Notes from August 2026

2026-08-01

#OTD

On this day, in 1819, Herman Melville was born.

Mortal Kombat II

I was not keen on seeing "Mortal Kombat II" (2026) after the first film, because it was generally a mediocre experience. But then I heard good things about the sequel, and I caved in. Creators took criticisms to their heart and reconfigured how the story is told, etc. And it shows. It really shows. This probably means that if you didn't play the games, there's less for you. But not everything should be for everyone. It's campy as hell and fun to watch. If you're the right viewer.

The main point of criticism was introducing a canon foreigner to be the main character. It's Mortal Kombat and you have tens of characters and you don't need to make anyone up. The rationale could be creating someone relatable for newbies, but this doesn't really work, rather tells us that there was critical failure on understanding what kind of film they were doing for whom. This was rectified now. The canon foreigner was killed. Not unceremoniously, but still, he had to go.

Instead, we're getting Johnny Cage. I gotta be honest, Johnny never was a highlight of the game for me. My main focus was on the Sub-Zero/Scorpion line. But apparently, Cage was not included in the first film because he would have been too much. Now he's in, and while there is no main character this time — quite aptly for Mortal Kombat — he is important. Karl Urban plays him over the top and not without some goofiness. The introduction through an old action flick within-the-film is hilarious.

Hilarity follows the viewers on almost every step. The amount of cheesy one-liners is amazing. And they come in two types; one are cheeky one-liners and taunts, but the same style was kept also for various backstory exposition. Lord Raiden going deadpan serious with the lore really is a cherry on top. In these regards, the film is not pretending to be anything that is not. It's not a drama, it's not an epic story. It's a videogame as a film. A little plot, nice visuals, and a lot of action.

I always thought Kano to be underutilised in the MK films, because I think he's too far from the whole tournament story. There is a potential there, but in current configurations, he's demoted to a secondary character. With these amounts of characters available, concessions had to be made, and it's hard to be upset about that. "MK2", however, made him a comedic yet cocky relief. An interesting move that gave him more presence.

Sub-Zero returns as Noob Saibot. And there is Scorpion, too. There wouldn't be Mortal Kombat without these two. I liked how Noob Saibot splits himself into two entities.

If I had to name the most main character of them all, it's gotta be Kitana. While she doesn't get more screen time, she has the arc spanning from the prologue to the finale. Gotta admit, I never really played her character in the games, but being Shao Kahn's daughter obliges.

But the biggest winner are the visuals. Many earlier MK films were using film language to present the fights. It's okayish, but too much is lost in translation. In "MK2", however, the framing is closer to a fighting game. For the first time, I think. The fighters are generally in one line, as if in a 2D game. The backgrounds are over the top. There even is The Pit from the first game. There is no in-world explanation for that, so it's an artistic choice. And it delivers hard.

The other realm visually looks like inspired by the 90s. A lot of fantasy settings, when thought to look campy, reach out for the 80s vibe. But not here. The buildings and the architecture look like from a 90s fantasy show, just done really well technically. It might be the first time when I see the 90s used as aesthetics so well.

It will be interesting to compare them with the upcoming He-Man film and how they tackled this there.

So, if you played games and liked them a lot, this is probably the best big-screen adaptation of the whole franchise. Very close to "by the fans, for the fans". It fixes what the first film broke and delivers fun.

Avenue 5 (Season 2)

I was afraid that the "Avenue 5" second season would be bad, and that's why it was cancelled. Luckily, that's not the case. By some sense, it found its style and pacing. It's no longer the first shock of being stranded in space. People are tired. There are problems with food. General morale is low. Situations get nervous and atmosphere tense. Too bad we won't get more, but the finale is not a blatant cliffhanger, so it's still worth watching.

Five Nights at Freddy's (the game)

"Five Nights at Freddie's" is a short horror game with a limited action. We play as a night-shift security guard working at a family pizzeria. We need to survive from midnight to six AM. Did I say survive? There are four animatronic animals who come to life and are trying to get into the room, to do unspeakable things to us. We have no weapons, but we can close the doors to not let them in. The problem? There isn't enough energy to lock ourselves for the whole night.

Therefore, the game is primarily about resource management. We can open and close the doors on our left and right. We can also turn on the light to check if an animatronic is there. And we have access to the closed-circuit system to watch the whole place. And all the three things use energy, so we cannot use any of them for too long.

The game started as a response to the creator's previous game, where people said that it was too scary when it was not supposed to be scary at all. In response, a horror game was created. It's a good example of finding a niche where people tell you were it is. Not so common.

