House of Nettles

2026-09-21T03:42:54Z

developing a headcanon that the chickens in Sekiro are normal sized but most of the people are tiny. the chained ogre is pretty much the size of a child. the demon of hatred is as big as a normal man

2026-09-14T04:59:24Z

I know it's small potatoes in the scope of the illiteracy crisis as a whole, but I'm seeing more and more people misuse "it's" and it's making me despair a bit. I'm not even talking about in casual communication, I've seen it in written works intended for public display, and it makes me so sad that people don't know or don't care or both.

For reference: "its" without an apostrophe is possessive. "It wanted its food". "It's" with an apostrophe is only correct as a shortening of "it is" or "it has". "It's hungry". I know the rules of orthography are silly and arbitrary and this one in particular is inconsistent with how other possessives are written, but however arbitrary the rules are, following them still conveys that you the writer care about your work and that you read other peoples'. Petty and pointless^[1] rule violations suggest to the reader (and most strongly to exactly those readers who do the most reading) that not only do you not take pride in your work, but you don't engage with the wider art form you're trying to contribute to enough to understand its basic patterns.

Typos happen, and that's fine. I make them too! But when I'm writing something substantial or making art to put out into the world, I get people to proofread it so I can catch and fix them. You should too!

There are definitely times when rules can be violated on purpose to make a point. Writing without capitals, especially in short-form text^[2], conveys a certain informality and serves as a tone marker. Leaving out apostrophes altogether does this even moreso, evoking pre-autocorrect T9 text messages. But an incorrect "it's" doesn't really communicate anything other than sloppiness on the writer's part. ↩︎
I've seen people do this in longer-form text as well but personally I find that it isn't worth the cost in poor legibility from lesser visual emphasis on sentence structure. Besides, a longer form work already conveys a degree of formality just from the mere fact that its length requires effort, so the pointed informality of lowercase can come off as pretentious. ↩︎

Hoodwinked! (2005) - ★★★½

2026-09-04T09:46:26Z

Last night, I went to the theater and saw a preview for the latest Illumination film. It looked just like every other Illumination film, which all look just like every DreamWorks film, which of course all look just slightly worse than every Disney/Pixar film. There are a lot of reviews here talking about how bad Hoodwinked! looks, but you know what? It doesn't look like that. Instead, it has a strong flavor of the sorts of videos I was seeing in the Linux community around this time being touted as "made entirely in open-source software".

This was apparently made in Maya, but the realities of its creation by a small team who weren't digital animation experts is visible in every frame, in the same way that the realities of budget and physicality are visible in every frame of a traditionally-animated film. It doesn't look polished in the same way that Madagascar (also 2005) does, but it does look distinctive. When characters emote here, it doesn't look like the universal set of signifiers (such as the infamous DreamWorks face) that were already well-established by this point in time. Even the models are able to be distinctive in a way that comes off just as charming as it does strange.

In contrast with the extreme scrappiness of the animation, the cast is full of big names, all of whom do remarkably good work despite largely not being voice actors by training. The script is a genuinely fun Rashomon/crime drama pastiche, full of clever setups and background gags. There's something optimistic about this, a vision of an alternate universe in which messy little films are allowed to exist and attract real talent, and I love it a little bit for that.

I really do think you should learn to use the Linux command line.

2026-08-30T06:42:52Z

Bruno Dias wrote:

I really do think you should learn to use the Linux command line.

I really do think you should learn to use the Linux (or Mac, I suppose) command line if you can find the time at all. It is, genuinely, a dramatically more empowering way to use your computer than the alternative, and it will enable to think about your computer as a tool in ways that are completely different.

So much of what's wrong with "computing", in general, stems from systematic user disempowerment... I think most people my age are cognizant of the harms of young people today not being exposed to even the most basic underlying concepts like the existence of the file system as an independent thing from siloed apps. But a lot of us never took that step backwards of considering the ways in which graphical user interfaces are disempowering. The thing about terminal interfaces is that by nature they must expose every affordance; if something can be done within the system, then it must be doable by a user from the terminal. And those affordances talk to each other, can be automated and connected in ways that go significantly beyond simply being able to toggle something or do something.

