Yichao
@michaelyichao
Narrative director and creative consultant, making secret new things. 👀 Previously Phoenix Labs, Riot Games, Wizards of the Coast, ArenaNet, Imagineering. Founder of Take 5 Improv. Cofounded Jam & Tea Studios. Most often found in Seattle. ✨
From the makers of Squid Game The Game comes“We built the “don’t build the torment nexus” immersive live experience”
It's been a while since I've gotten to bring this lil' stamp out of retirement 🫡 Excited to be crafting some new lore again
Thinking of how my chapter in an academic textbook opens with this picture bc no one told me the “fun headshot” they requested would be published without further questions or context at the start of said chapter
I enjoy board games, but they don’t trigger my unrelenting crushing guilt that “I should be writing instead” quite enough Board game designers: hold my beer
"We put an error prone slander machine into our previously ironclad high trust search product and all it cost to do so was all the water and electricity capacity in Wyoming, only to get sued and lose in German courts over it" was, somehow, not on my 2026 bingo card
It’s 2026. You sit down to play a game of Magic the Gathering. Your opponent plays Garfield Sol Ring into Isochron Scepter into Talk to the Paw. The game then ends because @megansmith13.bsky.social ate all your cards.
Sometimes I stop and think about this bunch of bananas abandoned on a sidewalk
Proving yet again that men are just too emotional and fragile to lead companies.
Dead: the Turing Test, where a human determines if conversational output is human or machine Essential: the Cheng Test, where we determine if someone is a real human or a LinkedIn mindrot zombie based on if they react in earnest or in parody to a Ken Cheng post
Very amused that all news coverage of @take5improv.bsky.social is like "THEY WILL HURT YOU AND YOU WILL ENJOY IT"
American workers asking for a crumb of healthcare from their employers be like
Guys I made a BRAND NEW TikTok account for our improv company and what in the nine hells are the IMMEDIATE suggestions for my Discover algorithm??
I know normally my BlueSky is for gamedev memes and reposting cat videos but today I have to share perhaps the coolest development with my improv theatre company to date (and right on my birthday, no less!):
With the increase in day job contracts and theater projects, I took a pause on some of my novel writing. Coming back to it now and actually digging what wrote. Like, hell yeah, this character voice is fun and sharp! Good job past me. Let’s fuckin’ go! Unrelated, sharing this graph for no reason✨