Errol 🦇🏳️‍🌈

Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.

It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

Sorry but it’s insane to me that GDC is still held in a place where attendees have to be warned about getting disappeared at the airport.

A photograph of a small seagull plushie labelled “Seymour Seagull Plush” in a plexiglass prison (probably due to his many war crimes)

DID YOU UNLEASH THE HOUNDS ON HIM

Sorry guys, this industry isn’t profitable enough for half of you to keep your jobs. We can afford to buy out a public park for a week though -

hang on are you saying you literally threw a plushie seagull effigy of me to the dogs

I feel so genuinely ambivalent about GDC. On the one hand it can be a huge boost for early career devs - it was a huge boost for *my* career, even! On the other hand, it’s crazy expensive, completely disconnected from the community it allegedly serves, and you might be arrested trying to get there.

“It doesn't feel safe”—Many international game developers plan to skip GDC in US Stories of border issues lead to pervasive travel fears across the worldwide industry.

As GDC starts this week, I published a story summing up the overwhelming fear stopping many international developers from coming to San Francisco this year. arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/...

The soft animal of my body loves walking on my knees through the desert repenting, actually. Can’t get enough of it.

looking at the GDC talks for this year and this kinda sums it up, huh

(Also the labyrinth is a music box that plays my favourite track from the Pathologic 2 soundtrack. I feel very Seen.)

A photograph of a box containing a miniature version of the abyssal labyrinth, including a miniature version of this author, probably composing their own skeet about an even tinier labyrinth with an even tinier version of themself inside.

My wonderfully talented best friend has used her powers for evil and trapped a tiny version of me inside a tiny abyssal labyrinth. Don’t worry, I’m having an amazing time in there.

Quoting this again a week out from GDC for nooooo reason

We could do all of this at once, even.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

And Dr Seuss!

Happy Birthday! Also omg we have the same birthday 🥳

March birthdays best birthdays 😌🐠

Also IT’S MY BIRTHDAY, be NICE to me

“I miss when Resident Evil had a big scary lady.“
[five minutes later]
“No not like that.”

it is weird to know the peak of success as a content creator is "many brand deals and a podcast with multiple advertisers" while I was taught in journalism school how some reporters do not drink coffee at press events to avoid conflicts of interests

“The Great Gatsby isn’t about the parties” oh yeah? What happens when he stops hosting the parties? Does that work out for him?

got laid off this morning, send thoughts prayers and freelance work my way! </3

I spent three hours learning more than I ever wanted to about James I/VI’s sex life and none of it made it into my essay. Fuck.

And I’m REAL MAD that I feel this way because the games industry does genuinely have a problem with insularity that leads to people avoiding negative critique in case it upsets people. I would LOVE if we all started Doing Real Criticism. But for some reason it always manifests like… this.

My best friend sending me a poorly written article: delightful, hilarious, no notes
You all blasting the article in public where everyone can see you scrambling for an original take: Oh Dear

Ultimately the practice of dunking exists because a lot of people have forgotten the difference between privately ridiculing something and publicly critiquing it. It’s parasocial behaviour in reverse.

I love this stuff. One of the only annotations in a used copy of Utopia I had was this:

English Heritage has the Pride of Place map! www.historypin.org/en/prideofpl...

Ad from the December 1921 issue of Photoplay with the text “Cook books are the enemies of teeth and gums”

You could just put whatever you wanted on ads back then