Experiments in play, creativity, and interactive entertainment. Play Like You Mean It.
A contemplative building game. You have a pile of stones. You have a space to fill—a gap in a wall, a cairn to complete, an arch to span. You pick a stone, you place it, you see if it holds. The pile is finite but generous. There's no single solution. There's your solution.
Imagine your own world. Whisper its name. Grow your dream with a friend.
Zen games for people who can't sit still. Instead of guidance or goals, it offers simple, tactile experiences—stacking stones, raking sand, watching smoke drift—that quietly calm the mind through play. No streaks. No guilt. Just attention, trained badly.
Build stronger, learn faster. A focused, educational physics simulator designed for the classic popsicle-stick bridge competition. Prototype, test, and refine your designs digitally before ever touching a real stick or bottle of glue. Also available at popsiclestickbridge.com for computer users — even better for real STEM engineering.
The first perceptual training app that treats your senses like muscles and turns feeling alive into a measurable, gamified, addictive skill.
A nature craft studio for your iOS device. Choose a landscape—forest floor, beach, meadow, or mountaintop. Pick a season. Gather stones, leaves, twigs, shells, and petals from your forage pile. Arrange them into mandalas, cairns, spirals, or whatever emerges. No scores. No streaks. No timers. Just the quiet satisfaction of making something with what the world provides.
Transforms the phone from a consumption portal into a ritual object for collaborative storytelling. Parent and child open the app together. One speaks or types a single sentence. They pass the phone. The other adds the next sentence.
A single-player, phone-first physics game where the only thing that really matters is how frantically you scrub your finger on the screen. The throw is simple. The sweeping is excessive, physical, and slightly embarrassing.
Experience the magic and the misery of Ultramarathon racing in Trail Torment. Take on the legendary 32-mile Pemigewasset Loop in the White Mountains. You've got this!
By Justin Neuman
Jonathan Haidt is right. Phones are rewiring childhood. The data on anxiety, depression, and social comparison is damning. If you're a parent who read The Anxious Generation and felt a low hum of panic, you're not alone. I felt it too.
But here's what Haidt gets wrong: the prescription. Take the phones away, he says. Delay smartphones until high school. It's a nice-sounding argument. It's also a fantasy.
Parents aren't giving up the phones. Not because they're weak or don't care… but because the infrastructure of modern family life runs through these devices. School communication, logistics, connection with faraway grandparents, the audiobook that makes a four-hour drive survivable. You can take the phone out of a kid's hand, but you can't take it out of the ecosystem they live in.
And even if you could, you'd still be solving the wrong problem.
The deeper crisis isn't screen time. It's the collapse of shared imaginative time between parents and children. Families stopped telling stories together, making things together, building worlds together long before the iPhone arrived. Phones didn't create that vacuum. They filled it. The blue glow in a child's face at the dinner table isn't the disease. It's the symptom of a creative absence that was already there.
This is where Haidt's framework stalls. He offers a diagnosis with teeth and a prescription that dissolves on contact with reality. What parents actually need isn't a ban. It's a model. Kids learn what technology is for by watching how the adults around them use it.
The phone can be a slot machine. It can also be a gathering place… where a four-year-old and a grandfather build a story one sentence at a time, where the screen faces up on the table instead of down in a lap, where the thing that usually isolates becomes the thing that connects.
That's why I built PassTheStory, a collaborative storytelling app I built for my own family and friends. It's voice-first, no AI, no ads, no data collection, everything stored on your device. It's free, because storytelling is free. It doesn't replace imagination. It just keeps the thread from unraveling.
Haidt is right that something is broken. But the fix isn't fewer screens. It's better apps, and using them together with our kids.
By Justin Neuman
If you're in the ultra-running or backpacking worlds, you probably know the Pemigewasset Loop. It might be on your bucket list. It might be haunting your nightmares. Either way, you've heard the stories.
The Pemi Loop is 32 miles of the White Mountains at their brutal best. 10,000 feet of elevation gain and loss. The endless exposure of Franconia Ridge. Bondcliff's wild remoteness. Most people do it in two or three days. Some people run it in a day. A few have done it in under 7 hours.
Now you can live the misery… and laugh at it… without leaving the couch.
Trail Torment is a Pemi Loop simulator, built by an actual ultrarunner (me) who knows the loop and loves the sport. In this game you're not doing the running. You're the pacer/planner; the voice in their head. You roll a random starting condition... maybe it's your runner's Best Day, maybe your runner woke up on the Struggle Bus. Pack ruthlessly, because every ounce costs speed and every missing item costs more. Do you bring the chafe cream? The storm shell? Decide now. Then you coach your runner through 32 miles of chaos. Send advice and see if it helps. Finish strong and you earn a virtual belt buckle with your time engraved. Bonk? A Saint Bernard comes to the rescue. The real FKT leaderboard is in there too… see how you fare against the actual fastest known times on the Pemi.
Ultrarunning has exploded. In North America alone, unique finishers grew from about 8,400 in 2000 to nearly 98,000 in 2024. Globally, participation surged 345% in a single decade. Over 600,000 people now complete ultramarathons every year, and that number keeps climbing. The sport has gone from fringe to phenomenon, fueled by social media, by Strava, by books like Born to Run, by podcasts and YouTube and the simple contagious madness of watching someone run 100 miles and thinking I could maybe do that. And you know what? You probably can.
It's an amazing sport. But it's also absurd. And hilarious. And disgusting. It's full of disasters and "type 2 fun"... the kind that's more fun in the stories than in the experience. Blisters. Chafing. Gastric distress. Getting lost. Getting found. Silly earworms and mantras that keep you moving when nothing else will. Ultrarunning strips us down and breaks us open. That's what makes it awesome. It's also what makes it hilarious.
There's no game that captures that. Action games are too fast. RPGs are too serious. Trail Torment lives in the spirit of Oregon Trail, not Sonic the Hedgehog. It's a strategy game about suffering, built on real trail data, real navigation hazards, and real quotes from real ultrarunners that pop up at the worst possible moments.
The game is free. It takes under ten minutes per run. Infinite replayability. If you have a Strava account for any sport, you'll get it. If you're a runner or a backpacker, you'll get it. If you're not laughing, you get your money back (it's free).
Download Trail Torment (Free on iOS)
Plan. Commit. Suffer. Repeat.