Artificial Intelligence and data analytics solutions have been the driving force behind the growth of various industries. Manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and most importantly, the retail sector are business verticals leveraging these innovative technologies’ potential.
Now that the rate at which retailers are implementing technologies like data analytics and artificial intelligence into their business is known let’s figure out the impact of these technologies in developing actionable customer insights. https://bit.ly/3j9cm9e
It's always a good day when your nemesis gf finds her wings. Sage is always experimenting with new innovations in her systems and machines, but customization/transformation being one of her favorites. She likes feeling in control of her body and existence. Charmy is always eager to see what has in store for him in their confrontations. She much like her father before her, adores the attention.
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An AI tool used to help ICE identify potential new recruits with law enforcement experience wrongly categorized some potential new officers,
An AI tool used to help ICE identify potential new recruits with law enforcement experience wrongly categorized some potential new officers, sources say.
Jan. 14, 2026, 5:19 PM EST / Updated Jan. 15, 2026, 7:00 PM EST
By Julia Ainsley
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement was racing to add 10,000 new officers to its force, an artificial intelligence error in how their applications were processed sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the error.
The AI tool used by ICE was tasked with looking for potential applicants with law enforcement experience to be placed into the agency’s “LEO program” — short for law enforcement officer — for new recruits who are already law enforcement officers. It requires four weeks of online training.
In 2023, back when my posts were still being shared to Twitter because the API wasn’t paid-only, I wrote an article about the potential ramifications of generative art media going forward. My concern in the immediate was that the tools weren’t going to go away, but also the potential harm to artists was as much about general economic precarity and not people using fanart to make their D&D characters. I further added to this with a consideration of how I wanted to avoid using generative art in my game development because I didn’t want what people would say about it. That is, a social pressure about the art is what keeps me from using it, not a personal philosophical disposition. I’m an artist who already works with collage and constraints, this feels like a handy way to have something I can play with.
Well, it’s been a year and change and a sort of AI Art Apocalypse has happened, and if you’re not aware of it, it’s because you’re someone who avoids all of the pools that have been so thoroughly pissed in that they are now just piss. If you’re at all related to any part of the internet where people share a bunch of images – which is to say a lot of social media – then you’re already dealing with the place crawling with generative images. Whether it’s a fanart booru, or big sites like facebook and twitter, or god help you deviantart, there is a pretty clear sign that anywhere that opened the door to generative art became a space overwhelmingly for generative art.
I teach about this subject now and I have had some time with it in a situation away from the internet, and I’d like to give you some insights into what this stuff is for, what it does, why you shouldn’t use it, and ways it can be useful.
Content Warning: I’m going to be talking about these tools as tools that exist and leaving the philosophical/ethical arguments about ‘art theft’ and their genesis aside. I’m not including any examples. No shrimp jesus jumpscare.
You might notice I’m saying ‘generative art’ and not ‘AI art.’ Part of this is because I don’t want to buy into the idea that these tools are ‘artificial intelligence.’ Ironically, ‘AI art’ now has less of an implication of being ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and is much more of an implication of ‘it’s ugly shiny art of shrimp jesus with badly spelled signs.’
I want to focus for this conversation on generative graphical tools, and I want to do that because I don’t have much experience with the other types. The textual generators offer me something I don’t really need? I already make a ton of words of dubious quality. Those are actually the things that concern me because their natural aesthetic is authoritive and comprehensive and that’s why it’s a problem that they’re being used to present any old nonsense that may just be straight up wrong. I don’t use those tools and I avoid the platforms that use them so I’m not familiar with them.
Things Generative Art Is Good For
I already use art I don’t own, a lot, for playing. Every day for the past three years I’ve shared a custom Magic: The Gathering playing card, a game I don’t own the rights to, using a card face I don’t own the rights to, and artwork from an artist on Artstation whose artwork I did not pay for or even ask for. This is generally seen as a totally reasonable and acceptable form of playful, transformative media generation and I at no point pretend I have any rights to the material. If I take a picture of someone famous and put a speech bubble over their mouth saying ‘I drink farts,’ if I, as tumblr says, play with jpgs like dolls, that is by no means being done with rights and permission.
Which means we’re already aware that there’s a way of playing with images that both violates copyright but is generally okay to do.
