digitalbrain-blog

[digitalbrain-blog]

La-Mulana 2 Review!

La-Mulana 2 Review! #NintendoSwitch #Nigoro #LaMulana2

I was never a Star Wars kid. To me, it’s Sci-Fi trappings always seemed hokey and slightly preposterous – it’s supposed to be, of course, but to a child like me, I had been bitten by the roguish charm of Indiana Jones. Evil Nazis, skull encrusted tombs, demons and monsters, that whip, that hat? I was utterly, hopelessly obsessed with Spielberg’s romantic re-imagining of adventurous archaeologists…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Death Stranding (PS4) Review

NEW POST! A LOVE LETTER TO PEACE: A review of the latest @Kojima_Hideo game #DeathStranding !

I don’t like giving up in games. But there’s a mighty test of my hardened patience in Death Stranding where giving up felt so easy. Half way up some snow-capped mountain with a nuclear bomb strapped to your back, where any slip, slide or bump can end your excursion instantly. It’s the kind of instant-failure states that make people run for the hills. But this is Death Stranding. A Hideo Kojima…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Ex PC Gamer Blues

Ex PC Gamer Blues #PCGames #Office #drudgery #helpmeihatetwitter

I’ve absconded from the PC.

(more…)

[digitalbrain-blog]

A Note on the End of Things.

A Note on the End of Things.

When things end, there is no highlight reel.

No spectacular light show. When it ends, it gently whimpers as it scurries away, slinking out of the cat flap to the howling wind, where the disappearing highway swallows it whole. The end becomes a part of the dazzling Soho of your mind where memories are window decorations. The end of things is often cloaked and shadowed, hidden from you and it isn’t…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Eyes Wide Open - How the Internet made people kinkier

Eyes Wide Open - How the Internet made people #kinky

A cold phone booth sits on Lewisham high street in the late 90’s. Stepping inside that phone booth was like entering some enshrined defiled womb; The door would shut tight behind you and seal you inside, tuning out the sound of nearby traffic until it became a distant murmur. The overpowering smell of stale piss would hit you first, followed by the visual assault of graffiti on every conceivable…

[digitalbrain-blog]

A 31-year-old man attempts online dating: A cautionary tale.

A 31-year-old man attempts online dating: A cautionary tale. #dating #tinder #okcupid

Its 2am here and Brixton from my bed is as silent as anything. Outside, distant cars create an echoey soundscape and the penetrating light of my phone swallows up my face like a flood light. Its a sleepless night tonight. Just me and the disillusioned glow of a dating app to keep me company. Faces of people swoosh by, of people who seem to have fascinating lives. They’ve travelled to Europe, they…

[digitalbrain-blog]

On being alone and not being upset about it.

On being alone and not being upset about it. #mentalhealth #depression

The summer of 2017 was a really hot one. I know this because my then girlfriend and I hauled everything we own across several streets in Clapham, up several flights of stairs in a flat before dumping it all on the floor of our empty front room. I held several boxes in my clutches, a huge backpack slung across my neck, pushing a rickety old cart along the street with the brutal sun beating us into…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Booze, men and masculinity: A soundtrack by Arab Strap

A sparse acoustic guitar plucks a shy tune over the laconic drawl of Aiden Moffat, singer of Arab Strap, as he begins his almost 5-minute long diatribe dedicated to the first big weekend of the summer. A driving kick drum stomps a beat that’s as consistent and clean as anything you’d hear on an electro record thudding away behind the brick walls of a club at 11pm. Lurking beneath the surface of…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Broken Reality Review - A dizzying trip through internet excess

Broken Reality Review - A dizzying trip through internet excess #brokenreality #vaporwave

The great thing about Steam in 2019 is you’ll never run out of choices. The bad thing about Steam in 2019 is navigating it’s tremendously overstuffed storefront is a lot like scouring some forgotten trash heap where finding a diamond in the rough is the proverbial needle in a haystack. Now, more than ever standing out from the pack is innumerably hard. It must be twice as rough on the worlds…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Yawning (and how I learned to stop worrying and love sleeping pills)

