The Genesis of TerraMorphz | iRyanBell<br>SHARECOPIED TO CLIPBOARD

The Genesis of TerraMorphz<br>They came to remind us.<br>May 19, 2026<br>Anyone remember the Z64? Mr. Backup himself?

I have never, in my entire life, met another person who had one of these as a kid. I was THAT kid. The kid who had to have one. Same kid with the handheld Radio Shack scanner that could auto-scan into cordless and cellular bands in the 800 and 900 MHz range. Bought it at Radio Shack with that sweet garage-sale cash. A few months later, they pulled it off the shelf.

The Z64 sat at a strange three-way intersection: weird Zip-disk-era storage, obscure homebrew console gaming, and import ROMs you couldn't get any way other than through the usual back channels.

Back in the day, I was the kid who knew the ritual. A spring in the PlayStation. Demo discs. Swaps timed to the intro music. This was pre-software updates over the wire, early hardware shipped with bugs you could touch. If you f*cked it up, you could scratch a disc or wreck the motor. If you got it right, game on.

But cartridges? Cartridges needed a bit more ingenuity.

This is where I met Pokémon. One random afternoon, hanging out with my best friend, we were browsing Dextrose and came across a Game Boy emulator we could run on the Z64 - to play the Japanese Pokémon Red on the N64. Fuckyea.

It was the most fun I'd had with the entire platform. Better than GoldenEye. Better than any release title. The graphics were terrible, the music was bad, I don't think we could read a single word, and we had no way to translate any of it. But the game itself was totally novel. It was so good it messed up my sleep.

My friend Logan ended up with a handful of choice holographic Pokémon cards. I think he still has them. His mom would later catch Beanie Baby Mania. There's something deeply exciting in our DNA, for reasons I don't totally understand, about finding something really rare and showing it to someone else. Hell, on a slow afternoon, we'd dump a bag of Pogs on the rug just to rummage through the set and rediscover the obvious top slammers.

A few years later, I rediscovered text-based adventure games. Even then it felt like a throwback, back to the DOS games of my early childhood. Now the whole genre is a throwback of a throwback.

That's where I met Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The vibes were immaculate. Weird. Britishly odd. Kind of hostile. Completely its own thing. I found it on some random website. The internet was so weird then, My earliest memories of downloading random shit from the internet were these UFO pics off CompuServe forums. Blurry as hell. Nothing earth-shattering. "Face on Mars" level oddities. Grainy JPEGs that took four minutes to load one scanline at a time, and you'd watch it render top to bottom hoping the bottom half was the good part. Most of the time it wasn't. But every once in a while something would resolve on screen that made the hair on your arms stand up. It was my bigfoot hunting as a suburban 90s kid with a 56k setup.

I always wanted to go back and make something young Ryan would have thought was badass. Power Glove level bad. The kind of thing that felt rare before you even understood why.

They say AI makes this stuff faster.

I started the first card two years ago.

Made thousands of images, then cut them down to a seed set that actually felt like it belonged to the same universe. And god, the misses. For every keeper there were fifty that came back with six fingers, melted teeth, a hoodie fused to a neck that didn't exist.

You learn the model's tics like you're learning a person's tells. The negative prompts got longer than the actual prompts. No extra limbs. No warped hands. No melted faces. No text. No this. No that. No whatever weird thing it did last time that I now have to specifically forbid forever.

By the time I had something, a new model dropped, so I used it to upscale everything. Then another model dropped, and I used that one to get past the clay-rubber look - the original Clayliens slowly becoming TerraMorphz. And working on Clayliens I was back to losing sleep. Pokemon Red on the N64 levels of "what time is it, why is it light outside."

I wrote code to synthesize the traits, prompts assembled like generative art, with rarity weights deciding how often a card got "cotton" instead of "hoodie," or "mohawk" instead of "glass dome." Then new LLMs came out, and we'd riff on ideas for weeks.

Month after month. Year after year. Model after model.

Curating jokes. Sketching. Rewriting. Throwing out whole batches. Starting over.

Then another model, and I rebuilt the whole thing around selfie-style compositions. One by one. Every single card. Some came back overcooked and crispy from going through too many passes, that fried over-processed look. Those had to be fully recreated. Some came back with the subject fully outside the frame. Some came back fully inside the frame. I learned to do it in two passes: one prompt to put the alien...