Here's a great use of language models, in conjunction with real live journalists and novel reporting, to attempt to inform the public. www.texastribune.org/2025/11/07/t...

Really good summary here

AP reporter Regina Garcia Cano looked into a few of the men killed in Trump's extrajudicial strikes on Caribbean boats. "They were laborers, a fisherman, a taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a local crime boss who contracted out smuggling services" apnews.com/article/trum...

Friday, Chill www.youtube.com/watch?v=20cu...

Youtube Comments sections are, let's say "not great" in general, but YT comments on music and live performances are probably the most wholesome remaining part of the commercial internet. Non-stop affirmation and personal history.

Thursday, Parties www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyuF...

I played through "The Invincible" over the past week and, for a shorter game, it has really stayed with me. The art and sound design succeeds at what I think its trying to do, and I do love the source material. It's mostly a walking simulator, but it's a real good one.

Can probably close the book on Republican interest in redistricting, I think.

I have a pretty negative view of TikTok and think folks On Here should be way more suspicious of the CCP's use of ByteDance for e.g. surveillance of overseas Chinese. But yes, the idea that views on Israel are about TikTok, rather than Israel's actions, is pure cope.

Why is the UAE involved in Sudan’s bloody civil war? - https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/why-uae-involved-sudans-bloody-civil-war

Blocklist discourse is mainly interesting to me in what it says about how people approach social media (maybe platforms in general) and how badly it fits with what Bluesky, or Mastodon, is trying to do. And similar to GenAI discourse, we blame technology when it is the people who suck.

Friday - ! www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCmA...

Pac man is such a great game, perfect and perfectly simple.

Thursday, Almost There www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD4p...

Chaos Zero Nightmare is a funny game - some of the presentation is good and some of it looks like a half-finished Hoyo clone - and I still don't fully vibe with deck-based combat. But the way the roguelike mode can build diverse character kits and the focus on diverse builds in combat has potential.

It's become a much bigger problem that the entire upper echelon of US management thinking is so psychotically hostile to workers. It's hard to say whether the pandemic and remote work made it worse, but it's so clearly a religious belief now, untethered from evidence and reality.

He is so obviously mad and unfit it's just incredible there isn't a national conversation about his need to step down.

Really striking to me how quickly the whole LLM-centric development world is advancing our ability to work with messy data from heterogeneous sources. This is like, THE challenge of contemporary Information Science and it is slowly disappearing into a mass of neural networks.

Oh lol they really are doing the Halo remake - at least this avoids the problem of having to figure out what to do with the Halo narrative. This will make for a nice addition to PS+ in early 2027...

No strategy, total innumeracy, nobody willing to say no.

I was curious about the regional response to the administration policy of randomly bombing Colombian fishing boats so I went looking for news, and found out from Democracy Now that Petro strongly protested and in response Trump called him a drug lord. Mad king shit, seems easy to point out!

I don't have a position on what games "should" cost but I do strongly support unionization across the game industry, and I expect that to increase the cost to consumers. I would gladly pay a few extra dollars so that game devs have good health care and job protections.

TEMBA, HIS ARMS WIDE!

Yeah, so XBOX as an actual separate console looks dead, this seems pretty clear that "XBOX" is just the brand for gaming on Windows. I don't even disagree with the strategy, but I definitely doubt that MS can execute it. thisweekinvideogames.com/news/next-ge...

Really gotta appreciate the extent to which this administration is committed to symbolism, especially all the worst and most obvious symbolism available. Committed to closing off all the avenues of defense or dissembling over whether the mad king is in fact mad or wants to be king.

It's genuinely gotten to the point where if I spend money on games, it's more to support new development, not because I need more games to play. I have games I got for free years ago that I haven't touched yet, and as a retro game enjoyer I have decades of games I want to play.

Relatedly, I've been thinking just how MUCH "videogame" there is in the world relative to the $ spent - AAA releases like Yotei can easily consume 100 hours, or you can spend 100s of hours in Genshin without spending a dime. That's not sustainable in terms of paying devs to build them.