There's just such a wealth of useful tools (in the Linux world, at least) that exist as CLI applications. magick is just always going to be better than any graphical utility for doing stuff like converting a png into a jpeg; rg is always going to be the best way to search a bunch of files for a snippet of text. Becoming comfortable with it will eventually give you avenues to make almost any task you do on the computer better.

I strongly cosign this post. The command line does a good job of being a lenticular system: one that's easy to use in simple straightforward ways while also providing a large amount of power when necessary^[1]. Here are some absolute basics:

To access the command line from a desktop, run a program called something like "Terminal" or "Console". The exact program will depend on which flavor of Linux you're using, but it'll almost always come up if you search for "term". This application will look like a big old text box something like this:

This text that's displayed there, nex3@framework16:~$ is called the "command prompt", since it's prompting you to enter a command
The terminal is your window to the command line. You can type commands in here, and the output of those commands will appear below. For example, if I use the ls command^[2], it'll print the names of all the files and directories in the working directory.
```
nex3@framework16:~$ ls
bin  code  Desktop  Documents  Downloads  Music  Pictures  Public  src  Templates  Videos
```
"Wait," I hear you ask, "what's the working directory?" Good question, friend! Every command line session takes place in a particular directory on your system. You can see the working directory using the pwd command, and move between directories using the cd command.
```
nex3@framework16:~$ pwd
/home/nex3
nex3@framework16:~$ cd Downloads
nex3@framework16:~/Downloads$ cd Downloads
```
For reference, here's what my home directory looks like when I open it in my graphical file manager. You can see that it has the same contents that ls displayed earlier:
The most basic way to run a command, as we've seen with ls and pwd, is just to type its name^[3] and press Enter. Sometimes you'll want to tell a command to work on a particular file, directory, or occasionally even something else like a URL. These are called "arguments"^[4], and you can pass them to a command by writing them afterwards separated by a space. That's what we did earlier with cd Downloads! Once you've passed the argument or arguments you need, press enter to run the command.
In addition to their main arguments, most commands support options. These look like arguments that start with -- followed by hyphen-separated words. For example, you can write ls --quote-name to print all entries with double quotes around their names:
```
nex3@framework16:~$ ls --quote-name
"bin"  "code"  "Desktop"  "Documents"  "Downloads"  "Music"  "Pictures"  "Public"  "src"  "Templates"  "Videos"
```
Sometimes, options can be shortened to - followed by a single letter. For example, ls -Q is short for ls --quote-name. You can combine multiple short options without additional spaces or hyphens, so ls -aQ is short for ls --all --quote-name. (In some cases, for historical reasons, some options may only be available in short form.)

"But Natalie," you ask, "how do I know which options a command will even recognize?" There are a few ways. Just about every command takes a --help option that prints basic information about how to run a command and its options:

nex3@framework16:~$ cd --help
cd: cd [-L|[-P [-e]]] [-@] [dir]
    Change the shell working directory.
    
    Change the current directory to DIR.  The default DIR is the value of the
    HOME shell variable. If DIR is "-", it is converted to $OLDPWD.
    
    The variable CDPATH defines the search path for the directory containing
    DIR.  Alternative directory names in CDPATH are separated by a colon (:).
    A null directory name is the same as the current directory.  If DIR begins
    with a slash (/), then CDPATH is not used.
    
    If the directory is not found, and the shell option `cdable_vars' is set,
    the word is assumed to be  a variable name.  If that variable has a value,
    its value is used for DIR.
    
    Options:
      -L        force symbolic links to be followed: resolve symbolic
                links in DIR after processing instances of `..'
      -P        use the physical directory structure without following
                symbolic links: resolve symbolic links in DIR before
                processing instances of `..'
      -e        if the -P option is supplied, and the current working
                directory cannot be determined successfully, exit with
                a non-zero status
      -@        on systems that support it, present a file with extended
                attributes as a directory containing the file attributes
    
    The default is to follow symbolic links, as if `-L' were specified.
    `..' is processed by removing the immediately previous pathname component
    back to a slash or the beginning of DIR.
    
    Exit Status:
    Returns 0 if the directory is changed, and if $PWD is set successfully when
    -P is used; non-zero otherwise.