My daughter introduced me to the game when she was watching a playthrough by two YouTubers whose names I didn't get. We watched a couple of the games, then I found out it's available for Switch at a rather affordable price, so we went for it.

But I have to say that it was less scary than I expected. I still remember playing "Fibrilation HD" and the game being so scary that I had to split it in short chunks. An alleged 90-minute experience took me weeks to finish. No such thing here. Even when an animatronic monster got to me, I wasn't that scared. But it's fine. The fun part was figuring out the patterns of the monsters. That's the thing here. Pattern-spotting with limited resources. That's why we like indie game. Don't we?

2026-08-02

Faust

"Faust" (1994) is a trippy ride from Czechia. It generally tells a story of Faust and his deal with Mephisto, but the framing device is just bonkers. There is a nameless man who get a map handed too him in the street, with a spot marked on it. He goes there and ends up in a theatre where the play about Faust is played. And he becomes the actor and the character at the same time. But he also gets out of the role. It's as abstract as I just described. I really liked it.

It heavily reminded me of a clip for Moby's "Honey", where Moby goes into places, like under a bed, only to get out somewhere else. The clip was so suggestive that it inspired me in high school to write a whole book happening like that. Therefore, "Faust" felt very familiar to me. I like when something feels like mine. It shows me there are like-minded people out there in the wild.

I also liked that film heavily leaned on showing, not telling. The first line of dialogue is late. And generally all the spoken words are from the play within the film.

As the film was shot in Prague in 1994, it fits nicely with realities shown in Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Dekalog". Funny how nostalgia works. I wouldn't like to go back to that, but as a film setting it brings rather fond feelings.

And lastly, the whole Honey-inspired experience reminded me of the Backrooms. Both literally and conceptually. Literally, because the backstage of the theatre looks like the 90s Central European Backrooms. Conceptually, because of non-Euclidean geometry: the man opens the door and goes to one place, then returns, and opens the the same door again, but this time they lead elsewhere.

Once again I am reminded that the Backrooms didn't just pop up a couple of years ago. Then they only emerged.

2026-08-03

Lorne's Lure

I had an eye on "Lorn's Lure" (2024) since I saw the demo. As a big fan of "NaissanceE" and "Blame!", I got enamoured with the visuals. Though, funnily enough, "Lorn's Lure" reminds me of "Blame!", but not so much of "NaissanceE"; but "NaissanceE" reminds me of "Blame!". So, the connection is a bit of a round trip. But anyway. We play as an android that followed something into an underground megastructure and stuck there for 253 years. That's when we pick up.

The game highlights a point where we should get, but the way there might go not in a straight line. After a couple of minutes we pick up a pair of ice axes that allow us climbing to higher places. Before that we can only jump and climb low obstacles. There's a limitation, though: just like in "The Legend of Zelda", we have stamina and we cannot climb indefinitely. Once it runs out, you're falling off.

The visuals are superb. Low-poly with pixelated textures. A game true to its materials. Very brutalistic. And then the world is also build from some sort of concrete-like material, so it's twice brutalistic. I played the Nintendo Switch port which comes with smaller view distance, which I didn't mind, as it felt closer to PSX games. It's also darker, compared to the PC screen recordings I saw. On the visual level, that's fine. But this leads to certain problems.

Because it's dark, I missed a critical rod I was supposed to land on. After watching a video, I could see it, knowing where it should have been. It would not be a problem at all, I guess, if not for the broken checkpoint system. When I missed the rod and fell down, I ended up a bit further, and it assigned me to the next checkpoint. At this point, I couldn't return and I couldn't try again and it was important, because that was where I was supposed to pick up the axes. I got soft-locked.

As a matter of fact, I got soft-locked thrice. After which I resorted to a video walkthrough. After that I played for two more hours without any hiccups, but there is a section where we go very up and then we have to go down. On my way down, I fell again and got assigned to a lame checkpoint from which I couldn't get anywhere. Somehow, I managed to progress to even later stage, but until I go back to where I can't, I am soft-locked again. At this point, I'm giving up.

It is possible that there is a way out of it, but because of limited visibility, I don't see it. I tried blindly a couple of times, but it was always a miss. It's a shame, because I liked the game. The visuals, the exploration itself, the music. It's all there. The difficulty level is high and I don't mind it, but getting soft-locked like that is just stupid and a game-stopper for me.

