Jess Allen, The Passing Of Time (2023)

Untitled, Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Boris Dralyuk)

Guys, where do you get your book recs? And do you have recs? (Of books or of bootuber/ig/substack/podcast/...)

Daily fucking reminder that Luigi Mangione is innocent, completely and fully. He has been convicted of no crime. He has had no fair trial. He is a SUSPECT. Luigi Mangione is entirely innocent and everyone needs to stop parroting this insidious propaganda that he “committed” the crime he is only SUSPECTED of. He is not a murderer. He is not a criminal. He is an innocent man.

A few weeks back on tumblr and suddenly I want to adopt a cat and pet a cow 🥺

🎬 Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

Hey, y'all! I made these today! I release them into the world to support the cause! They're sized for 8.5x11 printer paper. Take 'em. Print 'em. Post 'em EVERYWHERE.

Quietly losing my mind over the fact that Elon Musk has straight up orchestrated a coup of our executive branch and like....I don't even know what, if any, system we have in place to fix this. Like... He's just taken control of the money and locked out the actual appointed officials. What the fuck.

I do genuinely always think about the opening scene of the social network being Jessie Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg being openly rude, disrespectful, smarmy and misogynistic to Rooney Mara's character and she responds with the now iconic line that he will very probably be very successful and will go through life thinking that people don't like him because he's a nerd but actually people don't like him because he's an asshole and that this interaction is how the movie is framed and even bookended, with Mark in the final scene trying to request her as a friend on Facebook but she as far as we know doesn't accept. And everything in the movie only serves to prove her right, that he is successful and smart but ultimately an asshole who built his success on comparing women to farm animals out of spite for her. This is literally the opening sequence of the film, the main interaction it's framed around and it baffles me that there are people who view The Social Network (2010) as some kind of lionisation of Facebook's creation, and not one of the most prescient cautionary tales about misogyny and technocracy of our time. To this day, the only thing Zuckerberg actually disputes about the film is that actually he married a woman he met in college. Nothing else. He disputes nothing else. No movie has aged better than The Social Network (2010) and I do actually sincerely wish that wasn't the case.

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.