If there's stuff here you don't understand, don't worry about it!

There's also the special command man that takes the name of another command and provides more comprehensive documentation on it. For example, this is what you'll see if you run man ls:

LS(1)                          User Commands                          LS(1)

NAME
       ls - list directory contents

SYNOPSIS
       ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION
       List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default).
       Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort is spec‐
       ified.

       Mandatory  arguments to long options are mandatory for short options
       too.

       -a, --all
              do not ignore entries starting with .

       -A, --almost-all
              do not list implied . and ..

       --author
              with -l, print the author of each file

       -b, --escape
              print C-style escapes for nongraphic characters

       --block-size=SIZE
              with -l, scale  sizes  by  SIZE  when  printing  them;  e.g.,
              '--block-size=M'; see SIZE format below

       -B, --ignore-backups
              do not list implied entries ending with ~

       -c     with  -lt:  sort  by, and show, ctime (time of last change of
              file status information); with -l: show  ctime  and  sort  by
 Manual page ls(1) line 1 (press h for help or q to quit)

This documentation is colloquially called a command's "man page". You can usually also find a web version by searching for "<command name> man page", like this one for ls.

If you run man, you'll notice that the familiar command prompt is gone! Unlike other commands you've run so far, man runs as an interactive application, allowing you to scroll through and even search the documentation. Most command-line tools don't work this way, but it's certainly not unheard-of. You can press q when you're done to exit out (as it helpfully reminds you on the bottom line).
Most Terminal applications these days use pretty common key bindings for editing text. However, there are a couple important exceptions:
- Control-C in a terminal will quit the tool that's currently running. That means it won't copy text! Most Terminal applications use Control-Shift-C for that instead, and Control-Shift-V for pasting.
- Control-Z in a terminal will suspend the tool that's currently running. (If you end up doing this accidentally, you can run fg to get it back.) To undo, press Control-Shift-Hyphen instead.
- The Up and Down arrow keys let you move through the commands you've already written and re-run them. You can even edit them if you want to change something!
Here are a few additional commands that are extremely useful for day-to-day tasks:
- cp <oldpath> <newpath> copies a file from one path to another. You can also pass the --recursive/-r option to copy an entire directory.
- mv <oldpath> <newpath> moves a file rather than copying it, like cutting and pasting in a file browser. This is also how you rename files.
- rm <path> deletes a file. Be careful: there's no confirmation dialog and no recycle bin for this one! Like cp, you can pass the --recursive/-r option to delete an entire directory.
- mkdir <path> creates a directory at the given path.
- grep -F <text> <file>^[5] will print every line in a file that contains a given string of text. grep -RF <text> <directory> will print every file in the directory that contains that text instead.
- find <directory> -name <name>^[6] will find a file with the given name if it's in the directory. There are all sorts of additional flags you can pass to find all sorts of additional files.
- less <file> will open a text file in a scrollable interface right in your Terminal application, much like man.
- wget <url> will download the page or file at the given URL from the internet. (This one might not be installed on all systems, but it probably will.)
There are a few "shorthand" paths that are often used on the command line. I already mentioned that ~ refers to your home directory. . refers to the working directory, and .. refers to the directory that contains the working directory.
In most cases where you can specify a file, you can use * as a "wildcard" to specify all files that have any characters in place of the *. For example, rm *.txt will delete all .txt files in the working directory.
There's a lot more than this, but luckily people have been using this stuff for many decades so there's plenty of documentation and even more FAQs littered all over the internet. You can write your own scripts (just made of the same stuff you can do in the terminal) to automate common tasks. You can move output between commands, run commands conditionally, loop through files or directories or numbers, set variables that you re-use, and so on. But you don't have to know any of that to get started.

