List of Molecular Reality Corporation puns
I'm calling it that, because I'm a verbal anarchist.
Kent Kemmish, naming a method from a 2026 paper "Mambapore"
This is a list of puns and other wordplay in the names that Molecular Reality Corporation and its founder, Kent Kemmish, have given to the company, its instruments, games, personas and pages. The company began as one: its first name, demonpore, joins Maxwell's demon to the pore. The founder's online name, Kemmishtree, is another. Most of the rest play on arcade games of the years 1978 to 1983, on the closeness of "hole" to "whole" and "holy", or on the names of famous people.
The founder has had second thoughts about at least one. He calls the company's first game "the unfortunately named 'Spyke Hunter'", and adds: "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?"[1] For the company's technical vocabulary, see Glossary of Molecular Reality jargon.
List
| Name | Recalls | First record | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| demonpore | Maxwell's demon; pore | 2014 | A colleague who heard the founder explain his sliding pores was reminded of "those little cartoons" of the demon.[2] The domain demonpore.com was registered on December 24, 2014. |
| Teamonpore | Team; demonpore | 2018 | The company's staff of the time, "most of teamonpore", watched the first blood go through a pore.[3] |
| Spyke Hunter | Spike; Spy Hunter (1983) | 2020 | The first game the company coded, played with the spikes that knots in a nylon string made in the current.[1] |
| demonpore 64 | demonpore; the "64" of the Commodore 64 and Nintendo 64 | 2021 | The company does not explain the number. In 2026 the founder gave it a meaning: a future version "will be at least a 64-channel device."[4] |
| demonpore 2600 | demonpore; the Atari 2600 | Undated | The console's name in a version of the 2021 advertisement kept in the company's files.[5] |
| 2021: A SARS Odyssey | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) | 2021 | Renamed because "we didn't ship in 2021 and had to change the name!"[6] |
| SARS Invaders | Space Invaders (1978) | 2026 | The founder calls it "a pun on Space Invaders".[5] |
| Poop of the Gods | Chariots of the Gods? (1968) | 2021 | The title has the shape of Erich von Däniken's book; no company source makes the comparison. |
| MoliGotchi | Tamagotchi (1996) | Undated | A game in later versions of the advertisement, in which players keep "a complex and unique microbial civilization within a teardrop-sized vessel".[5] |
| Genomic Ranger | Range; ranger | 2022 | Among the game's samples is "transcriptome from the 'genomic range'".[7] |
| Experigaming | Experiment; gaming | 2022 | First recorded in the company's December 2022 technical overview.[8] |
| Clauderific | Claude, an AI model; terrific | 2024 | A browser tool for writing code with an AI model, in which phrases drift across the screen.[5] |
| Molecular TV (MTV) | MTV, Music Television | 2025 | The company's homepage in the first half of 2025.[5] |
| Texteract | Text; tesseract | 2025 | Animated tesseracts made from texts, each captioned "texteract from:" and its source.[5] |
| Sciencer | Science, as a verb | 2025 | A character class. The essay that introduces it says the name "anthimeriates 'science' full circle, from noun to verb and back to noun."[9] |
| Ludician | Latin ludus, "game"; magician, musician | 2025 | The character class whose members "design games".[9] |
| The Hole Enchilada | "The whole enchilada" | 2025 | A section of the same essay, on the history of the Coulter counter, which arrives at "That's the whole enchilada! Or, rather..."[9] |
| Dungeons & Diligence | Dungeons & Dragons | 2025 | A text dungeon about the company's science, also called The Disclosure Crawl.[10] |
| "Gotta Sense 'Em All!" | "Gotta Catch 'Em All!", the slogan of Pokémon | 2025 | A slogan of the same dungeon, in which identified signals become "USPE Pokémon".[10] |
| Unidentified Signal Producing Event (USPE) | Unidentified flying object | 2025 | A signal not yet matched to any particle. No company source makes the comparison. |
| AEST | Accelerationism | 2026 | "Accelerationist-Equivalent-Subjective-Time": the company's first slide deck dates from "several thousand years ago in AEST", "i.e., around 2015".[2] The same letters stand for Australian Eastern Standard Time. |
| Corpspeople | Corps; people | 2026 | The form of address of The Quartermaster, the persona who handles hardware for the Molecular Streaming Corps.[11] |
| Mambapore | Mamba, a neural-network architecture; pore | 2026 | The founder's name for a method in a paper whose authors, he wrote, should be blessed "for not neologizing their method".[12] |
