Note: Yes, I know I wrote a complaint about ’everyone reviewing things’, and especially how ‘reviewing’ things meant I stopped enjoying them. I’m starting a new little series here, not to review films I watch, but to provide some thoughts on films I am re-watching. I’m going to putt them in sets, I think, several at a time. So, here’s the first bunch:

Sorcerer (1977) and The Thin Red Line (1998)

…

Around the time I was pushing 18-20 years old, adventure games died. RIP adventure games. Gone forever, never to come back except in Germany, etc, etc.

I wasn’t particularly upset by this at the time, because iD software had let off an atomic bomb on PC gaming, and I was too busy being excited by 3D graphics and fast-paced action gameplay of a sort I had never even imagined before to actually recognise that I was not really that into playing what we now call first-person shooters.

…

Today is a big day. In a few hours as I type this Death by Scrolling, a game I made with the man who needs no introduction, Ron Gilbert, becomes available. It’s been an amazing project to work on. But it also got me thinking about my personal projects.

When I began to put up my vampire prose and my weird little throw-back BBS game (Swords of Freeport), I was struggling with a day job that was rapidly falling apart (because, video games industry). That’s no longer the case. I’m still in a messy place of having no real idea just what I’ll be doing next year, I now know that short of disaster I will be able to finish and release Dungeons of Freeport (a semi-classical roguelike) and Deck & Conn (a Super Star Trek-like game being published by Microprose).

…

To get this out of the way: working from home is good. It’s good for me, it’s good for many other people. The studies agree. I’m not saying it’s always the best fit for every industry or even every company, but I am saying that most of the pressure to come ‘back into the office’ come from overly-controlling bosses and people who are sitting there eating the rent on very expensive offices for their companies.

…

Note: there are a lot of generalisations in this blog post, as it’s kind of a stream of thoughts. Most things are more complex than the way I word them below, so please don’t @ me saying as much - I’m well aware.

My life isn’t what I expected it to be. Not in a bad way, just in the kind of way where if you described who I’d become and what I was doing to me at age 25, you’d probably get a reaction of extreme confusion.

…

A good friend of mine just made an observation:

“We don’t have profit seeking capitalists anymore. They had a moral compass. Usually a fucked one but they had one. Now we have rent-seeking post-capitalists.”

If you ask anyone around my age or a bit younger (at least, one who wasn’t born with a silver spoon massaging their gums) which category of human they hate the most, they’ll probably answer landlords. See, most of us still rent the roofs over our heads. I don’t need to go into detail about all this because, frankly, there’s a million articles and videos on how the housing crisis and cost of living has fucked pretty much anyone who’s a millennial or younger.

…

What follows is a sort of loose collection of thoughts I had during my current re-visit of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don’t expect some grand conclusion or an essay; just come with me on this little trip, won’t you?

…

In the past four years or so, I went from having done a bit of photography in my past, to doing a lot of photography in my present. I went from owning merely a single beat-up rarely-used DSLR I’d owned since 2006, to having a spreadsheet full of cameras ranging from a modern mirrorless camera to dozens and dozens of old rangefinders and SLRs obtained from markets or found by friends in the bottom of parents’ cupboards.

…

Like a lot of you, I recently upgraded (or downgraded, if you’re being unkind-but-fair) my iPhone OS to the new one, iOS 26, which has the biggest UI shakeup they’ve done for years. Gone is some variation of the semi-flat Apple UI elements, replaced instead with semi-transparent floating all over the application or web page’s content, floating in and out like that stoner at your friend’s house party.

I had briefly tried a beta of this new on OS on my iPad Pro (which is these days my primary portable computing device, unless I need to do a bunch of actual C++ game dev) but found the aesthetic and interface changes ruined almost every aspect of my work flow. I returned it to its original state, and as of this moment have no plans to sully my actual mac or iPad with the new system.

…

Social media has a lot to answer for. Along with everything else truly terrible about it, we also have to suffer the indignities of the existence of Letterboxd. Beyond the horrid misspelling of the word, this service has resulted in friends at parties saying, “Did you read my letterboxd review of that new Marvel Film, Chongusman? Here, let me read it to you.”

In practice, of course, this is no worse or better than any other “Oh have you seen the new Clint Eastwood film?” conversation at a party. If you hadn’t figured out by my pre-coffee snarkiness, I am not on this service. Jokes aside, I recognise why people like it. I’m sure partly it’s the inherent voyeurism of knowing what friends and parasocials are watching. But it’s no doubt also that for the handful of people who follow you, you get to have a platform to espouse your opinions about films.

…