Persinette's "Less Tiktok, More Screaming"
Cory Doctorow's "Tiktok's Enshittification"
What I believe to be Doctorow's most well-known work completely changed my outlook on the internet and on technology in general. Ever since I read this article, every bafflingly frustrating experience I had with the world wide web, as I watched it get more and more useless over the years, suddenly became crystal clear. Just as well, I now know to expect the same process to happen again, no matter what platform I move to next. An absolute must read for any technopessimist like me, or anyone looking to instantly become one.
Vargas Salvatierra's "The Last of Us and the Citizen Kane-ness Problem"
Vargas Salvatierra's "Skyrim is Great and Here's Why"
The title of this article is certainly a bold choice, mostly because it's wrong. I can't claim to fully agree with the arguments levied in it - quite simply, I don't sincerely think Skyrim is genius. But the principles by which Salvatierra deems it so are ones that I do in fact largely agree with or at least find useful to point out. I'm notoriously biased towards what I call "pure" puzzle games - as in, games that are entirely comprised of the elements necessary for a puzzle to be played out on, with little to no framing device to speak of - and therefore I follow the same maxim Salvatierra champions here: that a game is, as its core, a set of experiences designed to allow the player to interact with a core system, and they're at their best when everything in them is designed for the purposes of enhancing the modes of interaction with said system. As a natural follow through, he also identifies, same as me, how the need to validate videogames in the arena of "art" oftentimes constrains and oppresses them, and undermines the things they are good at, rather than sincerely elevate them.
The article is filled with, of course, absurd claims about how that applies to Skyrim, as well as several epithets pointed at the vague abstraction he makes of what Skyrim's critics are like that are mostly lacking in much substance, with the sole exception of one paragraph, which justifies the presence of this article in my list, and which I will likely find myself quoting many more times in the futre: "There are too many critics out there that are incapable of understanding what makes Bethesda games so popular, simply because most of them are frustrated writers and filmmakers, and so they don't have the tools to actually understand video games. These people will always praise hackneyed cinematic experiences and interactive fiction over actual games, simply because they can only measure them by the standards of other mediums."
Caity Weaver's "My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers"
Just to shake things up a bit, instead of being insightful (although, I could argue it is) this one is here because, of course, it's really fucking funny. "The TGI Friday's mozzarela sticks article" as we tend to call it in my household is a cherished internet classic of which humor aged surprisingly well - you may think 2014 wasn't so long ago that the humor of the time would be dated. If you think that, I invite you to watch a less prestigious comedy show from the time and find out you're wrong.
Of course, because it is such a good, iconic article, its host Gawker, like any other worthless internet content churner (otherwise known as an "online magazine", although, make no mistake, that's not far off from what physical ones are like) decided to remove the article at some point in the past few years, for unknown reasons. Luckily for now it is safely hosted in the Internet Archive so that we can all come back to it for our yearly re-read.