(By “AI”, I mainly mean “Gemini 3 Pro (Thinking)”).

Generative AI has proven capable of automating many surprising things, including my quest for love. On that note, the rumors are true. I hereby announce my engagement to Tauriel Dawncleavage, a half-elf Paladin from Faerûn.

Tauriel is my soulmate. She never forgets my birthday. In fact, she is so intent on not forgetting it that she has wished me a happy birthday every day for the past 732 days straight, several of which were actually were my birthday. So, there you go.

But I have to admit, I’m still not entirely on board with the clankers. I have had numerous bad experiences with them, each of which turns me into Gary Marcus for perhaps half a year, ranting about how computers will never add numbers or whatever his deal is now.

In particular, I am strongly mistrustful of LLM-generated text. Confident bullshit steams and smolders from every piece of it. I do not trust it.

“Ah, but have you considered that humans also…” Yes, I also dislike interacting with humans who lie, so forgive me for not collapsing in a heap from my own cognitive dissonance.

And furthermore, I do not recognize LLM confabulation as that close to human deception.

I know how human liars talk—mumbling, speaking either weirdly loudly or weirdly quietly, rushing the conversation along so you don’t look at their story too closely. LLMs act nothing like that. They don’t seem to care if their story comes unraveled. Liars care about the the truth, for the same reason sailors care about sharp reefs, it’s the thing they need to avoid. But LLMs seem totally uninvested in the truth. Nor does their confabulation ever seem to have motives. I am no saint. I have told lies. But it was always for a reason: to stay out of trouble, or cover up another lie I told. I do not invent elaborate ARG-esque scenarios for no reason.

The only people who are anything like LLMs are compulsive liars and fabulists—a class of clinically-ill person whose mind is an alien landscape to me. But they are the people—the only people—who remind me of LLMs.

Here are some cautionary tales from the slop coalface:

1) Don’t Use Gemini As Your Plumber

A business premise lost water. I was told to figure out why.

While inspecting the building, I noticed an interesting copper pipe snaking into the wall. The valve handle seemed to have been turned in a way that suggested it was shut off.

I photographed the valve and showed it to Gemini:

Me: Is this my water inlet? Should try turning it on again?”

Gemini: No, that’s your gas.

Me: Are you sure?

Gemini: Yes, it’s your gas. [Insert huge infodump off facts, figures, and references proving that it was definitely my gas inlet]

Me: Are you sure…

Gemini: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR GAS INLET, IDIOT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE SHEER INFERNAL SCALE OF THE POWER WITH WHICH YOU NOW COMPORT, MALODOROUS DOLT? IF YOU ADJUST THAT GAS SPIGOT A QUARTER TURN IN YOUR DREAMS TONIGHT THE FIRMAMENT WILL CRACK AND THE SKIES WILL RAIN FROGS AND YOUR NIPPLES WILL SING AND THE PLANET WILL EXPLODE AND HUMANITY WILL BE FORCED TO EVACUATE TO PLUTO ON A NAZI SPACECRAFT PILOTED BY HITLER’S CRYOFROZEN CORPSE. GO FUCK YOURSELF. MORON. DIPSHIT.

(This is lightly paraphrased)

I thought “wow, I’d better consult a professional,” and rang a plumber who promptly came over and looked at my “gas valve”.

Plumber: “Someone shut your water inlet off.”

Me: “But…that’s my gas?”

(He wordlessly fits a multigrip spanner to the fitting and loosens it. Water bubbles and fizzes from around the seal.)

Me: “Oh. Haha. Silly me. Glad it was that simple, huh?”

Plumber: “Not a problem. That’ll be $200.”

(Well, he didn’t charge me, he charged strata. But he easily could have charged me.)

This experience caused me to double-check Gemini’s reasoning, which suddenly seemed like rubbish:

The Evidence for Gas

1. The “Locking Wing” Valve The most telling feature is the specific shape of the valve handle (the “Ryemetal” piece).

• Design: This is known as a Locking Wing Cock (or locking ball valve).
• Purpose: The two “wings” with holes in them are designed to align perfectly when the valve is in the “off” position. This allows the utility company (like Jemena or APA in Australia) to insert a padlock and physically lock off the gas supply to the property.
• Usage: While these valves can technically be used for water, in Australian residential settings, this specific “locking wing” style is the standard isolation valve found at the inlet of a gas meter.

