My understanding of 19th century medicine is roughly equivalent to my ability to describe the smell of the clouds on Jupiter. It's essentially 21st century medicine but minus painkillers and handsoap, right? All the surgeons looked like Clive Owen and were addicted to bath salts. Still, I do recall reading that there was a lot of competition for access to corpses.
Sundays are for landing on a mysterious planet. At first, the surface seems barren, a dusty sheet of paper stretching towards the grey horizon. Does anything live here? Could anything live here? Is there anything here which can inform how I'm supposed to feel about it all? The emptiness is a feeling, but one can only deploy the world bleak so many times before starting to read it as ble-ack just to try and avoid dying of boredom. Then, the ground around you opens up. A great dark space into which you slide. Everything goes cold, dark, and wet. Suddenly, you're back among the stars in a flurry of movement. Adrian Edmondson's planet-sized head stares at you, licking its lips to get rid of leftover spittle. Well, there's two of you in the bleakness now.
It's a busy week for union organisers at Activision Blizzard. Yesterday, in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a group of over 100 developers that work on Hearthstone and the mobile only strategy game Warcraft Rumble voted "strongly in favor of wall-to-wall union representation." This comes after around 400 Blizzard platform and technology workers voted to unionise, also with the CWA.
Like whatever genres you like, but for me personally, I find platformers to be the quintessential video game genre. Even with the most challenging entries, there are very few other genres that (when done well) are as easy and quick to pick up, play, and have fun with. I think that's why so many of them have such longevity, one such game being N++, a tough but fair platformer that's celebrating its 10th anniversary with a new update.
See ya, suckers – I’m off to India for a week, and am only writing this introductory paragraph because Ollie stole my 'taking holiday' idea while I was distracted by a bird. Specifically, I’ll be in Dharamshala, the mountain town where the Dalai Lama lives. Maybe I’ll get to ask him what he thinks of my Steam Deck.