Maybe the PC version avoids that because of the larger distance rendered. I don't know. I think a system of manual saves would solve the issue here. If I can save in a safe spot, then I don't mind getting soft-locked. I can just reload the last savegame. But if I'm stuck in an impossible situation, then I'm done. I might actually write to the dev about it. I don't expect much, though. Redesigning the checkpoint/save system would be a tall order and I paid mere 8 euros for the game.

Again, shame. The game world is just humongous, and it falls in line with "Blame!" and "NaissanceE", where you were this little nothing. A particle in the world. Also, as having a fear of heights, I had especially lot of fun with various platforming sections. Sometimes you climb, but sometimes you have to jump on pipes hanging in this black void (courtesy of Switch, but it might be working better for me; it reminds me of some dreams I had; it looks exactly like that).

So, that's probably the end of the line for me.

2026-08-06

On Claude on my language

If LLMs are good for anything, it's language, I guess. So I asked Claude to analyse two of my texts. One was compared to Jerome K. Jerome, whom I didn't know but now I have to read something, and the other one was generally along Elmore Leonard and Chuck Palahniuk. Not bad. Also, not someone I would compare myself to in the first place. Of the three, I read only Palahniuk. It doesn't change much for me, just a bit of trivia.

(Before I forget, there was also Geoff Dyer.)

There were some more highlights. For instance, it pointed out some Slavic-English phrases. I am aware that our language use gives away our origins, but coming from them I have a blind spot for them. It doesn't bother me, because while I am interested in perfecting my style, I am not chasing any specific one. Slavic English is just as fine. And in the age of AI, flaws are considered authentic. You actually sound more genuine when you make errors.

"If it was flawless, it wouldn't look hand-drawn."

When writing fiction, I try to conceal my style deficiencies by using first person narrative. This way I offload writing errors to the characters.

One other thing pointed out to me was mixing UK and US vocabulary. However, that is partially on purpose. I choose words I like. It probably matters when you're aiming at a particular audience or market. But the Internet surpasses regional borders. The main thing is if I'm able to share my message, my point of view. If you understood me, then I consider it a success. It probably wouldn't fly in official documents or scientific papers, but I'll worry about it when I get there.

Rayman

In the spirit of games true to their materials, I dusted off Rayman, which I got for my 40th birthday, and it's been such fun. It's 2013 "Rayman Legends", which are 2D and really well polished. There is no plot that I'm aware of, just platforming challenges. There is a range variety of types of levels. For plots, I'll turn my attention to books. It could be that "The Legend of Zelda" and "Shadow Man" exhausted me; also, how do you beat that? I'm gonna focus now on games that are games.

Learning new words on Fedi. It is a good day.

2026-08-07

I decided to take a break from writing about games. It would feel repetitive. And boring. Upsides of taking notes for yourself.

9 days later...

NARRATOR: Then he wrote extensively about Quake.

ME: Well, fair. Though, it's not the usual analysis of minute details, but rather impressions. Notes.

NARRATOR: *blows raspberry*

South Andalusian August is here. Humid and wet and sticky. And I like it. If it lasted longer than those two-three months then I would have probably got tired of it. But it doesn't overstay its welcome. It is, however, true that I have stamina for that and it surprises even some local people.

2026-08-08

New Quake episode. Contrary to the previous one, this one lured me in. With its architecture.

• Please proceed to the thread here.

2026-08-09

On Friday we went to our townhall, after receiving a letter a couple of weeks ago in which we were asked to show up and confirm we still live in our house. Turns out it've been five years already. We had the same clerk serving us as the last time. But he didn't recognise us. When we were done, we went for churros in a artisanal cafe just opposite of the townhall. It was a good day. We got to spend time as family.

Underworld

We went to Underworld concert yesterday. Or so I thought. It turned out to be a festival with more artists, like Sven Väth or Bonobo. Underworld was just one of them but we came for them and left after they finished. Very much like Jean-Michel Jarre last year, Underworld went hard with beats. As this was an open-air event, I just sat down at the distance of acceptable volume.

They played two compositions I knew. One was "Moaner" from "Batman & Robin". This is probably my second most-listened song of theirs. I had a limited CD collection back in the 1990s and I had to listen to the same stuff all over again. "Batman & Robin" was my fourth CD in the collection. I didn't recognise it at first yesterday, as it starts with uncharacteristic drums. But then it started hitting me that it might be it. And then it emerged fully. To think that "Batmann & Robin" would prepare me for it. :D

The other composition was, perhaps not surprisingly, "Born Slippy" from "Trainspotting". When the first sounds started playing, people started rushing to the stage from all directions. It generally felt as a reward for enduring the earlier merciless wall of sound.

