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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I’m sorely unimpressed by those artists who “had to” to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole “because my audience is there”… until Musk’s policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won’t prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making “cis” a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It’s really disappointing to see.
















  • ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.

    Trailer

    You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.

    You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)