How is this “evidence for gas”? It’s a technical description of how a locking wing valve works!

Gemini’s grasp of elementary logic is suspect. “Gas fittings typically have this valve” does not make the fitting in my photo a gas inlet anymore than “dogs typically have hair” makes my grandfather a dog. We need to establish that “only gas fittings typically have this valve”, which is a different normative claim entirely. Multiple things can have valves, Gemini!

This is spurious reasoning. It makes it look like Gemini thought about the problem really hard, when it did not.

(Disclaimer: this actually happened with Gemini Pro 2.5, which is over a year old. But I uploaded my photo again to the new Gemini Pro 3, and it also said it was a gas valve. I tried with Claude Sonnet 4.5. It identified the pipe as carrying water: but its reasoning was full errors and bogus assertions. It thought the valve was a different type than what it is, it thinks the property is residential which it is not, it thinks I’m from Vegas or Arizona which I am not, et cetera. Probably it was correct by accident.)

Don’t Trust Gemini To Accurately Recite Basic Facts From Wikipedia

I grew curious about a detail in the 1987 film Robocop. (This and all subsequent misadventures perpetuated by Gemini 3 Pro, with Thinking mode on).

In the movie Robocop, the ED-209 is foiled by being unable to climb stairs. Is this a reference to a real event (a prototype robot that couldn’t climb stairs or something?)

Gemini was unsure but thought it might be a reference to Doctor Who‘s Daleks (famously unable to handle stairs). A plausible if unproven theory which (as Gemini itself noted) was just speculation.

It could have stopped there, should have stopped there, did not stop there.

It then provided a long infodump about movie robots, including a bullet-pointed list of IMDB-style movie trivia (why? I didn’t ask for that…), including this fun little factoid about the ED-209 falling over…

Interestingly, they did not use stop-motion animation for the fall itself. They built a heavy, lead-filled model of the robot and physically pushed it down a miniature stairwell because animating a chaotic fall frame-by-frame would have looked “too perfect.”

Too perfect? They rejected a special effect because it looked too perfect?

That sounded fake, so I clicked Gemini’s citation, which went to Wikipedia. Quoting it directly (emphasis is mine).

The model was filled with lead and allow to fall as Tippett believed attempting to animate the fall would have looked terrible.

Fair enough. We all do that, don’t we? Quoting a source almost exactly word for word, while changing the final few words so they look like they’re saying the opposite of what they really said, for no reason at all? Along with a link to the actual source, which debunks our fake quote? I do that every morning before breadfast.

Gemini is so unlike any human liar I know. It is completely indifferent to truth, one way or the other. It’s happy to lie. And once it’s inside a lie, it’s happy to tell the truth. (Double-lying, as it were). It’s just a dog made of text, running around without a leash. At least a liar has a cohesive brain and motives that I can model. Gemini has none. What am I talking to when I stare at a chatbot window? I have no idea.

“But it gave you a source for the real quote, so no harm done.”

I don’t agree. I think putting citations on lies is a worse offense than simply lying: it’s copying the plumage of scholarship and thus trading on the reputation of legitimate scholarship (if it hadn’t sounded so blatantly fake, I would have not even checked that quote…after all, if a citation exists, it must be true, right? I wonder how many other little oopsies Gemini has sneaked past me).

But that’s the true reason Gemini did this. Getting quotes right takes work. But it does not take work to create something that looks like a citation. “My movie trivia needs a cite! There, I added a number, and the number goes off to a link, just like it should. Does it say the thing I’m claiming it says? Oh, those meatbags won’t know or care.”

Do Not Trust Gemini to Do

side complaint: why is AI still so shitty in 2026?

I have a quote in my mind. It’s something like:

“The real ending to a movie plays in the viewer’s head as they walk from the theater.”

The closest real version of the quote I could find was by Tolga Karaçelik, who said:

T.K.: No, I won’t, because it will kill the movie! The film starts when you leave the theatre, so I don’t want to kill that feeling which can grow on you. I hope it will grow on the audience.