Alas, they didn't play my all-time favourite "Cowgirl". But "Moaner" was a really nice surprise.

In general, it was less vocal than I hoped for. More like a DJ set. Still fun but less.

On remembering

I have the so-called autobiographical memory. Not as strong as the photographic one and mostly limited to my own experiences, but it's much better than the usual one. As I got older, it started failing me. The newer stuff doesn't stay with me that strong. It actually feels like a relief, to be honest. However, coming from that memory, I don't like giving up on things. I have this imperative to remember as much as possible indefinitely. This can be tiresome. And that's where note-taking helps.

I can write something and forget. Then I read it and it all comes back. Amazing invention, this writing. I read recently my text about Juriusz, and at the end I discovered that I have forgotten the text's final conclusion. Now I remember it but differently. More distanced. Could be a therapeutic value here even. And that is why I'm undergoing painful journey through my dog's last days. So I can forget but not forever.

As the adage goes, people die twice: first when they die physically and second when someone says their name for the last time. The same rule applies to the pets.

I kind of regret I didn't write about my family members. But there is so much more material. And also, I didn't know then what I know now. How useful that can be.

I often say that I lost my grandma twice: first to cancer and then to the last year being so intense that it overwrote other memories of her.

40 minutes later...

It turns out to be much harder than I expected. Writing about my late dog. I'm in the literal last days and I need to take a break after each sentence. Which is probably a good thing to go through with it till the end.

Working with text means cheap tooling.

Turns out it's "Five Nights At Freddy's", not Freddie's.

"Five Knights At Freddy's", the medieval edition.

2026-08-10

A post from ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋ

/source

Who reviews the reviewers?

Let's choose a Linux distro but by its logo.

I just learned by accident that James Sallis, author of "Drive" among other things, has died on January 27th this year. I still have plans to read more of his books. He has this terse, dry style that I like so much.

In the age of constant surveillance of Meta glasses, nothing comforts people you meet more than wire-rimmed glasses.

At least until smaller cameras are made.

A post from Jess

/source

Every corporation is 2 people quitting at the same time away from losing all reliability for a few months.

2026-08-11

It's 20 years today since I came back from my failed trip to Scotland where I went to earn a lot of money during vacations.

I feel I have now an idea how to make it into a text. I've been struggling for years with it, but I realised recently that it's because of my tendency to preserve as many details as possible. That's wrong. It creates an everything soup. You need to cut out a sliver telling a specific story and disregard the rest. As much as it's painful for the rememberer, it's necessary.

There is something oddly satisfying in typing on a mechanical keyboard. As if tapping into an ancient part of my brain and unlocking a very old feeling that served a purpose millions years ago, now largely obsolete but still present in the code. Gotta be honest, I did not expect that when I was deciding to get a mechanical one.

2026-08-14

On AI training sources

Just when it seemed there was no new data to feed to the AI monsters, the companies behind them found old and rare books and started buying them in batches and destroying them physically to feed their monsters even more; removing said books from access both in sense of physical accessibility and to their contents. But, if I see it correctly, that is the last station. There is no more text to consume ever again.

I just hope that when the bubble finally bursts, we're able to enforce the AI companies to give us the raw scans they made.

• Later retraction

And then we got drunk and I proposed and she said yes and it has been almost eighteen years now.

Another Bandcamp purchase

Another Bandcamp purchase that goes back to my frenetic exploration of their catalogue back in 2012. I guess it's a surprise for the author that 14 years later someone bought your album out of the blue. And yet.

This album: "Half of A X-ing" by Cyesm. It supposed to be a soundtrack, but I tried tracking the film over the years and every time came up with nothing. So I guess it's one of those faux soundtracks that occupy a special place in the Bandcamp's universe.

It happened, by the way, because I was reading an article about nomads in China and stumbled upon this:

Herding yaks on solar farms

I spent time in a nomadic community located about 161 km southeast of Xining city, the capital of Qinghai province.

Funny how memory works sometimes.

On tactics against AI fanboys

I am going to test something with AI fanboys. Being adamantly stubborn about an issue but without getting emotional about it should start making others doubt their own beliefs. If I cannot appeal to them with arguments then let's go with this form of gaslighting. Very much like in a case of fictional angels and their just wrath, I see this as an acceptable course of action.

