So the time limit in Seance of Blake Manor is definitely not really a barrier - I'm about to skip two hours on the second day because I'm pretty sure I've done everything I can do prior to the Silent Dinner. Characters not being available to talk to *is* a frustration that can trip you up.

So once you get over the initial anxiety caused by the ticking clock, and get a sense for how time and investigation and NPC schedules work, The Seance of Blake Manor is a pretty damn good game. It has me hooked.

Film #37 for 2026 is A Dog's Breakfast (2006). As a direct-to-DVD comedy off-season project for Stargate actors, audience expectations are low, allowing the third act to be surprisingly great just by not being shit. The other two-thirds of the film are on shaky ground though.

Film #36 for 2026 is Sunshine (2007). Danny Boyle & Alex Garland's "god hates astronauts" thriller is basically Godwin's "The Cold Equations" stretched out to feature length, until in the third act it becomes something even stupider. A stacked cast are largely wasted, though Chris Evans is good.

They could save a lot of money on autism diagnoses by just going through Letterboxd and tapping everyone who posts review after review that is basically just "I don't understand people's emotional reaction to this film".

Film #35 for 2026 is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1912). This early one-reel adaptation has a memorable version of Mr Hyde but is otherwise a bit of a snoozefest.

Feels like something I'm going to need to repost on a regular basis. He will shoot you until you fight back.

Film #34 for 2026 is The Gentlemen (2019). It's a pleasure to see Guy Ritchie just doing Guy Ritchie - no genies, no magic swords, no period setting, just fast-talking Cockney bastards in labyrinthine crime capers. It's not nearly as good as Lock Stock or Snatch, but it's enjoyable all the same.

Watching Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen" and Hugh Grant doing a Cockney accent as a Guy Ritchie character is everything I could hope for.

Film #33 for 2026 is Thirteen (20003). Finally someone has the courage to address the threat posed to teenagers by extremely unsubtle colour grading. Does *your* teenager's life look blue and washed out? She may be trapped in a Catherine Hardwicke film!

The reason that Wicked did not get a Best Picture Oscar nomination is that the nominations were made by people who had watched at least one 2025 film other than Wicked. As for the other categories... *shrug*. But let's be real that it wasn't going to win them even if it got nominated.

Star Wars worldbuilding is "somehow Palpatine returned" but also being able to imply every aspect of the political and economic environment of the New Republic from the design choices of the MC85 Star Cruiser.

"So anyway, professor, here's a photo of me naked in bed with my wife, who looks identical to one of your students. Don't think too hard about who took the photo. Yours truly, Scott Summers."

I love me a high-quality one-sitting game with an appropriate price point. (Already bought my copy.)

Film #32 for 2026 is Train Dreams (2025). It could honestly go far just on its stunning landscape photography and a persistently haunting soundtrack which always makes it clear what you should be feeling, but it transcends all that to be something very special. Highly recommended.

Star Trek has always been bad, and it still is, and Star Trek has always been good, and it still is.

My initial reaction to The Seance of Blake Manor is that I love the general vibe and UI of it, but a ticking clock is always a source of anxiety, and I particularly hate that whenever I want to follow my curiosity there's always some douche forcing me to solve a mini-mystery in under an hour.

Film #31 for 2026 is The Bling Ring (2013). Sofia Coppola's fifth feature film has more energy and conflict than her last two, but it's difficult to see why she felt it needed to be made - other than as an excuse to indulge her endless love of shooting wispy young privileged white girls.

The cancelled TV show you'll never stop thinking about.

The Guardian is on fire today. Salute to whoever was in charge of picking the banner image for this article and didn't even bother to try.

I love a sunburnt country.

A lot of complaints about Starfleet Academy seem to basically be people watching a show set in the year 2000 and going, "WTF, why is this blonde guy in an office, don't the writers know anything about Vikings? The borders of France are all wrong, did they not look at a map?"

Diving into detective game The Seance of Blake Manor (@blakemanorgame.bsky.social) and bought a new notebook to assist!

Videogame #1 for 2026 is The Outer Worlds (2019): Spacer's Choice Edition (2023). There's a lot to like about The Outer Worlds, but very little to love. Everything about it just enough to be the game it wants to be, and never more. It's fine as Fallout-in-Space, but inferior to any actual Fallout.

Based on the first episode, the new Star Trek is good.

Post a moment you love from Kathleen Kennedy’s stewardship of Lucasfilm

NEW: 1 in 10 teens going to headspace say the teen social media ban was a factor in their decision to seek mental health support. This very preliminary data, supporting concerns about negative impacts of the ban, shows why more online reform is needed, headspace said.

Stop scrolling and post two characters who bring you happiness.

