All work and no play make Brad a dull guy.

I’ve been working on real projects, too, but I still find a lot of time to dabble in entertaining myself with no hidden agenda. This past month I’ve been stoking the seeds of rebellion and growing virtual canola, but not necessarily in that order.

I’ve been enjoying…

gaming: farming simulator 2025

There are really only two types of games that exist. I mean, when you sit down and think about it—and believe me, I’ve done my share since trying to build a video game from scratch this year—but those two types of games fall basically into one of two core game mechanics: create chaos or create order. The create chaos games are simple: blow stuff up, fight, battle, knock down a wall of bricks with a little ball and on and on. The creating order games are pretty obvious, too: craft stuff, build structures, sort objects, organize those objects into neat rows. We could probably argue about the nuance of all things and that sometimes creating chaos is leading to order or vice versa, but hey, I’m trying to keep this simple. And all that said, what I can’t exactly tell you is when the first “farming” game came out because farming games (unlike this game I have been playing) are not necessarily about literally running farm.  Farming games are generally about creating order: taking a wild space and converting it into a resource-generating source.  Farming games can, yes, and often do replicate vegetable farming from reality, but too sometimes you are farming gold, or in-game energy, or dinosaur eggs, player experience points or maybe just maguffin-like doo-dahs that progress the game play, and many farming-type games use the abtraction of farming as a mechanic to create a need in the game to progress gameplay by forcing a labour-like management system of creating order out of the seeming nothingness of the game world. But Farming Simulator is literally what it says. It’s buying tractors, harvesting crops, and managing animals, all in a massive virtual space that looks like a slice of some agricultural landscape pulled from a film trope. And I’d be damned if I denied that driving a virtual tractor around gravel roads to pick up a load of wheat isn’t the coziest way to lose oneself in a few hours of meaningless order-creating video gaming. The 2025 version is probably my fourth or fifth official stab (not counting the mobile versions on my phone) at digging into this game, and really only the second one that stuck. The game is of such complexity that it is easy to get lost and eventually bored in the first layer—driving a tractor until you run out of things to tractor on—and just miss all the nuance offered at deeper levels. A thousand other reviews have already talked about the graphics and the mod base and the mechanics of the engine, so I will simply say that what is often overlooked—and probably what drives some suburban computer nerd to play games like this—is a kind of latent urgency in the genes of humanity that impels us to grow things, harvest food, and tame the land: it is like a survival instinct, almost, fulfilled by the simulator pretending to do work that is the foundation of human societies. Plus, who doesn’t like to drive a green tractor through the countryside?

streaming: andor, season two

There has been a meme floating around online that Andor has ruined Star Wars because it was just that good. And, frankly…I almost agree. The jibe goes something like this: watch Andor, then go back and watch the very first Star Wars film again, A New Hope. At the end when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are getting kudos before the end credits roll, put yourself in the shoes of just one of those guys standing in the crowd some of whom were (now, according to canon) probably friends and at least coworkers with the characters of the new mini series. They had fought together, suffered together, built a rebellion through personal sacrifice for years…  and then one day some farm kid and a space trucker show up, luck out in a single battle and they get a parade, medals and literally all the glory. Oh, Luke, wipe that shit eating grin off your face. Don’t you understand the game you just stumbled into? Didn’t you watch Andor on Disney+ for fs sake? All joking aside, what makes this show so good and what I think a lot of people who like this series so much (but maybe aren’t fully able to articulate about it) see in it’s story is simple: real stakes. The whole point of the story arc that leads from the first scenes of Andor to the end of the Rogue One movie is that literally none of these people make it. The whole story is based on what is almost a throwaway line from that famous opening crawl of the original movie, that some rebel spies stole the plans for the death star, the plans that become the key the story in that same first film.  Some clever person said, hey, let’s tell that story because those guys did the real hero work and probably lost their lives to do it: stakes. Andor ignores the mysticism of the force and assumes that the regular suite of bad guys are busy somewhere else doing their bad guy shit and that the real fight is happening out of sight, in dark corners and that people who have been drawn into it because they are people who make good choices while still doing things objectively less good, are giving up everything to help everyone else for change they will never live to see: stakes. There can’t be a season three because what happens next is all the movies you love already and all these characters did that for the galaxy and the plot: stakes. Weight, purpose, and stakes. I haven’t had much good to say about Star Wars for a while, but if you are any kind of fan at all you need to watch Andor.