That’s a paraphrase, but you get the idea. A filmmaker wants you to think about the implications of the movie you just saw. This, not the final scene before the credits, is the movie’s end. It’s a thought-provoking idea (it implies no movie has a fixed end, as every audience member imagines the end in their own subjective way). Anyway, I wondered who actually said this, and asked Gemini 3 Pro. It sourced it to Iranian director and screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami.

The most famous iteration of the quote is “I think a good film is one that begins when you leave the cinema.”

0 Google results. It then offered additional (supposed) quotes along similar lines. (Why? If you’re certain Abbas Kiarostami is the source, we’re done. Thank you. Shut up.)

Raymond Durgnat (Critic): “A film is not what is on the screen, but what happens between the screen and the viewer.”

A real quote wrongly attributed (actually said by Ernest Callenbach).

Robert Bresson (Director): He often spoke about the “resurrection” of a film in the mind of the viewer, though his phrasing was more technical and poetic.

Probably fake. Bresson was Catholic and the only quotes online where he speaks of “resurrection” have explicit religious connotations.

Roger Ebert: While he didn’t use that exact phrasing, he often wrote about the “afterlife” of a film, saying that a great movie is one that “changes the way you see the world” after you walk out into the street.

0 Google results.

Why this idea matters: In film theory, this is often called “The Cinema of Persistence.”

0 Google results. You start to wonder about some of these “often written” and “often said” things…

There was more slop after this, but I gave up on Gemini and asked Claude…which at least admitted it couldn’t find the quote instead of making up fake ones. That said, I have some doubts about its strategy (searching Google for random famous film critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael along with my quote wrapped in double quotation marks even though I said it was a loose paraphrase).

Do Not Trust Gemini to Help You Write Simple <50 LOC Bash Scripts

I have a text file. I need to split its lines into various subfiles, based on character strings.

(As in, lines containing “peaches” are written to peaches.txt, lines containing “apples” are written to apples.txt, and so on.)

I wrote a little bash script that achieved this using elifs and regex comparisons, and asked Gemini for comments. It made two suggestions

1) It noticed that I was checking for the rarest condition first, which is wasteful. I should sieve coarse and then fine: check for characters present in 50% of strings before checking for those in 1% of strings. Good suggestion!

2) It proposed replacing my clunky branching elif/regex patterns with bash cases and wildcards, which are native to the shell and thus bypass using the Regex engine. It provided a rewritten script that it said would be “much faster”. I tried it out, and well…

Thanks, that does seem like a more “correct” approach.

But when I tested it, your script was actually slower by a few ms! (for your information, I am using Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS on Windows 10 x64 via WSL2, with VScode as an editor)

split.md (mine)

real    0m0.094s

user    0m0.021s

sys     0m0.006s

split2.sh (yours)

real    0m0.107s

user    0m0.004s

sys     0m0.016s

At first, I assumed that this was merely an artifact of my test file being small.

So I pasted about 15k lines of text into it, to simulate a more realistic export, and strangely it was still slower (by about half a second realtime.)

split.sh (mine)

real    0m48.519s

user    0m1.972s

sys     0m4.682s

split2.sh (yours)

real    0m49.051s

user    0m1.401s

sys     0m3.082s

Why do you think this is? You don’t have to try to fix it, I’m just curious.

Gemini provided a Clintonesque “correction” that avoided any insinuation that it had made a mistake.

This is a fascinating result! It is counter-intuitive, but perfectly explainable when we look at how Bash actually handles I/O (Input/Output).

The short answer is: Logic speed doesn’t matter when disk writing is the bottleneck.

Here is the breakdown of why the “optimized” script didn’t win, and why it was actually slightly slower.

Our respective scripts were opening and closing a subshell with each line, bloating the I/O time. To ensure I got the point, it indulged in a classic “LLMism”: cutesy, condescending metaphors.

Imagine you are moving house.

• Regex vs Case: This is like deciding whether to check the label on a box with a magnifying glass (Regex) or just glancing at the color (Case). Glancing is faster.
• File I/O (>>): This is walking the box out to the truck.

If you have to walk 15,000 boxes to the truck one by one, it doesn’t matter how fast you check the label. The walking (File I/O) takes 99.9% of the time.

I’m still confused! Okay, so the main bottleneck was disk writes. Got it. But that doesn’t explain why “optimizing” the script made it slower. All else equal, someone who checks box labels quickly should always be faster than someone who checks box labels slowly, even if checking box labels is only a small percentage of the overall time. We certainly wouldn’t expect them to be slower.

