I can't tell if this is me (my time is far more precious now and I have less to git gud) or it, but Silksong after several hours/areas in is starting to feel like a slog. I just don't get the same feeling of satisfying discovery I did with Hollow Knight.

While people are suddenly and uncharacteristically paying attention to media regulation, please take a moment to notice all the massive harm Brendan Carr has done to consumer protection and public safety as well me, back in April:

some unfortunate journalist is about to launch a newsletter called The Carr Alarm

I feel like Block Club Chicago has done a pretty good job locally, arisen from the ashes of DNAInfo after Ricketts killed it when they tried to unionize.

I would love if orgs (rightly) calling out the toxic information ecosystem could pair that with a bold, coherent, tangible plan for supporting a new one. Ideas like public news funding, etc. certainly exist, but the message of "look at this slop, now let's demand better" could be much more powerful.

Democrats are playing a major role in the growing strangling of online anonymity, apparently totally unconcerned by the way this could play into the Trump administration's authoritarian push.

Really jealous of whatever outlet has the sources to report what it's like making children's programming for a powerful company settling under the thumb of an administration that demands not just the suppression of certain identities but an ethos of unabashed cruelty.

the obvious explanation for this is that until at least 1260 BC, the people of the outer hebrides lived for several hundred years and that their heads were interchangeable, much like lego figurines. the real mysteries are when they lost these abilities and how we can help them get them back

imagine being some austin edgelord who spends years building your rep as a dangerous truth-telling comedy outlaw and the government decides jimmy kimmel is more dangerous than you

the dancing around white supremacy in this hearing is going to be downright balletic

I was honestly not expecting to admire the guys doing hunger strikes in front of AI companies the way this @haydenfield.bsky.social piece left me doing. A small gesture in the scheme of things? Maybe! But they seem to take AI's implications more seriously than any of the CEOs working on it.

The right's intense, government-backed cooption of public shaming, one of the few weapons available to vulnerable people regularly unserved by hard politics or the legal system, is probably one of the most successful cultural operations of the decade.

Was not expecting how quickly the "risks of chatbots" hearing would jump to blaming Character.AI for making kids turn atheist.

The less the First Amendment meaningfully protects the average person the easier it becomes to say the First Amendment doesn't matter, and anti-SLAPP is about the lowest-hanging option for improvement you can get.

Okay I'm three books deep now with Michael McDowell and the man has not let me down. Cold Moon Over Babylon was a little formulaic but Blood Rubies and The Elementals are legit unsettling while being very satisfying pulp.

I need somebody to scientifically figure out if Silksong is harder than Hollow Knight so I'll have an answer to the question "how much has parenthood trashed my twitch-reflex gaming skills"

did a little media criticism www.theverge.com/politics/777...

The Verge is running a subscription sale! Subscribe so you can read more of our cutting edge news coverage on how Charlᶦᵉ ᴷᶦʳᵏ'ˢ ᵃˡˡᵉᵍᵉᵈ ˢʰᵒᵒᵗᵉʳ ᶜᵃʳᵛᵉᵈ ᵇᵘˡˡᵉᵗˢ ʷᶦᵗʰ ᴴᵉˡˡᵈᶦᵛᵉʳ ᶜᵒᵐᵇᵒˢ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶠᵘʳʳʸ ˢᵉˣ ᵐᵉᵐᵉˢ www.theverge.com/politics/777...

Even if you're into the premise that science tells us about fiber arts and vice versa, stuff like crochet modeling of hyperbolic planes has been a field of study for decades, you'd probably expect some percolation there.

the verge and various other sites have referred to DOGE as "fake" or "not real" a lot because musk didn't follow the legal rules for creating a US government department, and the effect this apparently had on google's magic answer machine is truly incredible

The clearest boring, old-school "objective" journo reason to not be on X is still that X has a history of suspending journalists for offending Elon, and heavily relying on a platform where you must avoid saying things that bother the owner undercuts your credibility as a free speaker and thinker

I'm gonna start a version of that "current architecture sucks because a secret superior extinct civilization built everything before 1930" conspiracy theory for corporate logo trends

The annoying thing about AI is that the tech is exciting and full of potential! But the hype cycle incentivizes companies to build increasingly asinine, useless, and harmful applications.

It's not often I genuinely see a story I think *must* be The Onion but this one qualifies hard

the majority of straight romance stories are about selling patriarchy as a desirable social contract by either laundering it or instilling a sense of fatalism. either "this man isn't like the others, he isn't a monster" or "I have no option so I might as well try to enjoy the mediocre sex".

@ysbryd.net World of Horror pixel art in my part of town on wplace o_o

new silver age superhero origin story dropped

Death Stranding 2's whole middle act is leaving me pretty cold but unfortunately I cannot ignore the pull of building a continent-wide road AND monorail network

When LLMs go off the rails, people often try to find out what happened by asking the bot itself. But they should be skeptical of the answers. As @alexhanna.bsky.social‬ explains, the only real way to find out is to demand transparency from the creators. www.theverge.com/x-ai/758595/...

I keep wondering why I've become so much less reticent about condemning AI chatbot fails than social media moderation fails, and I think I've come down on: overmoderating social media risks removing genuinely valuable human communication, overmoderating companion chatbots risks mostly reducing slop.

constantly thinking about this

The last movie I watched was Sinners and @knguyen.bsky.social is sorely tempting me to take the lowest fall possible as a followup www.theverge.com/film/758158/...

I've been reading a little contemporary fun wlw pulp (Killer Potential, Hades Calculus) and it really drives home how much We Straights are missing out on the combo of "not heterofatalist but still intense and slightly fucked up"

*tapping this sign over and over*

could everything just please stop smacking of gender for a little

Wonderville is hosting its 1st annual Alt.Ctrl Festival! Taking place on Sunday August 24th this festival features games and installations that use alternative inputs. The gallery will be open from 4pm-10pm and features a plethora of great games! Flyer designed by Wenxiao Ding

the structure of protagonism asserts a kind of force that is not only independent of right and wrong, but concretely sociopathic in how it urges you to discount it

I've been dreading this turn for months — the war over AI scraping data is undercutting a load-bearing part of the internet, and it will probably only get worse.

Ken Levine's devoted centrism is incredibly politically wrong-headed but also one of the reasons System Shock 2 and Bioshock are very compelling games

the new world of tech governance is bad laws/regulations that are then held over platforms' heads as leverage in a way that undercuts the premise for why the rules were adopted in the first place

Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns

an all new way to get the best of our cursed tech policy coverage

xAI's Edward Cullenbot sounds basically as silly and awkward as I would expect

can elon musk stop doing weird ai sex stuff for 5 minutes

I wonder how much of the sudden acceptance of age verification would have been avoided if major digital platforms hadn't monopolized access, eroded privacy to the point that one more layer of surveillance feels minor, and stewarded their spaces so poorly that nobody sees value for children in them

I honestly don't think it makes much sense but I'm sort of charmed that a major plot point in the sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials is the main character having her soul run away because she got too into Ayn Rand

paying somebody to hold up a huge flashing sign at every big tech event talking up AR glasses that reads DISPLAYS ARE HARD

I find this as funny as anybody, but the serious answer is in the part where he carefully notes his *daughter* is the one who moved out of the city -- they're never (ostensibly) afraid for their own safety, it's the people they're manfully protecting who are scared