All excellent, I’m sure.

• No Man’s Sky - 1,631 hours
• The Long Dark - 1,337 hours
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 651 hours (I combined the original and Special Edition playtimes)
• Nova Drift - 434 hours
• Fallout 4 - 378 hours
• Starfield - 178 hours (I enjoyed it!)

What I like about this moment is that the people who ought to be fearful are indeed the ones who are fearful. I mean shit, Elon is posting Tweets about how great CEOs are actually, health insurance companies are removing pages from their websites that identify leadership, it’s a lovely little pocket of schadenfreude where we can all take a breath and prepare for the next 4 years.

This is the only way Bill Gates can go to the grocery store unaccosted.

Known to horror aficionados, but not to general movie watchers: Lake Mungo (2008)

I highly recommend you don’t read up on it. Besides the fact that the film just works so much better when you come to it fresh, most reviews - both in print and YouTube videos - spoil pivotal scenes, including in the artwork they choose to use as a thumbnail/heading. Just watch it. Even if the horror doesn’t work for you (many people report being bored by the film), it’s still a great film with surprising depth and heart. It’s worth checking off your list for sure.

The basics: It’s a mockumentary set in Australia, made by a director/writer who hasn’t done anything before or since, featuring actors who probably aren’t known to you, even if you’re an Aussie. Much of the dialogue is improvised, so it feels very real and natural.

Try to watch it alone, in the dark, with no distractions (turn off your phone). This will help maximise your chances of being one of the lucky people the film has managed to scare in a profound way. I’m one of those lucky people, I’m happy to say!

I can’t help but pronounce it like a Slavic surname.

Lose the ‘infinite growth’ promise to shareholders (in fact, lose the whole shareholder thing entirely). That’s the root of all evil right there. It’s the cause of all woes suffered by gamers, devs and even the very sociopathic CEOs who think Epic exclusivity is a sound financial strategy. We all suffer for it, and all to benefit shareholders who, in 2024, still believe the lie that next year’s profits will exceed this year’s. It’s delusional, and even if it weren’t, it would quite literally be cancerous. Cancer is just a board of shareholders in a biological system.

If they had added fast travel, it would have been a really solid game (to me, at least). The excruciatingly-long driving sessions were interminable, and it was this that made me abandon the game in the end, even though I was already about 2/3 of the way through it. The characters, acting and story were really good.

It’s quite repetitive, but no more than any other middling open world game. I happen to enjoy stealthily murdering people with a giant combat knife, so the repetition didn’t bother me. The constant criss-crossing around the map to go to/from objectives bothered me a lot. 90% of the checkpoints in each quest could have been a phone call.

I wonder if there’s a mod that lets you teleport to map markers 🤔 If so, I would play the game again.

It looks indistinguishable from every other tech site.

It’s depressing that bleating “free speech” has become a shibboleth, betraying the speaker’s tedious far right contrarianism and a wish to express it without consequence. Racists, Nazis, x-phobes, bigots of all stripes; these are your target audience when your primary objective for your platform is supposedly “free speech”, especially when it’s in opposition to the censorship of your users’ bigotry on other platforms. I wish it weren’t so, but it fucking is, 100% of the time.

It’s like on reddit, when you discover a splinter sub called r/FunSubReborn or something, where they post the same content as r/FunSub, but in this “reborn” sub you can also be an unmitigated cunt in the comments and make racist or phobic remarks without getting banned.

Tedious, tiresome, clueless wankers.

I wish Linux weren’t completely fucking impenetrable for casual users.

(from Perplexity AI)

Imagine using Chrome in 2024.

Elon is psychologically compromised. Not sure if it’s rampant drug abuse, mental illness unrelated to drugs, a brain tumour, or what. But the man is not on planet earth, and not in the way he would prefer. If he weren’t a billionaire, he’d be sectioned/committed. Same with Kanye; that dude would be in care in no time flat if he were a regular Joe. This is one of the few ways that being rich and famous is a net negative; when you need help the most, you get enablers and yes men instead fermenting your insanity for their own purposes or out of fear for their own livelihoods.