| Holey Grail | Holy Grail; hole | 2026 | A solid-state pore that reads DNA with the help of chemical labels, "where the asterisk is 'required labels but it's a damn good start.'"[13] |
| "Bend it like Beckman Coulter" | Bend It Like Beckham (2002) | 2026 | The heading of a post about the Coulter counter, whose makers became part of Beckman Coulter.[14] |
| Moleculart Fleming | Mozart; Alexander Fleming | 2026 | A persona of the company's member software, drawn as a quiz host.[5] |
| Molecular de Unamuno | Miguel de Unamuno | 2026 | A persona that posts in Spanish: "¡Lucha por un mundo libre de oscuridad molecular!"[5] |
| Juxtapore | Juxtapose; pore | 2026 | A pore formed by two edges sliding beside each other. "Juxtapore is our own word, chosen because it says precisely what the thing does."[15] |
| JeoPOREdy! | Jeopardy!; pore | 2026 | The company's quiz, subtitled "Where Pores Meet Their Match".[16] |
| Moleculoids | Asteroids (1979) | 2026 | Introduced as "a molecular take on the classic Asteroids"; the game that shipped is a dungeon crawler.[17] |
| Pac-Protein, Molecular Invaders, Centipeptide, Crispr Command | Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Centipede, Missile Command | 2026 | Games listed as coming soon on the hub of MoleculArcade, whose own name joins molecule and arcade.[5] |
| Iridian | Iris; "iridian", like a rainbow | 2026 | A gallery of animated eyes, "197 Views of the Seeing Eye".[5] |
| Daemon Pore | Demon; daemon, a background program in computing | 2026 | The working name of the MR1 Nanopore Reader until October 18, 2026.[18] Programmers at MIT took the computing word from Maxwell's demon in the 1960s. |
| The Hole World | "The whole world" | 2026 | A page of the company's website, published on September 26, 2026.[19] |
Patterns
Arcade games of the Atari years supply the largest group. Besides Spyke Hunter and the Invaders pair, the coming-soon list of MoleculArcade reaches Pac-Man (1980), Centipede (1981) and Missile Command (1980), and Centipeptide puts a peptide, a short chain of amino acids, in the place of the original's centipede. A remake of the 2021 advertisement shortens the company's game about aging, Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant, to Lab of the Dragon Tyrant.[5]
Holes form the second group. The company's subject is a hole in a membrane, and its pages respell "whole" and "holy" three times: The Hole Enchilada, The Hole World and the Holey Grail. Its field guide takes the same line without a pun: "The hole will wait for you."[15]
The personas form a third, in which a molecule is added to a famous name. Their posts are written for the members of the company's community, and the Spanish of Molecular de Unamuno is aimed at Spanish speakers among them.
Retired puns
The first pun did not last. In 2021 demonpore, inc. became Molecular Reality Corporation, and in 2026 the founder explained why: whenever the company drew attention online, "a bunch of insane people came out of nowhere to make veiled death threats." He concluded: "Sorry, you can't name a biotech startup after Maxwell's Demon in the age of Qanon." In the same post he counted demonpore among "the three coolest/quirkiest names for a genomic tech startup ever", with Two Pore Guys and Roswell Biotechnologies ("I was sooo jealous of this name!"), and added: "Sadly, all three of us wimped out on our cool quirky names." Two Pore Guys had become Ontera.[20]
The demon came back in the name Daemon Pore and left again in October 2026. 2021: A SARS Odyssey was retired by the calendar.
See also
References
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Welcome to my Minds". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "rain of blood". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. February 2026.
- ^ "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ a b c Kemmishtree (2025). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.
- ^ a b "D&D: Disclosure Crawl". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2025.
- ^ Quartermaster (March 29, 2026). "The Line". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Mambapore". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Magic with labels". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Thucydides (March 29, 2026). "Bend it like Beckman Coulter". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
- ^ "JeoPOREdy! Where Pores Meet Their Match". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
- ^ Pixel Marchetti (July 14, 2026). "Moleculoids Review: An Asteroids Game That Turned Into a Dungeon". Ludicious.
- ^ Ferris Calloway (October 23, 2026). "There Are Two MR1s and That Is Fine". Debye Length.
- ^ "The Hole World". Molecular Reality Corporation. September 26, 2026.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Flossing with DNA". EQBio-OS.