Ben 🦇🥌

@ben.batst.one

754 Followers 704 Following

Pro Game Designer, amateur hole digger. Building social/systems at Dropfake working on @play-dcko.bsky.social. Prev: Linden Lab, Disney, Foxglove, Midwinter, Akili. Trying to build a better pig pen.

A ceramic vessel shaped and textured to resemble a red, white and blue soccer ball. It is displayed on a stack of boxes. It is full of tequila.
Screenshot of a New York Times Cooking email newsletter dated May 29, 2026. It has a header photo of a pasta dish made with spaghetti and walnuts. The header reads “17 Food Items You Should Buy When They're on Sale” and the lede follows with: “Stocking up on certain ingredients when you spot them at a lower price can help you save significantly. We talked to a few budget experts and several New York Times editors and writers about what items they buy and how they make the most of them in inflation-friendly recines.”
Video of new Amtrak locomotive rolling through Everett
A photo of a device interface. An orange led is illuminated over an icon of a battery. Below it a simple readout shows Load: 7% Batt: 1% It is a UPS that powers the DMX controller for our lighting system.
The baker in Kiki’s delivery service.
A photo of a Girl Scout cookies booth with a box of Pokémon cards in the foreground sitting on a clear jar with a handmade pink sign that reads “Girl Scout x Pokémon Raffle”
A photo of a snowy hillside framed by a window: the perspective is of the photographer inside his office looking outside. On the hill are three dogs having a great time playing together. One dog is a small brown fluffball and the other two are a full-sized white Labrador and a black/brown German Shepherd.
A display set up on a folding lunch table. Two tri-fold boards. The right-most with red text and yellow background says “Germany” with photos and descriptions of the country and its culture. More central is a more densely detailed board “Resistance against the Nazis” multiple books on nazis, Anne Frank, and ww2 are on the table.
Two dogs sleeping on a patchwork quilt, both curled into bagel shapes. The upper dog is a brown and black German Shepherd, the lower dog is a white Labrador retriever. In the upper right of the photo, you can see half of a large grey dog bed on the floor, but neither dog thinks they belong there.
Screenshot of a header of an email from Nextdoor Subject: *NOT POLITICAL* our neighbors were just taken by ICE.
Cover of a pamphlet titled “Service Unit Product Manager Guide” and subtitled “2026 Girl Scout Cookie Program” The sobriquet “Mr Ben” is in the upper right corner
Four young girls are chopping vegetables on a folding table outdoors. They have tomatoes, avocados, lettuce and an onion.
Word cloud visualization for 2025 showing your 50 most-used words, sized by frequency. Top 10: "game" (18×), "games" (14×), "find" (9×), "experience" (8×), "chance" (8×), "industry" (7×), "studio" (7×), "labor" (7×), "interview" (6×), "school" (6×) (from Anisota's Annual Bluesky Harvest)
A selfie of the author, a scruffy middle aged white guy wearing a ball cap embroidered with “Go Sports”
Screenshot of a LinkedIn notification that reads “game designer: new opportunity in Seattle WA” with a thumbnail image that is the Lowe’s hardware logo.
A pressure treated 4x4 set upright in fresh concrete. Tools and more boards are strewn around it on the ground. A bright pink line stretches between the post and a gate frame. Past it a wooden bridge stretches across a small ditch and more posts stretch up a gentle slope.
Screenshot of two posts, the first by @bburbank.bsky.social with an image of drunk Don Draper pitching the 2013 KFC add campaign “I ate the bones!” The second post is @brunodias.bsky.social posts about reheating a frozen ortolan (famous illegal delicacy consumed bones and all) in a toaster like a frozen waffle.
A pig-shaped mortar full of fresh made guacamole artfully displayed.
A photo of four actors silhouetted against a bright magenta backdrop. They may be recognizable as characters from a Disney channel made-for-tv movie.
Screenshot of the primary point of contact section with the name “Michael ‘Orbit’ Nayak, Ph. D.”
A gold colored balloon emblazoned with a Happy New Year message. It is lying on a linoleum floor.
Two massive ham hocks sitting in a yellow dutch oven, half immersed in a dark liquid. The electric range is glowing under the pot.
A batch of biscuits (scones for the commonwealth) that went a little wild on the rise and started to spread out in a cthonic sprawl. Nice golden brown tops though.
A wire mesh hanging fruit basket with about 10 small lemons, and one very ripe delicata squash, larger than the lemons, but the same shade of yellow.
"They don't know meme" with loner in corner watching dancers at a party. Text reads "They don't know I'd love to forge a real, authentic bond with any of them but am stuck in a feedback loop of anxiety."
A poster image of Tim Walz, done in a pastiche of the Obama Hope poster, captioned "Ope". Walz is wearing a Gopher's ballcap, and cradling a piglet in his arms as he smiles like a chibi cartoon.
Screenshot of a message I sent to a friend in mid December 2023. It reads: “So I don’t want to dig up old skeletons, but I had entertained the idea of talking with possibility.co for a hot second. Some of the secondary leadership folks they have are peeps who’s work I admire. But I know the actual leadership were Undead Labs and that you had a bad time with that, so that gave me pause. Anyways, I saw a few months their art director (Jane Ng) left, and now their game director (Liz England) posted she left and for a studio that’s been working on something for at least 3 years and hasn’t announced anything yet to be shedding leadership talent definitely seems like red flags. So thanks I guess for warning me indirectly!”
A cybertruck strapped on the bed of a tow truck in a nondescript parking lot.
Screenshot of a headline from Slate “Will Barron Trump Ever Stop Growing?” With accompanying photo-illustration showing full-color Barron head-and-shoulders above other members of his (greyscale) family and a graphic evoking a ruler.
A deep dish pizza, golden crust, with a swirl of green pesto laid on top of a solid layer of chunky tomato sauce.
A large pig with its head in a galvanized steel can, animal feed bags strewn around.
Robert Redford, mid-nod, a clip from a gif.
Screenshot of Bruno’s tweet over a tweet by Aaron Gordon linking to reporting on cruise taxi murder.
A display of flags for sale at a fair booth with a “buy 2 get 1 free” sign. Alt-right symbols flown next to pride flags.
A large slug creeping over the ashes in a fire pit towards a large, active campfire.
Cover for Wyclef Jean’s solo album “The Carnival” featuring the artist, a slender black man, in a spotless white suit and a black fedora on front of a crumbling concrete wall.