Remember when I told you that Wasteland 3 has great musical interludes? The job they’ve done is amazing! With a few pieces of excellent original recordings of public domain songs, they’ve spruced up this game a lot. And I mean a lot! This, again, is really impressive. And on an optional side-mission, too. I almost don’t want to look at the digital soundtrack I bought, so as to not spoil what else is coming.
The Private Citizen 37: Unsecure Restaurant Contact Tracing Lists
“Now, I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character, so let me make this abundantly clear: I do the job. And then I get paid.”
— Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly
Wasteland 3 is out today. I’ve played it for about 12 hours now for a review I wrote and can whole-heartedly recommend it, if you like old-school CRPGs. There’s this one scene in the beginning of the game, where I knew they had me. I was all-in after that. This guy gets shot in the head and then this amazing music kicks in… It’s so well done!
I’ve been emailed by a couple of people who asked if I’m going to play – and share my thoughts on – the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. Since I guess I’m a well-known simulator nut, it’s not unreasonable to ask.
The answer is yes, I will, eventually. But I first have to upgrade my PC. I’ve already ordered a new 1 TB SSD for this, but when it arrives, I’ll have to make time to install it and re-install Windows – which is long overdue anyway. Once that’s done, hopefully this weekend, I still need to make time to play the actual game, which could be a bit tricky. With my move to Düsseldorf coming up next month, free time is in very short supply for me right now. But I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of the game as soon as humanly possible.
Spent most of my day today playing Wasteland 3 for a review I’m writing. I’ve always loved the Wasteland series and this game doesn’t seem to be an exception to the rule. At least so far. Which is fortunate with Fallout being shit these days.
Anyone who immediately recognises who my characters are based on has my respect. You clearly know your Westerns.
Lego are a bunch of fucking hypocrites. On the one hand, they refuse to sell anything that might be construed as militaristic, on the other hand, they turn around a few weeks later and release this:
You do realise Luke gets his hand cut off with a sword by his dad in that scene, right? They do know full well they’re hypocrites, too. Look how careful the framed this shot so you can’t see where Luke’s right hand is missing. Fuckers…
Back to Work
Light at the End of the Tunnel
The Cost of Sustainability
These images are amazing. And terrible. So terrible.
Today in 1970, France conducted “Licorne,” its fourth H-bomb test—and 36th test overall – at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. Six hours after the 914-kt explosion, Defense Minister Michel Debrè swam in the lagoon as a publicity stunt to show it was not dangerously radioactive.
Game Development with PICO-8
What the heck are the Russians up to now? Isn’t this exactly how Chernobyl started too?
22 /23 June 2020, RN #IMS station SEP63 #Sweden detected 3isotopes; Cs-134, Cs-137 & Ru-103 associated w/Nuclear fission @ higher than usual levels (but not harmful for human health). The possible source region in the 72h preceding detection is shown in orange on the map.
Russia said on Monday it had detected no sign of a radiation emergency, after an international body reported last week that sensors in Stockholm had picked up unusually high levels of radioactive isotopes produced by nuclear fission.
Matt Taibbi is taking on cancel culture within the US media, a problem John C. Dvorak has been outlining for years. In his signature style, Taibbi is even more scathing, of course.
- Matt Taibbi: The American Press Is Destroying Itself
But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness. The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired from a research firm for – get this – retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones! Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions. The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.
Taibbi goes on to describe one of these social media lynch mobs. And I can tell you from personal experience that this stuff is real. And it happens inside of publishing companies. I’ve seen it happen first hand myself. That’s why I have been a publicly outspoken opponent of these self-described “progressive” cancel culture do-gooders and virtue signallers for years. This idiocy has to be stopped. It’s bad enough in any profession to call for your co-workers to be fired because they voiced opinions you don’t like. In journalism, it’s a death knell for any sort of quality reporting at all. When these people are given the powers to cancel people, the publication or broadcaster in question can essentially be considered a complete loss when it comes to quality journalism going forward. People can’t do objective research and write about what they believe to be the truth when they are afraid that bringing certain things to light will cost them their job.
Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.” To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues.
All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.
Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones. The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.
Taibbi ends with three paragraphs that any self-respecting journalist should print out and stick to a wall in their office:
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
I don’t need to print it out, though. I’ve asked tough questions and didn’t give a shit about people trying to stop me from telling you my opinions from day one of becoming a professional journalist. And I’m not about to stop. Which is just one reason why I’m not drawing a salary anymore.