It's a bit of a joke in programming circles, in fact, that you'll often end up accidentally building something way more complicated than you should using just command-line scripts just because it's so easy to accumulate more and more features without ever running into a point where it just doesn't work. One thing command line scripts aren't great at is managing large amounts of complexity. If you learn the Linux command line and use it enough to run into that problem, though, you've already become a programmer and you're ready to learn a full-fledged general-purpose language. ↩︎
I use ls habitually to get a more visual sense of the "lay of the land" in the terminal. In fact, I ended up setting up my configuration so that every time I enter a new directory the command line automatically runs ls so I don't have to. ↩︎
Fun fact: almost every one of these commands is its own little executable program. You can find most of them in your system's /bin or /usr/bin directories. ↩︎
Sometimes you may need to pass an argument that has a space in it already. In that case, you can surround the entire arguments with double quotes and it'll be interpreted as a single value, as in cd "Not Porn". ↩︎
The --fixed-strings/-F option here tells grep to interpret its first argument as plain text. By default, it interprets that argument as an old dialect of regular expressions. This is probably worth learning and using too, but save it until you need to match a pattern rather than a fixed string of text. ↩︎
find is an unusual command in that its full-word options start with - instead of --. Why? Historical reasons, of course! ↩︎

2026-08-24T00:06:09Z

I probably should have read Computer Power and Human Reason years ago, when all this hype really started getting going. Honestly I should probably have read it in college when I was first getting into programming! But the next best time is now, so I borrowed: my mom's inscribed copy a few months ago (which to be fair she has also never read) and got started.

A lot of the first few chapters is fairly straightforward for anyone who has a basic grounding in computer science. Weizenbaum^[1] is walking an odd line where he's trying to explain concepts like "turing machines" and "assembly languages" to a lay audience without sacrificing either rigor or a relatively academic tone. I'm curious how well this works for someone who genuinely has no prior exposure to this material; to me, all of this is review of the basics of the field, and so ended up feeling a little boring.

But then I got to this section which blew my socks clean off my feet (emphasis mine):

The idea that a person can write a program that embodies anything he "thoroughly understands" is at least equally problematical. Understanding something always means understanding it at a certain level. An actuary uses some fairly sophisticated mathematical tools whose fundamentals he almost certainly doesn't understand or care anything about. Everyone who makes change uses arithmetic, but very few people know or care much about the beautiful axiomatic system on which arithmetic is based. In effect, we all constantly use subroutines whose input-output behavior we believe we know, but whose details we need not and rarely do think about. To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word "because" and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the "why" of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with "obviously," and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word "therefore," only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of natural language and to its inherent ambiguity. The very eloquence that natural language permits sometimes illuminates our words and seems (falsely, to be sure) to illuminate our undeserving logic just as brightly. An interpreter of programming-language texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence. And words like "obviously" are not represented in the primitive vocabularies of any computers. A computer is a merciless critic. Therefore the assertion that one understands a thing sufficiently well to be able to program it is, first of all, an assertion that one understands it in very particular terms. In any case, it can be no more than a boast that may well be falsified by experience.

The other side of the coin is the belief that one cannot program anything unless one thoroughly understands it. This misses the truth that programming is, again like any form of writing, more often than not experimental. One programs, just as one writes, not because one understands, but in order to come to understand. Programming is an act of design. To write a program is to legislate the laws for a world one first has to create in imagination. Only rarely does any designer, be he an architect, a novelist, or whatever, have so coherent a picture of the world emergent in his imagination that he can compose its laws without criticism from that world itself. That is precisely what the computer may provide.^[2]

It is beyond my capacity to express how strange it was to see exactly the same argument I made articulated nearly fifty years earlier, without coding LLMs as a motivating factor, by my own grandfather. Maybe it's obvious to anyone who takes seriously the SICP principle that "computer language [...] is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology", although even that line was written eight years after Computer Power and Human Reason and may in fact have been inspired by it (both works came out of MIT, after all).

But even if it is obvious, it still strikes me as a shockingly prescient point to choose to emphasize at a point where automatically converting a vague high-level natural language description^[3] into a full program was still science fiction. As I argued in my earlier post, the act of programming is critical to developing a human understanding of the logic being programmed, and a misunderstanding of this point is critical to the failures that lead people to believe that LLM-generated code could be useful for anything more than a band-aid over a gaping lack of suitable abstractions. Weizenbaum made this point, as far as I'm aware, long before anyone else.