(1) Knowing (2009). (2) Dream Scenario (2023). (3) Emilia Perez (2024).

Film #30 for 2026 is Being John Malkovich (1999). This is a rewatch. When I first saw it, on release, I thought it was gimmicky and immature. Since then, I've seen Charlie Kaufman's other films and loved them. Upon rewatching this one now, I still think it's gimmicky and immature.

In case it's not obvious: of *course* Trump wants to provoke violence against ICE in Minneapolis or elsewhere, so he can justify further oppression. But if nobody forcefully resists ICE he wins even harder, and he will oppress anyway. He will shoot you until you fight back.

The original point of the *US* constitution was to protect educated white land-owning Christian men from the possibility of a government that didn't align with their interests, but it can certainly aspire to be more than that.

Film #29 for 2026 is Isle of Dogs (2018). This is Wes Anderson at his most visually inventive. Every scene and every shot has layers of cleverness; nothing is done the easy way; and a top-tier cast committed to playing it dead serious make the story and stakes work. I loved it.

Film #28 for 2026 is The Weather Man (2005), which I'm going to be honest, I couldn't finish. This is a cringe comedy that's all cringe and no comedy and I found it frankly unbearable to watch. There's no cleverness or satire in its parade of miserable things that happen to miserable people.

Film #27 for 2026 is Somewhere (2010). This is Sofia Coppola's fourth movie, and her third in a row about how damn hard it is to be rich and famous. It's excruciatingly slow and at times it feels direly in need of an edit - and yet conventional editing would only leave 40 minutes of film. (cont.)

Watching The Weather Man (2005) in a possibly unwise attempt to find another Gore Verbinski film I like as much as The Ring or the first Pirates. But this is probably not it. My initial reaction is that this is Verbinski daring to ask "what if Adaptation (2002) were terrible".

Film #26 for 2026 is She's Gotta Have It (1986). Spike Lee presents one woman's quest to do kitchen-table poly with the three most toxic men she can find. It's vibrant, dynamic, and surprisingly feminist, and it's great despite largely bollocksing the ending.

New Inkle game coming! (They've been advertising it for a while but in a kind of ARG-y way that blurred the lines between reality and game that was just going to be confusing to repost.)

I correctly guessed the winner in 10 out 15 film categories at the Golden Globes. My real "WTF" is Stellan Skarsgard for Best Supporting Male. He's talented and charismatic but in Sentimental Value he was really just playing himself, whereas Sean Penn in One Battle After Another was phenomenal.

Historically speaking, when dictators are eventually ousted from government in favour of democracy, the democracies that survive tend to be the ones that swiftly execute the dictator and his ranking supporters, and the ones that don't tend to regret it when the dictator ends up taking another try.

Film #25 for 2026 is Phoenix the Warrior (1988) aka She-Wolves of the Wasteland. You've got to watch some trash to find some gems, but this is 100% trash and 0% gem. Too restrained to deliver the exploitation it advertises, too profoundly incompetent to be a real film.

Once again: Really hard for me to even consider using Bluesky more when it refuses to let me access messages after a dozen successful verifications (Alternatives to get around this have only been semi-successful and not really perfect for mobile either)

I made my Golden Globes picks and guesses for the film categories over on Facebook: www.facebook.com/greg.tannahi...

Film #24 for 2026 is 65 (2023). Adam Driver is surprisingly good as a space-dad, but the film otherwise swerves repeatedly between "predictable" and "stupid". It's not good enough to be good and not bad enough to be memorable.

Watching 65, which is a terrible film, but it really does get that the worst thing about being outdoors (or trapped on an alien* planet) is when your hands get dirty and you can't clean them. Also I don't know whether Ariana Greenblatt needs a better agent or if she's simply found her level.

Film #23 for 2026 is Lords of Dogtown (2005). Catherine Hardwicke creates the rarely seen "hangout biopic". There's very little effort to explain the importance or impact of the Z-Boys, but it's surprisingly enjoyable to hang out with them for two hours as they skate and angst.

Polygon continuing to have an absolutely delusional view of the RPG marketplace. D&D accounts for a little over 50% of the entire RPG market. The next largest single system is Pathfinder, which has maybe 3% of the market. No other single system (including DCC) has more than 1% of the market.

Chekhov has a gun On the mantle, it's not hard to find When they're setting the stage up, it's easy to see They'll introduce it in act one and it'll fire in act three Oh, I wish that I had Chekhov's gun Yeah, I wish that I had Chekhov's gun Where can I find a weapon like that?

Film #22 for 2026 is The Vagabond (1916). A relatively bland Charlie Chaplin film. There's one inspired bit (his adversarial relationship with a bucket), but the rest is generic - and filled with sadly par-for-the-course anti-Romani racism.