Sundays are, and apologies in advance for the less-fun-than-average intro, for peeling back the layers of the smelly legal onion that is scattering pet ashes in the UK. The government’s Regulatory Position Statement (or RPS – no relation) suggests this is only easily done on property you already own, which makes things tricky for my flat leasehold – if you’re unfamiliar with this term, it’s a bit like what Steam is to games, in that I don’t technically own jack shit. My willingness to sneakily spread Roxy, who I’m more pleased to report went to sleep while blissfully stoned, across a nearby garden has also been sapped by the knowledge that ashes are highly alkaline, and could thus kill weaker plants and grasses. Shame, really. She loved destroying things.

As for this week’s words, Jeremy Peel has been writing about Marathon for We Have Rock Paper Shotgun At Home. On the emotional support animal that is the shooter’s smiling med drone:

The magic of the med drone is that it takes care of life’s little scrapes. When a clumsy escape from gunfire finds you stumbling off a low cliff, into the spore radius of a toxic plant that exfoliates with alarming enthusiasm, the med drone handles repairs. It saves you from snarfing all your patch kits and shield charges before you’ve found anything approaching a real fight. And yes, it smiles at you. That might have been saccharine in a less relentlessly miserable game, with fewer scalding rainstorms and lethal lightning strikes. But as a constant presence in the corner of your first-person view during a desperate scavenging mission, it’s a powerful balm. Like a family dog failing to read the room on a traumatic day, the med drone is capable of cluelessly breaking a tension that threatens to become debilitating.

I enjoyed the ranty letter format of this blog by Ashley Schofield and Micaela Hazel on the thematic shortcomings of Sony’s Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

But, no. Peter, once again, has his cake and eats it. Harry can’t die. There can be no consequences. Miles remembers he has a biological defibrillator in his body and jams his new Electric Blue sparks into Harry’s chest. Harry’s corpse comes alive. No one dies. Nothing matters. Who fucking cares. I’m so fucking tired. I truly despise this game’s narrative. A fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man. A sanitised clusterfuck of villains and arcs that allow for none of the difficult choices and necessary suffering for the greater good that makes Spider-Man, Peter Parker, the platonic ideal of the superhero. Nothing. Fucking. Matters.

As Edwin noted in last week’s Paps, A.V. Club Games/Endless Mode/Paste Games has been shut down, a wholly undeserved end to one of the most dependable sources of quality games criticism – whatever the name – on the internet. This week, Critical Distance remembered their work with a mega-roundup of article highlights from across the years,

There’s a lot one could say about this moment. It’s saddening, naturally; infuriating most definitely. The owners of Paste Media couldn’t see or seemingly understand what kind of tidal force Paste Games had become, and so games criticism as a whole is now poorer for it. Gently, the death of Paste Games, and of games media more broadly, was/is not from natural causes.

Our former Gamer Network colleague Tom Orry’s free slice-of-life newsletter, Low Poly Mess, continues to serve up understated mirth.

Leeds Castle is also the site where my son was attacked by a swan. A year or so back, in front of the castle itself where the ducks, geese, and swans gather, he was giving some approved gift-shop-bought feed to the ducks, only for a giant Mute Swan to approach him from the side, clearly with jealousy in its mind. Wanting in on the feeding session, this swan wrapped its beak around my son’s arm, in a moment witnesses have since breathlessly labelled “Jaws but with a swan, beside a lake”.

Philip Oltermann of The Graun investigates the enduringly AI-resistant translation profession.

Even people who develop machine translation software concede there are tasks that remain beyond their product’s reach. “If in Italian I say Solo tre parole: non sei solo, then a literal translation into English would be ‘Just three words: you are not alone,'” said Trombetti, who founded Translated in 1999. “But you’ve ended up with four words, not three. That’s something that machine translation still struggles with.”

Since I’ve already brought up both regulation and ash, our own erstwhile tobacco huffer Julian was intrigued by this London Review of Books blog on UK efforts to wipe out smoking.

Disposable devices became widely available in 2020 and were aggressively marketed at children. The predictable effect has been widespread uptake of vaping among young people, including many who have never smoked. The previous government voted down amendments to the 2021 Health and Social Care Bill that would have given it the power to regulate such marketing. We are five years behind where we could have been in bringing youth vaping under control.

Music this week is Cryogen by Muse, which along with last year’s Unravelling, has instilled in me a dangerous hope that they’ve finally remembered how to mix rock tracks without sounding like Matt Bellamy is scared of scratching his plectrums.