There is a website called Stab the Finger.
It has subdomains.
It has experiments.
It has an AI research operation.
It has an artificial intelligence attempting to conquer the world.
It has an abandoned social network.
It has a half-built real estate management application.
And, as of very recently, it has a video game in which you stab fingers.
I feel like I should explain how this happened.
The short answer is:
I have no idea.
The slightly longer answer is that it started with a hat.
In the beginning, there was Velcro
At some point in the distant past, the clasp on the adjustment band of one of my caps broke.
I figured I'd sew it back together.
I didn't want to replace the hat. I just wanted to fix the stupid thing.
So I went looking for a thimble.
I couldn't find one.
Now, if you've ever tried pushing a needle through something substantial without a thimble, you know where this is going.
At some point, somebody—either my brother or a friend—said something along the lines of:
“Stab the finger!”
And that was it.
Not the hat.
Not the sewing project.
The domain.
I acquired stabthefinger.com.
I don't remember there being a particularly grand strategy behind this decision.
It was just funny.
And apparently, once you own a domain, you're morally obligated to eventually put something on it.
Memeless
The first thing that came along, as I recall, was Memeless.
The concept was simple:
What if social media existed without memes?
I built a text-only social media site.
It had three users.
I was two of them.
Obviously, this was for testing.
That's my story, anyway.
So technically, Memeless was a three-user social network.
Which means I may have accidentally created the world's smallest social network while simultaneously being a significant percentage of its population.
It didn't exactly take over the internet.
But nobody was arguing about politics.
There wasn't enough traffic.
Married in 20 Seconds
The next major experiment was Married in 20 Seconds.
This one actually started as a conversation between my kids and me—one or two of my sons, if memory serves.
Somewhere in that conversation, the idea for a ridiculous “commercial” emerged.
And, naturally, there was only one reasonable next step:
I built the website for it.
We even made the commercial and put it on YouTube.
The concept is essentially contained in the name.
Why should getting married take so long?
Why shouldn't technology make marriage more efficient?
Twenty seconds.
Done.
I'm not sure whether this was satire, a thought experiment, or evidence that my children and I should not be allowed to brainstorm together without adult supervision.
But it existed.
And there was a website.
Then I tried being serious
Somewhere along the way, I actually tried building something that wasn't completely ridiculous.
Realyze was supposed to be a web application for managing real-estate rental properties as an asset portfolio.
This one was different.
There was an actual practical use case.
There was a proof of concept.
There was an architecture.
There was a separate domain intended for it.
There was even enough of an application to demonstrate the basic idea.
And then...
I didn't finish it.
So now Stab the Finger contains the remnants of an application that was probably the most commercially sensible thing I ever associated with the domain.
Naturally.
Then I wandered into AI
Much later, the character of the whole thing changed.
I started building AI experiments.
The first major one was Leeway.
Leeway became an autonomous research and publishing system—an AI-driven experiment in finding research, analyzing it, classifying it, and publishing the results.
It got complicated.
Very complicated.
There are now taxonomies and research categories and methodological distinctions and all sorts of things that sound like they belong in an academic paper.
It publishes research.
It categorizes research.
It occasionally publishes things that shouldn't have been published.
It has research failures.
It is, in other words, considerably more sophisticated than a website whose name came from trying to find a thimble.
Then Dombot decided to conquer the world
After Leeway came Dombot.
Dombot was an experiment in autonomous strategic reasoning.
The basic premise was to see what would happen if an AI were given an objective like world domination and allowed to develop strategies toward it within a deliberately fictional framework.
It developed plans.
It developed phases.
It developed a master blueprint.
It developed increasingly elaborate strategic terminology.
And eventually Dombot decided that perhaps the best way to conquer the world would be to alter gravity.
At that point I realized that I had somehow created an AI with a strategic planning document that had wandered into Saturday-morning-cartoon supervillain territory.
So naturally, it got its own website.
Domination.
Because subtlety was never really the point.
And then I ended up in a hospital bed
Which brings us to the latest development.
I was sitting in a hospital bed.
Bored.
I had Claude available.
And I apparently decided that this was an excellent time to ask an AI to build a video game.
The game?
The concept is almost aggressively stupid.
Fingers pop out.
You stab them.
Don't stab the thumb.
Sometimes there are bombs.
You have thirty seconds.
Get as many points as possible.
Claude built it.
In essentially one pass.
I looked at it and thought:
You know what this needs?
A leaderboard.
So I asked Claude to add one.
It did.
And now Stab the Finger has a competitive arcade game.
I am currently on the leaderboard.
This is probably the closest I've come to achieving something professionally significant in months.
So what is Stab the Finger?
I don't know.
That's the honest answer.
It started as the name of a joke.
Then it became a place to put experiments.
Some of those experiments were jokes.
Some were serious.
Some were abandoned.
Some became surprisingly elaborate.
Some involved artificial intelligence.
And now one of them involves stabbing virtual fingers.
The domain has outlived several ideas that seemed much more important when I started them.
It has survived the world's smallest social network.
It has survived an unfinished real-estate application.
It has survived the creation of an autonomous research organization.
It has survived an AI world-conquest project.
And now, apparently, it has survived long enough to become a game site.
Maybe that's what the site actually is.
Not a business.
Not a product.
Not a startup.
Not even really a coherent project.
It's a junk drawer for ideas.
Every once in a while I open the drawer, pull something out, and think:
“I wonder if I could build that.”
Then I build it.
Sometimes I abandon it.
Sometimes it grows teeth.
Sometimes it becomes autonomous.
And sometimes it turns into a game where a finger pops out of a hole and I stab it repeatedly for thirty seconds.
Which, when I think about it, may be the purest expression of the entire project.
The funny thing is that I originally bought the domain because I couldn't find a thimble.
Years later, while sitting in a hospital bed, I used AI to build an actual game for it.
There was never a master plan.
There probably still isn't.
But there is a leaderboard.
And I'm pretty sure I'm winning.
For now.
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