Conor Bateman

Every single hobby I love has has been infected by slopped up and unserious software. It's exhausting. aftermath.site/ai-slop-hobbie...

Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed.

the best part of Control Resonant is landing a Ninja Gaiden II "Obliteration Technique" (the thing where a staggered enemy can be killed by pressing L3 with a cool anim) and The Board's guttural mumbling booms through my Sennheiser HD650s through a Schiit Hel 2 and I go "FUCK YEAH" every damn time

If we wanna cut these off at the source, stop sharing them, stop making videos about them, stop hosting them on your websites. Stop giving talentless hacks the attention they crave. Stop rewarding them for defiling our hobbies.

In the Valley of the Underground Mountain, within the compartment nation of Lyptch... 🛤️🏛️🎨The Zium Railway🎨🏛️🛤️ an open world gallery, a new exhibition, now available! Free admission. Be welcomed and enjoy. thezium.art/theziumrailway

five years on from its premiere, Analects of Kung Phu, the 85-minute collage film I cut for artist Jason Phu, is heading overseas - it'll be on display as part of the Busan Museum of Art's upcoming exhibition Future Museology from the 26th of September through March 2027

proud of my long-time good pal Jay Weissberg and his @variety.com review of "Naza" variety.com/2026/film/re...

TBH I'm grateful for bad first pages - filtering out all the books I don't need to read What I hate is a good first page that sneaks a book past the filter, so I can learn for myself that the remaining 349 pages were phoned in

It really sucks when someone you were following for their work in the retro scene turns out to be big on AI and using it in all their projects. That instantly kills any and all interest in anything they ever make.

2 Die Hard With a Vengeance: the first three Die Hard films playing together as one, jumping between them in release order at every shot change (not synced temporally, so the total runtime is around 5hrs)

very successful book fair haul at Trades Hall today - particularly stoked about The Book of Fantasy

People Make Games traveled to Michigan to meet Jerry Gretzinger, an 84-year-old man, who's spent most of his life working away on a single, giant map to an imaginary world. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N...

Dr. Nosferatu, the Gambler

1997: Gran Turismo released for the PlayStation 1998: The Cardigans release the album Gran Turismo, featuring the single "My Favourite Game" 1999: Gran Turismo 2 released for the PlayStation, with The Cardigan's "My Favourite Game" as the intro track for NA and EU versions 2026: I realise this

absolute headbanger (within its field)

the Sugarcubes cover in here is so damn good

moby-dick, his eyes enormous: from hell's heart you STAB at moby? for hate's sake you spit your last BREATH at moby? oh! oh! the great shroud of the sea for ahab! the great shroud of the sea rolling on as it rolled five thousand years ago!!!!

best Alvvays song not made by Alvvays www.youtube.com/watch?v=awQz...

a few tracks on the new James Blake cross over into the Junebug zone (high praise)

cloud control

@andrew-ray.bsky.social Hi Andrew, I stumbled onto your blog via Kagi's new Small Web feature and am greatly enjoying it. If you haven't read this already, I think you might get some mileage out of Adrian Duncan's relatively recent novel The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth

I was asked to give my thoughts on generative AI usage in games - here they are!

I cannot stop thinking about Marathon: aftermath.site/marathon-bungi...

Fine's 'sonic diary' for NTS from Jan is ideal cooking music: one of the best solo Spice Girls tracks, Janet Jackson doing Moments in Love ("Anything"), and her own intimate demo sandwiched between t.A.T.u. and Jojo - www.nts.live/shows/fine/e...

My cyberpunk video collage RESET is now on display in Singapore at ArtScience Museum as part of the exhibition Another World is Possible, which runs until 22 Feb. It was single channel at ACMI in 2024, but for this exhibition it's been fractured and placed onto a heap of screens, which is fitting.

@jacobgeller.com have you read Lisa Tuttle's novella My Death? I finished playing Returnal this week and watched your video - this book is very much within the wheelhouse of that game thematically

i think if you use genai for anything, even writing an email, you're both a moron and a huge baby, and i dont want to play your video game as a result. its not that hard!

here's where I'm at ytd

I had to capture the intro to GP mode because it's just. this is how you fucking DO it

Stevie Smith

I recently copped some HD 600s at half price and the most notable 'oh god these are great' moment so far has been listening to the latest Stereolab double a-side

really enjoying the new CV Vision album, it's like scanning through stations late at night, pausing intermittently to catch a fuzzy psych rock track: cvvision.bandcamp.com/album/releas...

well read - you've correctly identified a situation you're well read - you've read a lot of books well red - an Englishman describing a fire extinguisher

The second LaserDisc Rip today is rarer than the first, and also is by Japanese City Pop artist Tats Yamashita. Early 90s. New York City. Real people. A single day documented from morning to midnight. Christmas comes early this year: Christmas in New York. archive.org/details/chri...

The first LaserDisc upload today: a video art City Pop love letter to the American Southwest. A collaboration between two Japanese pop artists in the 1980s. Tatsuro Yamashita & Eizin Suzuki: Southward Bound, translated and captured on a Domesday Duplicator. archive.org/details/tats...

I wrote about my five days in Israeli prison for the LRB. Remember with every paragraph that this is the cosseted version of the experience; it is infinitely worse for Palestinians www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...