# Six blocks, four blocks, two blocks, one

> A memory card's sixteen blocks split six, four, two and one between four people, with three left free — a division nobody sat down to negotiate.

August 20, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-memory-card-with-three-names

Sixteen squares, two rows of eight. Six say `AN`. Four say `DA`. Two say `MR`. One, on its own,
says `AA`. Three are empty. Underneath: `3 FREE`.

Nobody sat everyone down and divided the card. It just ended up looking like this, and the numbers
are the entire negotiation, held forever on the screen.

## Why does the split matter this much?

Because the card has a hard limit and no referee.

Sixteen blocks is a fixed resource. There's no setting that grants somebody more space, no queue,
no rule about how much any one person is owed. Whoever saved most often, or saved biggest, simply
ended up holding more blocks — and everyone else could see it, every time the card was opened.
Six against four against two is not a decision. It's a record of who used the thing.

## What is the single `AA` block actually showing?

A fourth person, who was here exactly once.

Six, four and two account for three people who kept coming back. The lone `AA` doesn't fit that
pattern at all — one block, one visit, and then nothing. Somebody who wasn't a regular in this
house used this card a single time, saved their progress, and didn't come back to add to it or clear
it. It's the smallest amount of evidence a person can leave behind and still be provably there.

## Why did nobody just delete somebody else's block?

Because it was available the entire time, and taking it would have meant saying so out loud.

Clearing another person's data takes one button press — the same
[destructive default that sits on a confirmation screen](/stories/the-save-that-got-overwritten),
just aimed at somebody else's blocks instead of your own. Nothing in the hardware stops you. What
stops it is that overwriting somebody else's slot is a hostile act with no plausible accident
attached to it — you'd have to explain why you did it. So the blocks just accumulate, protected by
nothing except the awkwardness of being the one who touched them.

## Why do the three free blocks matter as much as the used ones?

Because they were the shared thing everyone was tracking.

`3 FREE` is the number that decided whether the next save was even possible. Whoever wanted to
start something new had to watch that count, not the tags — the tags told you who owned what, but
the free count told you what was still up for grabs. It's the one line on the whole card that
belonged to nobody and mattered to everyone.

## Does this need to be a real console's memory card?

The card format and its block-counting interface belong to whoever made the hardware, and that
kind of interface is licensed all the time.

A specific memory card's exact icon set, font and block-grid layout is part of a platform's own
design, and the recognisable ones are trademarked. Use a real one and it's a permission to secure,
not a wall.

The tags themselves are a different kind of property entirely: `AN`, `DA`, `MR`, `AA` and a count
of three free blocks are your household's own figures. Nobody needs to license somebody else's
initials on a card that belonged to your family.

## What if just two people used the card, not four?

The design scales down without losing anything — a two-way split of sixteen blocks tells its own
story just as well.

Two people, uneven blocks, still no free line in sight, still no negotiation on record — that's a
complete piece on its own. The empty blocks aren't required either; a full card with nothing free
says a different true thing about a house that seemed to need one more slot.

## How is this different from the slot that nobody clears?

[That piece](/stories/the-save-slot-nobody-touches) is about one particular, dormant slot on
a screen with three total. This is about a whole card, sixteen blocks wide, and about who's holding
how much of it. One is a single frozen number; this is a household's entire footprint on one piece
of storage, [the same kind of accounting a family keeps in the words it calls each other](/stories/what-your-family-calls-you).

## Does it print well?

Yes — the whole thing is small flat squares and a blocky typeface, which is close to ideal for
screen print.

Sixteen identical squares at a readable size hold their shape easily; the risk is in going too
small, where the two-letter tags blur into the border lines. Keep the grid generous and the border
hairlines crisp rather than thin-to-invisible.

Plum or another deep saturated ground with a pale backlit fill for the squares reads as an old LCD
screen immediately. Two inks — one for the grid and border, one for the fill and text.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the card at [JustOG](/) — how many blocks, whose initials, and how many left free. Pick a
direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and
shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

One block, one visit, still sitting on a card three other people kept filling.