Microsoft saw the Netflix model of "sell a subscription for a tremendous amount of content at a loss to drive the old industry out of business" and thought that was just the sort of evil they loved to do. Then they started game pass without stopping to realize that they were the old industry they were going to drive out of business.

This is incredible. I feel like maybe people don't understand how world-historic this is. Not only did the United States of America lose this war, there's a strong argument to be made that this is the worst the USA has ever lost a war. The only other war that's even in the conversation is Vietnam, but the consequences of that loss were entirely domestic. The US wasn't forced to make any geopolitical concessions at all^[1] despite losing soundly.

In fact, the USA has never in history had to make major strategic concessions after a war^[2]. Every single goal it had going into this conflict—forcing regime change, further hobbling the economy, eliminating the nuclear program, bolstering Israel's expansionism—is explicitly disclaimed by this treaty. Not only that, but the latter three ended up in a substantially better place for Iran than the status quo ante bellum.

This is a world-historic event. This is the USA's Suez canal moment^[3]. I don't see how the country can go on enforcing its hegemonic will globally after so thoroughly failing to do so in Iran, especially when the domestic appetite for war has been obliterated after decades of quagmires even before this spectacular loss. Maybe the US will be able to fall back to Monroe doctrine lines and continue to coup the Americas at will, but illegally abducting Maduro already failed to produce regime change (although it did prompt meaningful concessions) and it's hard to imagine the US having more leverage now than it did at the beginning of the year.

And just to be very clear: this is a resoundingly positive development. Since World War II, the United State of America has been far and away the greatest force for evil in the world. It has done everything in its power to prevent the development of real sovereignty, democracy, and prosperity of the masses, and to destroy those anywhere they've managed to take root. It has and continues to enact genocide and slavery as matters of policy, and props up fascists and ethnostates to force its will across the globe. Every loss for the US is a victory for the…

it's embarrassing that French has a less gendered term for "kingdom" than English does. we have to start saying "royome" instead

the problem with every show in the world having a cold open now is that after all these years I still instinctively expect to hear the theme from The Wire or The Sopranos after the HBO sting

dogs should have pouches, like marsupials

if I were the captain of a whole-ass starship and every time I wanted tea I had to explicitly specify that I wanted it hot I would not let a single engineer sleep until the problem was solved. I do not give a gorn's scaly ass that the warp core is on fire, the goddamn computer keeps giving me lukewarm tea

"I wish there were more hours in the day" another finger on the monkey's paw curls shut. the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom is now 5% faster

I wasn't planning to play Marathon.

Christa, a Bungie lover of the old school^[1] and particular aficionada of the original Marathon trilogy, talked it up to me non-stop since the announcement. Undeterred by the decidedly underwhelming closed technical test, the delay that that test prompted, or the plagiarism scandal of the visual design^[2], she kept excitedly sending me updates and videos. I read along interested enough, but it did little to make me want to pick up the game myself.

I'm not much for shooters. That's not to say I haven't played or enjoyed them; I played through a couple James Bond games^[4] and the Halo 2 campaign as a child, I played Splatoons 1 and 2 for a respectable number of hours, and I even cleared the original Destiny single-player content while recovering from surgery. But these games washed over me like waves; none of them inspired any particular affection for the genre or desire to play the latest thing. Certainly they are far outnumbered by the big-name shooters I've touched barely or not at all—Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Team Fortress, Fortnite, Overwatch, or indeed the original Marathon games.

When the open server slam came, I didn't play it, even as more friends beyond Christa were starting to admit it might have the juice. When the game launched, I didn't get it, although I quite enjoyed watching friends stream over Discord. It was those streams, I think, that did it. Being in the moment with someone, feeling the ebb and flow of tension and release, and seeing how much of the game wasn't shooting, the thought started wriggling its way into my brain.

"What if I did play Marathon?"

As I continued watching my friends, as Christa continued sending me videos of feats of meticulous planning as well as derring-do, as I learned more about what the structure of an "extraction shooter"^[5] meant in practice, this thought grew. I found my modding work in a lull, waiting for upstream changes and code reviews, with no particular video game on deck^[6]. I decided to give it a try.

What really started singing to my soul and got me to spend the $40 USD wasn't even necessarily the prospect of hand-fun from playing the game, but rather mind-fun^[13] from engaging its design with a critical eye. Christa is fond of repeating the idea that extraction shooters are a "game designer's genre", but it wasn't until picking it up with my own two hands that I really began understanding why. The last time a game has given me this much insight into the relationship between mechanical design and player experience was Resident Evil GCN. Everything in this game is part of the texture of interactivity in a way that's just not true of other genres; every sound design choice has repercussions on how other players might hear you, every…

I think if I were making a movie I would probably subtitle it by hand before I'd let it be presesd to disc without subs