Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Have you heard of the hot new game "Where's Dario?" It's like the "Where's Wally?" books. Instead of hunting for a guy in red-and-white stripes in charming cartoon scenes, you're trying to spot bits of the slop articles Google vomits at you that got sloppily corrected by hand. 101
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026The EU Kids Act proposal IS very silly but the EU Parliament is literally the best place on Earth to thrash out how to do what the act wants within the realm of sanity. (FWIW having a big incentive for the industry to create high-quality offline games for all ages is kinda a plus as well...) 110
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026If I sell a Pong clone on eBay am I a vendor of an online game? Does eBay have to do age verification of the buyer? 021
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Read through the EU Kids Act and it will need significant refining before it goes out, otherwise it essentially shuts down all video gaming later than the PS1 era, at least at a very aggressive reading. 111
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 29/09/2026The proposed savings from reforming the triple lock will be £15bn a year by 2040. That, in context, is about 9% of how much money OpenAI and Anthropic have had shovelled into them in the past nine months. (If you, charitably, double that to include 2030-2039 savings, you get to 18%). 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Announcing an end to the triple lock after the election and then signalling that that election will be on rules you have decided are unfair is a bit batshit as a combo. "I'm going to wait five minutes and shoot you with this loaded gun on the table, but not stop you shooting me first." 110
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Lib Dems the microsecond the national electoral reform commission opens: 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 28/09/2026As much as I think the Frame is a poor VR headset, Valve at least did not try and ship Facebook's new one, which is a chimera of bad ideas for a product that is largely worse than the Quest 3. 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Replace "agent" with "monkey", "GPU" with "typewriter", "datacenter" with "zoo", and all variations of "AI" with "Shakespeare". 120
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 25/09/2026This entire bubble is vastly funnier when you realize that the magical AI overlord that will take over the world literally only exists in the heads of the engineers who make it, and they're using text generators to predict what the magical AI overlord would say or do. Religion for tech bros. 210
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Cackling at this and the resultant thread of someone trying it and then discovering that Facebook's world-beating new product is them paying for Ubuntu containers and giving them away for free with zero internal limits and web access. I for one am excited for Zucc to host my next Minecraft server. 110
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Positive vibes post! I think people should keep an eye on the Intel Arc G3 gaming handhelds out soon. Prices are high due to the RAMpocalypse, but the cheaper SOC looks VERY tempting - 1080p-class gaming on modern titles with excellent battery life for about £1k, in your handbag! 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 23/09/2026A lot written about the demand for LLM chatbots and similar tech, not enough written about the most trivial way of cheating the system - being someone like OpenAI and spending billions internally generating demand by hiring teams (under e.g. the marketing budget) to use bots to do big dumb things. 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 21/09/2026If you believe in the rights of transgender people, the Lib Dems stand with you. #winninghere 130
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Basic guess on Valve lead times - about half the people who wanted a Frame got one, it took about a year for Valve to build up current stock plus the bought-but-not-received buffer, which is about six months. Ergo 1.5ish years to cover half the demand. 110
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Actually checked what Valve defines as the waiting list for their hardware, and they describe it as a spot in a queue for "any future production run", without any information about said place, and it lacks a price guarantee on said offer if and when it may exist. Dead on arrival device. 101
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Not too fussed to not get a Frame on launch, but I feel for more active VR people, esp. those in the VRC team. Price is only going to go up though. 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 15/09/2026If there is one thing Valve has hit on with the Frame, it is the frame itself: the idea of having the phone-y bit being entirely removable from the thing that sits on your head. Ergo the most common problem with VR headsets (the interface) can be completely controlled by a separate product. 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 15/09/2026First question in PC Gamer's interview with Valve on the Frame confirms they had an Index 2 internally "finished" four years ago but chose to scrap it and make the Frame instead. Suspect that history will not be kind to that decision. 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 15/09/2026The Frame is a product that requires you to pay for 16GB of RAM and an (old) flagship SOC because it needs to play games on the device. But even the Steam Deck is more powerful than it. So you would almost always be better off just having any handheld PC or laptop streaming the game to you. Why? 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 15/09/2026One does wonder how much of the 16GB of VRAM on the Frame is going to be used by the PCVR people that will buy the headset. 200
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 14/09/2026I shut up about my personal issues with the Frame the minute someone makes something like that colour passthrough camera but it just upgrades the tracking to use lighthouses. 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Frame comes down to buying into the ecosystem and hoping for a better strap IMO, and hoping that the base station ecosystem can limp on. Have to wait for third parties. Battery life and lack of 3.5mm audio are the two big issues for people wanting an Index replacement. 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 13/09/2026Basically TLDR on Steam Frame: as long as you can still upgrade to a lighthouse setup for FBT and better VR controllers, it is going to be an excellent purchase. If you cannot, you're buying one because Facebook suck at software. 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 13/09/2026The fact I'm a doomer on the Steam Frame (I think SLAM tracking is a dead end) and I will be buying one day one (as I have all the needed equipment to avoid using SLAM tracking) is an interesting duopoly. 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Bilbili EN's community guidelines make a little nervous in a couple of places but seem to be pretty OK overall - I'll just pull a few things out into this thread 210