The metric I use for this is if the thing you’re using generative art for doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re not going to try and claim money, if you’re not going to put it on a marketplace, if you aren’t going to try and claim ownership and profit off generative material, I think you’re probably fine. I mean probably, if you’re using it to say, generate revenge porn of a classmate that’s an asshole move, but the thing is that’s a bad thing regardless of the tool you’re using. If you’re using it to bulk flood a space, like how Deviantart is full of accounts with tens of thousands of pictures made in a week, then that’s an asshole move because, again, it’s an asshole move regardless of the tool.
If you’re a roleplayer and you want a picture of your Dragonborn dude with glasses and a mohawk? That’s fine, you’re using it to give your imagination a pump, you’re using it to help your friends visualise what matters to you about your stuff. That’s fine! It’s not like you’re not making artistic choices when you do this, cycling through choices and seeing the one that works best for you. That’s not an action deprived of artistic choice!
There are also some things that are being labelled as ‘AI’ which seem to be more like something else to me. Particularly, there are software packages that resize images now, which are often calling it ‘AI upscaling,’ which it may be using some variety of these Midjourney style models to work, but which serves a purpose similar to sequences of resizes and selective blurs. There are also tools that can do things like remove people from the background of images, which is… good? It should be good and easy to get people out of pictures they didn’t consent to be in.
Things Generative Art Is Bad For
Did you know you don’t own copyright on generated art? This is pretty well established. If you generated the image, it’s not yours, because you didn’t make it. It was made by an algorithm, and algorithms aren’t people. This isn’t a complicated issue, this just means that straight up, any art you make at work that’s meant to be used for work, shouldn’t be used because people can just straight up use it. Logo design, branding, all that stuff is just immediately open for bootlegging or worse, impersonation.
Now you might think that’s a bit of a strange thing to bring up but remember, I’m dealing with students a lot. Students who want to position themselves as future prompt engineers or social media managers need to understand full well that whatever they make with these tools are not things that will have an enduring useful application. Maybe you can use it for a meme you post on an account, but it’s not something you can build branding off, because you don’t own it. Everyone owns it.
From that we get a secondary problem, because if you didn’t own it, its only use is what people say or think when they look at it, and thing is, people are already sick and tired of the aesthetics of generated art. You’re going to get people who don’t care glossing over it, and people who do care hating it. Generative art as a way of presenting your business or foregrounding your ‘vibes’ are going to think that your work is, primarily, ‘more AI art’ and not about what it’s trying to communicate. When the internet is already full of Slop, if you use these tools to represent your work, you are going to be turning your own work and media presence into slop.
What’s more, you need to be good at seeing mistakes if you’re using these tools. If you put some art out there that’s got an extra thumb or someone’s not holding a sword right, people will notice. That means you need to start developing the toolset above for fine-tuning and redrawing sections of artwork. Now, that’s not a bad thing! That’s a skill you can develop! But it means that the primary draw of these tools is going to be something that you then have to do your own original work over the top of.
The biggest reason though I recommend students not treat this work like it’s a simple tool for universal application is that it devalues you as a worker. If you’re trying to get hired for a job at a company and you can show them a bunch of generative art you’ve made to convince them that you’re available, all you are really telling them is that you can be replaced by a small script that someone else can make. Your prompts are not unique enough, your use of the tool not refined enough that you can’t just be replaced by anyone else who gets paid less. You are trying to sell yourself as a product to employers, and generative art replaces what you bring with what everyone brings.
They make you lazy! People include typos in the generative media because they’re not even looking at them or caring about what they say! And that brings me to the next point that there are just things these tools don’t do a good job doing, and that’s stuff I want to address next in…
Things That Are Interesting
Because the tools of generative art create a very impressive-seeming artistic output, they are doing it in a way that people want to accept. They want to accept them and that means accepting the problems, or finding a way to be okay with those problems. People who don’t care that much about typos and weird fingers and so on, because you know, it gets me a lot of what I want, but it doesn’t get me everything, and I don’t know how to get the everything.
If you generate an image and want to move something in it a little bit, your best way to do that is to edit the image directly. Telling the software to do that, again, but change this bit, this much, is in fact really hard because it doesn’t know what those parts are. It doesn’t have an idea of where they are, it’s all running on an alien understanding of nightmare horror imagery.
