gaming

Games

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September 24, 2026

i know tapping B does nothing. i will be tapping B.

a GameFAQs post from approximately 1999 still has administrative privileges over my thumb. Tune in & read →

i rapidly tap B when i’m trying to catch a pokémon because of something i read on GameFAQs in, like, 1999. i know it does nothing. i have known it does nothing for a long time. my thumb has declined to participate in this conversation.

i rapidly tap B to 'improve catch odds' because of a gamefaqs post i read in like 1999 and i still do it even though i now know it Does Nothing
— schweg, (@schwegler.lol) 2026-09-16T15:13:13.355Z
https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js
someone else was talking about holding down + B, which is a different denomination of the same religion. apparently some of us believed you had to hold the buttons, and some of us believed you had to attack them. we agreed that the little animal needed to stay in the ball and that, somehow, this was a job for our hands.

an entire belief system could fit beside this screen. Evan-Amos / source. Public domain

the embarrassing part is that i’m perfectly capable of understanding the actual system. the original games’ capture calculations involve things like the ball, the pokémon’s HP and status, its catch rate, and random numbers. there is no bonus for how earnestly a child is pressing B. i am now an adult who works with computers. this should have been enough to resolve the matter.

it wasn’t.

the ball is wobbling and i would like to contribute

catching a pokémon has a very effective little pause built into it. you’ve made your choices. you’ve thrown the ball. now you have to watch it wobble while the game decides whether to be nice to you.

that is an unreasonable amount of time to leave a person alone with hope.

so i tap. if it works, excellent technique. if it doesn’t work, maybe i tapped badly. this is an extremely durable explanation because it can survive literally any outcome. the pokémon escapes and somehow the theory gets another chance.

i don’t remember the username of whoever passed this along. i can’t produce the post. i’m not even confident about the year. but the instruction remains available immediately, without searching, whenever a ball starts moving. meanwhile, a fact i needed for an actual appointment has already left the building.

smaller hardware, same opportunity to insist you are helping. Evan-Amos / source. Public domain

an old internet habit that can stay

there’s something funny about a bit of advice outliving your belief in it. i don’t go into the game thinking i’ve found a secret mechanic. i just start doing the thing, notice i’m doing it, and continue doing it. correcting myself would require more effort than the superstition.

i’ve written about missing the older, weirder web. this is a much smaller souvenir: an unverifiable instruction from a page i read when i was a kid, still making its way into how i play.

i don’t need to turn it into a lesson about misinformation or insist it was secretly good advice. it was wrong. my catch odds are unimpressed.

but if you see me tapping B, please understand that the information has reached the relevant department. the relevant department simply does not care.

Featured image: Evan-Amos / source. Public domain
Media

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September 12, 2026

the backlog is not a moral failing, it is a library

a backlog is only embarrassing if you believe every game you own is waiting beside the door with a tiny clipboard. Tune in & read →

there is a specific kind of guilt that arrives when you open a game library and see the little grid of unfinished things. not a dramatic guilt. nobody is injured. it is more like the feeling of owning three unread books and briefly suspecting you have committed a crime against literature.

Image: PCWorld

i am trying to reject the premise that a backlog is a to-do list. a to-do list is where i put things that will make somebody send another email. a game library is where i put worlds i may want to visit when the actual one has asked a little too much of me.

the Steam Deck is especially good at this distinction. it does not make a game into homework just because it is portable. it lets a forty-minute wandering session be enough. a game can be a place you return to, not a project plan with an estimated completion date.

Image: ShortCircuit on YouTube

there are games i will finish, games i will quit with affection, and games i will keep installed because i like knowing they are nearby. that is not failure. that is a library doing its job.
Games

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September 8, 2026

yard work simulator got a sequel before i got a lawn

a joke about yard-work simulators became an unfortunately complete survey of gaming’s most specific genre, just before the free prologue arrives. Tune in & read →

i reposted this because it is, technically, a joke, and also, technically, an accurate status report on where the simulator genre currently stands.

The Simpsons predicted that we would have Yard Work Simulators, but they didn’t predict that we would go Beyond Yard Work Simulators.

— Tred (@tredlocity.bsky.social) 2026-09-07T12:52:18.800Z

https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js

Beyond Yardwork Simulator is a real, upcoming Steam game from developer JoyDev and publisher PlayWay, a studio whose back catalog reads less like a release slate and more like a to-do list nobody ever crossed items off of. you mow, pressure-wash, weed, and sort trash in exchange for cash you then spend renovating your own house, one increasingly specific chore at a time, per the official Steam page.

a free prologue covering the first three jobs arrives Sep 9, per the Prologue’s Steam listing. the full game does not have a date beyond “2026,” which, generously, leaves PlayWay all the runway it needs to eventually announce Beyond Beyond Yardwork Simulator.

