Google weather map shows a giant kaiju Horace approaching. Stay safe if you're in the North, kids.

Damn you, 44-year-old computer! *shakes fist*

I have been to my Itch page and marked all of my games as "no generative AI used". Seems we're a dying breed.

Put it this way - if you'd spent two months making your first wonky BASIC game I would be all over that shit. That's what I want to see and play. If you "dreamed of making a game since you were a kid" find a way to actually make it. Yourself. Because if you used AI to make it, you still didn't actually make a game.

I'm not against opening up the scene to non-programmers, but there are game-making tools precisely for this purpose. "I spent two hours talking to a chatbot and made this" doesn't really feel like it's in the spirit of things, even without the whole "boiling the planet to make a shit game that barely works" thing.

Getting rather concerned/tired at the increasing volume of AI slop hitting the ZX Spectrum scene. Seems every other title is now created with Claude or something similar. It was bad enough when it was being used for box art and loading screens, now it's producing entire games and utilities. :-(

I wish I had just enough money to keep me safe and comfortable for the rest of my life so I could quit all this shit and concentrate on things that are actually important to me. I don't want to be rich, I just want to be calm and content. Doesn't sound like a big ask really, does it?

Thought of this because I started playing "Born of Bread" today and it has *no* voice acting, and what a breath of fresh air that is in an RPG.

Rather than going "full coverage", I wish all games had an option to turn off the voice acting. I don't have the time or patience for you to deliver your devastating monologue, I can read it ten times faster and get on with the game. Skipping is no good because then you end up with clipped voices annoying the shit out of you, so straight up "no voices' options, please! Ta.

The mighty Out Run on Super Chart Island this week. I bought the Speccy version of this with immense excitement and it was.... not great. I still played the shit out of it, however. https://superchartisland.com/out-run/

This is so ridiculously cool I think I might need one. https://www.techradar.com/health-fitness/smartwatches/a-watch-id-actually-buy-casios-latest-retro-take-on-a-smartwatch-is-the-f-b100w-with-step-counting-included

On a scale of 1 to Fucked Off I'm currently rating somewhere around a Hulk Smash.

I was absolutely delighted to find this morning that someone has ported one of my all-time favourite Atari ST games, Oids, to Linux, Mac, Windows, Raspberry Pi and Spectrum Next! There's even a Steam Deck-specific build and it runs and plays absolutely perfectly! So, so pleased - it's an absolutely fantastic game that more people should've played! https://mausthekat.itch.io/oids

Jesus. Well, that's the end of that, then. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/electronic-arts-ea-officially-sold-off-to-saudi-arabias-public-investment-fund-jared-kushner-and-others/

I'm going to continue to plug Super Chart Island because I think it's a fantastic blog and an essential read to anyone who grew up playing games in the UK in the 80s. This week it's the absolutely brilliant 'Renegade'. https://superchartisland.com/renegade/

If you want to see YouTube's AI-generated subtitles shit the bed, throw up their hands and say "fuck this, I'm going home" in the most spectacular fashion then "Informer" by Snow has exactly what you need. :-D https://youtu.be/TSffz_bl6zo?si=IdXDvRK6YUjfXVO0

I have never, in over 30 years in this industry, been so demoralised, disconnected or disillusioned with the whole fucking business. It's absolute dog shit.

My company is now pursuing a fully-agentic AI workflow. AI decides what features we need, how they should work, specs them, codes them, tests them, documents them, builds and releases them, and does the marketing and sales pitches and communications in order to sell them. At every step, professional people with actual.skills are being told they are not required for anything other than babysitting the AI. I wonder how many employees will actually remain in a year's time? Or customers, tbf.

Might be showing my age there.

What are the cool kids using for text editing on the Mac these days? Is it still BBEdit?