Hugin & Munin Journal

Official promotional artwork for Brotato , developed and published by Blobfish. Source: official game press kit. Used for review and commentary. Brotato looks like a joke and plays like a design argument. It is a top-down arena-shooter roguelite about a potato wielding as many as six weapons while trying to survive waves of aliens. The characters are potatoes, the arena is small, the graphics are plain, and the story barely exists. It resembles the sort of premise that should exhaust itself shortly after the first laugh. Instead, it reveals how little surface complexity a game needs when its decisions remain tightly connected. Weapons, statistics, characters, items, rerolls, money, enemy pressure, and wave timing all operate inside the same compact system. A purchase does not matter only because of what it adds. It matters because it changes the value of what the player already owns and what may become useful later. That distinction keeps the game from being merel...

There is a familiar moment in adventure fiction when the villain has won. The hero is captured, disarmed, and surrounded by guards with guns, magic, lasers, airlocks, or some other perfectly serviceable way of ending the problem. Nothing obvious prevents a quick execution. Then the villain starts explaining. Sometimes the entire plan comes out. Sometimes the villain reveals only the detail the hero needs to stop it. Sometimes the hero is left alone inside a slow execution device: tied to a conveyor belt, suspended over a pit, locked in a flooding chamber, or placed inside a machine designed with considerably more theatrical ambition than operational sense. The villain could kill the hero immediately, confirm the death, and continue with the plan. Instead, the story gives the protagonist twenty minutes of machinery, monologue, and unattended opportunity. This is usually treated as a joke about stupid villains, but that explanation is too easy. Stories are not tactical manuals, and...

I am no longer sure how I first saw Vidocq , or whether my memory of Brotherhood of the Wolf belongs more to the cinema or the DVD shelf. The uncertainty has become part of the memory. I know roughly when I encountered them and what they felt like at the time, but not whether either recollection begins in a cinema seat, in front of a television, in a rental shop, or somewhere in the early-internet haze of trailers, covers, recommendations, and half-remembered searches. With Le pacte des loups , released in Sweden as Vargarnas pakt , the record is clearer. The Swedish Film Database records a cinema release on 5 October 2001 , followed by a Swedish DVD release in February 2002. Vidocq seems more likely to belong to the next layer of discovery: the DVD shelf, an imported recommendation, or an online search that led to something strange but suddenly obtainable. The same database lists Scanbox as its Swedish DVD distributor in 2003 , which fits my recollection better than a conventional...

Desert and sand are so closely joined in the popular imagination that the connection feels almost definitional: dunes, heat shimmer, bare sky, and a horizon made of grains. Yet deserts are defined by dryness, not by their surface material. Some are sandy, but many are dominated by gravel, exposed rock, salt flats, mountains, or hard-packed sediment. Antarctica is a desert too. Sand is no more exclusive to deserts than water is exclusive to oceans. It occurs on beaches, in riverbeds, beneath forests, across agricultural fields, and within ordinary soils. Explaining a sandy desert therefore requires two different answers: where the grains came from, and why they remain exposed or accumulate in that particular place. Aridity matters, but it is not enough. Dry conditions reduce vegetation and surface moisture, making loose sediment easier for wind to move. The sand itself still has to be produced, transported, sorted, and trapped. A dune field is the visible result of that whole sequen...

Books about the future have an unusual relationship with time. Ordinary nonfiction becomes outdated around the edges; predictions acquire a second life as evidence of what once seemed plausible. Martin Rees’s On the Future: Prospects for Humanity , first published in 2018, is now nearly eight years old—long enough for that process to have begun. What is striking is not how much of the book has dated, but how selectively. Its discussions of climate change, energy, biotechnology, scientific research and long-term risk remain largely recognisable. Artificial intelligence is the obvious place to look for failure: almost everything about the public experience of AI in 2026 feels different from 2018. Yet rereading Rees more carefully complicates that judgement. He anticipated professional and cognitive work being automated while occupations such as plumbing and gardening remained difficult. What he did not anticipate was the speed, breadth and accessibility with which generative AI would m...

On 23 February 2026, OpenAI announced that it would stop reporting results from SWE-bench Verified, one of the most widely used tests of AI coding ability. The benchmark had once provided a useful signal of progress. By then, according to OpenAI’s own audit , its remaining failures had become difficult to interpret. The company examined 138 problems that OpenAI o3 had failed to solve consistently across 64 independent runs and concluded that 59.4 per cent contained material issues in their tests or descriptions. Some rejected functionally correct solutions because they demanded a particular implementation. Others tested requirements the task had never stated. OpenAI also found evidence that leading models had encountered at least some benchmark problems or solutions during training. This does not prove that SWE-bench Verified had become useless, nor should a model developer’s audit of a benchmark be treated as neutral arbitration. It reveals a recurring problem in AI evaluation: a ...

Jim Butcher’s White Night , the ninth Dresden Files novel, gives Harry one of the stronger actual mysteries of the series so far. Women with minor magical talents are disappearing or dying in circumstances made to resemble suicide. The evidence points in several directions, including towards someone Harry has very good reasons not to want as a suspect. There are convincing red herrings, competing explanations and enough uncertainty that the investigation remains interesting well into the novel. Strangely, that does not make White Night stronger than its immediate predecessors. The mystery is not really the problem. By book nine, Harry’s world has accumulated enough unfinished history that several larger stories keep competing to become the novel’s real subject: the White Court, Thomas, Elaine, Molly, the shadow of Lasciel and Harry’s increasingly difficult-to-dismiss suspicion that someone is manipulating conflicts from behind the visible antagonists. There is excellent material her...