Screenshot: Beyond Yardwork Simulator, via Steam; used for commentary.

i say all of this as someone who has spent measurable years of my one life running a digital farm in Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon without once, personally, touching a lawnmower that exists in three dimensions. Beyond Yardwork Simulator is aimed at exactly my demographic: people who will lovingly manage a fictional flower bed for forty hours and describe an actual flower bed as not my problem. the genre understands its audience. it is not judging me. it is, at most, gently billing me two thousand imaginary dollars per job.

and it is a genre, not a one-off bit. Beyond Yardwork Simulator is arriving into a field that already has Lawn Mowing Simulator, whose real sequel, Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, lands Sep 23 with licensed Kubota, SCAG, and STIGA equipment, per its own Steam page. PC Gamer, surveying the field, noted there is also a separate game called Lawn Care Simulator, and that it exists twice, which the outlet delivered with exactly the tired disbelief the situation deserves, per PC Gamer’s coverage.

Screenshot: Beyond Yardwork Simulator, via Steam; used for commentary.

somewhere there was a pitch meeting that ended with the sentence “we have done the yard, now let us transcend it,” and somebody funded it, and here we are, well over a thousand likes into a joke about the Simpsons being insufficiently prescient. i will be downloading the free prologue the day it exists, not because my actual yard needs anything, but because it does not have one to need anything about, and that, per the entire thesis of the genre, is exactly the point.
Everything

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September 4, 2026

oblivion remastered faithfully restored the part where the corpse disappears

I bought Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2 for the soothing combination of open-world wandering and half-watching television. The game responded by misplacing… Tune in & read →

i bought The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2 because it was on sale, and because an open-world game is ideal for the deeply sophisticated activity of playing a video game while also half-watching television.

Cyrodiil is big, familiar, and pleasantly indifferent to whether i am paying full attention. i can wander into a cave, pick up seventeen objects i do not need, forget why i entered the cave, and still feel as though i accomplished something. this is basically wellness.

playing the oblivion remaster and, there’s a quest-breaking bug in one of the mage guild recommendation quests? lovely
— schweg, (@schwegler.lol) 2026-09-04T20:03:36.747Z

then i reached the Cheydinhal Mages Guild recommendation quest, which asks you to recover the Ring of Burden from Vidkun’s body at the bottom of a well. simple enough, except the body was not there.

the game had misplaced its corpse.

Official Bethesda promotional screenshot for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Oblivion Remastered, used for commentary.

please allow three business days for the dead man to regenerate

apparently the proposed cure is to leave town and sleep or wait for three in-game days so the environment can reset. this is less a quest solution than an instruction to take a short vacation until the deceased remembers his appointment.

**apparently** the body in the well shows up if I go into another town and sleep or wait for 3 days so it regenerates the environment but I skipped it and hope by the time I come back the body is there 🤞
— schweg, (@schwegler.lol) 2026-09-04T20:14:36.530Z

i skipped the recommendation for now. i am hoping that when i return, Vidkun will be in the well, the ring will be on Vidkun, and the Mages Guild will stop evaluating my application through a scavenger hunt run by a broken municipal coroner.

the best part is that this is not fresh 2026 jank. it is heritage jank. players were documenting the disappearing-body problem back in 2006, when a Nexus forum thread traced it to the game cleaning up Vidkun’s corpse after several days because it was not marked as permanent. the UESP discussion likewise notes that the body may disappear after three in-game days.

Bethesda’s own support page says the missing Vidkun and Ring of Burden problem was addressed in patch 1.1 for the original game. two decades later, players of the remaster have reported the same basic failure again. the new version restored the textures, lighting, foliage, and apparently the corpse’s right to vanish without notice.

Official Bethesda promotional screenshot for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Oblivion Remastered, used for commentary.

on pc, reality has an edit button

if i were playing on PC, i could probably use a console command, edit a save, or install a mod built by somebody who got tired of waiting for Bethesda to put the dead man back. on Switch 2, i have portability, suspend mode, and the pure console experience of being trapped inside the official version of reality.

this is where the famous Bethesda charm stops being charming for a minute. a guard walking into a wall is atmosphere. an apple vibrating itself off a table is environmental storytelling. a required quest object ceasing to exist is the game turning to you and saying, with total confidence, “have you considered not advancing?”

i still love Oblivion. that is part of why this is funny, and part of why it is annoying. the game’s instability has always been tangled up with its enormous ambition: every person has a schedule, every object has physics, and every corpse apparently has somewhere else to be. remastering it without fully taming that chaos may be faithful, but there is faithful, and then there is reissuing the same administrative error in high definition.

Nintendo’s official trailer for Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2.

for now, i will go do other quests and let Cheydinhal marinate. perhaps three days from now, the well will repopulate. perhaps the ring will return. perhaps i will become the only Mages Guild applicant rejected because the dead guy missed his appointment.

sources and media: Bethesda’s August 11, 2026 Switch 2 launch announcement and screenshots; Bethesda support on the original Ring of Burden bug; contemporaneous 2006 Nexus discussion; and UESP community documentation. Promotional images are attributed in their captions and used for commentary.
Video

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September 3, 2026

this might be my dream mobile controller

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