Robot Jazz

  It is now mid-September. In my neck of the woods, September is a type of seasonal purgatory, a period that isn't quite summer but also isn't quite fall.  As such, it is a month where it is easy to fall into a type of somnolence. After suffering through a summer of heat and humidity, who could blame anyone?   Sadly, this sleepiness hasn't carried over to America as the news has been nothing but bad, with the worst actors on the move. 💀💀💀💀💀 The most recent bit of evil is the murder of far-right polemicist Charlie Kirk. This is not surprising, seeing the country's ever-deepening divide.  I mentioned that one of my inspirations for chronicling these dark days was Mary Chesnut Boykin's A Diary from Dixie. As I wrote then, I found her chronicle of the slave-holding South's descent into madness and war to be reminiscent of the contemporary mood in America, a time when the nation is dividing along ideological lines. However, unlike then, where the very real...

  Well, this was unexpected.  I never thought I would be writing two  posts about a game I only dabble in, which is to say No Man's Sky.  Back on July 28, I wrote a piece about how NMS  was getting me to appreciate the less loathsome aspects of summer, the worst season of all. Now, as I sit on the precipice of Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer in America, I am once again compelled to write a piece, but this time about  Hello Games' recent update,  Voyagers  — a content drop that is blowing up the internet as I write this.  🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Voyagers  is not the largest update Hello Games  has ever released, but it might be the most consequential since base building was added to the game oh so long ago.  Voyagers  arrived with what is often considered the mic-drop of space games: incorporating spaceship interiors into the game for a maximum of immersion.  In a game that long had spaceships only interactable from the fa...