New week new links! This one is a bit late since I was busy all weekend, but all my links are from Friday or earlier!

Bruno Dias: A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Supplemental: Commander's Road to Hell

I never really got Commander. I had a brief period where I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan because I ran away from home, and the person I was staying with there was a huge magic fan. He would offer to pay me to sort his cards for him, which I never really succeeded at. During this time he tried to get me to play Commander with him at his local game store, and I didn't really get what was fun about it? To be fair, I didn't know Magic cards well enough to know what was going on. (I still don't.) But I also didn't vibe with the social aspect of it. I got into card games through Hearthstone, and my favorite part of Hearthstone was carefully sequencing your actions to maximize the amount of value you could get out of a turn. This could be social if you played with a friend, but the game took a backseat to the conversation as opposed to being the vehicle that facilitates the…

I’m in the middle of moving, so I’ll try to keep this one short, but here’s links!

Mikhail Klimentov: Kill the CEO in your head

Genuinely though. I’ve read so much writing about games that just feels like a press release.

Os Keyes: Beyond Trans Archives, Beyond Trans Medicine

Please, if you only read one thing this week, let it be this. I found it in my read later pile, saved from a recommendation from probably god knows where. It’s a deep and loving look at archival practices, trans joy, and our relationship with academics. It will leave you in tears.

Laura Michet: It's okay to be a certain kind of hooligan

I do not "understand" getting that mad about having to drive slowly behind cyclists for a minute. I never will. It's deranged, murderous behavior. I'm glad to call it criminal.

I love basically everything Laura Michet writes, and this is no different. Read her stuff! It’s good!

jergling: 2026: A Tech Odyssey

You are awakened by a digital chime at exactly 4:00 a.m. Peeling your eyes open, you see the walls begin to shine in a rainbow of RGB waves. Your handheld greets you in Scarlett Johansson’s voice, through the bedside speaker…

A short story about the hell…

New week new links!

Michelle Starr: Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

Have you heard the news? Eating ants is the next big thing in animals!

Patricia Taxxon: mental health update

I'm just going to soapbox for a second. You might have DID without knowing it. It's far more mundane and common than you think it is. You don't need to hear voices in your head or wake up in random places without knowing how you got there. It can be a kind of depression that makes your memory spotty. A sense that something terrible has happened to you, but that feels like it happened to someone else, leaving you suspiciously unscathed.

This is genuinely just a mental health update from a youtuber I follow, but there's a lot of really good bits in here. I have rewatched it a handful of times, which is impressive when it's only two days old, just to hear the specific ways she phrases stuff. I think that it's a mark of a good writer when even the functional writing sticks with you.

Dr. Devon Price: Is Your Fear of Gender Transition Really the Fear of Aging?

Even the fear of transition regret is a resistance to the irreversibility of time. Life’s options inevitably winn…

More links! These link roundups are something I really enjoy because I have a good collection of new articles I have stolen from other link roundups, and old articles I have stolen from other link roundups. Okay, only some of these links are stolen from other link roundups, some of them I've found myself. Anyways, I hope you enjoy them all! Please comment if you do because I really genuinely love reading these comments. It gives me real joy to know my comment system hasn't broken yet.

Heydon Pickering: The Body Element

Heydon’s doing this series where they write an article on every single html element, in alphabetical order. This one’s on the <body> element, the one element that anyone who’s ever touched html knows about. This isn’t the most educational resource, but it is heaps of fun, and I think that’s something you can easily forget about when you’re diving into web development. It’s fun!

P H Lee: The V*mpire

A short horror story set on early 2010s tumblr. It’s genuinely really good.

Talia Fenix: Steaming a Good Ham

The writer of the scene, Bill Oakley, claims it i…

It's been a minute¹ since the last link roundup! Since I've got the new more convenient writing flow, I thought it’d be nice to actually use this to get back to doing these again!

Gobolatula: Please Forgive Me!!!

I’m starting this off with a whole-hearted recommendation of Please Forgive Me!!! It’s the sorta-sequel sorta-reboot of my favorite webcomic, It Hurts!!, and It’s genuinely so fucking good.

Butterfree: When Rumours Come True: The Mew Trick

As someone who never had a point in my life where the Mew trick was anything other than something people used to show how glitchy gen 1 was, it’s really nice to read the experiences of someone who was on the ground floor for it.

Anna Dana Hudson: Any Percent

I think this one made the rounds on cohost way back in the day, but I finally read it recently and holy hell this is good.

Sciman101: A Price of Commodity

Nothing, absolutely nothing, didn't have a human involved in the creation process at some point.

This post from cohost alumni Sciman101 is a good reminder that, all those things you have? People made them. Even the cheap things. Refreshing to see someone point out the hum…

Hey! It’s time for another link roundup! But first, some housekeeping.

Cohost Minnesota Wake at Minnehaha Falls at 3pm

That’s today y’all! The link for the wake is here. Please come down! I’m gonna be there! This is just a quick refresher for everyone here to actually go!

Geoffrey Bunting on the Rolling Stone: The Digital Orphans of ‘Pokémon’

Honestly, Pokémon is super important to me. Anything that takes a close look at the games will make me feel warm and fuzzy. I will use my link shares as an excuse to shove Pokémon down your throat and I will not feel sorry about it.

Studio MillMint: Photovolumes

MillMint is a long running website/worldbuilding project I’ve been following for the past 7 years maybe that’s about 40% thinking too much about guns and military stuff and 60% talking about weird fictional versions of things I actually care about. And trains. It recently put out an update about this world’s fucked up computers. Please read about them.

Eleanor Konic: On what it means to not have time

Tim is right that if this were a big enough priority for me, I could get up at four in the morning every day and work in a quiet, locked office with no distractions. I might end up d…

I’ve been seeing some people in my circle doing link roundups, and I thought it’d be nice to join in. I have such a huge backlog of links to work through and maybe this could be a good way to get through all of them. I’m thinking of only doing five links per roundup, but let me know if you think that’s too many or too few. That’s enough waffling for now, here’s the links:

Austin Walker: i have been trying to find some words for cohost's final days for about a week now

I don’t have much to say here besides wow Austin is really good with words in a way that I am as impressed by as I am envious of.

Indie Hell Zone: Tangle Tower

This is just as much a recommendation for Tangle Tower as it is a recommendation for the review talking about it. Tangle Tower is a complete delight, and feels like the closest you can get to a modern Professor Layton. I thoroughly recommend it. Oh and also this review talking about it too, of course.

iA: Our Android App is Frozen in Carbonite

I’m as much of an Android hater as the next apple fangirl (they just don’t have the same rich indie scene as apple does, and every android-native app I’ve seen feels like it hates itself),…