Expect the narrator saying, "It didn't work."

In Eastern Europe, we don't use articles before words and no one complains.

2026-08-15

I came to realise that I like playing games but finishing them became something of an option. This corresponds to the fact that recently I'm into smaller, less plot-driven games. It's liberating. I used to have this imperative that I had to finish each game I started, so I had to choose them wiser. Now I can just spin it and play it for a while and then toss it aside.

2026-08-16

Five Nights at Freddy's (the film)

"Five Nights At Freddy's" (2023) is a PG-13 horror film based on a series of popular games that conquered the Internet. As it's basically for children, don't expect anything drastic. There are a couple of jumpscares but that's it. They created real animatronics based on those from the game, and that was a good choice. They were able to make them scary mostly through what they do with their eyes. I wouldn't watch it for myself, but it's a fine watch with a younger generation.

I would place "Five Nights At Freddy's" among films from fans for fans. And probably by fans, too. It doesn't pretend to be anything more and it delivers what people want. That the film critics will not see much value in it is irrelevant. The film earned enough. And, what I think is important to highlight, it's a Blumhouse production. Now, they now how to do a solid horror according the genre's rules.

But there's more. I found a lot of adult fear here. The whole setup of a man having trouble with keeping a job while having to take care of his little sister who doesn't want to talk to him hit me harder than the animatronic animals. And then there's an aunt in the picture, who wants to take the whole custody over the sister. This is what drives Mike, the main character, to take a job as a night watch at Freddy Fazbear.

2046

"2046" (2004) is a Wong Kar-wai film about, well, coping, I guess. It starts like a science-fiction film and it seems to be a framing device, but midway through the film it gets explained that it's a plot of a short story that the main character writes. Nice distraction. To me, it was a delicious journey of a man into his past. It's not linear, it goes back and forth, aiming for the clarity of his situation. But it's all from a safe distance.

Delhi Crimes (Season 2)

"Delhi Crime" season 2 is not explicitly based on an actual crime, but I just read that there are gangs like the one depicted in the season. The police squad is almost the same, minus one person. It's working against tight budgets, people shortages, and messed-up political climate again. I can't imagine anyone willingly choosing a job like that. I liked the dead end in the first half, where instead of chasing the lead, there was an attempt at pinning it on some poor tribe.

Gabbeh

"Gabbeh" (1996) is an Iranian film about a young nomad girl and her way to love. I liked the framing device, where she shows out of the blue on a gabbeh (a type of carpet) and tells an elderly couple her story. I assumed that the nomadic life has been pictured accurately, so it's interesting to see how differently people live, or lived, out there. Visually, it's all very fluid, like memories.

The English translation was very good and brings poetry to the table. At times it felt like a poem and at times like a fairytale.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

"Five Nights At Freddy's 2" (2025) follows the story of Mike and his sister Abby. The Freddy's pizzeria is closed, but between film the bad aunt made a fuzz and everyone knows about animatronics. In a very Halloween-like frenzy, the whole town dresses as Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy. It's still PG-13, but the creators managed to avoid the same killer returning to continue his killing spree. And this time, for a change, there is a segment based on the actual game. I sense it was pointed out by fans in the first film.

Two stingers clearly tell us that there is going to be film number 3. It makes sense if you look at the earnings versus the budget. It is a kind of film that gives its viewers exactly what they want. Everyone else liking it will probably be accidental. Which is fine. I always respect stuff done for your own people. They don't have to pretend anything, because they know their audience in advance.

And it's Blumhouse, whose craft I respect.

The first time I told my daughter to plug something through USB, she did it three times. First correctly, then the wrong way, then correctly again. It clicked in the last time, of course. She was dumbstruck and said, "But it was the same way the first time." I laughed and said, "You just had your first USB experience. It's always like that."

Dust Bunny

"Dust Bunny" (2025) is Bryan Fuller's feature debut. A story of a young girl whose parents get eaten by a monster from under her bed. To deal with it, she hires a professional hitman living across her apartment. Then things get complicated for a number of reasons. If there ever was one film to be categorised as fantasy, it would be it. And, coming from Fuller, it's a visual wonder, starting from colours and ending with costumes. And the monster.

The beginning got me wondering if it's not a children film, but when 5B begins his side-investigation, it becomes an adult film. Not because they swear or something but because I think it's too much talking and it would bore children.

There are a couple of scenes that clearly allude to "Leon: The Professional". The hitman/girl duo, but also the fight in the apartment when 5B hides on the ceiling.

