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I went to the library last week and ended up picking up Neal Stephenson's new(est) book, Temination Shock.

His previous book to this (Fall or Dodge in Hell) was so horrible that I barely made it halfway through so I wasn't expecting much, but this one was actually more like his older books. Does have a "Stephenson ending," but at least it wasn't the abomination the previous book was.

My second time I was stunned at how much I'd missed the first time because I wasn't looking at game sites, etc.

The third time that I just started, not so much, and yeah, slower.

We are all really soon going to be like cockroaches skittering in the walls of vast swells of AI text where AIs are talking to AIs.

Which the AI-chasing parts of Big Tech companies don't really want but are powerless to stop because they're all dumb cunts. I was talking with someone at an academic publisher who suddenly reached out to me about a conversation I had in person with his predecessor about a manuscript I'm working on. That was four years ago. This guy was like "wow we want this book stat, send up a prospectus! Send us the almost completed manuscript!" and I was like "this is kind of weird". It turns out he was going through his predecessor's notes for the last decade of those kinds of conversations and he was hot to get everything in the door because the big corporation that bought this press a few years back signed a deal with several big AI players to sell them all the draft manuscripts they are working with for LLM training because they all have run out of text despite scraping the entire Internet, the entire corpus of Google Books, every digitized manuscript, every digitized archive. They don't care what's in the drafts, just that it's not by AIs. But they're not going to be able to get ahead of the AI Centipede wave where the AIs are shitting into social media and consuming their own shit and training themselves into a deadly recursive space where the shortcomings of their present training models get amplified. There's nothing human left to eat, and they're going to crowd us out of the textual spaces we've used to communicate with each other.

BG3 and Cyberpunk have both been really replayable for me. I appreciate that.

Same. BG3 slightly less than Cyberpunk I think because the gameplay is slower paced and so on replays I sometimes get impatient at the same story beats happening over and over.

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I expect within the year we'll see variations of this that add in product placement and/or political slogans.

BG3 and Cyberpunk have both been really replayable for me. I appreciate that.

Should be subtitled, The Internet's Slow Inexorable Descent into the Torment Nexus.

Starfield being a dud would certainly be a factor, I'm sure.

AAA gaming is fucking cooked, IMO. There are so few big titles I give even the remotest of a shit about. OTOH, I'm also into my 3rd playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, which will probably end up at 80-100 hours (my others were each over 100 hours long). I absolutely never replay RPG/Story-heavy games, especially ones that consume this many hours. And yet, I'm happily doing it with this one. So my view of the quality of game experiences might be a little neon-colored lately.

I've replayed Cyberpunk probably more than any other RPG as well. I think for me it's because the world is so immersive and the gameplay is so fun and I enjoy trying different builds and stuff.

Useless link: How to monetize your blog.

Starfield being a dud would certainly be a factor, I'm sure.

AAA gaming is fucking cooked, IMO. There are so few big titles I give even the remotest of a shit about. OTOH, I'm also into my 3rd playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, which will probably end up at 80-100 hours (my others were each over 100 hours long). I absolutely never replay RPG/Story-heavy games, especially ones that consume this many hours. And yet, I'm happily doing it with this one. So my view of the quality of game experiences might be a little neon-colored lately.