What that means is that people start to negotiate with themselves about what they want, getting to ‘good enough’ and learning how to negotiate with the software. My experiments with these tools led to me making a spreadsheet so I could isolate the terms I use that cause problems, and sometimes those results are very, very funny. In this, the tool teaches you how to use it (which most tools do), but the teaching results in a use that is wildly inappropriate to what the tool promises it’s for.
One of my earliest experiments was to take four passages from One Stone that described a character and just put that text straight into midjourney to see what it generated based on that plain text description. Turns out? Nothing like what I wanted. But when I treated it like say, I was searching for a set of tags on a booru system like danbooru or safebooru… then it was pretty good at that. Which is what brings me to the next stage of things, which is like…
These things were trained on porn sites right?
Like, you can take some very specific tags from some of the larger boorus and type them into these prompt sites and get a very reasonable representation of what it is you asked for, even if that term is a part of an idiolect, a term that’s specific to that one person in one space that’s become a repeated form of tag. Just type in an artist name and see if it can replicate their style and then check to see what kind of art that artist makes a lot of. This is why you can get a thing that can give you police batons and mirrored sunglasses just fine but if you ask for ‘police uniform’ you get some truly Tom of Finland kind of bulging stuff.
Conclusion
Nobody who dislikes generative art is wrong. I think there are definitely uses of it that are flat out bad, and I think it’s totally okay and even good to say so. Make fun of people who are using it, mock the shrimp jesuses, make it very clear you’re aware of what’s going on and why. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I do think that these tools are useful as toys, and I think that examining the art that they produce, and the art that the community around them are exalting and venerating tells us stuff. Of course, what they tell us is that there are a lot of people out there who really want porn, and there are just as many people who want the legitimisation of impressive seeming images that they don’t care about what those images are doing or what they’re for.
Now part of this defensiveness is also the risk of me being bitten. If I buy stock art that isn’t correctly disclosed as being generative art, then I might make and sell something using generative art and now I look like an asshole for not being properly good at detecting and hating ‘AI art,’ and when I’ve say, made a game using generative art that then is integrated into things like worldbuilding and the card faces, then it gets a lot harder to tear it out at the roots and render myself properly morally clean. I’m sure a bunch of the stock art I used before 2020 was made algorithmically, just pumped out slop that was reprocessing other formula or technical objects to fill up a free stock art site like Freepik.
Which is full of generative art now.
You won’t hurt yourself by understanding these things, and people who are using them for fun or to learn or explore are by no means doing something morally ill. There are every good reason to keep these things separated from anything that involves presenting yourself seriously, or using them to make money, though. If nothing else, people will look at you and go ‘oh, you’re one of those shrimp jesus assholes.’
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
I’m so tired of the The Video Game Awards. You know. Geoff Keighley's Winter Video Game Boogaloo. That one. I just… kinda don’t like the spirit of award shows in general. Releasing a game is a miracle and (props to award shows that do indeed do this, though) I think that should be celebrated instead of comparing each others’ work… and then also we should probably stop doing shit like… glazing over categories that “aren't as important” because we need time to sprinkle ads for other games throughout the show.
Instead of turning into a bastion of salt by the hands of Geoff Keighley, I’m gonna channel that energy into something positive. A lot of games came out this past year! Not all of them had big marketing power behind them and some of them fell by the wayside… and some I really just wanna gush about (read as: write some short essays). So let’s talk about about the games that I really liked this year!
~Games I Played This Year~
Rift of the Necrodancer
The World’s First Thirst Trap Rhythm Mini-Game Award
Rift of the Necrodancer is the sequel to beloved indie game, Crypt of the Necrodancer, except instead of moving to the beat in a dungeon crawler, the gameplay is more like Guitar Hero where cues come down a track. The twist is that the cues are enemies and each enemy is associated with a specific rhythm. Skeletons are a quarter note, but if that skeleton has a shield, then it’s two quarter notes. There’s also some rhythm mini-games similar to the ones you’d find in Rhythm Heaven, but with Necrodancer’s own style and aesthetic… which is where the thirst trap in the award title comes from.
The music is great! I mean, it’s gotta be, it’s a rhythm game after all. DannyB is back on the soundtrack, but other artists like Alex Moukala and Jules Conroy have also hopped on to do some music. I also love the art style a lot, it’s got those nice bold lines, vibrant color palettes, and the character designs are great! The game natively supports custom tracks from the community and they’ve also collabed with other indie games (and I guess also hololive and Vocaloid???) to bring official music charts into the game as well! Usually for a nominal fee, but, hey, support indie devs.
