This holiday season, why not treat your friends, family, and enemies to some MissingNo horror fan fiction?

I've overhauled the way I browse online yet again. I was using Reeder to consolidate RSS and socials into one list, but found I was missing a lot as I scrolled. I've reverted to Reeder Classic for RSS and the native apps/sites for socials. We'll see how long that lasts.

The way I look at big first-party Nintendo releases is that they're usually the best-in-genre by Nintendo. Breath of the Wild is the best open-world title they've ever made, and Metroid Prime is their best FPS. I struggle with the praise heaped on the company because there are often much better games in those categories made by other studios that are conveniently ignored by the media and the public.

I genuinely don’t understand the hype behind Expedition 33 and it practically sweeping The Game Awards nominations. It’s a good game, but I played better stuff this year that wasn’t even nominated.

I’m at the point where, if I see that the social media account where someone shares their art was created in mid-2022, unless they clearly state otherwise, I assume their work is largely AI-generated.

Microsoft paying $70 billion for Activision and then cranking out the worst-performing Call of Duty in recent memory is so fucking funny.

I use Claude Code to create small personal projects and tools, none of which I’d ever consider sharing with others, especially children. It's pretty fucked up that some people are cool cranking out LLM-powered junk for kids and charging money for it.

Granted, I haven’t finished it yet, but so far, Silly Polly Beast is fucking awesome.

First Demonschool and now Moonlighter 2? I don't have time to play everything, guys. I will play everything, though, don't worry.

Our kid had his first run-in with losing a save file in a game. We let him do whatever he needed to get past it, so we're having pizza for the second time in two days and buying some DLC.

I love that there’s a community dedicated to MissingNo horror lore.

Reading through solicits for new comics and the complete absence of new ideas in mainstream books makes me never want to read one again. More Spider-Verse books, yet another Hush story, Queen in Black, a Long Halloween sequel... why?

I'm so over the Game Awards. Their refusal to acknowledge the state of the games industry while claiming to champion game devs is fucking bizarre. The whole show is just smoke and mirrors to sell ads to companies that don't need more airtime.

Kind of mind-blowing that Microsoft spends any money marketing Cloud Gaming when it runs so badly on everything I’ve tried it on.

14,000 people lost their jobs today because $70 billion in profit wasn't enough. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.

Nintendo having a character who streams in their game when they themselves have been such pricks about people streaming their games is a bit too on the nose.

Hard to overstate how crazy Halo on PlayStation is. I remember the days of Killzone constantly being marketed as a "Halo killer". If you told me then that we'd eventually see Halo on other consoles, I'd have never believed you.

Crazy to think I owned the only version of the iPhone Air Apple’s ever going to make.

I swear I wasn't trying to go for the record of most phones owned in a three-month period, but I think I hit it anyway. I swapped my iPhone 17 Pro for a Pro Max.

I wish the Pokémon games were smarter. For example, if I have 200+ hours of playtime across other games, maybe I don't need the newest game to explain to me what a Pokémon is or how to catch one?

I was worried there would be performance issues with ZA like we saw with Scarlet and Violet, but so far, that doesn't seem to be the case. Gameplay is fun, and I really dig the setting. A modern Lumiose City is more my jam than the Hisui region from Arceus.

I realized I never looped back around and buttoned up the iPhone Air saga. Apple online support told me there would be no issue going into a store and doing an exchange outside of the 15-day return window, but the in-store support said this wasn't true. In the end, they did end up making an exception and let me swap for a silver 17 Pro.

I’m digging Silent Hill f, but I wish it did a better job with wayfinding so I didn’t have to open my map every three seconds to figure out where I'm going.

Less than a month into owning the iPhone Air, I'm growing increasingly disappointed with it. It's the epitome of form over function: it's gorgeous but has by far the worst battery life of any iPhone I've ever used.

Glad I never bought into the hype around Framework. After falling in the trap with TRMNL, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the majority of companies producing niche electronics, unless they explicitly state otherwise, are run by racists and transphobes or have little issue supporting people who are. Beyond disappointing.

After seeing the stuff going on around Bluesky, I decided to spin up my own Mastodon server again. I'd never had any major issues migrating before, but I got a little overzealous and stranded half my followers on my old account, so I'll have to wait and try again when I'm able to. If you're seeing this, see you in a month!

Disappointed but not surprised by Manuel Moreale's post about online behaviour. He's not wrong about social media in general but it's clear that he, like Manton, never bothered to look into the root issue before posting his thoughts. Heaven forbid we hold people accountable in public for the ill-informed opinions they choose to share.

I started Silent Hill f and it’s good, but now I also need a daytime game to play when my kid is around so I also restarted Oblivion Remastered.

