Crate Factories, Boardroom Connections and 80,000 Comic Covers

Published: 2026-09-28

It's been a busy couple of weeks since my last update. Big Whale Hunting got its first blog post, Galazon now has crate factories, Diende's Android app can sync your lists, and an old side project, Issue Infinity, is back online on a completely new setup. Here's the roundup.

Big Whale Hunting: who's connected, and who owns what

Big Whale Hunting, my project for exploring the people and companies behind the S&P 500, got most of my attention this time. The company graph now colours each company by sector and groups sectors together, so you can see at a glance where the clusters are. Clicking a company brings up a small card with its market cap and the year it was founded.

There's also a new directors table. You can see everyone who sits on an S&P 500 board, how many boards they're on and what their role is at each company. In the company table, anyone who sits on other boards has those companies listed beside their name, and connected companies now show how many directors they share. I spent some time making sure the director data stays current too. That meant fixing a sneaky bug that sometimes treated an old filing as the newest one, removing people who've left and adding new joiners.

The biggest new feature is about money. Using the SEC's quarterly filings from large investment managers, the company table now shows the top five institutional holders of each company and how much of it they own. Unsurprisingly, Vanguard and BlackRock turn up almost everywhere. The directors table also now flags directors who work for or represent an investment firm, whether that's a hedge fund, private equity, venture capital or an asset manager. I will be doing more work in this area soon.

Finally, I wrote up some of what the data shows in the site's first blog post, on how connected the S&P 500 is. A few highlights: 466 of the 500 companies are part of one connected web of shared directors, and on average any two of them are just under four links apart. Procter & Gamble is the biggest hub, and 189 sitting CEOs are directors at other companies in the index. The site also works properly on phones now.

Galazon builds crate factories

The bigger feature for Galazon that I mentioned last time has landed in the PC version. From Warehouse 3 onwards, part of the warehouse floor is taken over by red, green and blue crate factories and a crate destroyer. You pay to build a crate, watch the factory doors slide shut while it's made, then drag the new crate onto the grid. Crates you don't want go into the destroyer, a furnace with flickering lights that closes over the crate while it burns. What you spend on crate production now shows up as its own line in your quarterly review, because this is a corporate dystopia after all. I also moved the destroyer to a spot where you're less likely to drop crates into it by accident.

It's all in the new v0.0.60A PC build on vfxger.itch.io/galazon, and you can find the full list of changes in the patch notes. It's still free, and I'm still looking for playtesters.

I am gearing up for the Steam release of this game so this might be one of the last free releases of this game.

Diende's Android app can now save your lists

Last time I said the Diende Android app didn't have account sign-in yet. Now it does. You can sign in with the same account you use on the website, and your saved lists sync between your phone and diende.com. Your current list is also kept on your phone between sessions. Along the way I made saving faster and made drag-to-reorder smoother. Before, an automatic save could interrupt you mid-drag. The update is out now on Google Play, and the website now links there too.

Issue Infinity is back

Issue Infinity is a site I've had for years. It shows you a random comic book cover every time you visit, drawn from nearly 80,000 issues across almost 3,000 series. It went offline when I shut down an old server, but I still owned the domain and had all the data and covers, so I decided to bring it back. I rebuilt it from scratch as a simpler serverless site running on Lambda and DynamoDB, which makes it much cheaper to run. Every issue now has its own permanent page and shows a proper preview when you share it on social media.

It still needs plenty of work. In particular, the new design doesn't look as good as the old one yet, but it's a start. Go and see what turns up.

That's it for now. More updates soon. Thanks for reading.