I still haven’t fully finished the story mode in this game, though. Like Crypt, Rift is DIFFICULT. It is possible to play with a controller, but in my experience as someone who played piano in a past life, keyboard feels way better… which is partially why I haven’t put as much time as I’d like into it (I’m stuck on the Steamdeck when I usually have time to play). But! If you like rhythm games that lean heavy into the reactive side of it all, check Rift of the Necrodancer out! It’s good.
Kabuto Park
The Buggiest Summertime Vibes Award
Kabuto Park is a little game about catching and collecting bugs! You then take those bugs, feed them candies to make them stronger, and have them compete in card-based sumo battles with other bugs. The gameloop reminds me a lot of Pokemon GO, where you go out, catch bugs, turn in the bugs you don’t really want for candies, and then use those candies to power up your faves. Which is a good thing! I like PoGO. The art is super cute, there’s a good number of bugs to collect, but the game never overstays its welcome. It’s a nice, short, cozy experience.
No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES
The World’s Most Bullyable Pervert Award
I’ve been a Somnium Files fan for a few years now and was really excited (and also scared) to see that they came out with another one! Everyone’s favorite pervert detective that we all want to beat with hammers, Kaname Date, must figure out where the hell Iris Sagan, also known as internet sensation A-set (You bet) has been abducted to and by whom. Also everyone’s favorite artificially intelligent robot eyeball hamster, Aiba is here as well. This game is a lot shorter than the other two entries in the series and takes place in-between them chronologically.
Somnium Files’ big narrative gameplay thing are Somniums, mind palaces where you pick at peoples’ psyches to pick up clues for the overarching case. Story wise, out of all three games, this one has one of the best ones. New to this game, though, are escape room segments, which… were fun for the most part. I will admit, I’m usually not great with puzzles. I am too impatient for puzzles. But dang it, I gave it my best shot. The hint system for this game is really weird. On the difficulty I played at, for puzzles where I knew what to do, the characters would usually yap about what I had to do before I was given the chance to attempt it. But for things like the finale puzzle for each section, it felt like the difficulty spiked, and suddenly none of the characters wanted to talk about it at all or give me any further hints when I ACTUALLY needed them. I did have fun, but that’s maybe my only gripe.
I’ve seen some people voice complaints about the game being too short or the stakes not being high enough. For me, well… that’s actually good! It’s a filler episode! Not every story has to be a 50-hour high-stakes thriller. We also get supplementary moments to build on what we already know about pre-existing characters. For that alone, I hope more narrative games reuse assets more often to make bite-sized, low-stakes, filler-type video games like this.
Deltarune Chapter 3 & 4
Introduced Yet Another Tumblr Sexyman Into the Internet Ecosystem Award
If The Game Awards won’t give this game a nomination for Best Ongoing Game, then fuck it, I will.
This game needs no introduction, I mean. You’re on the internet. You know Undertale, you know Deltarune. I’m gonna be real, this is a bit of a difficult game to talk about because my Tumblr dash has been so INUNDATED with fanworks for the past six months, that I need to dig DEEP into the recesses of my memory to remember the game from a canonical lens.
That being said, though, I liked it! But… I don’t think I have anything more profound to say past that. Chapter 3 was a fun romp- Tenna’s a great character as are the other TV World freaks. And then the thing happens that made me go, “Yeah no if they had released this as a standalone chapter and we had to wait, there’d be riots in the streets.”
Chapter 4 is where things get more serious… and I’m about to get more serious for a sec. In a sociopolitical landscape where a generation above mine has a choking, writhing grip on society and is doing everything they can to make sure we don’t have a future, Gerson’s character was a nice, warm blanket. It was just really nice to see an older character who showed Susie patience and was willing to pass the baton to the next generation… and then the thing at the end happens and it’s not a “riots in the streets” cliffhanger, but boy that setup is GOOD.
