We watched Alex Garland’s MEN last night, and I’m really mad that I didn’t go see it in theaters back when it came out. When the original trailer first hit, I was very hyped, especially as we had just recently seen Annihilation. But for some reason, when it came out and the reviews were mediocre, I skipped it. Big mistake. Every negative review is undeserved. It’s beautiful, bold, and disgusting; another great addition to Alex Garland’s filmography.
April 2025
I am a weak man. I impulse bought Oblivion Remastered for my PS5 Pro last night. I’m around 37 hours into Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and I still have Promise Mascot Agency and 500 other games to play… Too many games, too little time!
My teeth are better than ever! Sorry, didn’t want to leave you hanging with that ellipsis forever.
Dentist time…
I don’t know at what point I lost the ability to exist on the internet with all the other assholes but, damn, people really bend me out of shape. I’m malleable as fuck. Is it ‘cause I’m solid gold?
Yeah, okay, so Companion really illustrates the problem with Rotten Tomatoes. The movie has a 93% on RT, but clearly is not a “93/100” movie. It felt like a solid 7.5 to me, which absurdly means “maybe better than average” when measuring media on an out-of-ten scale. This is because RT is binary, a review is either positive or negative, so a “universal 7” ends up being basically a 100% movie on RT.
On Metacritic, which averages out the review scores for media, Companion has a much more understandable 70 out of 100. As someone who, just this moment, watched the movie… I agree with this. It’s entertaining, it doesn’t absolutely insult my intelligence, and it only mildly squanders a fun idea, that has been done to death in various ways, by mostly retreading all the ways it’s been done before instead of doing something truly inventive and exciting with it.
I’ll say that it was much better than Mickey 17 but that’s a low, low, low bar.
We’re gonna watch Companion. It’s gotta be better than Mickey 17. Right?
My biggest gripe about Claude Code is launching it, asking it to do something, forgetting to hit shift+tab for auto-accept, walking away expecting it to do a bunch of coding for me while I am brushing my teeth, and then coming back to see it asking me to accept some edits early in the process and it didn’t do anything while I brushed my teeth… I’m sure I can just tell it to turn auto-accept on by default somehow. I use git, I’m not scared of edits, do your worst!
Man, is it really Monday again already?
Mickey 17
If you were excited to watch Mickey 17 like I was because you really liked Snowpiercer, and (of course) Parasite… temper those expectations, Mickey 17 is a total mess. No idea how it has reviews as positive as it does, because it’s just… not very good, or maybe not any good, really. It is just a loud, flashy, audacious mess.
Man, Claude Code really takes a lot of the pain out of software engineering. I love it. I’m gonna bankrupt myself building stuff with it.
Why am I awake right now??
Oblivion Remaster looks really fantastic. Fully cranked at 1440p Ultrawide, my 4090 can’t really hack it. There’s also some problem in the latest patch that disables DLSS and the on-by-default screen space reflections are clearly really borked and should not be turned on when RT is running. Kind of strange.
But the experience of going through the intro dungeon and venturing out into the world the first time… I felt it, that Elder Scrolls feeling, it started to pull me in. But… I still have a lot of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to play, so… I’ll wait for Oblivion Remastered to get patched a couple times.
If a sociopath is invested in your relationship you probably have one of the most powerful allies on the planet.
Someone tell this to my wife!
Just kidding.
This is pretty cool, lo-fi Square Enix music stream.
I used to know a guy who would be very distraught over the news that Forza Horizon 5 looks best on PS5 Pro. My heart goes out to him in this trying time.
On that note, Claude Code is seriously amazing. It’s done so much heavy lifting in this project so far, it’s incredible. Thank you, Claude Code!
i really just think the future is unknowable and that's why i generally just go with assuming everything will be fine. there was a point in history where it was unthinkable that you could 'work from home', and before that a point in history where having a job that wasn't some sort of grueling physical labor was similarly unimaginable. The technology that has already revolutionized our lives hasn't even been around that long, we're so new at this that most people still don't understand what social media really is doing to humanity–it will be the historians 50 years from now that sort it out. Part of the reason so many people can't see a good ending to this story is because none of this has happened before, just like 100% of literally everything that has ever happened to humanity. too many people think we've got it all figured out and that someone is in control, but none of any of this is on purpose, and still, things only really get better in the long run, because they have to. unless humanity is really meant to go out in one big ritualistic suicide after inventing AGI and not being able to cope with our redundancy, i don't know. but that doesn't seem likely to me. i think we'll all be food service workers, like literally every single one of us will be involved in food prep in some way, and there will be universal basic income, before humanity will allow itself to wipe itself out. there's a lot of power/inertia in the continual mass hysteria that is the collective hubris of mankind.
like you ever meet a person who makes every bad decision but still comes out on top every time, that's humanity as a whole, i just don't think it has ever been wise to bet against humanity, i don't understand why being pessimistic about humanity's prospects has gotten to be so in vogue. maybe it was a russian internet psyop to try to make everyone else miserable, they created /r/2meirl4meirl and it's just spiraled out from there and now we have AI doomerism
Man, I haven’t been napping but I’m still staying up late. Why? It seems like I get this way every spring. I get all cracked out working on stuff. It’s kinda fun. But I’m always kinda sleepy. Kinda fun and sleepy should be my tagline.
I spent the weekend building out the first prototype-like version of Postalgic. I’m writing this post on it right now! And this site is being published with it. That’s pretty neat.
I’m about 35 hours into Assassin’s Creed Shadows and I’m having a great time. The game is really gorgeous on PS5 Pro and I am all the more convinced that 4k 40fps VRR is the future of console gaming. We don’t need 60 fps on a 120hz television. 40 fps feels like a great sweet spot where it feels a little cinematic but still smooth. Here’s hoping GTA6 has a beautiful 40fps mode on PS5 Pro.