MrNumbers just posted a great essay, Annihilation -- on Pretentiousness in Media. I feel like he's saved me a blog post; I would've had to have written something similar eventually.

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I've been playing The Witcher 3 a lot lately. It's a good game, and a lot of the praises I've heard are accurate. It's got a big, living world with a good story. But one of the more frequent discussion points is the game's supposed moral ambiguity. In this game, there are supposed to be no right answers, no black and white. Only shades of gray.

It's a shame, then, that actual ambiguity pops up a lot less than it ought and the "gray" is closer to black.

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I recently finished Malcom Gladwell's latest book: Talking to Strangers. It's a good read, if bleak and unsettling. One chapter of the book that really got my brain going was on the ability of humanity to "read" the emotions of others. (I cannot find online anywhere the work cited for Chapter 6: "The Friends Fallacy"—my library audiobook version didn't have it—so I'm talking about this from my untrustworthy memory)

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So, uh ... I just hit Publish on something that probably two people on this website will appreciate. And the other one is named "Poorly Disguised Alt." I'm not linking to it because of NSFW, but if you have View Mature turned on, this post tags it.

And I feel I owe you all something of an explanation, and a warning before you click through.

Brief, incoherent author-noting after the break.

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Today’s topic is going to be a bit of a vague one, I’m afraid. At least initially.

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Hello readers! How was your weekend? Get any good reading in? I did. Working my way through Jack Campbell’s second Lost Fleet series, which has been good fun. Spoilers, but he has an interesting approach to alien life.

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