I went to see Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City the other night. In the bar on the way in, I confidently said to my partner, “immersive theatre is video games”.

It isn’t.

I’ve gone down into the depths these last couple of weeks with IndieWeb, POSSE and a whole bunch of other arcane terminology. Now that I’ve come up for air, let’s chat about it.

I moved from East to South London in the summer of last year. South London has been amazing, especially for food, but there’s one thing missing.

I had a really great year in 2022. I also played fewer games in 2022 than maybe any year previous. I don’t necessarily want to think about what that might mean, thank you very much.

I struggled recently to work out how to build an APK out of a native Android app without using Gradle.

I use an app called Daylio as a diary and a mood tracker. It’s really good! I recommend it. 

I also use an app called Habit to track things I want to do every day, like “stay off social media” or “work on a project”.

I’m genuinely impressed that 2021 managed to be a generally worse year than 2020, for a variety of fun reasons. It had some high highs but also some very low lows. It was a year in which I mostly quit social media (a positive change!), which means I was out of The Games Discourse for the last third. Do I miss it? Like hell.

2020 has been hot garbage. It has had very few redeeming factors and I am not appreciative of it at all. 

Some great games, though.

After six months and £11m of public money wasted, England and Wales finally have a functional contact tracing app for COVID-19. You can download it now - as long as your phone is new enough. Why this limitation?

Notarization is required as of macOS 10.15 (Catalina), and it’s a bit of a minefield - doubly so for a Java application, or anything built outside Xcode.