The amount of hate speech and abuse on Steam is mind blowing. It can often take weeks for reports to be handled, if they get handled at all. Almost every game discussion forum is covered in harassment and hate speech. Not enough people realize Steam is a breeding ground for right wing radicalization

Forget everything you already know about America's most notorious dead person. Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is in select theaters October 2.

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth

Very much enjoying painting the Dark Commune & other chaos.

I have nothing whatsoever to say about Andy Burnham other than that I am old enough to remember when he was nicknamed 'Bambi' due to his fresh-faced countenance and big, innocent brown eyes and dear God haven't we all been fucked sideways by time in the intervening years

Out today.

its so nuts to contemplate that many places will employ folks who are at the top of their game at problem solving and then actively give them no resources to solve those problems lol what a Greek tragedy. like torture

You heard it here first: landlines are the new cool, now the tweens are into dumbphones. Everyone’s going to be getting them reinstalled and allowing themselves to be unreachable. Text is dead.

Randy, Randy, Randy. www.latimes.com/lifestyle/st...

STILL agonisingly relevant, a whole 85 years later. youtu.be/J7GY1Xg6X20

As a matter of disclosure, please remember that I and many if not most creative folks have business dealings with one or more corporate entities who are navigating, delicately or, uh, otherwise, the fact the US government has been taken over by fascists, no, it's not great and also we have bills

"Don't break bread with the people you cover" is what I was taught. It was almost like the rule for not eating in the land of the dead or in Faerie - you share a meal, you now have a connection; you've accepted a kinship. One paper I worked for wouldn't let us take as much as a glass of water.

Writers should internalize Lao Tzu's lesson about how the emptiness at the center of a wheel is what makes it useful, and how a pot is valuable because of where the clay *isn't*. Corporate geek culture has warped us into thinking that negative spaces are flaws that need to be fixed.

Can't believe recipe-sharing is forbidden under this totalitarian regime. My mate Lee asked me for my couscous salad recipe, and I sadly told him, "It's tabouleh."

any interesting information games that people have to recommend? bonus points if it's tabletop or i haven't heard of it already

I don't know why the Greeks went on about Zemo's Paradox. Oooh, look at me, I've stuck a hood to my face with Adhesive X, how paradoxical is that. Nope, sorry, that's ironic not paradoxical. You'd think the Greeks of all people would've known better.

I love London so much. So much. Did you know that London has the lowest level of ethnic violence of any city of comparable size in the world? Multiculturalism has in fact worked here. They just don’t want it to be true because we happen to have a Muslim mayor.

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

here's the whole context: "Autumn reset. Write a one-line vision for Sept–Dec Keep it where your eyes land daily. Example: “Steady progress, kind pacing.”" what is it about 'steady progress, kind pacing' that is *so* LLM-written that my brain can't stop turning it over and over?

Historians (rightly) get annoyed when other academics weigh in on their subject & claim to have “solved” or “completed” history, ignoring existing research & nuance. Yet historians keep weighing in on games as if no one has ever paid attention to them before (& it’s not great)

USA 🇺🇸 Pour rappel, Charlie Kirk considérait que J. Biden était un tyran qu'il fallait arrêter et condamner à la peine de mort.

LINK ROT: 38% webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available 10 years later. Even among pages that existed in 2021, 22% no longer accessible just two years later. This is often because individual page was deleted or removed on otherwise functional website. Many implications for knowledge 🧪

This. It's why they have so much energy for it. It's an all-encompassing hobby. These guys need to have a project which is not destructive. I am fairly sure brexit happened because there were so many men of a certain age who had nothing better to do that by hypnotised by Farage's frogface.

I love this analytical take on video game categorization from Antoine Mayerowitz and Julie Belzanne: hushcrasher.substack.com/p/taxonomy-o... Instead of trying to vibe-intuit the definition of an "indie" game, the authors analyzed the data from the perspective of game size and credits length

Good news! www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/c...

Charlie Kirk is now internationally a household name and yet Melissa Hortman - Democratic speaker who was assassinated - is not. How did this happen? It happened because mainstream journalists in America and elsewhere (inc Australia) let Donald Trump set the news agenda. This is a perfect example.

The groypers' hate of Charlie Kirk is so well known there are like 4 paragraphs about it (under the cringiest fucking headline possible, "Groyper Wars") on Wikipedia. This guy hated Charlie Kirk cause he wasn't racist and homophobic enough. There is zero doubt of this in my mind.

Ingold's rules of narrative: - the universe must have a moral arc - plants always grow towards the light - mean people aren't interesting but nasty ones are - good people aren't interesting but kind ones are - every liar must be living a lie - every maze must have a minotaur

Realised that after only fours of sleep (final deadline on a project) I: a) work soooo much better for the morning b) get magically boosted by coffee & sugar into euphoria c) am an emotional rollercoaster d) am very easily knocked into deep sadness e) am a wreck afterwards for a couple of days.

Are short stories narrative prototypes for video games? Veteran game writer and narrative designer @iamleyeti.bsky.social certainly thinks so, and will be teaching you all about *Prototyping Video Game Narratives with Short Stories*. Lessons start November 24 📝 www.d6learning.com/course/proto...

_intelligence is neurodiverse_

#Textsthatyoucanonlysendtokieron @kierongillen.bsky.social

Go, listen to my brother's outsider music!

Top tip, don't increase your price by 50% an hour after release. Impossible to know if Shuten Order (Spike Chunsoft) is any good, because it's being battered by negative Chinese reviews. store.steampowered.com/app/3216500/...

This is vile. Local guy speaks to Sky News about the impact of asylum seekers protests. Watch what happens and share widely

“Prime Minister, sir, we…we’ve lost the Earl of Grantham…”

So I swear this isn't just because @kierongillen.bsky.social was saying nice things about Service Model recently, but instead prompted by the arrival of volume 2 of The Power Fantasy, so I've been re-reading book 1. And if you haven't, you really should. It's one of the best comics I read maybe...

Lofi Girl music just ended and the livestream is just silence. There are still more than 10,000 watching. And everyone in chat freaking out. It's fascinating www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKf...

“Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds” “Americans learn about the disposition of physical reality and their place in it, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds” #FTFY

My brain is currently singing Pink Pony Club to the tune of Left Bank Two (Tony Hart Gallery Theme) by Wayne Hill.

When an alien implants a house: tenor.com/view/the-you...

in this week's newsletter! I realised I'd been pretty serious for some weeks so I wrote quite a daft list on the things which make me realise that, at heart, I'm still extremely French, even after 16 years here: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/10-ways-in...

Listened to eight hours of Murderbot audiobooks yesterday (driving) and now I have SecUnit in my head, background narrating my actions. This is going to make writing very hard.

also, an all timer in the field of game journalism, “Yakuza opining on a Yakuza game”

I wouldn’t say “beloved” but there’s an episode of Mythic Quest that makes every game dev dissociate

Come on, man

One day, one day we'll get to chat seriously about the tragedy that was the attainder of Stafford and Cromwell's missed opportunity for equality at the Putney debates...

time for my weekly crash out THIS ISN'T ITCH'S FAULT YOU FUCKS ITS BECAUSE OF THE UK GOVERNMENTS AGE VERIFICATION LAWS BE MAD AT THE RIGHT PEOPLE I'M BEGGING YOU www.thegamer.com/itch-io-cens...