This game rips and you should play it

I'm flabbergasted how I got in there so damn fast, but what a nice surprise

And I've read a lot of the things in here already, for once. Even more cool stuff that I hadn't seen before. Banger week

April 19th Welcome back readers. Kept you waiting, huh? It’s taken me an extra day to do the work, but we’ve got 23 new-and-interesting picks ready to go this week, so pull up a chair and grab a b…

This Week: Unfair Flips, River Kings, Wrestling Monopolies, and a whole lot more:

critical-distance.com/2026/04/20/a...

This really helps me process things. Like, just today seeing that Reb Valentine was hired at Kotaku, a site now free from G/O Media and its direction, and just an hour earlier ran an article about an Xbox controller with "and I love it" in the headline.

Freudien slip, since they're Right.

When Do We Start Giving A Shit? The Microsoft boycott in extrapolation, one year later.

I've been scratching away at this for a few days. Maybe it's better if I just get it off my chest. If anything, I used to be a lot more vocal than I am now, so a reminder is likely due

I wrote about the Microsoft boycott as I've been seeing it around me. That's it 🫡💜

medium.com/@daavpuke/wh...

Oh nooooo

come on man.

While the Trump administration is trying to corner the market on morally compromised henchmen, a corporate overlord who wants his or her own security force can easily find everything from paid muscle to private intelligence analysis to the dark arts of public influence. LinkedIn alone is littered with CIA and NSA veterans who are #readytowork. Executives from Elon Musk to Bari Weiss reportedly walk around their offices with bodyguards at times, as if they need to be protected from their employees. Dueling global workforce management firms have accused one another of both corporate espionage—and of spying on their spies. One security executive compares our current situation to "where Italy was 100 years ago," when "people had guards at their homes and moved around with guys carrying rifles." In that sense, Dolan isn't an outlier; he's a model. Dolan may have gone further than most executives, by unleashing these increasingly sophisticated technologies and these increasingly common private enforcers on anyone he deemed an enemy-of-the-day. That doesn't make him some uniquely vindictive paranoiac. It puts him on trend. Like the security executive says, “We're in a time of private armies now.”

reading this after the palantir stuff feeling normal, it's fine

We reviewed an 18-page report detailing the second-by-second surveillance of a trans woman. They followed her as she went in and out of the bathroom, even though she posed 'no threat."

It's one of a bunch of new details in this deep dive that @robertsilverman.bsky.social and I took for @wired.com

hey what the fuck

remember when "walking simulator" was supposed to be a sick burn and now people fondly remember it as the invention of one of the coolest video game genres ever? or at least i know i do and i am definitely not the only one

They Killed Fritz!!

Some men experience the riches of the earth only to be blind to their own wealth

wife and I discussed what level of cat person has or doesn't have the rough tongue, I'd say it probably becomes human tongue when it gets human jaw shape (ex cat ears only) but she suggested soon as bipedal since the ability to use tools (cups, brushes) negates necessity

Gonna say it once more in case the point is lost on some, can y’all please just fucking hire some black women and femmes? I promise you your pub’s coverage will benefit from it

And cannot stress that this is responsibility. If someone wants to use it to harass, obviously there are ways to stream, capture, even just record with phone. But it cuts Nintendo out officially which is a save against legal trouble.

I really do think that the lack of sharing for Tomodachi Life is not "oh they don't want us to share Miis saying cocks" and rather to avoid culpability in harassment.
I can think of a thousand bad ways for a game where you add your perception of people to be abused.

What Are We Doing? My friend sent me the following:

The way that some people are using Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream has me concerned. Some thoughts about the viral incentives that are motivating certain players of this game and the broad criticisms of it, would love if you checked this out!

medium.com/@abrambuehne...

I try not to pan the same person over and over again. If I’ve panned somebody’s work very harshly and then see another movie that’s lousy in the same way, I don’t review it because it’s ugly to pan somebody over and over again. It’s vicious. (1992)

Something Pragmata really drilled home to me is that we need to really differentiate betweenthe 2 types of AI stories. The first are trying to say something about the realities of genAI as it exists today and impacts people. The second exist in a lineage of sci-fi AI disconnected from reality.

lol I will literally never knowingly give Target a dime again.

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I am not allowed to answer the question of "where do you get your games journalism and criticism from" because I can cheat and give you a big fucking list

Treeplanter is OUT NOW!

🌲Cozy sandbox builder
🌲No goals - just make pretty woodland scenes
🌲Choose the season and time of day
🌲Watch creatures move in

I plant a tree for every copy sold - so you restore REAL nature too!