Product management through the lens of pop punk, anime and game dev. Building cooler products with more energy and less corporate nonsense.
Break the rules — Build cooler products — Have fun doing it
In a 2005 Japanese drama, a homeroom teacher built a point system that turned twenty-four kids into informants. GE and Microsoft ran the adult version. Both failed for the same reason.
Read moreWhat's moving in anime, metal, J-pop and punk right now. One sharp take. No recap.
BABYMETAL opens for My Chemical Romance on August 30, then heads out on their own 20-date headline run three days later. The opening slot was the funnel, not the ceiling.
Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields puts Bikini Kill, Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski and the Breeders on one all-female festival bill. The point is infrastructure, not branding.
XG performs at Capital's Summertime Ball tomorrow — the first Japanese act to play Wembley Stadium. Not an anime show. Not a J-pop festival. The mainstream UK pop lineup.
LocalThunk built a math toy in poker clothes. Then the world kept mistaking the costume for the product.
Luna Haruna came from Gothic Lolita fashion, had one prior single and got the closing theme for SAO's messier second half. LiSA had the Aincrad OP. That turned out to matter.
Rakuro Hizakura spent years hunting kusoge, broken games nobody else wanted to touch. When he entered Shangri-La Frontier, 30 million players were already there. None of them had found what he found.
Eric Barone spent four and a half years building Stardew Valley alone. Publishers offered teams. Fans offered help. Every offer assumed the problem was speed.
Build a Rocket Boy raised £233M with Rockstar's DNA. MindsEye launched in June 2025 with a Metacritic score of 37. The story isn't about money or talent.
When a massive manga hit pause twice in one year for creator health, no one panicked. That's the shift.
Tools and plugins built for people who think in systems and feel in riffs.
Bring the blog's pop-punk/anime/product chaos into your editor.
High-energy themes for Zed, built with the same visual language as the blog.