Sternhammer

Disgusting overreach.

Excellent. We should play games on our own terms. I’ve hit skill barriers in many games, set them aside ‘for a short while’ and never returned to them. I bet I’ve missed so many great moments due to this so now my policy is to lower the difficulty if I’m getting too frustrated.

Also, difficulty levels can be quite arbitrary especially in games that have a particular play mechanic and then introduce something complete different for one level. (My pet hate is token platforming inserted into shooters.)

I remember one game (Indigo Prophecy I think) had a tiny segment that required subtle joystick control to get the player across a narrow beam. Nothing else in the game was like this. I couldn’t do it, countless fails. I asked my young nephew to have a go and he got it on the first try.

Good sir/madam, I read the whole thing thinking the very same and didn’t come to my senses until reading your comment. Thank you.

People forget that America was a penal colony before Australia.

I love great book covers and have great fondness for the covers of novels I love however I buy most books online and by reputation or review so rarely see a cover that arrests my attention.

This isn’t the same article but it’s relevant:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-02/kanye-west-denied-entry-to-australia-after-antisemitic-song/105487620

The first game is set in North America but mostly looks like Iceland. I don’t have high hopes that Kojima’s Australia will be recognisably Australia.

Sounds wonderful. I recently had my writing—which is liberally sprinkled with em-dashes—edited to add spaces to conform to the house style and this made me sad.

I also feel sad that I failed to (ironically) mention the under-appreciated semicolon; punctuation that is not as adamant as a full stop but more assertive than a comma. I should use it more often.

I’ve long been an enthusiast of unpopular punctuation—the ellipsis, the em-dash, the interrobang‽

The trick to using the em-dash is not to surround it with spaces which tend to break up the text visually. So, this feels good—to me—whereas this — feels unpleasant. I learnt this approach from reading typographer Erik Spiekermann’s book, *Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works.

Laughs in Queensland

Plus there is a tiny little Texas inside Queensland.

I agree. Subtly different but overall and surprisingly very similar.

PresAux are more hippy like and a little less like the academics in the book which I find just a little annoying but it’s OK (I’m an academic).

One of the things I’m really curious about is how they flesh out the contrast between the capitalist dystopia of the Corporation Rim and the clearly socialist Preservation Aux. I feel like it’s a politically charged topic in the current capitalist dystopia American context (at least that’s how it looks to me from outside America). I keep waiting for them to water it down but they haven’t done it so far. Good on em.

COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market animals after all, suggests latest study The finding comes from a reanalysis of genomic data.