Charles Randall

I’ve been deeply upset about an article going around about the UHC shooter, which suggests Luigi Mangioni was radicalized by pain. The article gives no evidence, and makes no convincing argument. It expects you to look at the negative space: because Luigi “had options”, and “could have been almost anything he wanted to be”, you are expected to believe that he turned to murder because of pain. He had a degree and a “promising early employment history”, showing yet again how society believes the only valuable thing a person can do is grind for capitalism.

There are enough people who are going to be at PTG that I felt it was useful to put my attendance plan somewhere shareable.

I’ve been sitting on the doomsday.watch domain name for some years now, and recently I started keeping track of the interesting articles I read in a month. The idea being, I suppose, to keep track of things so I have them around if I want to refer to them again, so I’m not just scrolling back through discord channels or whatever to find links. But also I use it as a kind of filter for what I think is actually worthwhile vs not.

In no particular order, except potentially how much I listened to them, here are my favorite albums of 2023.

Step 1

Get annoyed at streaming services removing content that you have as a dvd. The whole point of streaming services was so that you didn’t have to get your ass off the couch to watch a movie.

I often found Ubisoft to be a weird place, but nothing was more weird than Ubisoft Montreal’s hiring practices in the late aughts. Maybe it was government tax incentives, maybe constantly increasing the headcount looked good… I’ve heard a lot of stories about why things were the way they were, so I don’t know which are real. But I do know for a fact that Ubisoft would hire people who literally could not do their jobs, who never had a chance in hell of doing their jobs, who actively avoided doing their jobs… and who would never get fired for it.

When I was seven years old, I watched Challenger explode on live TV.

Last week, I had a revelation while I was on vacation. I was five days into a lovely excursion through Newfoundland, completely disconnected, when my phone buzzed. Huzzah! Data! Feeling it would be nice to get a brief update from the world at large, I checked my email, only to be confronted by notification of a new comment on this blog.

Never ever get into video games you are the biggest casual I met in my entire life

[Read More]

I love Super Metroid. It is very easily one of my favorite games. I haven’t played it through in a while, but I have easily played through it 50 or more times. There was a time when I would do it as a relaxation exercise; I can beat the game in an hour and a half. Or I could, at some point.

So I am definitely no slouch. I can also rack up a good amount of headshots in random FPS games. My reflexes are pretty good, and my control precision is still as good as it ever was. I think I killed almost every enemy in Bioshock Infinite with headshots.

First, a preface: I have been waiting for Final Fantasy Tactics on iPad for a long time. It’s hard to imagine a better platform for turn based strategies than a system in which you can scroll, zoom, spin, and touch. Originally due for fall 2011, fall came and went with nary a word.

Which probably should have been my first warning. But then, last week, it gets released! Wow, $18. But I’ve been waiting for it for so long, and I have this $25 iTunes gift card gathering dust… why not, right? So I grab it.