Yes, it is weird to refer to him this way. ↩︎
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason. W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976, pp. 107-109. ↩︎
On that subject, Weizenbaum says:

[M]any professional programmers believe that their craft is difficult because the languages with which they must deal have rigid syntactical rules. There is > therefore a persistent cry for natural-language, e.g., English, programming systems. Programmers who hold to this belief have probably never tackled a truly difficult problem, and have therefore never felt the need for really deep criticism from the computer.^[4]

↩︎
Ibid., 109. ↩︎

2026-08-23T23:25:22Z

mpklamerus wrote:

My Birthday Blog Challenge: Write About An Obscure Game

It is my birthday today so I am issuing a blog challenge. That is something you are allowed to do on your birthday. My challenge is to write a blog post about an obscure game, whether it’s a video game, board game, tabletop rpg, LARP, whatever, that you just do not see folks talking about online or easily findable documentation. No Substacks! Also you will not be graded on how obscure it is, don’t worry. If someone sees your post and says “That’s not obscure!” then they can get punched in the face. It’s just for fun. Doesn’t have to be a positive post about the game either, maybe it wasn’t very good. I just think it would be nice to see more documentation online of games rarely discussed and maybe someone will discover a cool new game they never discovered before.
…

I decided to rise to this challenge by loading up the list of all games I've ever played on Backloggd, sorting it from least to most popular, and finding the first one for which I felt I had something worth saying that I hadn't already articulated on my old media journal. What I ended up finding was a game I'd played long before I ever thought of tracking my impressions of media. It's sadly now unplayable due to the creeping march of time, but its place in my history and memory is worth writing about all the same:

nex3 wrote:

Javaders - ★★★½

This was one of a handful of games that my friends and I would play endlessly on the school library computers during lunch in middle school. It, more than anything in an actual cabinet, informed my taste for what "arcadey" games should be: fast-paced, easy to jump back into after a death, with just enough sense of progression and buildcraft to make each attempt feel a bit different than the one before.

It's a damn shame that this isn't playable anymore (I tried both applet-to-WASM plugins to running appletviewer from an old JDK), because I'd love to revisit some of the design decisions with older eyes. Instead, I'll have to make do with decades-old memories of power-ups changing shot shape and damage. In retrospect none of this is that different than any of its contemporary STGs, a genre which I wasn't even totally unfamiliar with at the time—I certainly had access to at least one cab on occasion, although I can't remember which game it held.

But Javaders had the crucial difference of being freely available on the web, even if it was much rougher around the edges, so I could throw myself against it again and again. This too is crucial to the arcade experience, as UFO 50 taught me (or perhaps re-taught me after I forgot the lesson I'd first learned from Javaders itself). The game is as much the progression through one's own skill as it is the progression through the game-space, or rather it's the dialectical relationship between the two. I don't remember for sure, but I think I did see the end of this game back in the day. I certainly put in the time on this game and came away with a fondness for it that's lasted all these years.

Using the StoryGraph

2026-08-23T09:20:27Z

I've moved all my book reviews, both archival and ongoing, onto the StoryGraph (link also available in the header along with my other media review accounts). If you want to see what I think about books, go give it a follow; if I recognize you, I'll follow you back. As with my other reviews, I'll only be cross-posting the ones I think are particularly good, so you'll have to go to the source if you want to see everything.

I've been searching for a really good book tracking website for a long time, and StoryGraph is good enough. I used Goodreads for a number of years, despite finding its Amazon ownership intensely distasteful, because at the time I started tracking books it was the only option with any amount of traction. In addition to (and possibly because of) its position in the evil empire of booksellers, it didn't seem to have developed a single new feature since 2013. In particular, it had no way to look through one's own books by genre or do other cross-referencing tasks that are a major part of what makes these sites valuable to me.

About a year ago, I migrated everything to BookWyrm on a friend's suggestion. It solved the Amazon issue handily, but was a step back on almost every other front. The UI is so bad that it actively discouraged me from tracking books as I read them; it's ridden with subtle differences between different ways of marking books as reading or read or writing reviews that do or don't show up as separate posts on its inexplicable Fediverse backend, and the frontend itself offers no affordances for basic things like indicating that it's processing a request you made. Its database is itself deeply messy, often with half a dozen versions of a single book with none being marked as canonical and no clear path to helping the admins unify them. On top of all that, it provided exactly none of the features I felt Goodreads was missing, if anything making it harder to organize and cross-reference a collection.

