So that’s the kind of thing you can expect here, except with even less of a filter. If something looks interesting at 2am, it qualifies.