“How do you kill that which has no life?”

Beyond parody (for nearly a decade at this point).

During lockdown I played ECHO, which had been in my backlog for a few years after a stray recommendation I saw on MetaFilter. It was a surprisingly tight integration of beautiful and intriguing environmental/UI/sound design, gorgeous music, compelling yet minimalist storytelling (and voice acting), and a really strong gameplay loop of stealth, puzzle-solving, and the occasional panicky run-and-gun. Imagine my surprise when I read up on it after and learned it only sold a few thousand copies!

I strongly recommend playing it blind, but this trailer gives a good overview of the style and mechanics.

One of the greatest games of all time from a design and gameplay perspective. There’s a reason it’s in the MoMA. The soundtrack is an all-timer as well.

It’s also relatively new as a federal holiday, only added in 2021. Before that it was largely officially observed only in Texas and a handful of cities.

It’s literally the name of the bill.

Apparently in many developing world cities with shaky property records it’s known for fraudsters to make fake real estate deals using buildings they don’t own, to the point that in Google Street View it’s common to see “this property is not for sale” or similar painted on house walls near the entrance. I’ve never seen it on a building this large though!

I wonder if this would include on-screen notifications.

Katamari Damacy. It has a reputation for being silly Japanese nonsense, but the gameplay is brilliant, the graphics are timeless, the soundtrack is incredible, and it has some surprising thematic depth.

GIVE ME MORE SOLDIERS, NOBLE LEADER, SO WE MAY SHEATHE OUR SWORDS IN THE BEATING HEARTS OF OUR ENEMIES

• Katamari Damacy
• Halo 2
• Civilization II
• SimCity 2000
• Crazy Taxi

Halo 3, Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, GTA4, Super Mario Galaxy, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, and Portal all launched closer to the original Sonic the Hedgehog than today.

Border disputes (mainly Kashmir) worsened by the friction between a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India when both are led by increasingly nationalist governments, basically.

27%

He has statutory emergency authority which can be checked by Congress if abused, except, what Congress?

(Also the tariffs are enforced by CBP, an executive agency.)

Drone warfare is politically agnostic. If it can be used by a Luigi against a healthcare CEO, it can be used by far-right extremists against progressive politicians, pride parades, or Black churches. I’m not very jazzed to live in the world of Slaughterbots.

Might be your settings. When I flip the front page to “Active” most of the posts have hundreds of comments (though I prefer setting it to “Top Six Hours”).

To be fair, that’s all they have to go on. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, how many pages is a lifetime (or even a childhood) of sight and sound?

At least it’s not pulling up mostly Motorhead-related content like it used to…

I feel like a good test of any supposed AGI would be to hook it up to a feed of a classic 3D platformer like Mario 64, give it input control, and see how long it takes to progress through the game. We’re seeing sparks of this with Claude Plays Pokemon, but any self-respecting superintelligence (or even human-equivalent) should be more than capable of learning the control scheme, navigating the 3D environment, solving puzzles, and generally playing through as competently as any 10-year-old seeing the game for the first time.