StoryGraph improves on all of these issues. It's not Amazon, and in fact explicitly marketed around the fact that it's better than Goodreads which gives me at least a faint hope that whoever runs it would find it politically infeasible to sell out too badly. Its interface is silly in places (it's possible to rate a book up to 5.75 stars due to idiosynratic the way it handles intermediate scores) but entirely functional. And its collection view allows enough cross-referencing to satisfy my general needs.

The thing I don't entirely understand is this: Letterboxd has existed for fifteen years now. It's well-known, it's widely referenced, and it's excellent from a UI standpoint. Its ability to collate and cross-reference films is smooth and universal: every film links its director, its year, and its cast and crew, and clicking on any of these brings you to a standard "film list" view that covers all of the films that fit the same criterion. This view is compact but also powerful, allowing you to further filter by decade, genre, and whether or not you've watched it (or reviewed it, or rated it, etc).

I don't understand why this hasn't been adopted as the universal bar for what a functional media browsing UI looks like. Compare Letterboxd's listing of films by a director to Storygraph's listing of books by an author:

Look how much more compact Letterboxd is. Look how many ways you can customize the view! Most of the interactions that take up half the real estate in StoryGraph are accessible through the hover interface in Letterboxd, and all the metadata for each book is just a click away. This isn't going to put me off the website by any means, but it's baffling to me why other websites don't just rip off Letterboxd's design here. It's flat-out better!

2026-08-22T08:28:35Z

Hatkirby wrote:

How Frog Game Allows You To Modify Map Data

It might look like two trees, but it's actually one. The borders of a top-down map are the same logical space as the borders in the adjacent maps, so those two trees actually represent the same object. It would be a finnicky edge case for the game to have to write two terrain edits to memory specifically when this tree gets destroyed. Instead, both trees are assigned the same global coordinates:

Left tree is on map (14, 2) at tile (9, 3). Global coordinates are (14 * 9 + 9, 2 * 7 + 3) = (135, 17).

Right tree is on map (15, 2) at tile (0, 3). Global coordinates are (15 * 9 + 0, 2 * 7 + 3) = (135, 17).

…

Hatkirby has been writing a very intriguing series of posts on reverse-engineering For Frog the Bell Tolls, a lovely and underappreciated gem of the Game Boy's library. This is actually just the most recent post; you can read the whole series here (start at the bottom and work your way up). This has a lot in common with my own currently-on-hold reverse engineering projects, and it's interesting to see a lot of the same problems tackled for a very different piece of software with very different tools for working with it.

A definitive ranking of poison swamps in From Software games

2026-08-17T22:18:11Z

[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 reward the daring explorer. It does feel a bit more like the Lothric Natural History Museum's diorama of a poison swamp than like a living breathing ecosystem, but it's still a lovely place to spend a nauseous and sticky afternoon.

#3: Blighttown Swamp (Dark Souls 1)

Fun: B
Swampiness: A-

Very swampy vibes from this one. Rickety wooden structures, a broad and organic area that nevertheless feels comprehensible to navigate, and of course the iconic experience of seeing it slowly come into view under your feet as you climb down through Blighttown proper. It is a particular victim of the early Souls games' characteristic PS3 muddiness of colors, but it's undeniable: when you talk about "FromSoft poison swamps", this is the archetypal example that springs to everyone's minds.

#2: Swamp of Aeonia (Elden Ring)

Fun: A
Swampiness: A+

The corrupted heart of Caelid, this swamp has impeccable vibes. Although as a mycophobe I struggled with the fungus theme, even I have to admit that it's a brilliant way to give Scarlet Rot a distinctive look and feel, and to tie the swamp proper into the region as a whole. I was even going to label this entire section "Caelid" until Zandra and Val reminded me that most of the region isn't actually a swamp. Aeonia has its own boss and several dungeons, and there's absolutely nothing swampier than getting Shanghai'd into a mine-prison at the beginning of the game and sneaking out only to find this nightmare stew waiting for you just outside the door.

