Do you remember Flash games? The ones that ran in the browser before Adobe decided to kill everything in 2020? I do. There were sites – Miniclip, Newgrounds – that were a kind of uncurated digital playground, pages with black backgrounds and popups everywhere, where you could spend hours without really understanding what you were doing. You complain about brainrot? Maybe you don't remember the nineties web and that girl with the wart singing the polka... Anyway, it was one of those unremarkable afternoons. I don't remember the exact site – one of those places with incomprehensible URLs like “geocities.com/~someone/games” and graphics that hurt your eyes. I stumbled onto something strange. The Adobe Flash logo hadn't even finished loading, there were no instructions, no “Play” button. Just a grid of black and white cells changing, generation after generation, apparently at random.