The gameplay has been great! Toby and co. have been constantly finding new ways to mix up the battle system and throw us curveballs. I had no idea you could push RPG Maker to do all the things that these chapters integrated. Looking forward to more!
to a T
The Perfect Shape Award
Keita Takahashi of Katamari Damacy fame and company made something weird and silly again. To a T is a video game about a teenager born with the disability of perpetual T-pose. I would actually probably compare this game to Dispatch (which I’ll talk about later on), where the format is like TV show episodes that you play through. But instead of the decision-based Telltale formula, it’s more like, you watch a bit of a scene play out, and then you move around the map and do some mini-games. These don’t have any consequences on the narrative, though.
The gameplay is… fine. There’s just kinda not… a lot of it, but it’s the kind of game that prioritizes the narrative first. The game does some cute ludonarrative things, though - you start out each day (if you want!) by making sure your character eats breakfast and washes up for the day correctly and it feels a little jank because… y’know, perpetual T-pose. But they have a lot of cute custom-made devices that help them with everyday things! It’s a genuinely nice little touch for a disability narrative.
The story is… a weird and strangely heartful tale about embracing what makes you unique… and answers questions you wish you didn’t have the answers to. It’s a silly story that… honestly younger audiences might have a more fun time with. Overall, this game is charming and whimsical and I think it’s worth giving it a playthrough or a watch-through.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3
The Dino Fucker Award
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is the third in its line of fictional sequels (1 and 2 do not exist, it’s a bit) from Strange Scaffold- developer of games like El Paso Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, and Clickholding. It’s a match-3 game with turn-based combat. You and the CPU take turns matching objects on the same board, collecting shapes, and using those shapes as fuel for special attacks. The gameplay’s fun and it’s got a fun and silly meta-narrative going on. Strange Scaffold’s writing has always kind of been a little hit or miss for me personally (nothing wrong with it, just not my taste), but this one hits, I’d say. It's worth checking out if you grew up on Bejeweled and also like a silly VN.
Date Everything!
The Literal Tall Drink of Water Award
So like.
If you know me like… even from a surface-level glance, you’d think that I’d be the last person on earth that would pick this up, but… the studio is headed by Robbie Daymond, Max Mittleman, and Ray Chase, and the game has like dozens of industry-level voice actors in it, so…
Yeah I’ll take some psychic damage for the bit.
Date Everything! Is the video game where you date gijinka of everyday ordinary household objects and more. There’s about a hundred datable characters and… yeah it can get a bit overwhelming. I think there’s maybe a good 20 or 30 characters I haven’t seen yet. From what I have seen, though, each character is thoughtfully written, designed, and fully voice acted. Yes. Even the toilet. I really appreciate the diversity in this game- there’s representation for a bunch of different cultures, lifestyles, points of view, and takes on sexuality and romance. There’s also different body types in this game! Not every character is stick skinny or the “normal” version of hot. Personality-wise, too, not everyone is palatable! There are FREAKS in this game, and you know what, you don’t have to like them, that’s super okay! The game never pressures you to go the romance route and never shames you for just wanting to be friends… or even enemies with someone. They just want you to go out and meet people!
The concept of the game is unhinged from the jump, but it’s also kinda cozy. I don’t know if I can recommend it as a true dating sim, but definitely if you like visual novels and are just a general fan of voiceover stuff, I think you’ll have fun.
PEAK
The Physically Clenched Award
PEAK is what happens when Aggro Crab and Landfall join forces to make a co-op roguelike about mountain climbing. You customize your scout, hop on a plane with your friends to god knows where, crash land on a deserted island, and make your way through several biomes without starving, falling to your death, succumbing to poison, etc. in order to make it to the peak and get rescued.
This is like, somehow simultaneously one of the most stressful games (I mean, number one goes to Silksong) yet chill games I’ve played this year. It’s just nice to go on a hike with your friends and try not to die. I do appreciate how this game handles death, though. You spawn in as a ghost and you’re tethered to one of your group mates, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the game. While you’re waiting for your teammates to make it to the next biome, you can coach them and help them scout out their route. You can still participate even if you’re not actively climbing!
Overall, the vibe of PEAK is deadly, but silly, and it feels great to work together with your friends and see yourself improving over several different runs.
Is This Seat Taken?
The Remembered to Take a Shower Award
Is This Seat Taken? was one of the last games I played this year. It's a short game where little shape-people are going to a function- be it public transportation or watching a movie, and they all have their preferences on where they wanna be. It's your job to arrange them in a way that makes everyone happy. The art style is really cute and the logic puzzles were just about the right difficulty for me- not mindless, but not "I'm stuck on this for an hour" kind of hard, either.
