Criterion’s Mobile Closet Wasn’t About The Van—It Was About IRL Friendships We Made Along The (Five-Hour) Way
Fifteen years ago, when director Guillermo del Toro was scheduled to drop by Criterion’s New York office for a project, a casual email from the social media team sparked an unexpected tradition. On a whim, someone floated the idea of snapping a photo of the director inside their office closet—a quirky little nook where guests on business, as a courtesy, were invited to pick out a couple of films as a parting gift. Knowing how generous the Pan's Labyrinth director was, , Criterion’s president
I Will Romance Every Character In Hades 2, But Under Duress
My relationship with Hades 2 is very much a “ ” situation. Do I endlessly complain about minor things that I don’t like about it, in its mechanics and its story ? Yes. Am I going to play another half dozen hours of it tonight? Also yes. As I continue to go deeper and deeper, as compelled as I am by essentially just getting more of Hades , it strikes me that so many of the returning features are basically the same, but just a little worse. Case in point
Why Are My Bluesky Bots So Into Irish
Things haven’t been great on Bluesky lately, where questionable moderation decisions , unpopular changes to , and the recent arrival of an are all making it feel not quite like the refuge from Twitter many initially saw it as. For as long as there’s been Bluesky there’s been Bluesky bots, sometimes called “resistance bots” for their bios full of liberal buzzwords and their tendency to repost political content or reply to users’ own political posts in strangely aggressive ways. I don’t get bots on my
A History of Histories
On the latest Aftermath Hours, Luke and Gita are joined by Matt Leone, formerly of Polygon. This week, Leone launched , a new site to house his oral histories of video games, starting off with .
We also talk about the adorable city builder Town to City , because Luke and Gita simply cannot help themselves. Gita makes a brief tangent into the world of Digital Audio Players, much to Chris Person’s delight.
You can find this week's episode below and on , , or wherever else you
Big Week For Unions At Blizzard As Hearthstone Team Also Votes ‘Yes’
Blizzard Entertainment's Team 5—responsible for the development of Hearthstone —is unionizing. A group of around 100 workers voted yes to representation with the Communications Workers of America under CWA Local 9510. It's the third union to go public at Blizzard this week, following two new units composed of Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net workers.
The Hearthstone union includes people from many different roles across the game's development, including artists, gameplay designers, and quality assurance testers. Microsoft
Battlefield 6’s Campaign Is An Act Of Narrative Cowardice
Battlefield 6 features the series' first singleplayer campaign since 2018, which as a fan of both Battlefield and dumb AAA shooters had me pretty excited! After rolling credits yesterday following roughly five hours of action, I should have known not to get my hopes up.
Unlike the last few games, which shipped with either glorified tutorials or no campaign at all, Battlefield 6's singleplayer harks back to entries in the series like Battlefield 3 & 4 , which tried their best to mimic Call of Duty and craft
The Sweet Spot Of IMDb Is 6.3-7.6
As a person who paid a lot of money to watch movies in college, I go to IMDb a lot. Yet in the several decades I’ve used it, I’ve never gone there to read user reviews unless it’s to make fun of them. That’s because IMDb reviews as an aggregate are reliably banal and awful. This wrongness has led me to form an extremely rough rule of thumb: Most good feature length movies that take any kind of serious risk, anything that isn’t
I Will Go Down Swinging Against Windows 11
On October 14, Microsoft ended security support for Windows 10. I’ve known this was coming for ages, but kept telling myself I had plenty of time to think about what to do about it. The decision I made was to… do nothing except occasionally get kinda pissed about it, and now that the moment is here, it seems like I’m going to do nothing but get pissed about it.
My anger at this transition up to this point had mostly been personal. I built (
I Apologize, Absolute Batman. I Wasn’t Familiar With Your Game
When DC Comics announced its new Absolute run— —I was one of its loudest detractors. Sure, ’s design objectively goes hard, but my favorite hero, Batman, looked goofy as hell. That fat, illegible logo on his chest barely resembled a bat, and the only thing “absolute” about him was that was an absolute unit of a man. Since his first issue was released last year, I would scoff and clown on him to my friends whenever his visage graced my timeline. I didn’
Battle.net Workers Unionize As Microsoft Neutrality Agreement Expires
Workers on Blizzard’s Battle.net platform have voted to unionize under the Communications Workers of America. The nearly 400 workers under Blizzard Entertainment's Platform and Technology department have created two new unions: one for software engineers, product and project managers, designers, and others; and a second for localization, quality assurance, and customer support.
The unit made up of Battle.net's tech workers has roughly 300 members, and the localization, QA, and customer support unit has around