đż️ Ship it... The Magic Circle is a 2015 sandbox puzzle game for consoles and PC that takes place in a vaporware adventure game that's been trapped in development hell for nearly twenty years. You are a QA tester who gets abandoned in the game after a dismal playtest that mostly consists of watching the two developers bicker. A rogue... someone... reaches out to you for help from inside the game. He teaches you how to hack the game's creatures and access new parts of the world and start manipulating things--so just maybe you can turn this game into something shippable before the developers figure out what you're up to. How I Remember It... This is a delightfully weird meta-game that derives a lot of humor from poking fun at the culture of software development and video game development in particular. The game-within-the-game The Magic Circle holds the record for getting the most rounds of crowd-funding for a single project without actually fulfilling it. The main writer
đŽ Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream... 1994's Speed was the movie that introduced us to Sandra Bullock (we don't talk about Demolition Man ) but it was 1995's While You Were Sleeping that made her a household name. And it is my favorite holiday movie. Forget Die Hard-- this is what I watch at Christmas, and it has been for years. And not just because I'm still harboring a decades-long crush on the lead actor. It's smartly written, full of hilarious performances, peppered with quotable lines, and more than anything else, resonates with me. When I was 15, I spent the week between Christmas and New Years watching this movie almost every single night. Seriously, I'm here for this movie. And, thankfully, the lessons it imparted on my then-hopelessly-romantic 15-year-old brain were actually pretty worthwhile. So here are a few of the takeaways from this movie that I still hold to today. Love = Laughter This is a really big one for me. The film sets up a love triangle b