The thing with Platner just seems like such a clear illustration of what people mean when they talk about the power of White (male) supremacy in US culture - a mediocre white dude, a child of privilege, for whom we are being asked to offer grace and forgiveness.

Another thing about playing more live service games is that it has forced me to think more directly about what it means to "finish" a game. Even most single-purchase games now have endless modes, NG+, or are roguelikes where you're intended to "beat" the game a bunch of times. Where is the end?

Yeah, this. Same thing with any of the "appearance of impropriety" stuff - if you don't draw the line at the appearance, it's that much harder to tell when someone is stepping over it.

An aside to this but one of my pet peeves with the portable devices is they are always shown with 3D games built for big 4K displays, but you really don't want to play Control or Cyberpunk on a smaller 1080p screen. Persona works great, but doesn't need a $1000 device.

LOL I only realized today that the new ROG device doesn't actually play Xbox games, it's more of a Steam deck with an Xbox logo on it. Obviously it's too expensive to matter much, but what a way to treat your loyal console customers. Of course MSFT can't emulate their own hardware ...

Sunday, Long Summer www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nut...

In some personal news, I just became a subscriber to @thisweekinvideogames.com It's actual reporting on the video game industry, and I'm mentioning it because I think it's important to support journalism. You can sign up from free, but I had some cancelled @washingtonpost.com money lying around. :)

Politics-as-entertainment again: "Politics" is not just national elections and debates on TV ; it is your HOA council arguing over whether to build a bike trail, Miller and Bondi arguing over prosecutions. There was a lot of politics even under Stalin, it just wasn't democratic.

Playing lots of live service/"forever" games has given me a real appreciation for how difficult a task it is to maintain the audience. I really enjoyed Hongkai Star Rail until a couple incoherent story arcs soured me forever - Loved Octopath but ran out of story. And so on.

You should just be excited if someone you like decides to spend their time here. It’s nice. Warm welcomes help it happen.

Been playing the updated FBC Firebreak - the mission revisions are mostly good and make the game more fun to dip into for an hour or so. Needs more players tho, and I'm still a little uncertain what they are doing with account progression - I don't think they care that much due to no season passes.

I actually believe that MSFT currently plans on producing another Xbox, mainly because their strategy is so incoherent that it doesn't matter whether it makes business sense to do so. But creative lying via an OEM console with an XBOX brand is as likely (if only marginally more sensible).

I guess the more interesting thought about this is the way the poverty of games media leads to Streamers being one of the main ways people relate to and consume games. D2 is just one example of a game now built for and in relation to Streaming - Raids are made for Twitch, not the playerbase at large

Thinking about Destiny, when Sony bought Bungie I assumed that they wanted to make D2 into the "Intro to Playstation multiplayer", a free game that would bring people into the live service/co-op experience. Astrobot but with a revenue stream. Instead they let Bungie get too far into their own feels.

I again repeat my stance that DHS must be dismantled

This is huge. Komeito (a Buddhist-backed political party) has long been a crucial part of the governing LDP coalition, carefully managing their differences over military rearmament and social spending. This leaves the LDP short of a majority in both chambers.

Interesting perspective on the EA acquisition. thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/bonu...

Seeing this reminded me that organized Tennis just ... gave up on Peng Shuai, and by extension women's (or players!) rights in China, because "it was expensive". It's no wonder they're still not protecting the players, they already said they don't care.

Trump never recovered or moved on from those last 2 weeks of the first term - he's still holed up in the right wing media cocoon and abdicating responsibility for almost everything. The main difference today is all the sweatiest losers in America joined up with him, seizing the main chance.

I'm excited for this one.

Once guns were invented, you lived in a gun world. Doesn't mean guns are good or bad but SOMEBODY was gonna use them and you did, in fact, have to adapt to the fact that you lived in a world with guns. And, you know, we know something about those dynamics from history.

"She had a garden hose but she did not drink from it and did not allow her kids to drink from it and this was the difference, less in lost things than in knowledge become suspicious and alert." - Don DeLillo, Underworld