https://lizard.click

Take that ten, and read this. As Ursula writes in the post, “The more complete the attention, the more you actually taste the egg.”

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/29-without-egg

#egg

https://tinytoolk.it/

#tools #diy #repair

If you’re not in a forest right now, you’ll probably enjoy this a lot more than whatever ambient sound is around you.

https://www.tree.fm/

#trees #ambience #forest

https://drawafish.com/

#fish #art

https://tomlehrersongs.com/

#TomLehrer #music

It began with a simple post, from a simple man.

Also happy inaugural “Take Your Kitchen Scales to Work Day” to all in the future who will celebrate this new holiday I have just started apparently.

Last Tuesday in July every year. Mark your calendar!

His calendar was duly marked, and then totally forgotten until a scheduled reminder popped up for July 29, 2025 (hey, that’s the day I’m writing this). The second annual Take Your Kitchen Scales to Work Day was on.

So far it’s off to a roaring start! The hashtag is on fire with thousands of posts already (NOTE: check this before posting to avoid embarrassment) as people all over the world take their kitchen scales to work and share their pictures!

Get in on the action today, or set that reminder for the last Tuesday in July 2026 and we’ll see you then!

We’ve got six shows to go! This coming weekend you can see comedians championing their chosen fandoms which include Sailor Moon, Pro Wrestling, Board Games, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

Tickets and show session times are all at our comedy festival show page!

Including the World Premiere of Mick’s Big Backyard!

Today we’re taking some steps towards putting everything together into a single Pretty Grouse entity. It’ll be a mess for a bit, and there’s no plan but we’ll keep talking about ourselves in the third person plural the whole time it’s happening. That’s a promise!

If anyone reading this has a lot of cameras and money and a TV station, hit me up and let’s get this baby on the air!

Damo and Mick will be back!

Part high-brow intellectual flexing, part madcap variety show, Damo & Mick’s Backyard Quiz aims to put the fun back into functional alcoholism.

Come and see the comedian contestants battle their wits against tepid-fire question rounds, face off on the Wall of Ducks, and try and snatch victory from the terrifying Jaws of Defeat. All for the ultimate glory of winning one of the sensational prizes that Mick salvaged from hard-rubbish.

It’s been a while since anything canonically Grouse was done in the physical realm, but by god we’re back in a big way this year! We haven’t printed “Grouse Media presents …” on a poster since 2016, and we still haven’t this year because it didn’t fit the design aesthetic but it’s there in spirit and that’s what counts!

Yes, we have a real show that you can go and see in person as part of the 2021 Melbourne International Comedy Festival that’s slightly less international this year but is still full of comedy!

This show has a regular cast of amazingly funny people, plus we’ve got different guests invited over to play each night. It’s going to be amazing fun and we hope tons of people come to see it, because oh god we’ve worked so hard and it’s coming together so well.

Do not delay, go ahead and buy tickets to see this 6-night-only wonder of the modern comedy world, so in your twilight years when the grandchildren gather at your feet you can tell them you were there at Damo and Mick’s Backyard Quiz and they’ll look up for half a second from their Mind-Phone or Space-Tablet or iHat whatever the fuck kids in the future are obsessed with I don’t know I’m not a future predictor I’m a game show host.

The Backyard Quiz run at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is now on sale! Six nights only, don’t miss out! Different guests and games every night!

When it comes to blog posts about the outdoors, you can’t beat Hiking Fiasco. It is very infrequently updated and includes lots of posts about not having posted for a while, which we here at Grouse find highly relatable. All the content, however, is top notch and extremely well written.

It’s a refreshing break from hiking tales that are padded with self-congratulatory selfies and sponsored links for expensive gear. Instead we get tales that don’t skip the parts where you’d pretty much welcome being struck by lightning if it’d get you out of having to drag your pack one more step.

You know what’s Grouse? Of course you don’t, or you wouldn’t be here. It’s OK, we’ve got you covered in this experimental edition of Quickies that is both a test post and a plug for one of our other sites!

Yellow Plastic is where Mike (benevolent Grouse leader without whom this site wouldn’t have made it out of the 20th century) posts links he finds to cool retrocomputing content and writes about himself in the third person a lot less.

Check it out, it’s Grouse!

That can’t be right, can it? Where did the time go? How is 2015 the distant past suddenly?

Grouse? In this economy?

