Having a dog boosts everyone’s mental health. Unfortunately, having a dog is only possible for people with the right living conditions, free time and disposable income. Like so much in our society, the things that make us healthier, happier people are unavailable to the people that need them most.

Oh, perfect. Thank you.

Honestly, I think this is just one where you try it for yourself. The compose file is about 4 lines long, I had the whole thing up and running in about 30 seconds (OK, 45; I forgot a port was already in use and had to redeploy).

So far my one big complaint would be that the self-hosted version replicates the entire website, including all of the “Why choose Bento PDF” and “Try now” and so on. It’d be nice to just have the tools right there when I load it up. Other than that, well, it looks cool, I’ll know more once I actually try out the available options.

I caved and picked up Clair Obscur. It’s a genre that I’m really not a fan of, but it’s just so exceptionally well made that I’m thoroughly enjoying it anyway.

Aongside that, I’ve been playing Rogue Trader at last, after my wife has been bugging me to play it for over a year. It’s very, very good. Probably one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. The degree to which your narrative choices matter is phenomenal. There are scenes in the tutorial that define the entire game. And it nails the setting.

Lastly, I picked up a founders pack for Soulframe. The only bad decision anyone made when working on this game was calling it Soulframe - it is in absolutely no way the “Fantasy Warframe” people are imagining. The designers say their big inspiration was Dragons Dogma. For me, I’d say the gameplay has a lot of the feel of Breath of the Wild. The combat is exceptionally tight. Easily one of the best combat systems I’ve ever played. There’s not a huge amount to do yet, but it’s early access, that’s understandable, and I think they absolutely made the right choice in nailing the feel of the game before worrying about how much of it there is.

So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went “Yeah, that’s gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient.”

Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.

Fascinatingly, this number can’t even include Fortnite, since it’s not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It’s not all “New releases failing.” A lot of it is “Games have a much longer lifespan now.”

Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren’t old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They’re in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They’ve never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.

So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You’ll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it’s all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that’s frankly a good and healthy thing. We’re seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that’s genuinely fantastic news for the medium.

It’s weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there’s ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn’t been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it’s incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it’s one of the best RPGs you’ll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it’s one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we’re getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter… And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it’s inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.

I mean, Clair Obscur and Silksong both came out this year, and they’re fantastic.

But if we’re talking triple A stuff? Uh… Not a clue. I wanna say there was a Battlefield game?

Two ways to read this and I think both are somewhat true.

Option one; They’re OPEC now. They set the supply, and you bring the demand because you have no other choice. This lets them push prices up, which pushes margins up, and that hopefully props up their insanely inflated share price a little longer.

Option two; They’re well aware that demand is going to fall off a cliff soon. We’re already at “Nvidia is paying people to buy their GPUs” and have been for a while. The AI industry can’t afford to keep this train running, and even financial chicanery and circular dealing will only get them so far. Companies are building out data centres with zero plan for how to make any profit from them. When the GPUs they have age out, they’re not gonna buy more, they’re gonna go bankrupt (allowing the banks to sieze the mountain of now worthless three year old burned out GPUs that they used as collateral). And there’s not enough venture capital left for new data centre builds. The genAI financial engine is reaching its peak, and Nvidia doesn’t want to be stuck with a mountain of production that no one wants to buy.

96-98 is the greatest three year run in the history of gaming.

The Total War series isn’t exactly turn based. The large scale strategic stuff is, where you position your armies and run your economy, but all of the battles are real time (with pause / ability to slow down time).

Bold, hot, and entirely correct.

Yes, and I feel like I addressed that with “…those plans come with a ton of asterixes…”

It’s actually insane to think about what could have been accomplished with the capital investment that has collectively gone into generative AI, public ledger blockchain, and metaverse VR projects. IIRC its over a trillion dollars. There are credible plans for more or less ending world hunger for under ten billion. Yeah, those plans come with a ton of asterixes, but the point is, if that’s what ten gets you, imagine what you could do with a hundred billion? Now think about what a trillion could do. It’s honestly sickening.

There’s still a metaverse budget?

And it turned out that the slower load on HDD wasn’t nearly as bad as they thought it would be.

Read the article before making assumptions. It’s nothing to do with the artists.

They were deliberately duplicating all of their data to speed up load times for mechanical disks. Based on industry standard assumptions, they thought this was necessary. The article goes more into why it wasn’t actually necessary after all. But it was nothing to do with the efficiency of their models and textures.

The following can all be true:

• The Democrats are a right wing neoliberal party.
• The Democrats are the most left-wing option that is realistically available to American voters.
• The Democrats can be pushed further left if American progressives work to do so.
• The Democrats - at the party level - will resist such a change, but that resistance can still be overcome.
• In the long term, massive structural overhauls and the downfall of capitalism are the only things that will save America and the world
• In the near term, voting consistly and enthusiastically for the least bad option can still protect vulnerable groups from harm and create changes that lay the groundwork for those structural overhauls.

I seriously doubt that any of the decision makers involved in this process actually watch anime.

Anyone in management who cared probably didn’t have enough pull / authority to do a damn thing about it.

1. Internal review also takes time and expertise. Those things cost money, and the whole point of the exercise is to not spend money.

2. No one uses generative AI because they actually care about the quality of the end product.

But even allowing for those points, it’s entirely possible that they did, in fact, do quality review. Extensively. But at some point the generation costs exceeded their allowed budget and this is what they settled on. This is the thing that lurks behind bad quality AI art; the fact that what we see is often the best result out of many, many tries. The Coca Cola holiday ad had to be stitched together from hours upon hours of failed attempts. Even the horrendously bad looking end product wasn’t as bad as many of the failed outputs they got.