#1: Lake of Rot (Elden Ring)

Fun: A-
Swampiness: S

You're a dozen or two hours or so into Elden Ring. You're spelunking through its vast network of underground cities when you come across a small hole in the wall. You walk out through it, onto a balcony overlooking a vast expanse peppered here and there with stonework but filled, overwhelmingly, with red and glowing Scarlet Rot. Although it will be hours more before you reach this rancid lake, a leaden weight settles into your bones even still. You know that, one day in the not too distant future, you will be forced to march through its deadly expanse.

Zandra calls the Lake of Rot "turbohell", and for good reason. Its infernal breadth feels impossible to traverse at first, even moreso once you realize that several minibosses lie in wait within its toxic shallows. But—and this is the crucial difference between the Lake and the Swamp of Sorrows—it is ultimately manageable. This area is a testament to From Software's ability to create a challenge that feels at first insurmountable, but through cleverness and skill (in this case, usually judicious use of the Flame Cleanse Me spell) falls beneath the player's feet to become a mere swampy canvas upon which the player can paint their will.

Marathon - ★★★★★

2026-08-17T06:50:01Z

I've never seriously played an MMORPG. I played maybe an hour of World of Warcraft during its heyday at a friend's urging, but found it immediately boring. Nor am I much for shooters, especially in a competitive context; I played a bit of Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer when they were the biggest thing in video games, and enjoyed myself, but I never got good and I certainly didn't feel the drive to hone my skills on the grindstone of Xbox Live.

But I've been playing Marathon. I'm still playing Marathon. I would have written this very review months earlier, except that I was too busy playing Marathon.

It's a surprise that I like this so much. Even my girlfriend who loves trying to push me out of my video game comfort zone almost as much as she loves Marathon (both the 90s and 2020s incarnations) didn't bother encouraging me to play it. But I had a gap in my gaming schedule and an itch to play something with a sense of both action and progression, so I gave it a shot and was blown away by what I found.

Marathon clearly isn't an MMO. There's no persistent game world, even in the Destiny "shared-world" sense, and the game progression is entirely based on the items you bring back from short-lived runs. But my more controversial contention is that Marathon isn't entirely a shooter, either.

Certainly, for those drawn to FPS team fights, this game delivers in spades. I'm told by aficionados of the genre that the guns have "the Bungie sauce". The character-shooter-style shells all play distinctly while remaining balanced among each other. The level design allows for hugely diverse engagements with lots of opportunities to play the map for advantage rather than relying on raw aim fundamentals.

But even here I'm betraying my own biases, because my aim fundamentals are still weak. This game has been driving me to get better, because no part of it is fully separable from the whole, but I've got a lot of practice to do before I can go toe-to-toe with people who have been playing Overwatch and Fortnite and Apex for years. The places I make up the difference, and which keep drawing me into the game even 800 hours in, are those in which you can shift the focus away from raw shooting and towards the rest of the game.

Here is Marathon's fundamental brilliance (and possibly that of the nascent extraction shooter genre as a whole): by making the fundamental goal retaining and accumulating loot, which is distinct from but in dialog with fighting other people, it produces complex and intense emergent experiences of a sort I rarely see in games.

As an example, Marathon is the most effective survival horror game I've ever played in terms of making me actually emotionally afraid. As much as I love the mechanical genius of Resident Evil or the writing of Silent Hill 2, neither of them made me feel terror. Playing Marathon, hiding in the tunnels with the loot I stole from a real human team, listening to their footsteps over my head as they search for me, knowing that all that stood between me and my demise was my own ability to outthink and outmaneuver them—then, I felt terror.

As another example, Marathon is a game about knowing the terrain. I was in a firefight through a doorway, accompanied by two teammates who were no more confident at raw gunplay than I. We'd fought to a standstill, and I told them to hold the door and keep the enemy's attention. I crept through a vent, knowing it would lead me to a platform just above the other team, where I rained gunfire upon them, breaking the stalemate and yielding us a victory against superior fighters with better gear. This is a game about playing smart, and on my best days, I can be smart.

To play Marathon is to play a hundred different games at once. It's an FPS, sure, but it's also survival horror, it's stealth action, it's a puzzle game, it's a game about navigation, it's a game about psychogeography, and on rare occasions it's even a game about making friends. The game is carefully structured so that stories unfold as part of the play, and I find that as fascinating to witness as an art form as it is fun to engage in as a player.

