Home Projects Links Ask About
Mastodon Letterboxd Backloggd Feed
  • Posted 17 July 2025 by Natalie

    nex3 BACKER
    reviewed Elden Ring: Nightreign
    ★★★★★ Completed on Windows PC

    I've played a lot of Nightreign. I'm still playing a lot of Nightreign. In the month and a half it's been out, it quickly became a member of the hundo club, it got me fully back into wiki editing and data mining, and even after beating every nightlord numerous times and completing every character quest I'll still cheerfully hop into a run any time anyone asks. The only reason I'm marking this "completed" now is because I want to get this review out of my head and onto the web.

    If you'll permit a digression, I deeply admire Elden Ring's parsimony. It's a huge game made be a relatively small company who had largely made relatively small games up to that point, and it accomplishes that with an economy of design I consider admirable. I know people complain about the re-used bosses, but there are actually very few of the 165 that are true duplicates of one another. Instead, they add little variations here and there, pair them with other bosses for duo encounters, or ramp up the complexity of their abilities over the course of the game. The small dungeons are the same way: they take a limited set of shared components, then mix and match them in different novel ways. These raw materials are a palette of paints that they re-use and recombine over and over to paint the entire game.

    Most large games work this way to some extent, but in Elden Ring the quality of the design at each point really shines through in large part because it draws attention to the patterns and repetitions. You know a catacomb is going to have imps or skeletons and some sort of clever trick, you know a watchdog is going to do some kind of elemental damage, you know a hero's grave is going to make you want to claw out your eyes. But you don't know exactly how—it sets up just enough expectations for it to be able to play with them and continue to surprise you throughout its massive length.

    If Elden Ring is a painting and its palette, Nightreign is another artist picking up the same palette and painting something entirely different. It stands as much in the tradition of unofficial mods as it does the tradition of classic soulslikes—it's related to Elden Ring in more or less the same way Defense of the Ancients is related to Warcraft III. The nouns and verbs are largely the same, but the context in which they exist is completely different and utterly surprising. After spending more than a decade as industry trendsetters, carving out a new genre and driving other studios insane trying to match their success in it despite going against all conventional wisdom, From Software has now put out a game that is itself reacting to trends in the industry. Not only that, it's integrating two trends—battle royales and…

    1. nat reviews
    2. nightreign

  • Posted 16 July 2025 by Natalie

    every beautiful Shakespeare line about love comes from one of three sources:

    1. complete idiot who ends up happy despite their every effort to the contrary
    2. innocent and tenderhearted angel who's about to have the worst day of their life and then die badly
    3. sonnet
    1. shakespeare

  • Posted 15 July 2025 by Natalie

    bcj posted 19 June 2025 on postnow.site

    Replacing Jobs

    My mom is a copy-editor, a job that has been ostensibly replaceable by spellcheck for what, 30 years? 40?

    Anyway, it’s interesting how you can basically always tell when a publication has decided they don’t need a copy editor


    1. Posted 10 July 2025 by Natalie

      attention all impostors masquerading as friends: you are eligible for an upgrade to friend status as long as you return the original friends unharmed


      1. Posted 30 June 2025 by Natalie

        the older I get, the more I understand my grandfather

        1. so-called ai

      2. So-Called "AI" Cannot Program

        Posted 20 June 2025 by Natalie

        I contend that it is impossible for so-called "AI", by which I mean the crop of convolutional neural network-based pattern-filling tools that is currently in the throes of a hype cycle that puts crypto and NFTs to shame, to meaningfully do programming. As more and more of the mind bogglingly rich tech oligarchs lead their followers into the delusion that these tools are useful in any way remotely comparable to their cost, I think it's worth taking the time to articulate exactly why this is, even if it's already intuitively clear to the more thoughtful practitioners of the craft.

        We must begin, as always, with a clarity of the term under discussion. "Programming", in its broadest sense, is the act of making a computer do something—but "do something" is itself vague, so we'll need to dig a little deeper into that. To understand it, please bear with me as I establish some useful terminology.

        A Brief Meander into the Philosophy of Language

        Let's talk about syntax and semantics. If you're a programmer, you may be familiar with these terms as they're used to discuss programming languages. If you're not, that's fine too. I'll do my best to explain them in brief.

        Syntax and semantics are two related ways of talking about an abstract structure. Although the concepts were originally developed to describe human languages, they can be used by analogy for all sorts of things, which is what I'm building up to here. They're very useful particularly for understanding how humans[1] relate to those structures and relate those structures to the world as they understand it.

        "Syntax" is simply the structure itself, in all the technical detail of how it fits together. The syntax of a human language is the way its words and sentences fit together, what's "allowed" and "not allowed" by the subtle and mercurial rules we all internalized as children (or adults, for second languages and beyond). In English, "ran boy" is not a valid sentence due to the language's semantics, although most native speakers would probably guess that it means "the boy ran". Noam Chomsky wrote "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an example of a sentence that is syntactically valid despite being nonsense.

        The fact that that sentence is nonsense is the domain of "semantics". Semantics are the human interpretation of a structure, the meaning we ascribe to it and to the best of our ability share with those around us. For example, although the syntax of the sentences "みなさんはピッコロさんが大好きだよ!" and "Everyone loves Piccolo!"[2] are completely different, their meaning—their semantic content—is exactly the same. And that meaning is something that humans bring to them, not something that is in any way intrinsically associated with those particular wiggly lines in that particular order.

        Although syntax is a very useful concept in its own right, in this post I really want to focus on semantics. So remember: semantics is meaning, and specifically it's meaning applied to a structure from outside by humans.

        A Better Definition…

        1. so-called ai
        2. article

      3. Posted 13 June 2025 by Natalie

        im gonna put the "bee" in "be right back" *buzzes away*


        1. Posted 6 June 2025 by Natalie

          nex3 BACKER
          reviewed Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
          ★★★★ Completed on Nintendo Switch 2
          Let me begin by saying: fuck Nintendo. Their insistence on ruining the lives of people who do anything they disapprove of with the products they sell, regardless of whether that thing is illegal let alone harmful to them, is despicable. It creates a chilling effect on vital efforts towards digital preservation that extends far beyond their own products, on top of just being a heinous thing to do to fans of their games. The regard in which they consistently hold their back catalog as assets on which they could one day collect rent speaks to a deep-rooted capitalistic mindset among the businessmen who run the company that is in no way outweighed by the positive things written below.

          All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.

          The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.

          And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is.
          Reviewed on Jun 6, 2025
          1. backloggd
          2. nat reviews
          3. nintendo switch 2 welcome tour

        2. tits out for pride month

          Posted 2 June 2025 by Natalie

          detailed image description

          spock swings a large bladed implement and cuts a hole across kirk's chest, revealing his tits

          1. pride
          2. star trek

        3. Posted 1 June 2025 by Natalie

          if I were willing to get tattoos based on media properties that I didn't help create, "bearer seek seek lest" would be high on my list

          1. dark souls 2
        1 / 22 Next Page
        Copyright Natalie Weizenbaum