Did you hear about that dumb Kotaku article?

Did you hear about that dumb Kotaku article that made a bunch of people mad? How about this instead: Did you know that one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was an occultist who ecstatically recited Crowley's "Hymn to Pan" during rocket tests and befriended L. Ron Hubbard? Interesting huh? No really, the …

Happy “y no international mens day?” Day

I've posted variations of this on Twitter or in private messages before, but given that today is International Women's Day, I thought I would enshrine the comments in a blog post. The original analysis was lighthearted, and I'm probably not the best one to speak substantively on International Women's Day, but I've also tried to …

Untimely meditations on a mania

Gamestop's market capitalization (share price multiplied by number of shares, a measure of valuation for the company) exceeded $22 billion by the end of this week, up from the quarter of a billion it was valued at the same time last year. This $22 billion valuation is greater than the market capitalization of Kellogg's, the …

Good politicians should disappoint you

I'm one of those people who is "into politics" but, in my defence, I started back when it was boring. The last four years have seen politics consume everyone's attention and the results have not been edifying. If there is one political story to come out of 2020 it is that people want politics to …

Leave Lurkers Alone

When I was in university I was walking home late one night with my headphones in. The only other person around was a man walking down the sidewalk the other way and he said something like "nice night" or other some pleasantry. I wear headphones to avoid this sort of thing, and I was not …

Steam Reviews are Asinine

Preface: I wind up wanting to write this article each time I check out the reviews for a game that I like that has recently been released. The game in this case is Lucifer Within Us and I was given a press key from Kitfox Games for promotional purposes. As much as I enjoy the …

Store Wars: Imperfect views of imperfect markets

Economics has something of an edge when it comes to respectability among the social sciences, but it is often squandered by talking heads acting like everyone else is an idiot on TV. The benefit of taking an introductory economics class is not prestige or a set of talking points but rather a set of tools …

The maturity trap

Insecurity Tabletop role-playing games have sense of insecurity hiding just beneath the surface. They haven't become the cultural phenomena video games are and certainly don't bring in the same kind of revenue. When they did have a cultural moment, part of it was being the subject of a moral panic. The outside perception of the …

The Networks of Cultist Simulator

Cultist Simulator reveals its world through fragments and its lore is discovered by considering these fragments in relation to each other. The game's Discord server has an active community that discusses the lore of the world (now known as the Secret Histories), and there is plenty of room for interpretation about what is going on. …

Thoughts on a game engine from someone who doesn’t know about game engines

Epic released a demo for the latest iteration of their game engine, Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). The demo looks magnificent and has a bit where the roof opens up and lights a room with 500 detailed statues. Once I looked at Twitter I was informed that the demo, apparently, wasn't all that good. The objections …