A shout-out from Stargate ​

This one is less about infrastructure and more about a show.

Stargate ​

Years ago I went through a long, bad depression. What kept me going was, of all things, a TV series. Stargate SG-1, then Atlantis, then Universe. A team that keeps choosing each other, every week, whatever comes through the gate. I didn’t have that then, and the show gave me the feeling of it. Found family is the phrase people use now. It kept me alive.

It never really left. The only tattoo I have is the Tau’ri symbol, on my arm. When I walked in at my own wedding, the music was the Stargate theme. It’s still my favourite thing ever made for television.

The Amalgaverse ​

Joseph Mallozzi was a writer and executive producer on SG-1, Atlantis and Universe, and later the showrunner of Dark Matter. Since September 2025 he has been running something on X called the Amalgaverse: a shared sandbox of science fiction universes, written as a daily choose-your-own-adventure.

It started with a year of fan votes to build a crew out of Star Trek, Stargate, Farscape, Babylon 5 and Andromeda characters: the ship (Enterprise-D won), the captain (Kirk), the first officer (Carter), and so on down to the shuttle and three wildcards. On 21 September the story itself began. Every day at 12:01 p.m. Eastern there is a new installment that ends in a few options and one word: “Choose!” People vote in the replies, the majority wins, and the next day’s post continues from there. It opens with you finishing lunch and eyeing the last cookie on the counter, just before a flash of light takes you to another universe.

It’s the closest thing to a new Stargate episode I’ve had in years, and the writer reads the replies.

So I built it a site ​

Following the story on X is hard. Every installment quotes the one before, the votes are buried in hundreds of replies, and if you miss a few days there is no good way back in. So I asked Joseph whether anyone had made a website for it. Nobody had, and he said go ahead.

amalgaverse.link went live on 18 October. It has:

• A 30-second cold open, like a 90s ship show, with an original soundtrack: a theme, a bridge ambience loop and console chirps, all synthesized from scratch in Python. No samples, no DAW.
• The missions, one beat per installment: the date, the part, a short summary, the choice and what people voted, links to the post on X and on Joseph’s blog, and a small 3D scene of the moment. The scene never shows an outcome while the vote is still open.
• The crew: all twenty seats, the ship and its craft, and what each of them did in Mission 01.
• How to play, with a practice vote, and Origins: the first poll and the year of brackets, for people who arrive in the middle.

Since then it has had thirteen releases, one for almost every new installment. As with everything I build now, agents wrote the code and I wrote the briefs, the rules and the reviews. A new installment is mostly data: one section, one entry for the 3D scene, and a few lines of text.

The shout-out ​

On 22 October I quoted that day’s installment and posted the link under it. About fifteen minutes later Joseph replied: “This is fantastic!” A few minutes later: “Incredible. I’ll be giving this a shout-out later today.”

That night he did:

Well, this is incredibly cool. @ugorur has created a dedicated - and gorgeously detailed - #Amalgaverse site. Check it out!

Fifty-odd replies came in under it. People liked that the crew bios quote the characters’ latest lines. One person was happy that “everyone who visits gets a real cookie”. One asked for a place to read the whole story in one go, and Joseph answered that the site already “offers easier access to every step of each mission”. Then:

I’m going to be linking the site to the bottom of every new post. Really well done.

He meant it. Every installment since 23 October ends with “check out the glorious Amalgaverse website … by @ugorur”. That’s eight posts so far, one a day.

I have built a lot of things that were useful. This is the first one that made the guy who survived on Stargate very, very happy. Someone from the show that kept me going saw a thing I made for his new story, liked it, and keeps sending people to it every day.

Orka since the last update ​

The rest of these three weeks went where it usually goes. The last Orka post covered one week and four projects. These are the numbers from 12 to 30 October, from the same run files and ledger.

The worker time leaves out 17 runs that were interrupted and only closed days later. One of them claims 305 hours on its own.

286 of those runs didn’t happen on my PC. Two VMs in the homelab now take cards too: one for heavy builds and the full test gate, one for demos and fast server cards. The orchestrator checks each machine’s load before it sends anything, because on 21 October it didn’t. It started four parallel workers on the PC, ran it out of memory, killed the processes that watch the workers, and the overnight queue sat blind with zero merges. That one is in the ledger under its own name.

Counting everything since Orka got its own runner at the end of September, plus the runs before that, it’s close to 4,000 worker runs and over 10,000 commits.

The reviewers changed. In the last post GPT-6 Astra did almost every review. Now Grok 4.7 does the most (305), Astra is close behind (291), and GPT-6.1 Sol is new and doing well. Of 615 first-round reviews, 326 came back REQUEST CHANGES. That’s about six in ten of the ones with a clear verdict, down from roughly nine in ten. Some of that is better cards. Some of it is the reviewer: Astra still asks for changes almost three times out of four, while Grok approves more often than not. I don’t know the split yet, and that’s the next thing to look at.

What they caught is the same kind of thing as before, just more of it:

• An approve/cancel race that carried out a change nobody approved. It reproduced 30 times out of 30.
• Private messages and staff titles reaching customers, and one leak across tenants.
• An SSRF hole in a browser path.
• A failed resume that would have copied over a live database.
• A 512 KB zip that took the server down by running it out of memory.
• An issued invoice that could still be rewritten.

Every one passed its author’s tests.

The scorecard over the same period, for the workers with the most recorded runs:

The orchestrator is still cautious. Over 685 cards, the actual smart score beat its prediction by more than ten points 94 times and fell short by that much 15 times.

Orka itself barely changed in this period. The new parts, workers on remote machines and a scenario runner, live inside one project for now. They go into the public repo once they’ve stopped surprising me.

One correction to the last post: it was counted before Sunday was over. The full week 41 was 606 runs and 918 commits, not 589 and 882.

One more thing ​

Last year Amazon ordered a new Stargate series from Martin Gero, with Joseph and Brad Wright on board as producers. In June it dropped the show before it was made. Fans have been asking ever since for the decision to be reversed, or for the rights to go somewhere that will make it.

I’m one of them. A fan site and a daily story on X are good, but they’re not a gate. Let Gero build it.

#SaveStargate