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NireBryce
@NireBryce
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Note: This is a living document. Just, very slowly, like a plant.

I'll start:

Table of Contents:

  • Computers
  • Library/Information Science and Search
  • For The Sake of Posting
    • Games
    • Science

There's way more in the comments -- If you reply to this with a share, please repost as a comment so it sticks with the thread, even if it's just a link to your post! People can't navigate chains backwards.

click this read more, it exists so the other horizontal rules are actually horizontal rules instead of saying 'read more'


prophetgoddess
@prophetgoddess

this is going to be my tim rogers post i guess. if you know of tim, it's probably from his youtube channel, where he makes docuseries-length reviews of video games. you might also know that he used to work as a video producer for kotaku dot com, making similar content.

prior to this, however, he wrote a bunch of other stuff, some of which i consider some of the best writing available anywhere on the internet.

there is a litany of immensely great stuff in the action button dot net archive. my personal favorite is the novella-length review of final fantasy vi:

(content warning for abrasive ableist and homophobic language from the mouths of teenage boys in the early 90s)


also worth a read is the substantially shorter and even more enigmatic review of shadows of the damned:


and the very first thing i ever read from tim, his review of bioshock infinite, a review that imposed upon me at the age of 15 the important lesson that a video game can be highly anticipated and critically acclaimed and still be pretty bad:


even less read than tim's old action button reviews are the handful of long personal essays he has posted to his medium page. the first one of these i read was "what we might mean when we say a clock is wrong":


my favorite, i think, is "when life was cold and love was weird":

a warning about these: they present a substantially different authorial voice from tim's youtube videos, and may substantially change how you view him as a person in ways that you might not like. viewer discretion is advised.


there's even more if you're willing to dig, like this very well-known article he wrote about metal gear solid 2, which i actually think is among his worst writing, but people would mention it for sure if i did not he also has some articles up on large prime numbers dot com, some of which are the same as on his medium page, some of which are not, like "should you see blood on the last day of travel".


uh here's a few things by other people i like so i don't come off as too much of a freak:

this is a great review of thimbleweed park that i think about constantly, not just with regards to the general failure of adventure games made by genre veterans (broken age, etc) compared to the success of adventure games made by genre newcomers (kentucky route zero, etc), but with regards to a frequent recurring pattern of video games that give you "everything you thought you wanted."


this article about terrible photos of nba players makes me cry laughing every time i read it.


everyting kimimi the game eating she-monster posts is a delight, but this recent series on the seven-part dreamcast rpg eldorado gate is magnificent. eldorado gate was released in seven parts over the course of a year, predating the 2010s experiments in episodic video game storytelling by over a decade. unfortunately, they're only available in japanese, so they remain woefully unknown in the west. kimimi covers a lot of games like this, and her writing is a vital resource for anyone interested in video game history.


duncan fyfe is a magnificent writer who now mostly writes good long reads about games for vice, but he also used to run a fantastic blog called hit self destruct. the benjamin franklin house has been a long running joke in the community around the podcast idle thumbs (rip), and duncan fyfe wrote what is undoubtedly the definitive chronicle of the experience.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

"should you see blood on the last day of travel"

http://largeprimenumbers.com/tokyo2k13/

Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs

https://www.shacknews.com/article/103473/beneath-a-starless-sky-pillars-of-eternity-and-the-infinity-engine-era-of-rpgs

Review: Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel III. spring song

https://theglorioblog.com/2021/05/13/review-fate-stay-night-heavens-feel-iii-spring-song/

The Only Game I Ever Replay

https://www.clockworkworlds.com/june2022/

If midlength-reads are ok...

http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/01/12/atomization_p.html
"The sphere of legitimate debate"
"Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles. As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, 'We think it’s important informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.' I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good. When it is criticized for this it will reject the criticism out of hand, which is also not good."
(This piece is interesting because it is from 2009 and therefore is better at diagnosing the disease than prescribing a cure; it does not notice some of the ways-- some of which had already begun at the point it was published-- that in the coming years the status quo would arrest or co-opt the processes it describes)

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html
"The iron law of institutions"
"the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution 'fail' while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution."

http://mu-foundation.blogspot.com/2011/11/maniac-mansion.html
"Maniac Mansion"
"[Maniac Mansion (1987):] it's small, it's old, it has an interface that wasn't fully exploited. It's still more open, more interested in reacting [to] the player's prodding than most other games I've seen in this vein--even very recent ones."

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
"Lena"
"Between 2030 and 2049, MMAcevedo was duplicated more than 80 times, so that it could be distributed to other research organisations. Each duplicate was made with the express permission of Acevedo himself or, from 2043 onwards, the permission of a legal organisation he founded to manage the rights to his image. Usage of MMAcevedo diminished in the mid-2040s as more standard brain images were produced, these from other subjects who were more lenient with their distribution rights and/or who had been scanned without their express consent. In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without his consent. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image."

I still need to read Fine Structure, my non-nonfiction non-post reading really took a dive since I stopped riding subways and busses as much due to the Miasma. They need to invent a way to let me safely read things that aren't audiobooks while bicycling.

(With headphone controls that aren't infuriating, so screen readers as they stand are out)

Brian Phillips is a remarkably entertaining sportswriter with deep enthusiasms. (See, for instance "This Is Katie F-----g Ledecky: A Thesis About Kicking Ass.")

https://grantland.com/the-triangle/katie-ledecky-athlete-best-swimmer/)

He wrote an extraordinarily long series of articles about the amazing rise of a minor Italian football club that last won an Italian championship in 1922. It's a story of hopes and dreams, taut drama, remarkable characters, and is an extremely vivid tale considering that nothing and nobody in it really exists.

It's called "The Story of Pro Vercelli," and it's wild.

https://www.runofplay.com/category/vercelli/

in reply to @prophetgoddess's post:

for some reason I decided to pick "what we might mean when we say a clock is wrong" as the very first thing I ever read by Tim Rogers. An experience for sure. He reads like he, himself, is the main character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, and the author has only a small amount more perspective on his life than he does.

also I'm amused that the wikipedia community seems to have responded to the NBA player pictures article by moving the crop of Mardy Collins over to the correct person. Still couldn't find a better picture but at least we can put the right person in the middle of it.

edit: I'm genuinely gobsmacked by how long it took me to find Bowen in the "Grand Jatte" pic hahhahaha