It's nice to see Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen return to cooperation. They worked previously on "Hannibal". And Sigourney Weaver is good too. But the main drive is pretty soon established to be Mads and Sophie Sloan. Really cool dynamics between actors.

William Orbit passed away in July. I just found out.

The concept of burstiness in writing fascinates me. Like, you write a really long sentence followed by a couple of short ones. And it works!

I like the visuality of isometric games, but the controls are always a bitch. Should you move diagonally, like on the screen? Or perhaps the D-pad top should correspond to a specific direction on the screen? No clear exits here.

2026-08-17

Backrooms

"Backrooms" (2026) is Kane Parsons (a.k.a. Kane Pixels) feature debut based on his web series about The Backrooms. The knowledge of the series helps a little with the origins of the place but is not necessary for watching. I was concerned if it will hold as a film, but it's good. The Backrooms part is obviously solid. They actually built them this time, as opposed to web-series blender-rendered world. The cast is minimal, with almost no extras. This helps for liminality. As the Backrooms alone wouldn't work for a wide-audience film, there is a character of Clark the furniture store manager, his assistant, hey boyfriend, Clark's therapist, and Phil from the Async Reasearch Institute. All but Phil discover the Backrooms without prior knowledge, so people from outside the lore can follow their journey with equally fresh eye.

Visually, it's a gem, with the colour palette and clothes and furniture and cars being the early 90s as fuck. There are two camcorder sequences as we would expect from the found footage origins of the series, but the most of the film is normal. We get to see the proper Backrooms not filtered through VHS for the first time.

Gone from the film is the explanation about the infinite storage room. I like it, but it would be too weird for normal people. They're not ready yet. And that's not bad, because instead we get Clark explaining Mary that the place they ended up in is like rememoried places (or people). "It's every place that ever was." As is, it reminds me of this music project illustrating dementia. There was also a Doom map like that.

Worldbuilding-wise, "Vivarium" comes to mind. Especially the part at the end when the girl gets out of bounds. "Vivarium" had a completely different colour palette, though. It was a nice attempt but was not quite there yet. "Backrooms" lands where it should. We'll probably get more, and the future instalments might go more technical on details. By then, only interested people will follow.

3 hours later...

The more I read about the film on TV Tropes, the more I realise it's very much like Stanisław Lem's Solaris attempting to copy humans. There's an extra twist here with distorting memories over time. Which is very much how memories work for human beings, too.

Incidental probably, but it could be also used as an illustration for model collapse in AI.

They say that you need three months to know that you don't want to live in Malta, but you need 3 years to know if you wanna stay. I just recalled that because a previous boss of mine moved back from Malta to Portugal. Three-year marker reached. :D

2026-08-18

Nothing eerie in listening to Backrooms-inspired music at six in the morning when all is half-lit and everyone else is asleep.

Dead man on a walk

We went with our dogs and found a dead man by the river yesterday. That's not a figure of speech. There was a dead person on our usual route. One of the dogs tried to pull me there, but I took the deceased for a dumped bathroom sink. It's a usual dumping site for some. But then the other dog pulled my wife to the same place and my wife said, "For a moment there, I thought it was a dead man. The head, the ears." And then it clicked for me too and I went back and looked again and there he was.

He was not far from the road, laying in bamboo-like bushes. Bald. In a white T-shirt. Slightly muddied. With his face down. I didn't see any more. While my wife was calling for police, I observed if he was breathing. They taught me that on a first-aid course years ago. Apparently, checking pulse can give false negatives for untrained people. But breathing will not. His chest was not moving.

It was dusk when we found him and it turned dark by the time the police and the guardia civil arrived. They took over from us and thanked us for the call and congratulated the dogs for finding the man and we left.

There's nothing about it in the newspapers, though. Of course, we had our theories about what could have happened.

The question now is if we should continue taking this route? I like it a lot. I saw many hogs there, but never dead people.

The next day...

One thing I find funny, especially now, is that I was afraid to approach the man, fearing that he might suddenly get up and attack me aggressively. Self-preservation first.

Guardia Civil wrapped a single tape between two bamboo-like canes and called it a day. The place would probably be safer from people if they left it unmarked.

2026-08-19

So. I've been reading it has been a lot of load-bearing for Claude Code recently. They really went with belt-and-suspenders this time.

2026-08-20

The humidity is retreating. Breathing is suddenly easier.