After almost finishing Elden Ring several times over the past couple years, I finally rolled credits on it. I think the original Dark Souls is still my favourite but I really enjoyed it. I also gave Shadow of Erdtree a fair shake but ended up abandoning it for having some of the worst boss fights of any FromSoft game.

Middle-aged, hetero, white dudes really need to learn that they’re not required to have a take on every little thing they read online, especially when they don’t care to understand the context.

One of the best things that could come from the EA buyout is that the new owners sell off BioWare and give that studio the chance to make good games again.

In my ~20 years using Apple hardware, iOS and macOS 26 might be the buggiest versions of Apple's OSes I've ever used. It's crazy that these were deemed acceptable to ship.

The EA buyout doesn't seem like it has an upside for anyone other than the investors and C-suite assholes.

If you’re in games media, ask yourself if Hideo Kojima needs more of your help promoting his projects or if you couldn’t use that time and energy helping smaller games get even a fraction of the attention his work gets.

I often feel I default to a pessimistic view of things, especially when it comes to technology, but so many of the things we use every day have become so shoddily built and need to be viewed through a critical lens if we ever want them to get better.

I think my favourite new iOS 26 bug is when you switch back to an app you were using previously and it's on a page or view you never navigated to.

I’m torn on pulling for Orphie and Magus in ZZZ. I love the characters’ design but struggled with them in combat. I feel like I should wait until Yidhari, whose design I like but find less interesting, who might be more my speed in combat.

I had to stop watching Zuckerberg's painful AI demos. Genuinely the worst second-hand embarrassment I've felt in a long time, especially considering they've spent billions of dollars so far and this is the best they can do.

The early iPhone reviews often feel tailored to Apple enthusiasts, but those same people are the ones who already have the phones pre-ordered. Who benefits from these reviews aside from the people making them?

This weekend, I took the time to move my site from 11ty to Astro. After some digging, I found that Astro was a better fit for my use case. At the same time, I also moved away from Supabase and now host all items locally, which simplifies the entire process.

With this year's lineup, Apple has made the already complicated process of buying an iPhone even more frustrating to navigate. Between different names, colours, sizes, specs, cases, and more, it's harder than ever for the average person to just buy a phone.

After adjusting my TV settings again and tweaking the in-game options, I have Expedition 33 looking okay. I still think there are a ton of issues with the colours and lighting, for example it's sometimes impossible to read the subtitles because of the white text on a bright background, but we're back in it.

The bloom and lighting effects in Expedition 33 make the game almost unplayable for me, even with the settings dialled down. Everything is either too bright or too dark, and there’s just too much visual noise. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to get much further.

Slack’s half-baked AI summaries have lead to some of the most unintentionally funny things I've ever read.

I’m confused why a bigger deal wasn't made out of PlayStation putting Helldivers 2 on Xbox. We never hear the end of Microsoft releasing stuff on Sony hardware.

I will almost certainly not be able to finish Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It's nothing against the game, I just don't know that I have the attention span for another 15 hours of methodical sword fights between sessions of riding around the countryside on horseback.

I will buy an iPhone 17 for the fabric case alone.

A couple of weeks on Android reminded me how dependent on iMessage and FaceTime my family and I are. I was legitimately upset that I couldn't send my kid a message or jump on a video call when he's visiting my parents without him having to download multiple new apps.

Meta hasn't built anything new in over 20 years. They've bought and copied their way to continued relevance. Complete chaos, disorganization, and failure is exactly what people should expect whenever Zuck announces the company's new focus.

The vast majority of the new games that got announced yesterday look so boring and similar. They're all bloody, gross, Souls-like action games or shooters. Seeing them without titles, you'd have a tough time telling them apart.

I'm especially annoyed when it isn't crystal clear before they launch how apps plan on asking you for money. Case in point, I was excited to use Macrowave but only just found out that there's a subscription required to use broadcaster features.

I ended up replacing our TRMNL with a Raspberry Pi running MagicMirror connected to an official Pi display. For $30 less than the TRMNL X, I got a bigger colour display, complete control (and privacy) over what shows on the screen, and the satisfaction of knowing I'm not giving money to a homophobe.

One interesting side effect in switching to Android is that, because there are no numerical counts on red badges for app notifications, my overall anxiety is lower when I'm using my device. When I inevitably switch back to iPhone, it'll be one of the first things I turn off.

I set a modest reading goal of 100 books this year and I’ve blown past that. I know there's plenty more to read out there but I'm at the point where I'm struggling to find new manga series that stick with me for more than a volume or two.

Kids these days will never know the pain of having to rewatch the same 40-50 episodes of Dragon Ball Z over and over while waiting for them to translate more.

I dug out my Pebble Time only to find that the battery is cooked. So bummed.

It's still wild to me that Google shut down their dedicated podcasts app and told people to use YouTube Music instead. The app is beyond terrible.

We're all drinking out of shitty paper straws trying to save the environment while these rich assholes fly around in private jets.