Once Upon a Katamari
The Rollin’ It Back Award
At time of writing, I haven’t finished the game yet and I’m still picking it up here and there when I can (this game hurts my hands). At the time of announcement, though, I, like probably a bunch of other people, looked at this game worried they weren’t gonna be able to nail it. After all, it’s a Katamari game in 2025 without Keita Takahashi on the team. But, to my relief, that ended up not necessarily being a bad thing.
My biggest concern with Katamari sequels is that the first game’s missions gave you enough time to meet your goal, but also gave you a good amount of what I like to call “fuck around time.” As more games were made, though, there was more of a focus on simply meeting a time requirement, and less of Takahashi-san’s M.O. of just having a toy to play with. Thankfully, this game seems to be leaning towards the first, where levels aren’t suffocating you. There's also an incentive to replay each level as the hidden gifts and cousins are back, but also three crowns in each level to collect. Thanks to massive quality of life improvements, these are all easily tracked this time and the new power-ups make it way easier to complete your goals, but are balanced enough that they don't break the game, either.
Music and visuals wise, again, it’s a 2025 Katamari game. The game looks great and, yeah, the low-poly of it all is still real good. The themed levels have also been pretty good this time around, there’s some fun and creative stuff in here. The soundtrack, I think, is where “this is a Katamari game made in 2025” really, really shows. Katamari definitely has had J-pop songs in the past, but the style of the genre has changed since then. With this established, would I personally have picked Katamari on the Doun with the peppy idol vocals for this game? I don’t think so. I don’t think any of the songs on the OST are necessarily bad, a lot of them are bangers, actually! But you can definitely feel the difference in aesthetic choices from Damacy, We Love Katamari, and this game.
All of that being said, I’m not the most seasoned Katamari player… but! Once Upon a Katamari is enjoyable. It’s got a slightly different flavor than the first two games, definitely, but I think this new team more or less knows how to make a Katamari game.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
The Gamedev Heaven Award
Yeah no I warned you guys that there would be an essay in here
I shouldn’t have to give this game an introduction since, like, if you’re reading this, you probably follow me for my Hollow Knight fanart or have at least picked up something through osmosis, so you probably know the whole deal*, but Hollow Knight: Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight. You play as Hornet, the protagonist’s sister and one of the first few bosses you fight in the first game. I’m still kind of processing my thoughts on this game in a way more articulate than just, well, Hollow Knight’s my favorite game and Hornet’s my favorite character out of everything, of course I liked it.
I spent seven years waiting for this game. I spent seven years making fun of the “Team Cherry abandoned us, the game’s taking so long” gang and telling them to shut the fuck up and go play something else while they wait ("always a good time to go beat the video game known as OFF"). For seven years, I held onto the hope of being able to play this game as a small frivolous thing to keep me going when times got rough. And… It was worth it.
I’m gonna start by addressing the Oblobble in the room: The Difficulty. Hollow Knight is a game that I cannot recommend to everyone on account of its difficulty and Silksong even less so because this game is even HARDER than its sibling game. Is that a bad thing? Not… necessarily, but I’ve seen some polarizing views. Speedrunner and QA tester friends tended to breeze through the game and had a great time. I also know some other friends who don’t regularly play challenging games also have a similar experience. But I’ve also heard tales of old Hollow Knight mutuals and even Hollow Knight speedrunners bouncing HARD off of Silksong.
I definitely had moments of “Excuse me, what the HELL are you asking me to do??” There’s a lot of combat challenge rooms in this game that ask you to fight waves of enemies with no breaks in between, similar to the boss rushes in HK. I’m still not sure if I agree with the two-mask damage system completely. I also have problems with the shard system in which I was hesitant to integrate tools into my boss attempts because I’d eventually run out of shards and feel punished for using them.
Progressing your strength in this game is also weird. Needle upgrades in this game sometimes felt less like an extra boon and more like a mandatory thing you HAD to do just to keep up with the skill level of the game. There’s also only a handful of upgrades in this game that’ll make things easier across the board, many of them are very situational or only work in very specific builds. Those certain upgrades that would make your life way, way easier, might also be tucked away in the part of the map you just never thought to check out. The game definitely rewards you for exploring but… ehh… re-routing a few things closer to the critical path would’ve made our lives easier.
