On Suicide
This is an essay about suicide. If that triggers you, don't read it. Similarly, if you're tempted to respond with a sentimental knee jerk response — especially a religious or mystical one — please don't, it really isn't helpful. I'm not seeking help, or sympathy. I neither want, nor need, either.
I am a person who suffers from depression, and who has done so over most of my life. But I do not believe I am depressed now. On the contrary, I believe that I am rational and clear eyed. Please do me the courtesy of reading this essay (if you choose to read it at all) with that understanding.
Life is harsh. I'm not speaking about my life, particularly; I'm speaking generally. Most people get by from day to day without any rational basis for hope. Across the world, most people are poor, many are hungry. Very few have significant agency in their lives.
T-Bug, memory management, and Cyberpunk
I have no inside information about the development of Cyberpunk 2077, but I am a software engineer with 35 years of experience, and I have written mods for both CD Projekt and Bioware games.
Cyberpunk is essentially two products: RED Engine, and Cyberpunk itself, which runs on top of Red Engine. The engine is very much analogous to a JVM: it abstracts the platform for the game code that runs on top of it.
Cyberpunk 2077, considered as a Witcher III DLC
Cyberpunk 2077, considered as a Witcher III DLC
This is the first essay I've written on Cyberpunk 2077; I doubt it will be the last – indeed, I hope it won't, because if it is that will mean the game has failed for me. I'm currently fifteen hours in, and, at this moment, I have to say that it's on it's way towards failing. And the question you may well ask, is 'why?'
Sexual morality in the world of the Witcher
Monogamy, as it has developed in the west, it intimately related to the concept of heritable personal property. The male partner gains confidence that the children of the female partner, who will inherit the wealth and power he is able to accumulate, are his get; the female partner gains confidence that all the wealth and power accumulated by the male partner will be inherited by her children. Thus monogamy became established in the highest echelons of society, where there was significant amounts of wealth and power to be passed on.
Indeed, one may speculate that the reason for the sheer amount of loot buried with the elites of pre-monogamous societies was that it prevented fights about who was going to inherit.
Virtual Cities
A review of Dimopoulus, Konstantinos: Virtual Cities; Unbound, London, 2020. ISBN 978-1-78352-848-6.
The Pelennor Fields around Minas Tirith, as rendered in Peter Jackson's film of The Return of the King, are at best rough grazing; the land outside Cintra, in Netflix' The Witcher series, is little more than moorland. This cannot be right.