Hi. I can't sleep. #sleep #mentalhealth #insomnia #depression

Life is cruel. You lay your head on the pillow at night and try to go to sleep and your minds synapses start to flare up like a dirty engine, sick with oil, spewing out flames in time with your brains wild flexing. The possibility of a good night’s sleep ebbs away. Thoughts incoherent and disparate, either relevant or not, emotional or frivolous. Jokes and fears merging into one. The familiar…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Wrestling is changing and the WWE knows it.

Wrestling is changing and the WWE knows it. #AEW #WWE #NJPW #Wrestlekingdom13

2019 will barely be four days old when we see it, but the card for NJPW’s Wrestlekingdom 13is already looking like it’ll be an absolute monster of an event, boasting some of the worlds greatest talent hitting the stage for the historic Tokyo Dome show. It isn’t mainstream right now, but for many grappling fans, January 4th will become synonymous with quality, cutting-edge wrestling just like…

[digitalbrain-blog]

London Alternative Market: BDSM, but not as you know it.

LAM or the London Alternative Market is disappointing. But it’s not disappointing for reasons you might expect. It’s disappointing by just how normal everything seems. It’s not disappointing because it’s gross. It doesn’t disappoint because it’s a toxic environment or because it’s overpoweringly intimidating. Nope, it’s actually just pretty normal.

(more…)

[digitalbrain-blog]

On Dad's and Christmas

On Dad’s and Christmas

As we approach Christmas I find myself thinking about my father an awful lot. The feelings are often confused and bittersweet and it doesn’t help when each year only seems to pile on more confusions and contradictions. After just a few years of this, the plumbing upstairs is well and truly blocked. I never grant myself the opportunity to untangle the mess, resigning myself to confoundment, but…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Gentrification and the Victoria Line: Authenticity as a marketing adjective.

Some quick slap dash nonsense about how unfulfilling everything is thanks to gentrification. Happy reading in time for xmas, folks! #glasshalfempty #everythingsucks #DigitalBrain

There’s a lot of crowds packed into a heaving tube train at 1am on weekends. People are smartly dressed and drunk. A man with a 5 o’clock shadow staggers on, swerving into people as though they were bowling skittles. He holds on to nearby handholds for dear life but the jerky movements of the tube car seem to swing him around like a pinata. The girls sitting near him giggle as he wheels around on…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Fallout 76 Beta Preview!

#Fallout76 Beta Preview! It's really, really good, but it's also really shit, too.

So, here we are then. My pals and I. Clutching an assortment of battered, cobbled together weaponry, leafing through the smashed remains of a West Virginian supermarket. It’s the middle of the night. We’re hunting for spare screws and aluminum to build our first generator – the last stop we need to get a working water purifier up and running. Clean, healthy water has been a struggle for a while…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Netflix's Castlevania and how it tidies up the dangling inconsistencies of the video games.

Netflix's Castlevania does a lot to paper over the inconsistent cracks in the lore of the #Castelvania games. It's super neat.

With the recent release of Castlevania Requiem on PS4 last week, it seemed to coincide either accidentally or not accidentally with the much-anticipated release of Season 2 of the TV show on Netflix. The strange thing about the Netflix adaptation of Castlevania is that, actually, it isn’t total bollocks. Adaptations often don’t go down well on both sides of the medium and for good reason:…

[digitalbrain-blog]

Mean Streets: Scorsese's observant gaze

Mean Streets: #Scorsese 's observant gaze

The strange thing about being British, particularly now, is you grow up in the shadow of the United States – a cultural behemoth, something so grand and consuming that we can’t help but know so many intricacies of their culture just like we know our own. Boston is a baseball town, New York is an immigrant city, California is affluent and gaudy – The America that we grew up with on the silver…