Not that I’d ever complain personally about a good hot summer arriving early—from 85 °F onward and climbing, I begin to feel like myself. I get a lot more things done, get better at making decisions, and enjoy life in general. This weekend, for example, I attended four concerts, three classical at Tonhalle Düsseldorf and one rock concert at the HSD Unison Festival. I wasn’t done then, but the weekend gave up and called it a day. Bummer. On a less personal and more global scale, however, it’s pretty catastrophic. Perspectives are bleak, even bleaker than we think they are. The other day, someone posted an urgent presentation on the current state of our climate, and the first comment decried it as a load of alarmist bullshit, with the galaxy-brain rationale that if it were really that bad, politicians would have done something about it already. You can't make this up! Particularly so-called “conservatives”—a misnomer in every respect—are holding humanity’s life support hostage against younger people and future generations. And they do so because climate action infringes on their right to obscenely enrich themselves, and because they’re either looking forward to the rapture or be part of a new breed of superhumans once the rabble is gone. A gradual catastrophe where things get worse and worse would be bad enough. But what I’m really afraid of are exponential runaway effects hiding behind invisible threshold values. If that comes to pass, then we can kiss our asses goodbye quickly. (Most of us, at least.)
Last week, I wrote a post on Apple’s Vision Pro and Media Convergence for my blog between drafts; uploaded a new album to Flickr with seven shots from the Shinobazu Pond in Tōkyō; continued posting my daily vintage travel-squaries at Pixelfed, and posted assorted images with moderate-to-lengthy comments at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.
As announced in last week’s newsletter, I’m stocking up on new Sunday funnies material and will, for a while, recommend games from the Indie Games Fest instead—some soon to be released, some in development, some subject of publisher negotiations. This week’s pick is Thief of Smiles by Irox Games, a kind of physics-puzzles-stealth-platformer-adventure in a satirically dystopian future where you can do all kinds of things with a telepathic chewing gum. Even with their excellent, enjoyable, and very polished demo—for which they won the DCP Bester Prototyp Preis—they have a hard time finding a publisher, because there are “too many platformers” on the market. Which is true, but the game is a lot more than just a platformer. If you’re on Steam, add it to your wishlist, and wish them luck!
J.
Last week, I wrote a post on Apple’s Vision Pro and Media Convergence for my blog between drafts; uploaded a new album to Flickr with seven shots from the Shinobazu Pond in Tōkyō; continued posting my daily vintage travel-squaries at Pixelfed, and posted assorted images with moderate-to-lengthy comments at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.
As announced in last week’s newsletter, I’m stocking up on new Sunday funnies material and will, for a while, recommend games from the Indie Games Fest instead—some soon to be released, some in development, some subject of publisher negotiations. This week’s pick is Thief of Smiles by Irox Games, a kind of physics-puzzles-stealth-platformer-adventure in a satirically dystopian future where you can do all kinds of things with a telepathic chewing gum. Even with their excellent, enjoyable, and very polished demo—for which they won the DCP Bester Prototyp Preis—they have a hard time finding a publisher, because there are “too many platformers” on the market. Which is true, but the game is a lot more than just a platformer. If you’re on Steam, add it to your wishlist, and wish them luck!
J.