Sundays are for sobbing to lift exactly one rock from the groaning pile of dreams that is my backlog. Good news, Vacuity, cpt_freakout and others – I’m trying your precious, precious troubleshooting game. I’ve heard it’s a hundred hours long, so please don’t take that as a promise that an article will be forthcoming. My main takeaways so far are 1) I like collecting masteries, i.e. packages of abilities and modifiers, and 2) this song “Short Break” it’s cool. Please hum as you browse our latest collection of exciting reads.
For Infinite timeAli Rinodot;za Takale analyzes how self-proclaimed big-tech visionaries borrowed trappings from Western science fiction and fantasy works such as Neuromancer, the Foundation novels, and Star Trek for their political projects. I think you could get a whole other essay out of this excerpt about how the threat of sci-fi apocalypse is perversely deployed as a means of distraction.
This is the triumph of the speculative science fiction scenario over human solidarity: why repair the world we live in when we can spend billions to prevent a robot uprising that only exists in the imagination? By trying to direct policy debates toward distant doomsday scenarios – killer robots, malicious AI, existential risk – the industry diverts attention from regulating already harmful systems: algorithmic biases in hiring, racial disparities linked to facial recognition, amplification of extremism by platforms.
For the LRBJenny Turner writes about the Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon (birth name James Leslie Mitchell), exploring nationalism, patriarchy, class, place, language and changing times. I’ve never read any Gibbon/Mitchell, but I found this piece quite enveloping. This is a longer text – 10,000 words.
Scots is about love, learning English, and you can only do so much of the latter before you lose your roots: this Oedipal confusion of nation, class, agency and power still runs deep, and without it there is no chance that (Nicola) Sturgeon’s vaguely social democratic Scottish nationalism would ever have twisted and held back people’s hearts the way it did. Much of it, as Sturgeon feels, has to do with “Scottish words”, as instruments of interpellation, especially when your heart is squeezed and squeezed by them at school. Gibbon’s use of Scots is quite puzzling, an artifact that appears authentic even though it is not: “The technique,” as he confessed, “consists of modeling the English language on the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and of injecting into the English vocabulary the minimum number of Braid Scots words which this remodeling requires.” He wanted his book to sell, particularly to the American public, and annexed a glossary of around a hundred words to the American edition. The most widely used “Scotticisms,” according to William K. Malcolm’s new biography, are modifiers such as awful, little, crude, fair, fallen, “cosmetic rather than descriptive,” easy enough to understand for the Scottish diaspora, more than a quarter of a million of whom left for North America in the 1920s alone.
For Stop caringan anonymous writer considers gender dysphoria through two games I would never have thought to lump together: Stellar Blade and Brush Burial: Gutter World. Beware of spoilers for everyone.
She is the embodiment of what I wish I could be. An androgynous, feminine killing machine with a big ass and tight waist. I can’t look at her without feeling a concoction of wild desire and raging jealousy. I love the way his eight eyes look at me and tell me to beg. I love the forked tail with which she strikes, the way she bends her enemies and twists them like dolls, the suffocating thighs and calves with which she squeezes the brutal guards. And she does all of this to help her and her partner breathe a little easier as they try to survive in this rotten world.
Jim Rossignol, elder of this parish, has a small Blue Sky Yarn about the creation and success of tweedy sandbox robo-avoider Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It makes me feel old.
So here we had a confluence of irreplaceable events in space-time. Kickstarter was a viable way to raise good money for a video game project, early access was a new thing that everyone wanted to experience, Steam was still organized, people were fascinated by the idea of procedural generation.
This one is from 2021, but I don’t care: Lizzie Marx has a fascinating essay on the stench of dead whales in 17th-century Dutch art, which also constitutes an invitation to consider odor in aesthetics and artistic production in general. Compare and contrast efforts to video games stink.
Decades after the beached whale predicted the fate of Amsterdam, visitors to the city came to admire Rembrandt van Rijn’s latest works in his studio. As Rembrandt biographer Arnold Houbraken recounts, when visitors approached the paintings, the artist would remove them, saying, “The smell of the paint would irritate you.”11 Oil paint combines sprayed pigments with linseed oil, a pungent-smelling binder extracted from pressed linseeds. The compound produces a wonderfully flexible, jewel-like paint that achieves fine details and varied textures. In Rembrandt’s self-portrait, he does not use oil paint sparingly, but practically sculpts with it. He spreads flesh-colored oils to construct his nose and, to evoke the folds of his helmet, he scratches lines of blue and yellow paint revealing the dark background beneath. In the studio, the smell of linseed oil must have been a disruptive force, and Rembrandt used it to persuade his visitors to move away from the painting, the better to contemplate the rough, impastoed slicks of paint. The painting has retained most of its luster, but its scent has faded over time.
I note with distress that Nic Reuben, former RPS librarian, has joined the musty has-beens at Jank.cool in their quest to publish no good writing. Here he is on Sol Cesto.
It is currently the second heatwave of the year in the UK. My PC shudders like an angry white sleeve at the thought of even the laziest task, and the Snickers ice creams melt in my palm and form crunchy bracelets around my wrist before I can bring them back to my face. Sol Cesto, you say? Has the sun stopped? Sign me up!
Get in the salemobile, loser, Pervert Jam 2026 is in progress. The goal is to “create games with no audience other than yourself in mind,” with the optional theme “A Pound of Flesh.” Oh, you’ve already engaged your intellectual faculties in Critical Distance’s latest “friendslop” on the theme Round Table Blogs? Very well, then. We will follow your career with great interest.
Here are some Modest mouse to play us.