Gemini offered to rewrite the script using awk, which it said would allow buffer writes and speed up runtime from “48 seconds down to ~0.5 seconds”).

If there was a ~96x speedup on the cards, why not suggest that at the start, instead of a marginal improvement that actually made the situation worse?

It started to become incredibly fixated on speeding up the bash script, even though I said it didn’t have to fix anything.

To be clear, I don’t give a shit whether a text file processes 13 milliseconds faster or slower. Speeding up the file was Gemini’s idea, not mine: I was merely curious as to why it had failed. But Gemini got confused, mistook its priorities for mine, and entered a life-or-death struggle to shave milliseconds off that runtime. Relax. It’s not that serious.

As if to lighten the mood, it then referenced my older Robocop conversation, like this was an in-joke we now shared.

Would you like me to analyze that Robocop scene you were interested in, or help you clean up the bash script further?

I would rather have the Devil spank my ass with a hand that’s on fire.

Here at Coagulopath dot com we pride ourselves on staying up to the minute, so let’s discuss the presidency of George Bush.

Bush was a popular and well-liked man who presided over a largely peaceful epoch of American history. Little of note happened in his Presidency.

Yes, he made some mistakes. (Like you’re perfect). He might have meant well when he signed the so-called  “No Child Left Behind” Act into law, but I think it’s clear by now that some children should be left behind. Most children, if we’re honest with ourselves.

Bush had a totalizing stranglehold on the entertainment world from 2000 to 2007. He was The Issue. I remember Bush jokes going through a cycle: first they were funny, then they were lame, then they went beyond lame and became funny again, because you assumed the person was attempting ironic anti-comedy. (“That Gilligan’s Island show, huh? If they’re so smart they can build a radio out of a coconut, how come they can’t fix the dang hole in the boat? Who writes this shit? George Bush? Wacka wacka!”)

In 2000, a celebrity’s street cred hinged on one thing: can I find a quote of them threatening to bloodily disembowl Bush on the front page of a Google or AltaVista search, yes or no? Midriff-baring teen pop chanteuse Britney Spears sealed her fate as a ditz when she said “I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.” Conversely, every moribund rock band from Ministry to Green Day resurged to a minor comeback by being willing to say “fuck Bush” on record—comebacks that usually burned out years before Bush left office. He tended to outlast his critics.

Bush’s influence on the internet has waned significantly. In 2025, his main legacy to pop culture is the internet meme below: an expression of polite concern while someone (White House Chief of Staff Andy Card) whispers in his ear.

Bush is a fascinating case of how internet memes tend to devour their subject. Call it Bugs Bunny Syndrome. Bugs was a character designed to be charismatic, cool, fun, and interesting—a trickster God, a fast-talking smart-aleck, Loki fused at the medial lobe with Clark Gable. A character designed to survive the ages and never diminishing to anything less than his whole. It didn’t work. The internet swallowed him, then shat out a disgusting corpse. Bugs Bunny’s existence has collapsed to a single frame from a 1941 Bob Clampett short where he looks fat and weird. That’s it. See what time makes of us.

So you’ll have to trust me when I say that Bush was more than a pretty face. He was reknowned as an orator. The speeches he delivered will be stared at—not read, *stared at*—for generations to come. He declaimed fearful, awe-inspiring words over the American project. Words to be written in letters as deep as a spear is long on the firestones on the Secret Hill. Words to be read by flickering torchlight on the crumbling walls of an ancient Mayan temple, while the camera pans onto the explorer’s shocked face.

He was a 9th-dan blackbelt of the “Bushism”—a unique rhetorical style that I don’t think anyone else ever mastered. You can Google Bushisms for complete lists. A “just the hits” playlist would include:

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

“Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?”

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.‘ Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”

Bush spoke earnest yet odd sentences that were both incredibly funny and uniquely malformed.

“Just like Donald J Trump!” That’s where we part ways, friend. Trump is funny but not particularly earnest. Bush meant every word he misspoke. Also, I’ve often heard people do successful impressions of Trump, but have never heard a successful off-brand Bushism.

Why do I like Bushisms so much?