Looking for something Grouse in 2020 is a bit challenging. It’s pretty shitty out there, but I’m working from home, and currently in lockdown so I’ve got plenty of time on my hands. Also it’s cold outside and I can’t do much gardening. Let’s give it a shot.

I think there’s probably a reason why most Grouse-related projects have kicked off around July or August, you know. Expect me to give up and go out in the sunshine again in November. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to find neat stuff to show you and talk about.

Something Grouse!

One thing that’s Pretty Grouse I want to point out right now is the Fediverse. A distributed network of social media sites. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. If you’re there already, hit me up. If you have no idea what I’m on about, come and sign up.

You’re going to see a lot less mentions of things like Twitter and Facebook in this iteration of Grouse. We won’t be sharing anything directly on commercial social networks any more. Feel free to do it yourself if you still use them, but we’re going strictly independent and old-school web first.

Return of the Podcast

The Pretty Grouse Podcast is coming back, too! The first couple of recording sessions are lined up and if the stars align right we might get the first episode out in a week or so from now.

Of course, I know I said something like that in the first and only episode that was ever published before, and that was four years ago. I also said to follow me on Facebook. Yeah, well … let’s try again shall we? You can find the first couple of pilot recordings and tons of subscription options here.

Let’s wander into a brave new Grouse world together and see what we can find. I bet it’s not all doom and viruses and death out there.

Right?

I guess I should include a big spoiler warning at this point as I have no idea if anything I’m about to reveal is or is not true. It might be. I have no idea.

The first thing that shocked me is that attending a screening of The Force Awakens in a dream apparently means it’s held inside the foyer area of the old Kmart your grandparents used to take you to as a kid, so it’s not surprising really that there were empty seats. I got a pretty good one down at the front.

Sitting next to me for this screening was no-one other than Harrison Ford himself! I could never quite see his face, but I knew it was him anyway. He didn’t really seem to want to talk to me. He was wearing a nice suit or a bathrobe of some kind, possibly both at the same time. Maybe one was occasionally the other depending on how I was perceiving his presence. His face never faced me no matter where I moved. The bathrobe was the one that hangs on my bedroom door.

I then spilled an old friend’s beer as the opening text began to crawl up the screen, so I couldn’t read any of it but I didn’t care for some reason. I hadn’t seen this friend for a very long time and we talked a lot about a VHS cassette I vaguely recall from a house about ten years ago that I think I copied for him, or someone, once. Nobody minded that we were having a chat during the movie as they hadn’t turned down the lights yet and some people were still changing into their pyjamas. I didn’t have mine with me as nobody had told me I needed them.

I offered to replace my friend’s beer so I needed to be at the bar. The bar had a TV on it showing you the movie that was on inside the cinema which I thought was nice. I saw one of the scenes from one of the trailers with the X-Wings all flying around across the water on it. The man behind the bar told me that the bar was closed when the movie was on so I couldn’t have another beer. I had to give my friend my beer which I had now, and I’d taken one mouthful out of it already and it wasn’t very cold any more. He didn’t mind.

The TV on the bar showing the movie came unplugged from the wall somehow now so I couldn’t see the movie. I tried to plug it back in but the socket was a really weird shape that was kind of like this weird circle bit on my toothbrush that I never quite figured out the reason for. I tried to push the plug back in but it didn’t fit right and kind of squished with the amount of resistance you’d expect from toothbrush bristles if you tried to push them flat against a table or something – it kind of moved and rotated a bit as you pushed. It was probably my toothbrush.

Part of the movie is apparently a bit where JJ Abrams just stands in front of the camera and talks about the movie and how he made it. I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying at any point, but the people in their sleeping bags seemed very attentive and appreciative. I wondered if I was going to be cold without my sleeping bag. I wondered if I could go home and get it and noticed that JJ Abrams looked a lot like one of my teachers from high school and I think I actually did go to high school with him but I forgot about that until now.

Back inside the cinema I can see there’s a really cool-looking scene on the screen with a cloud of dust and lightning flickering in it rolling out of a valley into the desert where it keeps its shape kind of like a sphere made of clouds and dust and electricity. It’s heading towards a tiny figure on the sand but someone’s head was in the way so I couldn’t see who. Maybe the head was on the screen because I’m in the front row still. Maybe it’s part of the movie but I don’t think so. I go to ask someone if it’s real or in the movie but I’m not in the cinema, I’m at the bar area again but this time I’m getting served a drink and I’m really really thirsty so I woke up.