However, over the years I’ve played HK, I’ve built up this mantra of, “I know I’m not good at this, but the only way I can change that is to try. If I get hit, that’s probably my fault, and I just have to figure out a way to not get hit next time. The first step is to learn my script, and then the second step is to execute it.” And… for the most part, I think that attitude did help me through the game. I think your enjoyment of the game will highly depend on how much patience you have for The Challenge, your own skill issues, and reconciling within yourself that it’s gonna take a bit to overcome both of them. Not everyone has that and… that’s okay! But also, this game is really, really tough! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!
In terms of art, as always, the world is gorgeous. Whether you like Hollow Knight or not, I think everyone can appreciate the immense work and love that went into this game. The worldbuilding is as good as ever- there’s so many instances of environmental storytelling. Areas blend and almost quite literally bleed into each other, no one biome exists in a bottle separate from the others, not even the one that’s MEANT to be a sealed-off bottle. There’s a LOT of different enemies and bosses in this game, many of them with banger designs and some with MASSIVE spritesheets. So much artwork went into building this game.
For the story and characters, again, I’m still processing my thoughts on it, learning new things about the lore, and I’ll probably still be doing so for months to come. Hollow Knight did a very good job of exploring the theme of what it means to be born and what obligations we have to uphold from simply existing and Silksong is no different. In terms of cast and NPC writing, they’re fun! Lots of friends, lots of weirdos, as always. Silksong also did a very good job of fleshing out Hornet’s character more. You learn more about her past, what she likes and doesn’t like, and it’s just really nice to see her casually interacting with people outside of situations that call for extreme violence.
Silksong is a game that means a lot to me, as evidenced by the essay I just wrote. Is it for everyone? No, no piece of art that was made with heart and soul ever is. But if I had to give something my personal Game of the Year, it would be Hollow Knight: Silksong.
*shout outs to Bee, who showed up to my stream one day and said, and I quote, "I know little to nothing about Hollow Knight/Silksong, except the little skull bug dude is a girl here, did she transition"
~Games I Have Watched~
ENA: DREAM BBQ
Originally a webseries, I’ve seen bits and pieces of ENA over the years but for some reason was never really pushed to interface with it on my own, but I happened to catch an ENA: DREAM BBQ stream one day.
Yooooo this shit’s gooooooood
The world of ENA is a bit difficult to explain. It feels like you’re actively being exposed to the nuclear fallout from the second fall of the Tower of Babel. The world is very psychedelic and dreamlike and it will fill you with discomfort and possibly fear at first, but give your lizard brain like 20 minutes to normalize with it all. The game itself is mostly a walking simulator where you meet characters with what I can only describe as Design Sauce. ENA herself is very gender- Aleks Le voices the suave salesperson side of her, while Nola Klop voices the yelly, angry side. Do I understand what’s going on in this world? Not at all. Do I respect the amount of creativity that went into this world? Hell yeah.
Poco
Poco is a point and click about a tiny clown that gets kicked out of the circus and needs to find their way back home the only way a clown knows how. For a student game, the production value and polish is REALLY good. The little world they’ve built up is neat. It’s not a super long game, it’ll probably take just a couple hours to finish, but it’s a nice little thing you can play for free.
Stray Children
Stray Children is a weird game by the Onion Games, the devs of games like Moon: Remix RPG and Chulip. Your protagonist is a dog-faced kid that gets sucked into a world that operates like a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. In this world, there are monsters called “Olders” who are initially violent and incomprehensible, but as you gather information and learn what their deal is, you can talk them through their struggles and free their souls.
It is an understatement to say that this is a weird-ass game from every single angle. The story concept itself is weird but the gameplay is as well. It’s been compared to Undertale, where each enemy can be fought or spared, however, unlike Undertale, killing non-boss enemies does not have story-changing consequences and farming a bit of EXP off of them actually makes the game easier. “Sparing” enemies on the other hand, is the most difficult part of the game. Shed husks of the Olders are found throughout the world map and interacting with them gives you a journal entry with a hint for the puzzle to quell their souls. Some of the puzzles in the game are a bit obtuse and feedback isn’t always given. This might be due to translation errors, localization problems, design flaws, or maybe a mixture of all of them. Also like Undertale, there are bullet hell segments between the puzzle segments in battle encounters and some of them can be a bit too punishing.
