[This is a repost of this post I originally made on Cohost on 4 October 2022.]

Assembled with the assistance of Zandra and Val. These swamps will be judged on two axes:

• Fun: How enjoyable it is to play through the swamp as a zone in a video game.

• Swampiness: How effectively the swamps invoke a feeling of depression and despair.

Of these, Swampiness is of course the most important, but fun is certainly not a negligible factor. So we begin, in order from least to greatest.

#8: Harvest Valley (Dark Souls 2)

Fun: C+
Swampiness: F

A decent area to walk around in. Full of sexy ladies and big strong men who will suplex you given half a chance. Neat to explore, not too difficult to survive, kind of bullshit in a couple ways but not too bad. However, it's not a fucking swamp. It's just a bunch of poison gas in a mine! It's only even in here because Dark Souls 2 doesn't have any better candidates. Poor show, DS2, poor show.

#7: Bodhisattva Valley Floor (Sekiro)

Fun: C-
Swampiness: C-

This poison swamp is too damn small. It's just a skinny little slip of muck that's both totally optional for finishing the game and easy to grapple across even if you do want to grab the stuff inside. It gets a few extra swampiness points for how demoralizing the elder monkeys are, but they're not even really an intrinsic feature of the swamp. Sekiro may be my favorite FromSoft game, but it's got a crummy swamp.

#6: Nightmare Frontier (Bloodborne)

Fun: C
Swampiness: B

I really hate how this place looks, all yellow and gray and impossible to navigate because everything looks the god damn same. That said, it's easily the swampiest swamp so far, with good and proper mandatory sequences of wading through gruk while trying not to get wrecked by enemies. It's even got some nice goodies hidden within its swampiest nooks. But the real triumph of this area is the presence of the swampiest character in the series: Patches the Spider! His presence alone bumps this up half a letter grade.

#5: Swamp of Sorrow (Demon's Souls)

Fun: D
Swampiness: S

Now we're getting to the good stuff. This swamp absolutely reeks, but in the best way. The all-encompassing misery of trying to navigate this area and getting the shit ripped out of you over and over by goblins and phantoms lowers its fun score and thus overall ranking, but its sheer griminess demands a terrified awe.

#4: Farron Keep (Dark Souls 3)

Fun: C+
Swampiness: B

There's nothing tremendously remarkable about Farron Keep, but it ticks all the boxes. It's got the nasty juice we love to hate, and plenty of it. It's got tasks to keep you moving, enemies to fuck you up, and treats to…

Sorely disappointed that the canon that dogs in the Swan Boy universe are in fact just small humans, as established in the third comic:

...has now been definitively disavowed in today's comic:

Note the decidedly canine dogs in the first panel:

I always thought this gag was quite charming and kept looking forward to it coming back one day, but alas, today my hopes are dashed.

This post has so many interesting tidbits in it!!! I had a lot of fun reading through it, even though I've really only played the first game in the series. I strongly recommend giving it a read.

can't wait for English to redevelop the tu/vous distinction and then lose it again so the only second person pronoun is "y'all"

I'm sure all of you have already read my Apologia for RSS (the very first post on this blog!) and I'm sure you're all reading this in an RSS reader you've chosen for one reason or another. But does your RSS reader show you everything a post contains, or is it hiding the deepest, juiciest quips and chatter from you?

I've been on Tumblr since its heyday back in 2011, and it's now the only social media I can really say I use regularly^[1]. One of the aspects of its culture I appreciate tremendously is the concept of "chatting in the tags". Tags in Tumblr are snippets of text attached to both posts and reblogs, but only the original instance. If you reblog a post, that reblog doesn't include the tags of whoever you reblogged it from.

Although tags were presumably intended primarily for cross-referencing posts on the same topic, Tumblr culture has adopted them as a way of writing sotto voce commentary on posts, visible only to people who are following you specifically without escaping into the larger network. Sometimes people use this to be funny, sometimes to relay anecdotes, sometimes to be catty. Universally, it gives a window into the personality of the person you chose to follow, above and beyond just their curatorial decisions about what to post.

Even on one's own posts, tag chatter provides a means of adding a bit of commentary that's tangential to the post itself, of a different tone, or a little more personal than they want escaping into the wider network.

One of Tumblr's virtues, and in fact one of the main reasons I still use it at all, is that it provides RSS feeds for every user. These are the main way I read the website at all! What's more, these feeds actually contain that user's tags. For the technically-minded among you, the feed entry looks like this:

<item>
  <title>
    gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like&hellip;
  </title>
  <description>
    <p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="https://perfectday1972.tumblr.com/post/792148193180827649/gonna-be-a-lover-for-a-minute-reblog-and-put-in">perfectday1972</a>:</p><blockquote><p>gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like intensely loved like 5 stars on letterboxd LOVED</p></blockquote>
  </description>
  <link>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</link>
  <guid>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</guid>
  <pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:40:35 -0700</pubDate>
  <category>PlayTime</category>
  <category>although todayhat was a rewatch</category>
  <category>most recent new one was Chimes at Midnight</category>
</item>

Those <category> elements are the tags. Neat! But totally useless in practice unless a reader actually displays them.

My…

I don't love all of Suresh's framings around LLMs^[1], but I do appreciate that his closer exposure to them has given him the perspective to write this piece. This matches my experience very closely. I've so far managed to avoid participating in the false zealotry he describes, but I'm not sure how much longer I can manage it. My colleagues have not. I can hardly blame them.

Meanwhile, it's extremely clear to anyone who hasn't succumbed to the reality distortion field that this monomania is completely corrosive to the organization. Suresh documents the realities of this corrosion, although I imagine most people reading this have seen it in one or another aspects of their lives.

Personally, I'm just doing my best to grit my teeth and try to do good work as best I can, both professionally and personally, until we get back to a point where the managerial consensus is once again that "quality" is a real thing that exists. Until then, I suffer.

---

1. I feel that a hard-line zero-tolerance standpoint is necessary due to the myriad negative externalities and the strong tendency for "well I can see it being a bit useful for X" being taken in bad faith as a broad license to use it "where it makes sense". Even in cases where they're not strictly enforceable, zero tolerance policies establish a culture and enable enforcement…

There's so little we in the global north can do to aid the historical struggle of Palestine. We can try to sabotage the military-industrial machinery, although that risks serious legal repercussions. We can send money, although many people have little to spare and finding trustworthy recipients is difficult. Or, for no money and no risk, we can choose not to buy entertainment products that Palestinians have asked us to boycott. But for reasons I cannot fathom, even this is beyond so many people!

has anyone ever given a name to the bird that appears in the first shot of the Twin Peaks intro?