So there you have it kids! All the spoilers, all the plot details you were wondering about! Wow! JJ really knocked it out of the park, didn’t he? I can’t wait to dream about the next one and see what happens in that!

Check out the rest of the Random Ads channel for more comedy gold!

If you’re still on the fence about seeing Mad Max, despite all your friends jumping up and down talking about what a fantastic ride it is, you should check out Ozzy Man’s review below and see if that convinces you.

Fair warning though – if you are convinced and you want to see it, skip this review for now. It’s got mild spoilers for stuff and I think you’ll enjoy it more going in cold. It’s up to you now, use your power wisely.

Our Grouse Mate, Harrison, has started a new series on streaming video with a bit of an overview if you’re wondering what’s up with everything right now. If you like sitting on couches and watching things on a screen, sit on your couch and spend a few minutes watching this.

There are some mixed reviews going around, from unexpected device incompatibility to intermittent login errors, then a limited selection of content if you do get on. I only experienced one issue; I chose to watch the first Hobbit movie and it took almost an hour for the movie to start. This was apparently Peter’s fault though, not Stan’s.

Given Stan’s primary competition won’t even launch for two more months, they’ve got a pretty good shot at ironing out their issues and seizing some hearts and minds. Still, it’s really going to come down to who has the shows we want to watch in the end, at least for me.

Feature photo by schmilblick

There are three really big lies that we weave though childhood. The Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus (spoiler warning I guess). On the surface, all celebrations of milestones, events in a year … but really, at the end of it all, each one a conversation we don’t want to have.

The Tooth Fairy I get. When you’ve got a young kid in your care who’s really only just come to terms with object permanence, the discovery that pieces of their own body can actually just fall off is somewhat distressing. You’ll say anything to make them feel better in that situation, and all parents know that bribery is a reliable method to soothe most ills. If you’ve got an extra-inquisitive child who starts asking the hard questions about why this alleged fairy actually values the teeth so much, you just need to hint that any further investigation down this line would result in the money stopping, and you’ll pretty promptly be given a solemn nod. Kids know what the deal is.

The next big lie on the journey to adulthood is the Easter Bunny, and again, that one kind of makes sense. We don’t want to have the conversation explaining about this one, because nobody actually understands. Something to do with death and rebirth which logically progresses to chocolate eggs and an anthropomorphic rabbit courier … nobody wants to be the one giving that presentation to an audience of any age.

Apparently one of the factors in the rabbit angle is that once upon a time it was believed that rabbits were hermaphrodites, and reproduced without losing their virginity. Presumably this was believed mainly by people who had never seen rabbits, or possibly only seen them on plates and had thought the lack of any obvious genitalia was not part of the same process that induced the lack of other things like “skin”, and had raised its body temperature significantly above normal.

We can easily fall back on the bribery angle to shut down anyone who’s too much of a free thinker again here. We have an understanding that chocolate will be delivered. A nod’s as good as a wink to a rabbit on a plate.

Santa Claus though? What’s the basis for that? Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re not avoiding any difficult conversations and just roll with it.

“My darling child. We humans like milestones, we like markers. Our calendar is replete with them. At the close of each year, and the beginning of the new, we like to reflect on the time now past, and the people closest to us. We celebrate by exchanging gifts, gifts that ideally reflect the connections we feel towards each other and the love that we feel.

“We give gifts to show how precious we are to one another, and how we’ve seen what our loved ones desire and have worked for them to have it. Life is dark at times, and strange, but above all we should keep in mind that we are all in this together.”

Why the hell would we want to do that, when it’s much easier to avoid the whole messy, emotional business and throw a big lie in a red suit into the mix.

“My darling child. All throughout the year, an old man watches everything you do. He makes notes, and assesses each action based on his perception of whether it is ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’. At the close of the assessment period, he travels to your home, breaks into it while you and your family are asleep, and he delivers his judgement.

“Let’s leave a glass of milk and some cookies out for him!”

Doesn’t that really make life a lot easier? Merry Christmas. Be good, and stop asking questions.

Missing tooth photo by srett . Santa hood photo by marfis75

Here at Grouse, we don’t really subscribe to the whole “keep Halloween out of Australia” thing. Dressing up,having parties and handing out tons of lollies to kids? Fucking awesome. Let’s do this thing!

Lollies aside (yeah we’re not going to start saying “candy”, don’t worry about that) the Halloween period is also a great excuse to watch a bunch of horror movies. We’ll help you out with the movie part today; here’s “Perished”, a brilliant little Australian-made short film that’s full of zombies. Have a watch! It’s perfectly suited to viewing during a lunch break, if having lunch with the undead is something that sounds good to you.

