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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 22h

Does anybody recognize the O in this logo? I clocked that the A has a little S.H.I.E.L.D. eagle but the O is stumping me.

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Reposted by William Hughes

Erik Adams @erikadams.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Recommended: Hearing Keith David do a great big Keith David laugh over the telephone

avclub.com

Nobody’s having the year Keith David is having

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Erik Adams @erikadams.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Could be complete horseshit, or another way of feeding ourselves into the Big Tech woodchipper, but won't you join us in seeing if we can get around all the ways Google broke its most useful product? www.google.com/preferences/...

google.com

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'll have a column about it later this week but I'm finally playing Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, and it's such a relief to have joyful boss fights to throw myself against after slogging through Wolverine and Control: Resonant.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I did a mid-season check-in on Season 6 of Slow Horses and dipped in for a really fun episode - and not just because Gary Oldman and Hugo Weaving finally get a chance to try to out-"calm old badass" each other. www.avclub.com/slow-horses-...

avclub.com

It’s date night on a tense, funny, midseason Slow Horses

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~Jala-chan in Places~ @jalachan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Top Jala-chan's Place episodes by number of downloads! Y'all downloading the Phantom of the Opera ep because I won't shut up about it probably 😂 With @picklefactory.org @julietstmoon.bsky.social @realdavejackson.bsky.social @plumberduck.bsky.social @senplus.bsky.social and more!

Top JCP episodes by number of downloads:

1) The Phantom of the Opera and Phantom by Susan Kay with Slade & Alex K.

2) Metroid Fusion with Juliet, Dave J. & Daniel

3) Body Dysmorphia & Gender Dysphoria with Zombi and Addy

4) Murder on the Orient Express with Will
Hughes

5) Vikram Vedha with Dave C. and Raúl

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I will also be there but I'm easy to avoid with even mild camouflage or juking.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Noel's greatest weakness continuing to be not being able to perceive where he lives relative to others on people's Swan Boy Character Power Tier rankings

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Global political theory regressing to, like, 1750 at this point.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The most exciting part of watching Lanterns is finding out which character will act profoundly stupid as a way to generate tedious drama before learning that they've once again opted for "all of them"

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Streaming tonight at 8 p.m. More Resident Evil: Requiem, more making fun of the FBI's decision to send its least-trained agents to their mother's murder scenes as a sort of "on the job" therapy.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It is an unfair and inequitable thing that genius exists, but it (very rarely) does, and if you set yourself up in direct comparison to it it's pretty much impossible not to come away bruised.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The thing about H. Dubois is that, despite the many deranged ways you can play him—retreating into facile fascism, obsessing on politics, apologizing to everybody, the, uh, "Rite Of Honour"—he is fundamentally consistent. It all comes from a place of pain that the script understands like breathing

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

An example: Disco Elysium and Zero Parades both give you lots of crazy, antisocial dialogue options. The difference is that DE's are so specific, weird, and funny that you can be tempted to say them even against your own best interests; the writing is the reward. ZP's just make you look like a dick

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I picked up Zero Parades For Dead Spies in the Steam Sale and it's one of the weirdest cover songs I've ever played. Turns out you can re-use mechanics, art style, and vibes all you want, but having one of the greatest scripts ever written for a video game actually is kind of important!

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Streaming tonight at 8 p.m. It's Spooky Season, so it's finally time to get one of my big unplayed games of 2026 off my backlog: Resident Evil Requiem.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That tracks, even if, from a personal place, I wanted to be able to say "No, he'll do it again, we gotta fucking stake him" in the moment. The path you took for it makes a ton of sense.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It works really well! Especially with how far you have to push past "polite" norms in order to do anything about it.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

More to the point, none of those games ground the conversation in real-world terms like Nighthawks does. Having another character take you aside and ask why you're brushing off a fucked-up thing you've been watching happen all game hits a lot of sharp nerves.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

While writing this, I tried to think of other examples where a "party member" is exposed to be something much uglier than you were led to believe. Dragon Age 2 comes to mind, as does Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous. But I can't think of one as impactful as the example in Nighthawks.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It's Friday, which means it's Game Theory: This week, a deep dive into a fairly late-game bit of @wadjeteyegames.com's new vampire RPG Nighthawks, which raises some REALLY fascinating questions when you realize one of your "party members" might be an actual monster. www.avclub.com/game-theory-...

avclub.com

A new indie vampire game asks what you do when the evil is coming from inside the party

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

As the writer who messed it up, the really embarrassing part is that I was BORN in 1984, so you'd think I would have clocked that...

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I promise I will stop tooting my horn about this, but I WILL report that the hardest I laughed while writing it was the category "Really Poorly Described Video Games," where the answer to "I think it's one of the Street Fighters?" was ultimately revealed to be "Tekken Tag Tournament."

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Part of the reason I get so excited to talk to guys like Sam Reich and Alex Horne is that if I had my druthers I'd do nothing but come up with fucked-up game shows and torture my friends with them.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I wrote a 90-minute Jeopardy!-style game for my friends and presented it as a talking skeleton with 15 extremely stupid categories. As one does!

