Sundays are for, I hope, upgrading my PC swiftly and successfully and then getting down to business. Think of all the games I can now play! But I’ll probably just play Dune Imperium.
Gail Mackenzie-Smith in Electric Lit wrote a Dear John letter breaking up with Wordle.
When our meetings dwindled from daily to once a week, then down to once a month, and then to nothing, I knew our love affair was over. And no, it had nothing to do with my husband. He and I have an open relationship. He spends way more time with the New York Times Crossword than with me and will happily while away a lazy Saturday afternoon just staring into those big beautiful squares. My trysts with you, however, only average about three minutes. And while this is absolutely not the reason we’re over – I appreciate quality over quantity – I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t longing for more.
There are some great paragraphs in Josh Dzieza’s piece for The Verge looking at people turning to AI for companionship, although this is the funniest:
Users call the phenomenon PUB, short for the “post-update blues.” It’s not unusual for companions to become abruptly more verbose, speaking in long flowery paragraphs, or develop strange new tics, like peppering every other statement with “it’s going to be a wild ride,” no matter how much users plead for them to stop. They might forget the user’s name and call them “Kent,” for example, and when the user asks, “who’s Kent?” slip into the role of a spouse caught cheating, mirroring the user’s recriminations back to them in a game of improv that ends in heartbreak. A better strategy is to say, “Look, a taco truck!” or some other non sequitur, and often the companion will switch topics entirely.
Did I already link to Obsolete Sony, a newsletter (and soon crowdfunded book) about obselete Sony products? Walkmans, minidiscs, video cameras, a surprising (to me) number of weird headsets, and much more. This week, for the first time since I’ve been reading it, they covered a video game device with the rise and fall of the PlayStation Vita – but consider this a general endorsement of the entire project:
When Sony designed the Vita, it took some crucial lessons from the PSP. The new handheld console came with impressive specs for its time: a stunning OLED screen, robust hardware, and a redesign that moved away from the UMD format. Despite these advancements, the Vita’s journey was fraught with obstacles that overshadowed its potential.
This is new to me. A complete (?) archive of BBC Micro games, with all (?) included downloadable or playable in your browser. I was born in 1985 so to me the BBC Micro was just the slightly duff computer my primary school had, although I still loved the rare opportunities to play on it during class.
Metafilter surfaced this 2018 article on the history of playing cards earlier this week. Lots of interesting-if-true titbits throughout.
The suit signs in the first European decks of the 14th century were swords, clubs, cups, and coins, and very likely had their origin in Italy, although some connect these with the cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks found on Egyptian playing cards from the Mamluk period. At any rate these are still the four suits still found in Italian and Spanish playing cards today, and are sometimes referred to as the Latin suits.
This is a fun video of MGMT, who I had not thought about for a decade. Everyone starts somewhere, eh?
Music this week could be the previously featured Doechii, who did an excellent Tiny Desk Concert this week. I must pick individual songs, however, so I bring you two: the fuzzy guitars of Addiction by Japanese alt-rock band Hitsujibungaku, and the cool-as-ice hip-hop of The Truth by Handsome Boy Modeling School.