It's kinda wild that by basically making no video games in ten years (okay one but still) Rockstar has made GTA VI's release the biggest thing imaginable, and by contrast most gamers probably would guess "What is the most recent Assassin's Creed game?" wrong because they get sharted out too frequently.

A masterpiece. https://minesweeper.mikelacher.com/

idk, I see what I see thanks to popular media infecting my brain

I think people may have forgotten how powerful internet publishing was 10-15 years ago.

I got every job I had because of my writing. I was invited to conferences or expos because of a post or two I wrote. People would email me regularly and we'd become friends based on things I wrote. Sharing my thoughts with the world on a blog I owned led to so much direct and indirect opportunity.

That hasn't happened in years now. The beautiful ecosystem that gave me so much is dead.

(There are many many many minor and not so minor technical inaccuracies in this film, and none of them bother me because it's a fun movie, but for some reason this one is sticking in my craw.)

On my 709th watch of Hunt for Red October it only just registered to me that Ryan's ploy of "he always go to starboard on the bottom half the hour" is a trivial one to debunk as (a) many people would remember the last few crazy ivans and which way the turns went, and (b) it'd be not much harder than that to simply do a quick check of the ship's log if Mancuso wanted to quickly check if Ryan was full of shit or not.

Sure, the world is roaring to an end due to climate change and war thanks to stupidity, fascism and AI, but I just had a Fisherman's Friend so who's to say if it's a net positive or negative?

There are words that have been soiled by AI. You run into these words or phrases when doing a search for something you need to know on the internet, and every time I run into them I wince as I quickly realise the page I've clicked on is just AI slop.

It's infuriating.

"Worth Flagging" is the latest one.

I really just want to stop using the web. Entirely. I should stop wanting to know things. Can you train yourself into doing that?

It'd be entertaining watching Epic dramatically foot-gun with this "pivot to AI for all coding" as they are seemingly declaring they're doing, except they make one of the most-used engines currently used in game dev.

Though from what I hear UE6 is going to be basically a giant AI driven thing anyway, with AI chat interfaces replacing blueprints soooo...

I wrote a long angry blog post, including describing AI slop as "anal seepage from a corporate server-farm".

I'm not even sure I want to post it. It was just cathartic to write.

Huge medicine news: Spanish teaching hospital reports first successful separation of art and artist in experimental procedure

What if Blade Runner, but more? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwK5KxoJsvk

Cultural exchange program date:

Introduced Y to the Commodore 64, BASIC coding (she's a professional tech worker but slightly too young to have grown up with the glory of C64s) and Maniac Mansion (she'd been coding BASIC on the C64 for two hours before I showed her MM, and she gasped audibly watching the intro - "HOW THE FUCK DID THEY DO THAT?")

In exchange? She began teaching me how to pick locks. Felt a very @alice kind of trade, really.

Further random LAPD / noir trivia: Michael McGrady, who plays grizzled Homicide detective Finbarr "Rusty" Galloway in LA Noire, went on to play the real LA Police Chief who succeeded Two-Gun Davis, Clemence B Horrall, in Frank Darabont's underrated noir series, Mob City.

Another interesting note: Captain Connelly, head of Homicide in LA Noire, appears to be a heavily fictionalised version of Jack Donahoe, the real Captain in charge of Robbery-Homicide at Central division in the 1940s.

He's probably also a heavy influence on the other inspiration for Connelly, Dudley Smith from LA Confidential.

This is the real Ray Pinker. Hired as a police chemist back when the idea of doing forensic analysis was pretty new, he began working as a civilian chemist for the LAPD in an era when the level of corruption was just beyond the pal. Far worse than anything we can easily imagine now. The LAPD Chief then, James Edgar "Two-Gun" Davis, was an out and out supporter of Hitler. His men busted up unions and Communist organisations, he expected his officers to show no mercy (that is, gun down) criminals without consequence, and he was appointed by probably the most corrupt mayor LA has ever had.

Anyway, I mention that mostly because it's interesting to me that Pinker seems to be one of the only figures of the mid-20th century LAPD that comes out unscathed in just about every merciless depiction of that era of American policing.

Whatever else Pinker seemed to be, he cared about scientific provable evidence more than who some thug cop wanted to pin a given murder on.

I guess, in an era like that, it meant a lot.

The problem with re-playing LA Noire is when you get to the Homicide desk cases. Knowing the twist ending (that every case was actually done by the perpetrator of the Black Dahlia killer, who you secretly take out) all other cases feel hollow and shameful on second play, because you know you are arresting/locking up the wrong person.

It's made worse by the fact that there was SUPPOSED to be a Bunco (fraud) desk you played through before Homicide (you still hear Phelps is being transferred to Homicide after 6 months in Bunco). And, honestly? I suspect the cut bunco cases would have been awesome to see.

That and the potential for a Robbery desk sound much better than having to slog through like 7 brutal murders of women where you don't even lock up the right person each time.

The worst possible nightmare: you’re working in an office trying to complete a task you need done before leaving for the day. You keep getting interrupted. Then you wake up, ensuring your dream task never got completed and you start the day with the unshakable feeling that you have a task you need to complete.

OH: [21yo guy at a bar] “Do you know where I can get oestrogen? I want to look young forever.”

Thursday. Meet a stranger in the kitchen this evening. Disclose the hierarchy. A rotten plot. Dance! Thursday.