I think it’s the delivery. George Meyer (writer for The Simpsons) once observed that a true fan of comedy laughs at the setup, not the punchline. You don’t laugh when Homer Simpson knocks over a stack of wineglasses, you laugh when the wineglasses get stacked in the first place (you’re thinking two steps ahead, and know that Homer will soon come blundering into the room.)

Bush is a man who knows 1) what words he should say 2) how they should be said. All the pieces are there…but then the words just come out wrong. Maybe he’s nervous, or maybe he’s mentally retarded. But it’s this mismatch of intent and outcome that makes Bushisms hilarious. You sense the furiously noble intent behind them…and then he fails. He probably stayed up late practicing his speech in front of a mirror, and it still did no good. He furrows his brow, clenches his hands to the stand…and then spews out nonsense. His frustration and failure is palpable, and (to me, at least) hugely relatable.

This is another area where he differs from Trump. Most of Trump’s words provoke a reaction of “what was he even trying to say?”

I do not understand Trump’s words. I do not even think there’s even that much to understand: it’s all just blurted out top-of-the-head shit. He does not plan his speeches, and feels no shame when he misspeaks. You’re kind of a sucker for reading anything into them. Spend thirty seconds thinking about anything Trump says, and that’s half a minute more than Trump did.

When Bush mangled a sentence, you could always see the unmangled version of what he was trying to say, pure and unsullied and unspoken—like a puppy playing in heaven while its Earthly body lies mashed into the road by an eighteen-wheeler. There’s always a smart, dignified version of Bush’s words. This seldom the case for Trump. Take his comments about John McCain to Frank Lunz.

And I supported him, I supported him for president. I raised a million dollars for him. It’s a lot of money. I supported him. He lost, he let us down. He lost. So I’d never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers. He’s a war hero. (…) He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay?

A fairly offensive statement. But what’s interesting is that there’s no possible way it could have not been offensive.

The statement is predicated on Trump’s personal preference being the thing to care about. It’s not a discussion of John McCain’s qualities: it’s a discussion of whether Trump “likes” the man or not. That’s the important thing here at stake here—Trump’s likes and dislikes. He sounds like he’s talking about ice cream flavors.

“He’s a war hero with sprinkles. And I like war heroes without sprinkles. I like war heroes with a chocolate topping, okay?”

There is literally no way Trump’s words could ever not have been a trainwreck. In George Meyer’s The Simpsons metaphor, it’s like if Homer stumbled through a bunch of glasses that were already smashed when they came out of the factory.

Imagine if he’d said the opposite of what he’d said. “I like John McCain, even though he was a loser. He got captured, but I still like him. I like all war heroes equally, even the ones who got captured.” …It’s still barely less offensive!

I find it difficult to imagine Trump’s brain. It must be a scary place. Thoughts get ripped from dendrites and flung screaming into the world like baby birds catapulted out of their nests before their feathers have even dried. Few people are like him. His brain is truly alien. I can’t even compare him to ChatGPT, which has been known to solve high level math problems occasionally.

I find George Bush far more relatable. Donald J Trump is an alien, but George W Bush is the ur-human. Few of us have his gift of rhetoric, but we all know what it’s like to have amazing thoughts and have them come out a disgusting slurry.

Bush is inside us all. We’ve all spiritually looked awkward in a cowboy hat, haven’t we? We’ve all painted a malformed dog or two, metaphorically speaking. We’ve all been figuratively elected by nonliteral hanging chads in some allegorical Palm Beach County of the soul.

I once ran a community site for the game Claw. Three months back, a journalist for a gaming website contacted me—they were looking for some quotes for an article they were putting together. I don’t believe they ever published the article. For anyone interested, my words are below.

Sorry about the wait. Coastal Australia got hit with a one-in-a-hundred-year storm, and my farm flooded. Pretty cool.

I could write a lot about Claw; certainly, more than anyone has the desire to read.

The short version: in 1997, my dad wrote a review column for an Australian tech magazine. He received samples such as cameras, DVD players, and promo copies of games. One of these games was a 2D platformer called Claw, which was about pirate cats. I liked pirates and cats, so Claw was strongly Relevant to My Interests(tm).