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The basic problem in 2026 is that not enough people are thinking about me (complimentary) while too many people are thinking about me (derogatory).

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Here's a piece I'm really excited to roll out: An in-depth interview with Dropout's Sam Reich, diving deep on the game design of Game Changer season 8. Do I make a parody of myself by bringing up the concept of "the magic circle"? Oh baby, you bet I do. avclub.com/game-changer...

avclub.com

“We really aren’t control of that dial”: Sam Reich on designing the games of Game Changer season 8

The Dropout CEO on encouraging competition in his players and the ways he stops himself from turning into Mr. Beast.

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Nick Pancakes @p.ancak.es · 28/09/2026

The GFM passed the 12k mark, which means I'm on the hook to get Brayton to join me for a one-off podcast episode about Foodfight! (2012), as I've threatened him with for a couple of years. That's why you all pushed to pass 12k, right? It's still open, so don't stop just because that goal was met!

gofund.me

Donate to Duckraiser: Help Duckfeed.tv Recover from Legal Expenses, organized by Kaye Ross

EDIT: Here are the donation incentive for top donors! Write a messa… Kaye Ross needs your support for Duckraiser: Help Duckfeed.tv Recover from Legal Expenses

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This is a dumb take but it speaks to something realer which is that good stand-up is rooted in self-awareness and trying to make yourself hotter is not.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

My hottest stand-up take is that stand-ups should only get uglier. Sometimes when one breaks big they use the money to get handsomer and it always sucks.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My friends got hit with a massive unexpected expense, so we're turning it into content. I'm working today, so I won't be on the stream until my shift is over, but you should start watching now! It'll be good!

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Streaming tonight at 8 p.m. PT, I think we'll be playing some more Deadzone: Rogue, a silly little game that's got fun 3-player action. Reminder that tomorrow I won't be streaming on MY channel: Instead, I'll be participating in the last half or so of the Duckraiser fundraising stream.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I played it last night with the patch and, late-game, I did not notice a ton of difference. Individual enemies having too much health is part of it but there's also SO MANY of them. Just constant waves of the same enemies, and with very little variance in your moveset.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The same way you would, unfortunately, i.e., trawling through the 13,500-odd articles here. If I was smarter I'd keep a record of The Good Stuff but at this point I've been at this for so long that I've forgotten big chunks of it unless directly reminded www.avclub.com/author/plumb...

avclub.com

William Hughes, Author at AV Club

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The shit that is cool in Control Resonant is so, so cool (and has only gotten better as I've neared the end) but it's buried under some of the most boring core design choices - especially an obsession with constant, insanely repetitive fights - that it's hard to recommend. avclub.com/game-theory-...

avclub.com

Sequel Control Resonant tries to be more than the sum of some extremely boring parts

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I do, as long as the basic premise sounds intriguing!

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

That article is afflicted by a thing where text in links got deleted when our system transitioned off of Kinja a few years ago, but it's still pretty fun!

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A wild thing about my job is that you'll see a new bit of news and suddenly think "Oh yeah, I DID spent like a week watching every Saw movie and ranking most of the traps" www.avclub.com/saw-franchis...

avclub.com

Game on: Ranking the 20 best (and 5 dumbest) traps in the Saw movies

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And for an interview that really couldn't have gone better! Gracious subject, thoughtful answers, I was well-prepped. But the shaaaaaaakes afterward. "Watch someone react in real time to the half-formed question that just popped into your head about their life's work" is a particular kind of hell

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I don't know if I actually suck at conducting interviews but I for sure suck at not feeling like a huge alien dweeb immediately after conducting interviews.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Kaye you can just come on Cutthroat Kvetchin' some week you don't have to do this

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Reposted by William Hughes

Sam Barsanti @sambarsanti.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I would like to join everyone else on bsky in bragging that I also know @erikadams.bsky.social and worked with him for many years at a popular website.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Pretty good! Many of the pitfalls of serialized online writing, especially in the thinness of many of its characters in favor of big shock moments. But the SCP is one hell of a breeding ground for authors thinking through the consequences of sci-fi ideas, and TINAD is a blast on that score.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I finally picked up There Is No Antimemetics Division yesterday, and quickly realized that I half-remembered portions of it from old SCP trawls. The rare book where having half-remembered impressions of the same story but with different names and details attached is a feature, not a bug!

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Aw jeez we went to the scary store

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Thank you for playing everyone's favorite game show, "Is This A Subtweet Of Wolverine Or Control: Resonant?"

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

God grant me the confidence of a mediocre boss fight designer in 2026 deciding that what this tap-a-tap-a-tap-a fest really needs is a full second health bar.

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Streaming at 8 tonight! Gonna co-op some Deadzone: Rogue

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William Hughes @plumberduck.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And thaaaaaaaaat's how we learned it takes the Big Walk ski lift 12 minutes to make a full round trip of the island.

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