Sundays - well, very early Sunday mornings - are for watching a whole queue of hungry wild animals pass your kitchen window, because a neighbour has decided to leave a bollard-sized catfood dispenser outside the block entrance while they're away on holiday. I'm pretty sure the neighbour's cat wouldn't eat from the dispenser even if there wasn't a badger wedged eagerly inside it. She's an aloof and disdainful creature, who hates going near the front door because that's where those stinky humans come from.
Will I try to feed the poor moggy, denied her dinner by a bunch of Farthing Wood rejects? No I will not, because I'm too busy reading articles about videogames, and things that are vaguely in the orbit of videogames. Here are a few of those articles. Look, please stop fretting about the cat. She's perfectly plump and glossy, whereas that badger looks like he hasn't had a square meal since August.
Chloe Mashiter writes about the labyrinthine question of safety protocols when playing a live-action role-playing game inside another live-action role-playing game.
For Rascal, Thomas Manuel writes about the 30-60 player game of Band of Blades that spanned an entire school, discussing how troupe play and the sharing of characters may become a kind of institution-building, with a closing aside on Covid and Game of Thrones.
When was the last time you read something depressing about generative AI? Five minutes ago? Time for another helping: Futurism's Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian report at length on Brown Brothers Media, a firm who buy established journalism outlets in order to transform them into lakes of stochastic gruel.
It will have taken you at least another five minutes to read that, I reckon, so how about one more? Here's 404 Media reporting on unredacted court filings in which Microsoft and OpenAI executives state rather unambiguously that generative AI is, as one put it, the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
Let's counteract the genEnnui with this sprawling bit of StreetView sleuthing about the early days of MicroProse from Where Were They Now - a blog dedicated to revisiting the offices of some of Britain's foundational videogame developers. The write-up includes a few jolly mentions of embryonic videogame journalists, busy plying their trade in a prehistoric utopia when articles didn't have farking comments threads underneath them.
In much the same way that a billion typewriter monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, so it is said that if you throw enough Jank.cool writers at a videogame, you will eventually have a good article about that videogame. Not this group write-up about trying to play Wardogs without spending any money on gear, mind you. This write-up is a document of disgrace. Here's Jonty making the best of it:
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-sunday-papers-828
