Londoners, there is a webpage for you to see where your nearest "cool spaces" are when the extreme heat hits - places with water, air-conditioning & shade. Have a look and spread the word, especially to those who may need this but might not think to look for it: apps.london.gov.uk/cool-spaces/

It is Bookshop's Anti-Prime sale which means shipping on EVERYTHING is FREE. You can support indie bookstores and load up on reads for your summer. This includes my novel, THE DRAGON HAS SOME COMPLAINTS, which drops in three weeks. I want to thread some other book recs, though!

🏹🏹🏹 Mythmatch is Coming to Nintendo Switch!!! 🏹🏹🏹 Our narrative-rich, Greek myth, anti-capitalist merge game is coming Nintendo Switch on 7/7/2026! The perfect device for just one more day in the mortal realm or one more go in the minigames. 🐐 Merge the items 💪 Unite the people 🏠 Find your home

Hodder & Stoughton are open for novel submissions until 28 June 2026! #WritingCommunity www.hodder.co.uk/landing-page...

From Brexit day: Brexiteers, you won. You have made your country a smaller-minded and less important place... I will be polite and professional with you; I hope to work positively on projects of common interest in the future. But I do not forgive you. fromtheheartofeurope.eu/reflections-...

It will never stop being funny to me that the street fighter subreddit has a much better, well reasoned ai policy vis a vis literally all universities.

This was a solved problem 25 years ago! Put some goggles on your biggest titted friend and take a black and white photo of her in a construction site for gods sake. When did everybody become helpless

🚨 New research by us! 📣 Most British drivers don't know how dangerous SUVs are to other road users, but adding information to SUV marketing materials seems to do almost nothing to change people's plans to buy SUVs Here's a 🧵 on why harder action is going to be needed 1/10

this is about tv but we are absolutely losing out on good games because dev cycles take 5+ years & there’s so little time given to experiment, so you get a bunch of stuff that rehashes what money people think works & no one on the team has the space to compare 4 different ways theyve done a feature

Lots of people asking how we made Over the Alps: The Devil's Quill. Also asking why we made it, which is fair enough! So! A brief thread about how I finished off a game I started back in 2013. 🧵 #gamedev

Flooding my timeline with posts about Ithaca until it reaches its goal www.kickstarter.com/projects/ith... Skip adding one more game to your backlog and make this happen instead! 🙂

"taking off" as in frisbee'd across city streets i hope

Imagine owning Double Fine and even *considering* closing it. The history of Double Fine is the history of the games industry itself. This is a crime.

Hey narrative folks! I'm back at work and we're back to hiring 🦾We have TWO senior writer roles to fill on my team. Apply here: www.cdprojektred.com/en/jobs/2216... #writing #narrative #videogames

From one of the many PR emails I'm getting about the government social media ban. Obviously this is from someone selling this technology. But stop to think about just how utterly dystopian this is: *constant* video surveillance of all online activity, for everyone.

Really enjoyed some zero alcohol cider yesterday. Took me a while after finishing to realise… that’s just apple juice, right? ( Less sweet than most apple juice, but even so…?)

Because every time a game studio has to move resources over to making a trailer, it causes the game to lose about 4 months of actual dedicated development iteration time.

Just finished the Department Q books. What’s another good crime/spy series? (I’ve almost completed Slow Horses too.)

Can we finally get an apology from all the oh so sensible commentators who have spent the past ten years insisting Nigel Farage isn't part of the far-right

What if we just believed young people when they say it’s because of climate change and being broke?

Maybe if we tweak things so that 1 in every 10 billionaires is burnt at the stake each year, sacrificed to the Spirit of Unfettered Capitalism, like one would to calm an angry volcano god. That or a wealth tax. Either works for me.

Let's be clear about something: any editor who runs an author's work through an "AI detector" is using the same technology they're supposedly trying to avoid. Furthermore, they're feeding that author's work -- w/o permission -- to the same companies that have probably already stolen earlier work.

Everything about this car made me think it would be driven like a dickhead, but it really wasn’t. My entire sense of road awareness thrown off by my assumptions being dashed.

Anyway turns out some people argue that the moon is a planet (it has its own solar orbit), and that thus we would be a double planet system. Most people say that doesn’t count, because the shared Earth–Moon centre of mass is inside Earth.

On a drive with @babelfishwars.bsky.social, and we got talking about the moon and gravity, which led to a dive into orbital mechanics and puzzling a bunch of stuff out from the internet. Imagine using an AI summary for this shit! The loss of serendipity and learning-by-assembly.

As it’s #PrideCymru today, let’s remember this lovely Twitter exchange from years gone by…

Looking pointedly at the games industry

i think i read this when i was 12 or so and it completely outlined the rest of my life.

i have a strong belief that there's a Terry Pratchett quote for every person that sneaks in and takes root without you ever noticing, and it varies for everyone, and mine is

This is exactly it for me. If a character is “bad” because their world has made them so, that’s implicitly hopeful; the world can also redeem. But if characters are simply good - and worse, pure - that tells us the world can be divided into deserving and damned, and that‘s the root of fascism

Spinning up a new agent (me) to utilise tokens (minutes) to output iteratively-generated content (write) against a internal quality metric (reading) while I just make coffee (also me)

Because - as the art team would have flagged, had they seen it - in the middle of this very serious classical music title were now 16 pages of a magazine called ‘Scorpion’ devoted solely to spanked arses. And that went out as part of our concert guide. We all saw it in the early subscriber copies.

I once worked on a classical music magazine that got hijacked by BDSM porn. Early in my career, I got a job selling ads on this mag. It was all very posh. Every print day, the printers always biked a bound dummy copy up to our offices so the Art Director could check & sign it off. Failsafe, see?

Are you a Pokémon Go player of any era who has feelings about how the game's data has been used? Has it soured your memories of the game? Have you stopped playing because of it? Would you want to chat about it for a Kotaku story? Please reach out here or email me at [email protected]

If you got AI to write your book you didn’t write your book. Stephen King wrote your book. Octavia Butler wrote your book. Jilly Cooper wrote your book. Dav Pilkey wrote your book. Lisa Jewell wrote your book. I wrote your book. Every author whose work has been digitised wrote your book. You did not

lmao the concern when i was playing more avidly was that this would happen AFTER the app changed hands from Niantic to Scopely. well, that's fucked

It makes me feel so sad that the internet made of up places to share, discuss and meet people you would never have otherwise met is now just a distant memory. Person online has become 'creator', 'audience', 'dickhead', 'scammer' with everything filtered through pay to play for everyone

obsessed with thomas. happy pride 🪿🌈✨

Struggling to motivate to deadlift. Putting on the RRR soundtrack. Ok, let’s do this. (It’s better for running but still…)

Road to Ithaca - Day 2 Please support our game on Kickstarter <3 <3 <3 www.kickstarter.com/projects/ith...

The duality of game dev is absolute joy at the number of cool games coming out, and abject fear at the number of cool games coming out.

So Excited (and terrified) to finally announce our game, Bad Magpie! 🐦‍⬛ We at @milktoothgames have been dreaming of this day since 2019 🥹

the real nail in the coffin here is that GOG deliberately did not send the newsletter to germany - a place where you actually get in serious legal trouble for displaying nazi imagery. in other words, they knew *before* sending it that it would be perceived that way, but sent it anyway

If you want something to do: energy would probably be better placed making sure that MPs sign this 👇

Mensa Reddit is amazing

I’m with my dog-in-law. He’s perfect.