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  1. Metroid Dread

    2021 video game

    Played 6–29 June 2024 on Nintendo Switch

    Direct and engaging, with a nice digestible length. But I can’t help but feel like the Metroid formula needs to shed some legacy baggage.

  2. Decision to Leave

    2022 film

    Watched 21 November 2023

    A beautiful puzzle box. Pieces fitting together so satisfyingly, I could practically hear the clicking sounds.

  3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

    2023 film

    Watched 6 May 2023

    I really wish this series could just be its own thing outside the “marvel” “universe”

  4. Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’
    washingtonpost.com

    Taylor Lorenz:

    When the pandemic broke out, people on TikTok and other apps began referring to it as the “Backstreet Boys reunion tour” or calling it the “panini” or “panda express” as platforms down-ranked videos mentioning the pandemic by name in an effort to combat misinformation. When young people began to discuss struggling with mental health, they talked about “becoming unalive” in order to have frank conversations about suicide without algorithmic punishment. Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

    “One, it doesn’t actually work,” she said. “The people using platforms to organize real harm are pretty good at figuring out how to get around these systems. And two, it leads to collateral damage of literal speech.” Attempting to regulate human speech at a scale of billions of people in dozens of different languages and trying to contend with things such as humor, sarcasm, local context and slang can’t be done by simply down-ranking certain words, Greer argues.

  5. The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet
    wired.com

    Andy Greenberg:

    Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch. The domain he’d registered was a way to simply, instantly turn off WannaCry’s mayhem around the world. It was as if he had fired two proton torpedoes through the Death Star’s exhaust port and into its reactor core, blown it up, and saved the galaxy, all without understanding what he was doing or even noticing the explosion for three and a half hours.

  6. Andor, Season 1

    2022 TV show

    Watched 11–28 December 2022

    Star Wars: we live in a society
    Me: omg so true!!

  7. Top Gun: Maverick

    2022 film

    Watched 28 May 2022

    The original may be aesthetically superior, with those citric pink sunsets, extended plane porn montages, and glamorously lit sweaty bodies, but this one delivers on thrills and excitement on a much more real and visceral level — and they kept Danger Zone!

    Top Gun is a postcard. Maverick is being there.

  8. After Yang

    2021 film

    Watched 9 March 2022

    I really want to follow Yang on Instagram and cry at his intensely beautiful and melancholy Live Photos.

  9. Nightmare Alley

    2021 film

    Watched 13 February 2022

    The tone is pitch-perfect — the aesthetic, the performances, down to how karmically predictable some of the twists are. Love all the little props, such delicate artefacts, all feeling like they could tell a whole story. I couldn’t stop thinking of Ricky Jay, and now I find myself wishing for a Del Toro film about him. Or maybe just the objects he left behind.