Sundays are for sobbingly lifting exactly one boulder from the groaning dreampile that is my backlog. Good news, Vacuity, cpt_freakout and the rest – I’m trying out your precious, precious Troubleshooter game. I hear it’s a hundred hours long, so please do not take this as a promise that a write-up is forthcoming. So far my major takeaways are 1) I enjoy collecting masteries, aka packages of abilities and modifiers, and 2) this “Short Break” track is cooool. Please hum along while browsing our latest collection of Rollicking Reads.
For Aeon, Ali Rıza Taşkale analyses how self-appointed big tech visionaries have borrowed the trappings of Western sci-fi and fantasy works such as Neuromancer, the Foundation novels, and Star Trek for their political projects. I think you could get a whole ‘nother essay out of this excerpt on how the threat of sci-fantasy apocalypse gets perversely deployed as a means of distraction.
It is the triumph of the speculative sci-fi scenario over human solidarity: why fix the world we inhabit when we can spend billions preventing a robot uprising that exists only in the imagination? By trying to steer policy debates toward distant catastrophic scenarios – killer robots, rogue AI, existential risk – the industry diverts attention from regulating the systems already causing harm: algorithmic bias in hiring, facial recognition’s racial disparities, platform amplification of extremism.
For the LRB, Jenny Turner writes about the Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon (birthname 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. It’s a longer one – 10,000 words.
Scots is love, English learning, and you can’t do much of the latter before you lose your roots: it still runs deep, this Oedipal confusion of nation and class and agency and power, and without it, there’s no way [Nicola] Sturgeon’s vaguely social-democratic Scottish nationalism would ever have wrung and held the hearts of people the way it did. Much of it, as Sturgeon senses, has to do with ‘Scots words’, as instruments of interpellation really, especially when your heart is getting held and wrung by them at school. Gibbon’s use of Scots is quite confusing, an artefact that looks authentic although it’s not: ‘The technique,’ as he confessed, ‘is to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires.’ He was keen for his book to sell, to American audiences in particular, and appended a glossary of around a hundred words to the American edition. The most used ‘Scotticisms’, according to William K. Malcolm’s new biography, are modifiers such as awful, bit, coarse, fair, fell, ‘cosmetic rather than descriptive’, easy enough for diaspora Scots, more than a quarter of a million of whom left for North America in the 1920s alone.
For Stop Caring, an anonymous writer considers gender dysphoria by way of two games I would somehow never have thought to place together: Stellar Blade and Brush Burial: Gutter World. Beware spoilers for each.
She is the epitome of what I wish I could be. An androgynous, femme-leaning killing machine with a fat ass and a tight waist. I can’t look at her without feeling a concoction of wild lust and furious jealousy. I love the way her eight eyes stare down at me and tell me to beg. I love the forked tail she strikes with, the way she folds her enemies and twists them like dolls, the suffocating thighs and calves she clamps down on brutish guards with. And all of it, she does to help her and her partner breathe a little easier while they try to make it through life in this rotting world.
Jim Rossignol, formerly of this parish, has a little Bluesky thread about the creation and success of tweedy sandbox robo-avoider Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It maketh me feel old.
So here we had a confluence of events that is unrepeatable in spacetime. Kickstarter was a viable way to raise good amounts for a videogame project, Early Access was a novelty that everyone wants to check out, Steam was still curated, people were fascinated in 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 doubles as an invitation to consider smell in aesthetics and art production more generally. Compare and contrast efforts to make videogames stink.
Some decades after the beached whale foretold the fate of Amsterdam, visitors in the city came to admire the latest works by Rembrandt van Rijn in his studio. As Rembrandt’s biographer Arnold Houbraken recounts, when visitors edged closer to the paintings, the artist pulled them away, saying, “The smell of the paint would irritate you”.11 Oil paint combines pulverised pigments with linseed oil, a sharp-smelling binding medium which is extracted from pressed flax seeds. The compound produces a wonderfully supple and jewel-like paint that can achieve fine details and varying textures. In Rembrandt’s self-portrait, he does not use oil paint sparingly, but practically sculpts with it. He smears out flesh-coloured oils to construct his nose, and in order to evoke the folds of his headpiece, he scrapes out lines of blue and yellow paint revealing the dark ground beneath. In the studio, the odour of linseed oil must have been a disruptive force, and Rembrandt used it to persuade his visitors to distance themselves from the painting, to best behold the rough, impasto slicks of paint. The painting has retained most of its lustre, but the odour, in time, has faded.
I note with agony that Nic Reuben, former RPS librarian, has joined the musty has-beens of Jank.cool on their quest to publish no good writing whatsoever. Here he is on Sol Cesto.
It’s the second heatwave of the year in the UK right now. My PC quivers like angry blancmanche at the suggestion it perform even the laziest task, and Snickers ice creams melt down my palm and form crunchy bangles around my wrist before I can ferry them home to my face. Sol Cesto, you say? The sun has ceased? Sign me up!
Get in the filthmobile, loser, Pervert Jam 2026 is underway. The goal is to “create games with no public in mind but yourself”, with the optional theme “A Pound of Flesh”. Oh, you had already pledged your intellectual faculties to Critical Distance’s latest “friendslop”-themed Blogs of the Round Table? Very well, then. We will watch your career with great interest.
Here’s some Modest Mouse to play us out.