Angry Robot

God damn. All the episodes of Luke Cage are named after Gang Starr tracks, and Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad are doing the score. Looks like I picked the wrong month to quit bingeing Netflix shows.

A Great Disturbance in the Robot

Well I’ve started moving the site over to WordPress. The site currently runs Textpattern which is a little outdated and there are a bunch of things I’d like to be doing that I can’t do. Unfortunately, this blog was started about ten years ago, and I also imported most of the posts from my previous blog, so… there are something like 4,000 posts. A) It’s making me question my life choices, B) it seems to break every available import script, so there may be no way of doing this without some manner of schism, rupture, lacuna, or scene kinda like at the end of The Force Awakens where there’s a bigass earthquake and a huge rip in the ground and on the one side, this blog’s entire history, sweaty, overweight, insecure and broken, and on the other side, angrily waving its lightsaber, the svelte, cocky, and bug-eyed Future.

We’re not there yet, so bear with me. Blog rupture.

Gene Wilder Dies at 83; Star of ‘Willy Wonka’ and ‘Young Frankenstein’

Man. My dad loved Wilder, and they were the same age.

Three dead after reported crossbow attack in Toronto

Why Do Anonymous Twitter Trolls Use Anime Avatars?

Amsterdam's 'Night Mayor' Job Has Spread to Paris, Zurich, and Other European Cities

Wow, this should have been Rob Ford’s job

No Man's Blog Post

I don’t personally recall an indie game that received as much hype as No Man’s Sky, and I’ve been gamin’ since you were naught but a twinkle in your daddy’s ball sack. That it presents some aspect of Ultimate Nerd Fantasy has something to do with it. (I’m talking about space exploration, in case you thought I meant fussy inventory management.)

High expectations usually mean huge disappointment, and NMS didn’t disappoint in the disappointment department. By that I mean it was disappointing, to a lot of people. Just to clarify. Man what a disappointing paragraph.

I get the disappointment. I feel you, man. Here is a clear technical and artistic marvel of a game: a procedurally generated actual universe of unprecedented size, uncommon beauty, set to haunting music, and with such a frustrating initial gameplay loop that it seems to accidentally pose some deep questions about the pointlessness of existence. I can go anywhere in the fucking universe and I’m worried about how much iridium my ship can carry? What the fuck is wrong with me?

You get the sense that developer Hello Games struggled to find some gameplay that could be tacked on to the bundle of infinite beauty they had somehow dreamed up, and what they arrived at goes something like: Space Minecraft, but instead of collecting resources to build things, you collect ‘em to upgrade ship, suit and tools. It’s more complicated than that – there’s some plot, and yes you can fight pirates kinda. But that’s the base loop, and at the beginning it’s made much harder because you are randomly presented some subset of ALL the resources, depending on what random planet you spawn on. And you don’t know which resources you need to fuel this or that engine or improve this or that device. And your inventory is much too small.

As you upgrade your stuff, and learn what each resource is needed for, the gameplay becomes less frustrating. 25 slots of inventory means waaay fewer fussy decisions than 12 slots. The loop continues, though; you see pretty ships and they cost millions of space bucks. You start finding out which rarer, riskier resources might yield some real cheddar if systematically harvested. But is that really the point? It’s gameplay loop as existential crisis: a prettier ship, is that all I care about? It won’t get me to the finish line any faster. Is getting to the finish line faster even what I care about? It’s a real Conan, what is best in life? sort of situation. And I’m not sure that crushing your enemies is all that necessary.

In my opinion: the real joy of this game is exploring, discovering new worlds, seeing what strange beings have fluked into existence, and then speeding off for the horizon again. Zen Space Drifter should be the gameplay loop, not Soulless Min-maxing Resource Bandit. It’s odd to have a game’s own systems try to herd you away from that realization, but I suppose the original plan, open-world style, was to have a variety of activities that could constitute gameplay. Trading! Piracy! Taking pictures of rare space birds! Then most of them got stripped down to virtual non-existence in the rush to ship. Hopefully they also crib the continual updates from Minecraft, too, and this becomes a lot more fleshed out down the road.

I don’t mind it, though. After some light bingeing to start, I went a few days without playing it, and actually missed it. I’m a relaxed space tourist – I scan a lot of new lifeforms, take a lot of screenshots of cool animals and pretty sunsets n’ shit. It feels like getting high in your buddy’s van and looking at prog-rock album covers. Is it worth $80 CDN, the…. Eighty dollar question? I guess it depends on how many nights I hang out in the procedurally generated Imagination Van. Is it cheaper to just pay for some gas n’ grass and albums or… no wait, I’m min-maxing again.

One Star Over, a Planet That Might Be Another Earth

Zoë Quinn on Life Since Gamergate and Her Erotic New Video Game

The Tingler! Has anyone actually read any of his books?

Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above

Live, constantly recorded footage of an entire city core means that after a known crime occurs, the recordings can be checked to see who was there and wound back to see where they came from, where they went after, etc. Massive privacy implications, but feels sort of inevitable. This is what I always imagined Google Maps would turn into.

How Chance the Rapper's Life Became Perfect

His grandmother cursed him, kinda

Instapaper has been acquired by Pinterest

Oh great

The 21st Century’s 100 greatest films

As chosen by a poll of worldwide critics. #1: Mulholland Drive.

Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

“A lie with a billion dollars behind it is stronger than the truth. Peter Thiel has shut down Gawker.com.”

Trumpism is a Politics of Loss and Revenge

Roseanne Barr Calls Out Louis C.K.: ‘I’ve Heard So Many Stories’

Daring Fireball: Is Donald Trump Actually Trying to Win?

I’m torn between this explanation and the other plausible one, which is that he’s nuts

Triumph trolls Trump fans (thanks y)

Louisiana Floods Lead to 6 Deaths

On ‘Going Away’

“The expected thing, then, is that love will pop out at us, like a dolphin breaching in a polluted urban estuary. While its not terribly sympathetic to wait for happiness to come to you in your roomy pants, there is the appealing idea that it’s something that simply hasn’t happened yet, like the onset of a genetic disease.”

Learning to Appreciate My Chamber of Secrets

“A writer reflects on what reading fan fiction taught her about sex.”

Pieces of Silver

Krugman gives a good, concise version of the argument that Trump is no anomaly, he’s the monster the Republican Party has been developing for decades.

“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment

Grim

Everything Bryan Fuller revealed about Star Trek Discovery yesterday

The show runner of Hannibal is doing the new Trek series. AWESOME.

People drop acid and build Ikea furniture