I don't know how much longer this game will be around. The industry doesn't seem to be doing well, Bungie is certainly not thriving under its Sony overlords, and Marathon will never be the money fountain that Destiny was in its heyday (even Destiny for all its success is now officially over). I'm just glad I'm getting to experience this while it's here, while the lobbies are still filled with players, before this beautiful moment fades into memory and lore.

2026-08-15T07:00:40Z

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

Branson Reese wrote:

Swan Boy Texts His Mom

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

Branson Reese wrote:

Saddam Hussein Hole Rebirth: Shannon

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.

2026-08-15T04:45:52Z

Diego Nicolás Argüello wrote:

¡Objeción! The Trials and Tribulations of Translating Ace Attorney for Latin America

All of a sudden, the team of four was sitting in front of over 780,000 words. Any project of this magnitude would be daunting, to say the least. But Ace Attorney presented a unique series of challenges. After all, the visual novel series starring a rookie attorney and an absurdly large character cast is known for pun names, excess of jokes originally translated from Japanese, and subtle word mentions that become key pieces of evidence during trials. Over the following year, the team lived and breathed Ace Attorney.

[...]

“We decided that, inside the courthouse, they would treat each other formally, because that’s the facade they have. But that formality doesn’t exist outside the courthouse. It’s impossible to maintain the relationship with ‘usted’ because they already knew each other from when they were kids,” Morales says.

[...]

An overachiever sentiment led the group to try and keep most of them, but there were some significant lines drawn. When it came to transphobic and fatphobic jokes, of which there are plenty, the team proposed Capcom to censor or remove them altogether, touting the line between the games being a product of their time and considering modern sensibilities.

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.

2026-08-12T08:53:21Z

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"

Get You an RSS Reader that Displays Tags

2026-08-10T01:31:43Z

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 blog, the one you're reading right now, has tags as well. Not only that, I use them for chatter just like on Tumblr! And, naturally, they're included in my feed as well. But I worry that people who subscribe to that feed won't see them, because most RSS readers hide them entirely.

A Half-Hearted Recommendation

My current RSS reader is NewsBlur. There are things I like a lot about it, like the ability to natively convert emails to feeds, a solid mobile app, and of course the ability to see tags. There are also things I don't like so much, like the awkward UI^[2] and the willingness to capitulate to the mania du jour and add LLM features.

Its failings aside, NewsBlur is still the best reader software I've found after a decent amount of searching, and I'd much rather put up with its foibles than lose out on the ability to see what my friends have to say about their posts and reblogs. If you feel the same way, I'd recommend giving it a try. It's entirely fine!

Even if you don't, I encourage you to reach out and file a feature request with whatever reader you do use to add some way of seeing tags. If enough people want it, then maybe it'll even happen!

I can't say I recommend it, since the owners (as for all profitable social media) regularly do heinous shit like banning trans women for talking about how often they ban trans women. Their sole virtue is that they're less eager to fuck up the good things they have going than the rest of the social media bourgeoisie. ↩︎
I really liked the UI of the late great Google Reader, and I don't entirely understand why more readers don't just copy it wholesale. I have yet to find one that does and also meets my other criteria^[3]. ↩︎
I must not implement an RSS reader. Implementing an RSS reader is the time-killer. Implementing an RSS reader is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my ideal RSS reader. I will let it pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the ideal RSS reader has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ↩︎

2026-08-09T23:46:50Z

Nikhil Suresh wrote:

AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

Over the past year, I’ve run point on all of our company’s sales, led the technical components of all but two of our engagements, and over the lifetime of this blog have had something like 300 catchups with professionals from around the world. This has ranged from people on the ground in niche service industries to executives at Fortune 500 companies¹. Because of this, I've had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.

[...]

It has become outright dangerous to even raise the possibility that AI might not be the solution to a problem, let alone be the sole focus of a company’s entire strategy.

In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith. Overwhelmingly these statements are made by non-technicians, though it is not uncommon for technicians to emit deranged statements to curry favour.
…

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.

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 of at least egregious offenses. ↩︎