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.)

And still no Halo movie.

M O I S T U R I Z E M E

It’s a fine idea but feels like it’s maybe past its prime in terms of active maintenance? Like I checked out my old neighborhood in the suburbs of a large US city and the primary road through it (which the area is named after and has a very big visible welcome sign indicating that) was misspelled. I don’t have an account and didn’t care to learn how to edit it, but I did drop a note flagging the error. Then I browsed some of the other notes and noticed they were all multiple years old. Even Manhattan was littered with months- or years-old notes with only a handful of them marked resolved. Maybe they were just hard edge cases not easily fixed, but it gave the impression of a database that has not been broadly maintained for years.

Heckjumpers

As shitty as American politics can be, we should be very thankful that overt violence against political candidates, journalists, volunteers, etc. has not (yet) been normalized. I can’t imagine being involved with Mexican politics, especially anti-drug/anti-corruption reform, with the threat of cartel retaliation hanging over you and your family. Strong respect to those who tough it out.

The irony is that the situation is pretty much the opposite of this – the US vetoed a symbolic, non-binding resolution for essentially messaging reasons (it didn’t explicitly acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defence), but when it comes to concrete action it’s providing millions in humanitarian relief, and Biden is pressuring Netanyahu privately and publicly to pull back from a full invasion and allow a relief corridor.

I get people not taking the IDF at face value, but Hamas ain’t exactly trustworthy, either.

It’s cult shit. Not even mobsters would care about threatening grand jurors *after* an indictment has been unveiled. Regular jurors, sure, but that’s only because the outcome of the trial is on the line. But the Trump cult of personality ensures there’s a legion of stochastic terrorists out there to retaliate against grand jurors out of pure spite, even when there’s no practical reason to do so.

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/todays-my-birthday/