ranzware
Sundays are for bracing for the February half-term week here in the UK, during which schools are closed and parents must occupy kids while it’s still mostly cold and rainy outside. Quick, tidy the house, book in the playdates, get the shopping done, catch-up on sleep. And do some reading, obviously.
V Buckenham wrote a fun design analysis of “can you pet the dog”, breaking down each word in turn.
As an English person, I would much more naturally say “Can you stroke the dog?”. And on looking up if this was a me thing or an English thing I saw that Irish folk might well say “Can I rub your dog?” – a funny phrase to my ears. So “pet” is a reminder of the way videogame culture can spread a certain kind of implicit Americanism world-wide.
I was just recently talking to Alice B about Threshold, a staggeringly terrible episode of the second season of Star Trek: Voyager. What I didn’t realise was that a contrarian fan has declared January 29th “Threshold Day”, a day for celebratory blogging about this rightfully derided episode. Susana Polo covered the day for Polygon.
Apparently, breaking warp 10 has some knock-on effects on an organism, and Paris begins to undergo a grotesque transformation. His tongue and hair fall out, his skin grows sallow and spotted, he becomes allergic to water, he stops being able to breathe oxygen, and he begins behaving irrationally. Later, the ship’s doctor outright calls this a natural, albeit accelerated, arc of human evolution, saying, “It’s possible that Mr. Paris represents a future stage in human development, although I can’t say it’s very attractive.”
Takedowns of the work of New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul have been unavoidable over the past few years. Now that Paul’s role at the paper is coming to an end, Andrea Long Chu wrote the takedown to end all takedowns for NY Mag.
For in the end, the reactionary liberal is a ruthless defender of all that exists. Paul’s 2021 book, 100 Things We Lost to the Internet, is a cabinet of banalities wherein the usual liberal virtues (civility, patience) sit glassily alongside a predictable middle-class nostalgia for things like scouring the Bloomingdale’s shoe department for the right dress pump or taking in a Broadway show without hearing the low buzz of a text message. “There was nothing to do but let go of whatever might be happening outside the theater and lose yourself in what was happening onstage,” Paul writes wistfully. “You simply couldn’t be reached.” It is a great dream of the reactionary liberal not to be reached. Paul will freely admit, for instance, that it is immoral for Israel to kill tens of thousands of civilians. Yet it is no less immoral for student protesters to erect an ugly encampment in the middle of the quad and hurl slogans at the police. This is because political action is an unacceptable snag in the continuity of bourgeois experience. One gets the sense that politics has gone off, like a cell phone, in the darkened theater of Pamela Paul’s mind. It is worse than wrong: It is rude.
Some BBC research into AI assistants (PDF) finds that questions about news were answered with significant issues 51% of the time, introduced incorrect facts to BBC reporting 19% of the time, and altered or invented quotes from BBC articles 13% of the time. Cool.
Meanwhile, a new study by Microsoft (PDF) finds that using generative AI at work renders human cognition “atrophied and unprepared”. Emanuel Maiberg wrote up the study at 404 Media (paywalled). Once again: cool. Although note that the study was limited in scope and the effects might not be any greater than how, say, using a calculator atrophies your ability to quickly perform mathematical tasks without one.
“[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” the researchers wrote.
Tryhard is a sports RPG about managing an underdog rugby club in New Zealand. It’s under development by Grapefruit Games, a tiny new studio co-founded by Robert Yang and Eddie Cameron. They’ve also produced a manifesto on “sportslikes”: games that are not Sports Games, but which concern themselves with sports beyond their existence as entertainment products. I like this, and more people in games should write manifestos.
- The Sports Game ignores our everyday experiences of sports.
The Sports Game doesn’t take kids to practice, laugh at memes in the group chat, or scream at the TV.- The Sports Game flattens athletes into pawns with no lives.
The Sports Game can’t prank teammates on the bus, struggle to fall asleep before a match, or tie shoes five times for good luck.
WikiTok lets you peruse a randomised selection of Wikipedia page summaries by swiping vertically. Works best on mobile.
I miss French-Finnish electropop duo The Dø, so here’s Sparks from their final album, 2014’s Shake Shook Shaken. And here’s Sad Events Reoccur from A Void, a three-piece alt-grunge band based in London who deserve more fans. You can find all the Sunday Papers music choices from this era of the column in a YouTube playlist.
Source link
Kurt Indovina
Add comment