Yesterday I played chess with another person on Duolingo for the first time. An Indian, judging from his name. I lost but quite late in the game. But defeated I shall return stronger.

I have this urge to buy retrogaming equipment and I need to resist it, because I've been barely playing anything recently, and what's more, I've been perceiving playing games in general as sort of empty calories. I realised that books have much better plot-to-energy-needed ratio. So I keep telling myself that the best gaming setup for now is the one I already have.

Sherlock Holmes is in public domain, so anyone can take him and write his own adventure. I've been thinking about the following setup. The narrator would be Sherrinford Holmes, the third brother. (Sherrinford was one of the potential names for Sherlock.) In this version, Sherlock is a savant and John Watson is his professional caretaker. Mycroft Holmes is some sort of MI5 hot shot. The investigation would be run by Sherrinford using Sherlock's brilliance as a resource.

Now I need the plot.

But actually. There is one game that I would like to at least see. It's "No Man's Sky". I suspect it's too big for me to play it fully, but I just have been too curious about it over the years.

One of my quirks for years was to be superstitious about seeing your password in plain text. I would never write it outside of password fields and never check it with the show-the-password functionality. This slowly dissipated when I started using password managers and copypasting them.

Methinks, if there are devices like Analogue 3D that allow playing old physical games then in the future there should be similar ones that will play current games. That is if we have future. But let's assume we do. Obviously, there will have to be workarounds for checking those online statuses and other DRMs, but I believe in retro communities. So. In that case, it's worth getting Switch games in their physical form. And the secondhand market has some to offer.

Probably those GameBoy-shaped handhelds too. However, I find it tedious to play 3D games on handhelds. 2D games work best for me there.

What I like about Fedi dramas is that I usually stumble upon them after they're over. I can go and read both sides' arguments and move on to my usual idiosyncrasies. Twitter used to feed me those real-time.

I guess some would say that I live a privileged life. But I was just lucky in many aspects. But maybe that is a privilege.

2026-08-21

Cormac McCarthy, "Passenger"

Cormac McCarthy's "The Passenger" is one of his two last books, released side by side with "Stella Maris". A story of Robert Western, a salvage diver and a former racing driver and a couple of other occupations, who suddenly gets into trouble with mysterious forces. There is a plot, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the main story is Western himself, as a person. Anyway. It reads like poetry sometimes and there are juicy dialogues too.

The book reminded me of two things. One is also McCarthy's "Suttree". My favourite book of his. The other one is James Sallis' "Drive". Something about Bobby Western being a character between Suttree and Driver. In the beginning, I wasn't even sure what the genre is, but it clarified quite quickly.

And to think that he released that in his late eighties. To have such a sharp mind. Wow.

2026-08-22

A parrot eating fruits from a palmtree in front of our bedroom window woke me up. Again.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" (2025) is a science-fiction film where a man dressed in a plastic coat enters an LA diner to tell all the gathered there that he's from the future and he needs six people for a mission to change the said future. It's well written and well shot, with my favourite Sam Rockwell in the main role. There is time-travelling but we see only one loop in the film. In a way, it's the new iteration of "The Terminator" that we all deserved. It captures the essential.

Mad Love

"Mad Love" (1985) is Andrzej Żuławski's film about gangsters killing other gangsters. Roughly. But that emerged over time. For a while I was not able to tell what's going on. Everyone's acting crazy and, as always, there are naked women too. It's a loose adaptation of Dostoevsky's "Idiot" which explains the main character. Only for hardheaded film buffs, in my opinion.

"Manifold Garden" was amazing. It created a world that was at the same time small and infinite. Sounds like a paradox. And yet. The creators managed.

Dex

I dug out "Dex" from my Switch collection. I bought it don't know how long ago but never even started. Well. That's fixed now. I was planning on running it once and putting aside, but I found it interesting enough to continue. Hard to say now if it's an RPG lite or an action-adventure game with a more elaborate stats system. Or maybe a beefed-up cinematic platformer. In any case, it's fun. And visually appealing. I think I'll go with charming picklocker-hacker build.

• Here to the thread.

On AI training sources (retraction)

A follow up to On AI training sources.

I guess I was proven wrong. Google bought an airline recently so they can process 34 years of their data. This might not be the new source in the sense of a new type, as I've read about buying failed startups a while ago, but that is still a source that they can tap into.

An accidental cautionary tale. Always keep your private stuff off the corporate channels. You never know if Nexus Torment will not have a look into that a decade later. If not decades.