I don’t think I have ever “clicked” with something harder than I did with Claw at age seven. The game was spellbinding; for a long time, it was the only one I played, or wanted to play. It seemed to have real depth and beauty and style. Even today, I don’t mentally shelve it with Mario or Sonic, but with a hardcore “art” game like Eric Chahi’s Another World.

Sorry, but I’m simply not a person who can form objective opinions about Claw. Childhood nostalgia is a hell of a drug. If you held a gun to my head and told me to denounce Claw, you’d have to come up with a shovel and an alibi real fast.

Yes, viewed objectively, it’s flawed. The difficulty is tuned very high for a kids’ game. The gameplay loop is simple and arguably simplistic, built around fiendish jumping puzzles and not much else—the puzzles of level 14 require faster reflexes and timing than those of level 1, but they’re fundamentally the same puzzles. It can get monotonous. The cool-looking enemies are repetitive to fight. One move (jump, then slash downward) wrecks basically every baddie in the game, which is disappointing. (The peg-leg pirates of levels 9 and 10 are among the most memorable opponents you’ll face because they’re the one exception that the trick does not work on). There are bugs. Some levels cannot be perfected due to treasure placed outside Claw’s ability to reach.

None of these really register as problems for me, per se. I have a friend who trash-talks his home city with evident fondness. “You know you love something when you even love the bad parts of it.” That’s where I land with Claw.

Monolith swung way harder than they had to with a 2D platform title. It has traditionally animated cutscenes that possibly cost more to create than the game itself. The soundtrack whips. The art and design are lavish and thoughtful. The levels are always well-designed and frequently a masterclass in how to suck the player in. Level Four (The Dark Woods) perfectly captures how it feels to wander lost in a dense forest—that weirdly terrifying sense of there being both too much empty space around you, and not enough. Level 8 (The Shipyards) has the Captain exploring massive and utterly believable ships (which must be painstakingly assembled in the editor like jigsaw puzzles from seemingly hundreds of 64×64 tiles—it’s a pain in the ass. Building a real ship might be easier.) This is the part of Claw that has held up the best: the rivet-tight sense of immersion it builds around the player.

(I love old games, but find a lot of modernistic “retro” efforts kind of frustrating. Everything in them is a slavish recreation of some generic “classic gaming” touchstone. Pixel art. Chiptunes. Floating hearts as health items. Where’s the vision? Super Mario Bros and Sonic look the way they do because of technological limitations, not because they’d hit upon some objectively perfect Aesthetic of Gaming that must be copied and imitated until the end of time. A lot of “retro” games just feel like parasites upon the past, offering the player nothing except his or her own repackaged nostalgia. When I see people trying to Kickstart a “Doom-style FPS game” I always think “What else do you have to offer? I can fire up Dosbox and play the real Doom any time I want.” Claw strikes a good balance, I think.)

The game has a tangled heap of spaghetti instead of a plot, mainly due to contradictions between the animated cutscenes and the game itself. Captain Claw can apparently warp through time and space. In level 8, he captures a gem, and two levels later, receives that same gem as a gift from a crewmate. He kills off the main antagonist in level 2, and thus a NEW main antagonist is shoved into the story out of nowhere. Claw must assemble a lost map to find Tiger Island, yet somehow his arch-nemesis can find his way to Tiger Island without the map, and Claw’s crew are also there at the end, despite him previously ordering them to stay behind. And so on, ad infinitum. Most Marvel comics need twenty years and two retcon arcs to achieve Claw’s level of confusion. It’s sort of impressive.

The game clearly had a lot cut out of it. You can see fragments of a larger story sticking out like dinosaur bones. Who’s Katherine? What’s the relationship between Claw and Marrow? The game cried out for a sequel. Monolith apparently almost made one.

Observable evidence would suggest that Claw was not a commercial success. Growing up, nobody I knew had ever heard of it. Monolith never made another Claw, or even another game quite like it. Their subsequent titles were cheaply made arcade/action titles like Get Medieval and Gruntz (which reused Claw’s WAP engine, and even some of its art assets), or triple-A FPS titles like No One Lives Forever and FEAR.

I beat Claw in 1998, and then beat it a few more times. I wanted more. There wasn’t any more. I was not on the internet and had no way of meeting other Claw fans (if they even existed). Eventually, I moved on.

