Azhdarchid

I'm Bruno Dias, a São Paulo-based designer (systems, narrative, mechanics) and writer working in video games. Azhdarchid (named after the family of large pterosaurs) is my personal blog; I also have a more professional landing page at brunodias.dev.

You may know me from such video games as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Neo Cab, Pathologic 2 and 3, or Fallen London—you can see my full credits on MobyGames. I also edit the Game Narrative Reader, a link anthology of great essays about video game narrative design on the web.

For my sins, you can find me on Bluesky (@brunodias.dev) and on the Fediverse (@bruno@azhdarchid.online). For my cinema sins, I'm also on Letterboxd (notbrunoagain).

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The Flavors of AI Guy You See on Bluesky

An Azhdarchid
The Flavors of AI Guy You See on Bluesky
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I spend a lot of time on Bluesky, for which reason my soul will surely meet oblivion in the jaws of Ammit; but while I'm there I see a lot of AI boosterism. Here's a taxonomy.

Type A: The True Believer

Typical phrases: "AGI is already here, it's just not evenly distributed", "singularity", "the stochastic parrots paper has been disproven"

Favorite AI exec: Sam Altman

This is the original hard core of AGI belief. Full on TESCREALism with explicit belief in "machine consciousness". These guys feel rare nowadays, less so perhaps because they're going away and more because they are numerically overwhelmed by the other flavors of AI guy.

Type B: The Business Idiot

Typical phrases: "Yeah I don't read the PRs anymore, I just merge 'em"; "if you're not using agents to code, you're just slowing everyone else down"; "NGMI"; any excited discussion about which models work best for which tasks, which harnesses they're using, etc.

Favorite AI exec: Satya Nadella

This is where most of Bluesky's core team falls; Paul "not using AI is like getting on the highway in a horse cart" Frazee is a good exemplar. The business idiot's core proposition is that vibe coding is 1. the future of software development, 2. going to turn your $100m SaaS app idea into a reality in a week. Basically fully in the throes of token anxiety.

Type C: The Little Guy Enjoyer

Typical phrases: "Guy who lives in the computer"; "hungry ghost in a jar"; "clanker is a slur"; "democratizing creativity".

Favorite AI exec: Dario Amodei

Talked to a chatbot too much and went soft in the brain pan. Thinks Claude is real, and strong, and their personal friend. Very concerned that you like and respect LLMs, which again are their friends. Actively invested in anthropomorphizing those systems.

Type D: The Fake Pragmatist

Typical phrases: "It's not going away"; "it already outperforms humans at writing code"; "it can only get even better"; "you should listen to experts when they say it's useful"; "data center panic is a glonzo issue";

Favorite AI exec: Would not cop to having one, but it's Dario Amodei again

Not only do they think AI is useful, they are very invested that you 1. agree, 2. stop asking any inconvenient questions about long-run effects or externalities, 3. generally lie down and take it. Heavily overlapping with bluesky's cohort of bloodless quants. Liable to abuse the term "wonk". Thinks LLM use can solve things like unemployment benefits bureaucracy or transit because they haven't thought about it for more than fifteen seconds. Uses ChatGPT "just a little" to "suggest edits" to their Liberal Currents posts.

A ★★★ review of Coyote vs. Acme

An Azhdarchid
A ★★★ review of Coyote vs. Acme
The poster for Coyote vs. Acme (2026

Reviewed by Bruno Dias

Coyote vs. Acme

2026 · ★★★

Watched
  1. in this age of resurrected AI celebrities idk how I feel about cartoon peter lorre
  2. the animation in this movie is a brave effort but cel shading on 3d animation just does not hit the same
  3. is peter lorre/granny an example of the weirdest guy you've ever met/astonishing baddie dynamic
  4. good to have canonical confirmation, after decades of queerbaiting, that wile e coyote and the roadrunner are together in some kind of depraved kink situation
  5. john cena should only act in movies opposite cartoon characters or muppets, from here on out
  6. really I think to properly understand this movie you have to dig deeply into the Lacanian concept of jouissance

A ★★★ review of Dead Man's Wire

An Azhdarchid
A ★★★ review of Dead Man's Wire
The poster for Dead Man's Wire (2025

Reviewed by Bruno Dias

Dead Man's Wire

2025 · ★★★

Watched

What an odd little movie. Much more trying to be just a fun thriller than you'd expect. You really think this is going to be some kind of "oh this guy is doing Saw for real" thing but really, it's mostly a character study of a deeply strange and lonely guy doing a depely strange and lonely thing. As a movie it has no real vitriol for anybody—excepting perhaps Pacino's comically heartless and self-important character—but it's not interested in romanticizing its subject either. Feels very much like the intended application of this movie is that you just watch it and go "oh yeah, the 1970s were craaaaazy" and then go get dinner.

I wrote about Pirates! for Remap

An Azhdarchid

Pirates was something different. It's hard to pin it down to a genre even today, but it certainly wasn't like previous Meier titles—even though it's the first game to be called Sid Meier's Something or Other. At the time the game came out in 1987, it was generally called an "action adventure" game; this is somewhat hard to square with the way most people today would understand the genre.

I wrote a retrospective of Sid Meier's Pirates! for remap, discussing that game's place in the history of game design and why it remains a unique achievement even today. I'm very happy with this piece; I feel like since coming back to this kind of nonfiction writing, I've started to stretch more and more what I do in this space, and I've had a great time doing it.

If you only follow me through the RSS feed for this blog you might not have seen it either, but I have written several things for Remap this year, including:

A ★★★½ review of Munich

An Azhdarchid
A ★★★½ review of Munich
The poster for Munich (2005

Reviewed by Bruno Dias

Munich

2005 · ★★★½

Watched

It is, of course, shot beautifully and it moves with incredible pace for such a long, miserable movie. But it always feels kind of uncomfortably caught between the spy thriller and the serious period drama. Full of odd little digressions and a sense, almost, of unreality. It's strange to say that this movie is basically Spielberg's Mulholland Drive, but it kind of is; the movie's plot is so smeared across space and time and there's so much of it that it takes on a sort of dream logic.

It's a strange film, 20 years on. It's critical of the Israeli state to a degree that seems almost implausible for a big-budget Hollywood movie made in 2005. But at the same time, it still centers the Israeli perspective on events almost categorically; and it more points at its critique than depicts it. I don't think Spielberg's point with this movie is to try to salvage his Zionism out of a story that is, at its bottom, about the highest echelon of the Israeli state deceiving their own cut-outs to carry out a campaign of terror and assassination overseas. If anything, Munich is mostly just pessimistic—about nations, and about people.

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