Back in 1998, I would sometime wander as far as page 20 in Google search results. If the topic was right, I would be adamant. Relentless.

2026-08-24

When you hover over a tab in Vivaldi, it will show you how much RAM the website uses. Nice.

Yesterday I won a chess game with another person on Duolingo and not because I was better, as I was points behind the other guy, but because the other side ran out of time. This is something that I noticed when playing with my father before too. Duolingo taught me some tactical moves and I usually open quickly which gives me more time later.

But I still don't know what to think about my chess playing. I do this mainly for fun. I considered a local competition recently, however. So who knows.

2026-08-25

Suspect Zero

"Suspect Zero" is a 2004 film that starts like a story of a serial killer and an agent chasing him, but soon things complicate. I really like this film and it's at least the third time I've seen it. It quickly evolves into something that could be an X-Files episode, in a good way. Ben Kingsley seems to be having fun here and he and Aaron Eckhart built nice dynamics together. Carrie-Ann Moss however is largely a glorified extra.

I find the film visually very appealing and this time I found out that the director made two videoclips for Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar" era. And that was exactly how the visual style felt to me.

The film was largely a flop and has low Rotten Tomatoes percentage, but I don't care. It's one of those films that you've seen at some point of your life and it stayed with you. On the plus side, it's still rewatchable; not something I can say about many other films like that.

Slack opening links in a new window

I was irritated with Slack opening links in a new tab in the last active window, sometimes buried in the third virtual desktop. But I found out that if I open about:config and set browser.link.open_newwindow.override.external to 2, it will open all the external links in a new window. Always. So much winning.

For many people, Claude does the most of their research load-bearing.

Space Esperanto

Different languages have different rules about writing them down when you don't have access to the characters special to this language. For instance in German, umlauts get trailed by "e" ("ä" becomes "ae", etc.). Esperanto has "x", as the letter is not a part of their alphabet, so for instance "ŝ" becomes "sx". And this looks very sci-fi to me. Mi sxatas sxakon. I might use it somewhere.

A bit of trivia. In Polish we use bare equivalent ("ą" becomes "a", and you have to derive that from the context), so "zażółć gęślą jaźń" become "zazolc gesla jazn". Good luck if you're a foreigner. The reason for that, as I learned a while ago, was that in the old days Poles were using imported computers which mostly had the US keyboard layout and we only had the base Latin characters. All those Commodores, Ataris, Amigas.

2026-08-26

"Foundation" season 2 made me want to visit Lanzarote. Alien planet my ass. :D

On code slopification

So I get a 31-file PR opened for review and I realise that I don't really care that much about it as it's no longer my thing. The codebase that once was almost intimate becomes foreign. Alien even maybe. And that is the shape of development at the moment. I try to focus on catching dangerous stuff that might bite me in the ass in the future. But the overall quality fades. Why fight for small stuff today when tomorrow will bring a tonne of new stuff to go through again. This will not hold.

The year is 2031. First kids named Torment Nexus begin showing up in preschools.

Some magazine will ask AI for the word of the year in December and we'll all learn that it's "load-bearing".

2026-08-27

I never project a mind behind an LLM output. I know it wouldn't like it.

This current AI debacle reminds of an old joke we had in the 1990s: The computer is not smart. It only thinks that.

Designating blog platforms as terrorist organisations reeks of despair. If you ask me.

I ordered a Nintendo Switch game to my parents' place and my father called me to ask if he should open it because the box is a little too small for a disk. Like CD or DVD. Oh those memory cards. Fooling elderly people.

My AI-loving friends noticed that Github has been recently more unstable. Why could that be, I wonder.

Cien Años de Soledad (Season 2)

Season 2 of "Cien Años de Soledad" ("One Hundred Years of Solitude") closes the story. I found this season more appealing, but maybe it was me who changed. My favourite character, Aureliano Babilonia, doesn't show until the last three episodes. It's a really solid job they've done here. I was genuinely sad when Macondo started falling into disrepair. And Ferdinanda. My god, how she pissed me off. Which I guess she should have. Anyway, I recommend it.

A post from Jonathan Schofield

/source

Shite UI => ShUIte

enshuiteification

On my next laptop I think I'll go with NixOS. I still have a soft spot for immutability from my functional programmer days.

I wouldn't eat the rich. Too much ketamine meat poisoning.

I make so many typos. 🙈

Post factum it seems a big miss that I didn't place an intentional typo in the post above.

2026-08-30

1. I open articles.
2. I never read them.
3. ???
4. Profit.