Oof just saw someone say the Suicide Squad UI looks like those "Elden Ring by Ubisoft" memes and now I can't unsee it. There are some moments in the footage I've seen where it's like "where's the game? All you can see is damage numbers/counters/health bars."

On the whole I really like what Bungie has been doing with difficulty and rogue-lite mechanics in the seasonal content, but this season in particular has felt really hostile to solo and even casual players, and that's not great in the particular context of Destiny 2 and Bungie ATM.

Friday Vibe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2q6F0Dprk

Really remarkable to me how, across creative industries, there's such a huge disconnect between the creative level where I think we're getting consistently great work, in games, movies/tv, music etc and the executive/ownership level, where it's just so obvious how morally and creatively bankrupt they all are. I believe there are creative ways to make money from these! Instead we get microtransactions and films being thrown in the trash for tax purposes.

Boy the record of big console makers buying out big studios has, uh, not turned out too well huh? I'm trying to think of a positive example where things have improved in terms of operations, creativity, capability and struggling to come up with one. Insomniac seems to have been left alone, I guess, but selling 1 billion copies of Spiderman every few years probably helps keep the hands off.

Destiny's recent seasons have, in fact, been some of the best I have personally played, and I think its a shame that the layoff news and other community fussiness overwhelmed discussion of the quality of the seasons themselves. And now that we know that the Final Shape is being delayed, I wish they would do something roguelike with Dares of Eternity. #destiny2

I find it interesting that both Mastodon and Bluesky have a much more "grown-up" feel to me than early or even late-stage Xitter, like they are made up entirely of folks who have developed particular views of how social networks like this should operate. Just generally I am always fascinated by how culture adopts, and adapts, technologies over time, how the novel becomes routinized. See vaping for a small example, and e-bikes.

I recently finished The Ascent (on PC but I played with a controller) and I really enjoyed it. I'm spending much more time lately playing "AA" and Indie titles and finding them to be a nice balance both in terms of value and time investment, and The Ascent is a technical and art design marvel that is also quite fun to play. Highly recommend it.

More importantly I want to acknowledge here that Nathan Fielder is a certain kind of comedic genius. Perhaps we can all come together around the idea of Nathan Fielders genius - in any case I think it's interesting how much money he has successfully extracted from good-sized networks.