When I was 9 years old, my uncle gave me his copy of DOOM. Far below the age where it may have been appropriate, it was an introduction to Hell that I adored.
My evenings and weekends were spent trawling through corridors leaving trails of blood and guts behind me. Hoards of demons stood between me and the exit, and the only way through them was with punches, bullets, shells, plasma bolts, rockets, and big fucking projectiles.
The vaguely satanic imagery was something I didn’t see that often in Belfast during the 90s. To me, DOOM felt like a real life Necronomicon. Dropped into the disc drive to lead me on some Ash Campbell-esque quest to fight the dead. Not that I had seen Evil Dead at this point, but you get the idea.
DOOM felt like something alien. Something weird. Something forbidden. It was like reality had cracked and I had an object which shouldn’t exist in our world.
That feeling has stuck with me ever since.
Round the bend
I’ve written about the Playdate before when mine finally arrived. When it launched, it included a season of games delivered straight to the device, with 2 arriving each week.
Unfortunately, the Playdate shipped in groups, so the idea of everyone playing the same 2 games each week didn’t really work when everyone got their Playdates at different times.
Season 2 has just launched, and there are now many Playdates in the world, so this time it’s different. We’re on Week 3 and there’s already been some great games, my favourite so far being Dig Dig Dino. I want to share a surprise anomolous addition to the lineup from Week 1, Blippo+.
When the first batch of Playdates came online, something strange happened. All at once, the screens pulsed with an unusual pattern of TV static. Was it a software glitch? Or interference from a transmission coming from somewhere beyond our world?
Blippo+ is an TV channel broadcast from a planet that I think is called Blippo? Their scientists have detected something they call The Bend in the space time continuum near their planet that has allowed them to broadcast their prime time content with us, their aliens.
Now in Week 3 of this broadcast, it appears they are preparing a crack team of Bendonauts, completely chosen at random, to send through The Bend and make first contact with the human race.
It’s full of some incredibely weird shit. Here’s a rundown of the shows I’ve seen:
- Bliptionary - an educational broadcast teaching the aliens (us humans) some common Blippo language
- Subspace Lunchbox - different types of food for different types of beings, I think? I watched a pair of hands assemble a lunch for robots with gear crackers
- Clone Trois - a soap opera about clone nurses called Echo and Gemini which is the same actor portraying 2 characters on the phone to each other
- Quizzards - a Dungeons & Dragons style role playing game but it’s a quiz where instead of a dice the Dungeon Master asks the players trivia questions
It’s got a real Hypnospace Outlaw feel to it that I love. I can’t get enough of these weird pieces of culture where people go all out. I hope we see more cool stuff like this from whoever is behind it? Maybe it really is the Blippos?
Blippo+ gives me that same sense of joy I had when I first played DOOM and it’s definitely worth checking out if you enjoy that feeling too. Currently only available on Playdate, it’s coming to Switch and Steam later this year.
Honourable mentions
I’ve read some great articles recently on AI, such as:
- 🔗 My AI skeptic friends are all nuts went pretty viral. My view is that this is a marketing piece disguised as a hot take. It has some good points without much nuance, but the tone is deliberately colloquial in such a way to stand out. Just keep in mind that Fly.io has tried to position itself as the best place to run applications that require AI to work.
- 🔗 Looking elsewhere from Robb Owen. He articulates many of the same things I’ve been thinking about the race the bottom for costs, while maximising output for profit.
- 🔗 AI got no taste from Coops. Like him, I broadly like AI, and I agree with his take. Everything in my day job recently has been investigations and fixing bugs, rather than adding new features, so I haven’t had a chance to try it on a large production codebase yet.
Other stuff, not about AI:
- 🔗 Kareem Rahma of Subway Takes interviewed by The Face. I love his videos, so it’s nice to hear his takes for a change.
- 🎮 DOOM: The Dark Ages, while not as groundbreaking as the 2016 edition, was a lot of fun. Parrying is great, and a really interesting way to switch up first person shooter combat.
- 🎮 After DOOM, I picked up Avowed again about 5 hours from the end. It’s interesting to see a game approach a story with colonisation and erasure of culture with such nuance. I really enjoyed it, and it’s left me hyped for The Outer World 2.
- 📺 Taskmaster
seasonSeries 19. The lineup this year is absolute chaos but Jason is unbelievable. - 📺 Race Across The World has finished, and we’ve added so many more destinations to our bucket list from it. As a Thomas who is close with his Mum, Thomas and Caroline were lovely to watch, but really I was rooting for any of the teams this year.
- 📺 The Tylenol Murders was a crazy watch. The next day I went to buy some ibuprofen from Tesco but the packet was ripped so I got paranoid and put it back.
- 📖 Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain is a brilliant book about how politics and raving in the UK are more intertwined than we realise.
- 🎶 I went to the last ever Balter Festival recently, which was very silly. Musical highlights aside, they had a “throw the dildo on the Tory” game, which made me laugh a lot.
- 🌽 The Lambeth County Fair was great. We got there early enough to beat the queue for the famous vegetable sculpture competition.
- 🧑💻 I’ve been writing a lot of side project code recently and hopefully I’ll be able to reveal what I’ve been working on soon.