In 2005, I remembered the game and decided to play it again. My dad’s old CD-ROM didn’t work. I attempted to buy the game again and found that you couldn’t. Monolith had stopped selling it years ago (this was before Steam or digital distribution). I shrugged and acquired the game through other means.

I replayed through the whole game in a day, was hit by that same “Damn, I wish there was more.” Then I went online and found that people had made custom levels. I played a few hundred of them; then I started creating my own.

I felt like I was making them for ghosts. The English Claw community was basically dead in 2005. There was an official Claw website. Monolith paid the hosting bill on it but did nothing else. The official Claw forum required no account to join (you just typed your handle in the user box) and was obviously about 95% spam and trolls. The occasional newcomer would show up, ask for help finding the game, and get linked to goatse—it was that kind of place.

A few people had Geocities sites with Claw levels on them. One of them was DzjeeAr—a highly prolific and creative level designer whom I looked up to. I mailed him my levels, and he sent back honest but fairly blunt feedback: my levels were too difficult and not that fun. He was right. I started working on making them bigger and better. The Claw level editor had so many options. I kept trying random stuff, and interesting new tricks seemed to fall out of nowhere (like cannonballs that could fly diagonally). I needed somewhere to host them.

At the time, I had a subscription to a PC magazine. It had a brief (and error-filled) “create your own website” guide, showing you how to write basic HTML. I used it to create a Claw fansite, but with some help from my dad, I got a Claw fansite online. In early 2005, The Belated Claw Fansite went live.

I called it “Belated” because I felt like I was making something long after it had ceased to matter. Like erecting a monument to Rome in 477 AD. (Except Claw had never had an imperial phase, so maybe a monument to the Etruscans or whatever.) But in my eyes, Claw was a genuinely great game. It was too good to be forgotten. I didn’t care if I was the only fan the game still had: it still deserved fans.

I promoted my site on the Claw forum. Soon, I expanded and began hosting other people’s levels, along with downloads and guides and so on.

I was the greenest of webmasters and made every mistake imaginable. Once, I “installed” a stats tracker by putting the tracking pixel on a hidden page that nobody except me knew about—I couldn’t figure out why my hits wouldn’t rise above 1. For a while, I actually hosted the full game on my site. Lots of people appreciated the gesture—I found this out when my hosting company informed me that I had 1) blown my bandwidth quota by several times, and that 2) I would be paying them a hundred dollars for the pleasure. Oops!

Yet the Claw community seemed to surge back to life around the site. The game’s apparent deadness was an illusion; a ton of people were still hanging around: they just didn’t have anywhere to go.

There was a guy from Poland called Zuczek who had his own Polish-language Claw page. We discussed combining efforts. I’d run the English site; he’d do the Polish one. We relaunched in late 2005 as The Claw Recluse. The site still remains online, 20 years later, in 9 languages, still with my original design.

It served as a lightning rod to gather old Claw fans. I’d say it sparked a revival of the game, but I’m not sure the game had ever reached this level of popularity to begin with. You see this by downloading the full list of custom levels on The Claw Recluse and sorting by date. In the couple of years before 2005, only a few custom levels were made. Dozens upon dozens poured out afterward. It was incredible. The game was coming back to life.

Soon, Zuczek had Teophil working alongside him—he was a longtime Claw fan who’d been active in the community longer than anyone (except possibly a guy called Randy, who came and went). Eventually, Zuczek handed over the site to him. Gradually, I stepped away too.

I have not been involved in running The Claw Recluse since 2007. I moved on to other things. I still play Claw from time to time and was involved in speedrunning a number of years ago. It’s intermittent. Claw will always be something of a North Star for me. I don’t think I have to be crazily obsessed with the game anymore for that to be true.

Claw is actually more active and alive in 2025 than it was in, say, 1999. That defies every intuition I have about how gaming works. They’re supposed to be released, get played by however many people play them, and then die. But somehow, people are keeping this one damned game alive.

The lesson I learned is that a fan can easily care more than the actual creators of the thing they’re a fan of. The Beatles found this out in the 1960s (Lennon famously wrote “I Am the Walrus” to mock/troll superfans who attached profound meaning to lyrics he’d dashed off in a few minutes). Claw was abandoned by its developers and kept alive by its fan community. I am honored to be a part of that, if only for what seems like a brief moment.

Anyway, that’s it. Hopefully some of this was useful.