Not much is going on in the world (false) so it’s a good time to continue with my 2026 resolution of cleaning up tabs by doing a good old fashioned “link dump” of content that didn’t have a place.

Though I have a soft-spot for y2k-era art explorations of virtual worlds and games I didn’t find a place for it in the last email: Sylvia Eckermann’s “Hotel Synthifornia”, an Unreal mod from 1999!

Speaking of 90s game art, I always love Suzanne Treister’s  “Fictional Videogame Stills” every time I come across them. From 1991-1992! They still look great. Years ahead of the curve.

Open Systems: The Treachery of Images. One thing I noticed when doing some research is that a lot of the net / cyber art world is, like everything else, fraught with AI-usage and, even still, NFTs. On the one hand I’m sympathetic to cyber artists experimenting with new technology, though conversely it is the dominant “art” tool and aesthetic of the fascists and its usage makes me instantly question you like you’re Salvador Dali. Related: What It’s Like to be an AI Artist (Youtube, 2023.)

By the Machine for the Machine: Virilio’s Logistics of Perception in the Age of Generative AI (Heliotrope, November 2025.)

AI-generated imagery participates in Virilio’s logistics of perception in powerful ways by weaponizing the tension between plausibility and doubt to launch an attack on the very notion of truth (“the first casualty of war”). While some danger in synthetic images is in their capacity to dupe viewers, Eliot Higgins says the real threat is that they can encourage people to deny real images.(12) Known as the “liar’s dividend,” this operationalized doubt is integral to the cultivation of disinformation ecosystems, which are known to expand and intensify at times of conflict or political unrest.

Related: Discord, a poem (in PDF) about AI in education.

The Baffler’s November issue was After Words, about literacy in the modern era. The lead in essay was a The Wire referencing We Used to Read Things in This Country | Noah McCormack. Overall I found it… inconsistent?

AI huckster-cum-revolutionary and ChatGPT front man Sam Altman says, “A kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever.” His intention is to attract more investment into his company by the illusory promise of “PhD-level” AI, but he may be right despite himself: it is not that AI is reaching “general intelligence” but that children are not attaining it.

That issue also has this look at the writing of Disco Elysium, many writers’ (and leftists?) favourite game. To be honest I abandoned Disco Elysium half way through, lost in its formal structuring. I enjoyed the protagonist’s internal monologues, his volition or lack thereof, his inland empire, though not so much prodding him to do procedural cop stuff.

A lot’s been written about Disco Elysium already, videos have been made (noclip just released the third part of their series The Making of Disco Elysium - Part One: Foundations, The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Two: Building Elysium), The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Three: Writing), all the games being made in the shrapnel of ZA/UM’s explosion are anticipated in their own way, and all of it for a game that is basically dialogue tree traversal:

In the classic CRPGs, the text and dialogue are balanced with combat, a matter of stats and loot directly adapted from tabletop conventions. Disco Elysium simply lops off the fighting and replaces it with more dialogue

And yet that’s what a vast majority of Interactive Fiction already is. You can flip the above: Disco Elysium is an interactive fiction, with the conventional trappings of a video game – point-and-click character movement, inventory management, equipable ‘armour’ with stats, and dice rolls – tacked on top. The novelty of Disco Elysium depends on which side of the playing field you approached it.

For 2026 maybe I should play more IF instead (IF Comp 2025.)

Related: Tier Review “IF's Retrofuturist Roots” (November 2025.)

Newer IF games pull from interfaces that are more familiar to recent generations, like Disco Elysium mimicking the text scrolling of social media platforms like Twitter.

Which reminds me of a The HTML Review piece I was checking out again recently: Navigation queues an infinite scroll essay about the role of the scrollbar in the time of infinite scroll.

Infinite scrolling has since become a cautionary tale. Aza Raskin, who invented infinite scrolling, has spoken publicly about regretting its negative impact and now actively campaigns against its use. Without cues to halt, users continue endlessly consuming content without awareness of why.

Related: Scroll As Textile: An Interview with Maya Man by Anabelle Johnston

I have a billion filing cabinets — aka windows open on my laptop — and I also have no recollection of anything at all.

Ditto.

Also related: Lana Polansky’s (who has disappeared off the internet entirely, hope she’s doing well) “Politically meaningful games under neoliberalism” from circa 2017.

Enclose Horse. I love a good .horse top level domain, and have been enjoying this simple puzzler. I lost my perfect streak recently. Here’s a level I made.

Desired Landscapes

Desired Landscapes creates editorial experiences that connect people to cities and capture the sense of place

THE BEAUTY OF BAD TASTE | SSENSE

Hideo Kojima: The Creator | SSENSE

‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World (archive link)

Techfolks, man.

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself (Current Affairs, December 2025), ‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University (September 2025), AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library (February 2025), We should all be Luddites | Brookings (October 2025). The phony comforts of useful idiots (December 2025), “On Casey Newton and the shallowness of anti-skepticism.” I had a NYTimes / Sam Kriss article here but “ehhhh”. AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian (January 2026.) It’s all so tiring.

The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction, cool little scroll based site. I remember once long ago making sites like this.

Speaking of books, I had these book related tabs open for a while. Read more 2026 not off to a good start; “Fort Bragg Cartel” is gathering dust. On Stanislaw Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude | Recurring Bafflement, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, Palmer, Pepe Escobar’s review of The Collapse of Antiquity | Michael Hudson, Cambridge University Press - IX - The Game of the World.

By the time I’m done with one, a dozen follow. Whether it be books or tabs. Games. Or anything. 

It was my son’s birthday on the weekend. We played a little Tekken 7 on a proper arcade machine at a local Japanese arcade. Tekken was the essential Playstation era fighting game. I spent a lot of time with Tekken 2 and 3. Tekken 5 was the last one I played. There’s a 9th version coming, supposedly the last for Katsuhiro Harada. It’s been 30 years.

Listen to this

So in honour, Katsuhiro Harada himself put together a 30 Year Tekken journey mix:

TEKKEN: A 30-Year Journey – Harada’s Final Mix (Soundcloud)

A lot of it is odd, a lot of it is unknown to me, and maybe I’m that guy but the very first game, from 1994, had the best track in “Chicago, U.S.A.”