All this being said, I’m fascinated with the decisions made for this game and I would love to see the design docs. I would recommend this game if you have the patience for an old-school styled turn-based RPG experience. This game can be punishing, the puzzles can be frustrating, but the game oozes weirdness and creativity.
Dispatch
Dispatch is a game that happens when ex-Telltale devs and Critical Role shake hands. It’s an episodic story about a superhero man’s fall from… somewhere-less-than-grace and into a dispatcher role, where he has to play mentor to a bunch of ex-villains with all the messy stuff that happens in a corporate office space without a good HR department. As someone who’s just kinda burnt from the superhero genre, this was a refreshing take!
The characters are fun and the writing is snappy, funny, and holds its emotional weight well. The BIGGEST thing for me personally, though, is the character known as Royd - the most accurate representation of a modern-day Polynesian man I have ever seen from a production outside of Hawai’i or the West Pacific. While some media have trouble portraying Hawaiian Creole English (*cough LIKE A DRAGON INFINITE WEALTH cough*) Royd's pidgin is IMMACULATE. I really really love how they wrote him and portrayed his character.
As a story heavy-game, that’s pretty much all I can tell you about Dispatch! You should check it out! And put on those nudity filters and mute that audio at the beginning of episode 4 if you need to because… BOY this is a game for adults.
Alright, just got out of a conversation on artificial intelligence, attempting to write down some thoughts.
It is currently the case that massive investment is being put into artificial intelligence by all major players in the tech world. Does this, on a financial level, make sense?
Total training costs for GPT-5 are estimated to be somewhere in the range of $2 billion. How are they expecting to make their money back?
It seems to me that in the end, if there are two companies that have roughly equivalent models to each other, that what the customer gets charged is ultimately: compute costs + company cut + amortized research/training costs. Assume an efficient market (I know, I know) and this seems to me what it comes down to in the end, and I've run this by a few people who didn't object to it. You can charge a premium only to the extent that your model is offering something you cannot get anywhere else. You can also collude with competitors, but there are currently a lot of competitors to collude with.
This is ignoring that someone might steal model weights or distill your model. A company that does that has a lower burden of amortized research/training. And this is also ignoring open source models, which are given for free.
So OpenAI is going to spend $2 billion dollars on training GPT-5, in the hopes that they can either have a model massively better than anyone else has and thereby justify a premium. They're doing this in the hopes that no one successfully engages in model distillation. Ideally, this model will pay for itself because OpenAI will charge for compute costs plus a little extra, and this will make back the money spent on training until they're in the green.
There are a few things that OpenAI is hoping for, but Total Dominance is the big one. They want to be the only place to go for when people want an LLM. They want to lock people in. They want an API that places developers in a bind and sticky switching costs for enterprise software.
I don't think, long term, that this is going to happen. I think that we'll have multiple state-of-the-art models who are close to being at parity with each other, and maybe open source models will stay worse, but in theory people are only paying for the complexity of model that they need for any given problem. Enterprises and developers should ideally understand that model-independence is highly valued, and it's already the case that this is being implemented. Enterprises have decades of experience with vendor lock-in battles.
I'm skeptical about capturing users and businesses in an ecosystem, I guess, at least for this product.
So how does this $2 billion dollar investment pay off for OpenAI? How do similar investments pay off for everyone else?
Well, AGI.
And from everyone I've talked to, the message is the same: internally at Anthropic, Deepmind, OpenAI, etc, they believe that they're building AGI. And if AGI comes, nothing else really matters, so long as it's economical to run.
But there is a fairly clear slow-down happening right now, even with the insane scaling going on, and with every month that passes and it seems like AGI is still pretty far off, there's a strong chance that shareholders say "alright, so it's compute cost + cut + amortization" and get skittish about whether that's going to be enough to recoup.
If you are worried about AI doom, the best thing you can do is discourage these companies (and/or their shareholders) from more extremely expensive investment in AI. The best way to do that is to convince them that AGI is not coming, which is something that you, as a doomer, probably do not believe. (In fact, this is also what you should be doing if you care deeply about this aspect of climate change.)
The second best way of doing this is stealing model weights or distilling models or otherwise doing whatever you can to make sure that any non-AGI research product has no way to recoup its insane costs.
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