Documenting Life

“You might think: who cares? What’s 5m PS2s between friends? And it’s true that I find this lack of transparency particularly annoying because I am a journalist, and I like to have answers. But the absence of reported sales figures allows companies to spin narratives that don’t line up with reality, to please the markets and their shareholders. They can claim success on whichever metric best backs up that story”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/03/pushing-buttons-video-game-console-sales

“Some players have reacted with dismay to this game’s inflexibility, but I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day from time to time. It doesn’t bend to your will; you have to work around its rules – even when, at the beginning, you don’t necessarily know what they are. At first you might be frustrated that, for instance, characters often tell you about intriguing legends and rumours, but the game never marks these things down on your map to tell you where you might find them. Then, as the hours go by, you might find yourself caught out in the wilds at night without a camping kit, and seek shelter in a cavern that turns out to lead to a crumbling mountain shrine, where you find an actual sphinx. You realise that if someone had marked its location on your map, you’d never have felt so awed when you first spied its glowing eyes in the dark”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/27/pushing-buttons-dragons-dogma-2

“In its better moments, the House of Lords is a kind of council of elders, where the polished word and cogent argument have a home in a place where politics is more than an exercise of slavish obedience in the interest of climbing the career political ladder. It is a bulwark against populism, which is also flourishing in Britain – as seen in recent days with the government essentially suspending the right to asylum.

In its worse moments, the House of Lords is derelict ruin occupied by upstarts, party donors and lobbyists for whom nothing is further from their minds than true democratic rule. And in the already divided kingdom, the worse moments of late have heavily outweighed the better ones”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/haunted-house-on-the-thames-behind-the-scenes-in-the-house-of-lords-a-a85dc866-8843-414a-91b7-850487e41891

“Senior civil servants are “who you dream of, if you’re a vendor”; they may be exceptionally bright people with Oxbridge firsts who have completed their training at the Major Projects Leadership Academy, but in practice they have never worked in the industry with which they are negotiating. More fundamentally, civil servants do not understand that the other side is designing its bid to arrive at what project managers call the OFM (Oh, F**k Moment), when a new set of costs suddenly appears. The engineers have found that they’ll have to drill through granite to build the tunnel, or the data scientists have found errors in the old system. “As long as you can find things which weren’t covered in the original contract,” they told me, “you’ve opened the door to expanding the scope and demanding more money.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/01/the-rotten-state