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Uploaded a video to EN Bilibili as I've been curious about them now having an international site. Seems to work well - the site is really focussed without much feature bloat. Here's the test video: www.bilibili.tv/en/video/480... (This is also a test if embeds work here from that site - they do?)bilibili.tvEndfield's cool factory belt at Gamescom 2026 | bilibili 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Next BBC headline: "Dario Amodei has disappeared from existence after his hands covered his face. Wait, no, he's back. Oh shit he's gone again." 110
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Trying to imagine how you could even spend £72m in the UK on a political party within an election cycle; Reform still need to hit 321 seats somehow. Reform have a huge scare factor inherent in their politics and have to overcome FPTP encouraging tactical voting. 120
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 12/09/2026The Playstation Portal is the most frustrating piece of hardware I have used in video games in years. It is not a bad idea, it is not even badly executed. It is just completely crippled in software by Sony's protectionist approach, and it shows off why legislation is needed (which we will never get) 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Looking forward to chatting with my lawyer friends about this. It seems a quietly really important tribunal related to unions - how do cross-site workers organize online? How quickly should management act when aware of an online organization space that may unintentionally leak information? 120
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Thought experiement: if crypto had been boosted as much as AI was, what do you get? 1. Mantra from bulls: Early adopters becoming the new wealthy, everyone else is the underclass 2. The mag seven veering into crypto provision and building datacentres full of GPUs (then more dedicated hardware) 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 10/09/2026The thing that is frustrating about the AI bubble is that it is bogus, both at a technical and logical level, in the same way crypto was (and in reality is just a continuation of the crypto bubble, often by the same people). That did not stop a decade of people breathlessly talking about crypto. 110
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Three years into image diffusion models destroying art as a career and hobby, I open a gaming subreddit and actively have to wade past sixteen dozen fantastic bits of hand-drawn fanart to find discussion about the game. At Gamescom I walked through a packed artist alley full of 10,000 shoppers. 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Arknights Endfield continues to be my game of the year. An actual triumph of how to do a live service game in 2026. 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Europe should never fear a dominant Germany being able to invade and control other countries at will, because the Bundeswehr would get stuck on a platform in Cologne listening to an AI voice telling them that their invasion was delayed due to a late transfer of staff from an earlier train. 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Masters of the horror genre: America - Lovecraft, Poe, etc England - Shelly, Stoker, etc Germany - Deutsche Bahn #gamescom2026 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 27/08/2026Me reading about Top Gear Revival #4: This could work, but they need to avoid getting samey TV people and reach out to more millennial/zoomer friendly cr- The BBC: No we are absolutely not hiring Jimmy Carr and a former rugby personality Me: _just goes and watches a new Garbage Time video instead_ 200
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 26/08/2026#SilverPalace has a nice booth too, very themed around the late 19th C Paris/London #gamescom2026 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 26/08/2026It is an odd duck of a game, but an INTERESTING odd duck. They are doing photo prints on site!! #EndfieldGC2026 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 26/08/2026They have three huge statues of a few of the bosses. Cool fights these too actually, rare to play these games and enjoy revisiting the fights. #EndfieldGC2026 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 26/08/2026At Gamescom. The Arknights Endfield booth is the largest game booth I have ever seen, it is HUGE And it has WHACKY WAVING ARM FLAILING INFLATEABLE TUBE MEN #EndfieldGC2026 and #gamescom 142
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 25/08/2026If Dawn of War 4 is not the game of the year, life has no justice. I have seen three talks by the team now and it has to be the three best game dev talks I have ever seen live. 010
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 23/08/2026Gamescom travel day! A rare light in a depressing industry. 011
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 19/08/2026On Arday: I don't experience racism day-to-day, although I've lost jobs due to autism before. Two thoughts: 1. We really badly need Leveson 2. The amount of damage a hack can do right now is absurd. 2. We appear to have reporting controls that only protects rape victims, Elton John, and the royals. 100
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 18/08/2026People always talk about European double-decker trains and are sad we can't have them in most places in the UK, but given how absolutely stupidly efficient busses are, the fact that nobody else makes double-decker busses is actually criminal 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 17/08/2026To put it another way, $1tn over three years could have bought you: * An entire replica of the new Spurs football arena • Filled to capacity with software developers • Working full time for three years straight • 40 times over. 000
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 17/08/2026A thought: if the total amount spent on LLMs by the big companies is maybe a trillion dollars, that is hard to think about. Assume a software developer costs $100,000 a year. It is enough to pay for ten million man-years of software development. 021
Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 12/08/2026The fact that a cereal box, a pin, white card and a bit of tape can take your breath away is, literally, a wonder of the universe. #eclipse 010