Wasn’t that great? The folks who made that ended up going on to make another little short film that you may have seen, earlier this year. If you like their stuff, you’ll probably want to follow the Perished Facebook page. Or don’t. We’re not the boss of you.

The deafening applause began to calm, and the room slowly became silent.

Tim smiled and reached into his pocket. “We’ve gone in a quite different direction this time. This time the iPhone is a small dog.”

He pulls out a small golden retriever puppy and holds it up high. The puppy’s tongue flicks out and licks its little nose. It gives a tiny “yip” and wags its tail.

The crowd is silent. A few camera flashes go off. Tim’s smile grows.

“Look at the puppy! Look at little iPhone 6! Look at his little tail! Isn’t he a good dog?” cries Tim joyfully.

A ripple of applause starts and grows louder. Everyone in the auditorium is on their feet. Tim puts the puppy down on the stage. It runs around chasing its tail for ten seconds or so, yipping playfully, then sits down and starts licking itself.
A man in the audience points at a big black, fluffy dog with shaggy hair and one ear turned inside out that’s lying on the floor next to his chair. He yells angrily, “My dog was chasing its tail two years ago!”

Nobody cares.

Feature Photo by jonkriz

Paul Keating’s second leadership challenge against Bob Hawke succeeds, and he becomes Prime Minister of Australia. The Soviet Union collapses, bringing the wavering remnants of the Cold War to a final end just as the Gulf War reaches its peak, laying the foundations for a legacy of pain and destruction that persists to this day. In Sydney, drawing on the skills of members of the faltering pop group The Cockroaches, a new band called The Wiggles releases their first album, laying the foundations for a legacy of pain and destruction that persists to this day. At some point among these events, The Doug Anthony All Stars perform at Redlands Community College in Queensland.

Well … the All Stars performance might actually have happened in 1992, nobody’s quite sure, but 1991 sure was a better year to write about. Whatever. You can watch the entire DAAS gig right now! How Grouse is that?

This is for those lucky ones of us who have seen the current tour. Fuck yeah.

Photo by xiaming

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQRZXM-4xI&list=PLNJmwVFwfFGObBZa5ekSO_1JM3mY8SMQj]

One thing that didn’t fully register with me on my first watch is how a large amount of it seems to have been filmed near my home. This makes me terribly proud.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lki1y2wa820]

How good a deal is that? Enjoy it, then pay for it if you feel like it. Or never pay for it. It doesn’t get better than this.

This is a repost of an article from the old Grouse, way back in the distant past of June 7th, 2005. A simpler, more innocent time. I’ve included it here because it was the first long article of this type ever to appear on what had previously been a “site of the day” page, and because when I read it through again I really enjoyed the part where I started slagging off Belgium.

You’re in a dodgy moral position when you make cigarette rolling papers, even if yours are “Australia’s Finest”; the claim of the good people at Tally-Ho. Your target market is people either at risk of a variety of diseases and health problems from smoking tobacco, or blinking in the bright fluorescent lights as they furtively approach the 7-11 counter at 2am, hoping that the bored-looking guy behind the counter doesn’t totally guess what they’re going to be smoking in those, man.

Once you start from a basis like this, it’s bound to be tempting to cut a few corners here and there and decline into the grey areas of “truth” when it comes to packaging the end product.

We here at Grouse, in an attempt to gain recognition for our investigative journalism skills, will be delving into the rolling paper industry over the next few months. We will attempt to discover the tobacco of truth inside the paper of lies that even now lies gently smoking at the edge of the ashtray of marketing.

The familiar Tally Ho packet, proudly set on fire on a daily basis by countless Australians, is a common sight. It proclaims itself to be “Australia’s Finest” right on the front. Do you think there’s a proud family of Aussie battlers who have been hand-crafting these papers for generations? Are you led to believe that these, our finest papers, are truly the triumph of good, honest, Australian toil? If you do, then think again, because the horrible truth is about to be revealed.

On this sample pack, the word “Australia” appears four times, including in the address of Imperial Tobacco Australia, for whom the product is packed. “Packed”? There’s a warning sign right there. If it’s packed for them, then they didn’t make it. Not that there’s anything particularly Australian about Imperial Tobacco, anyway. To get our answer, we’ll need to dig further.

If you unfold a packet of these papers as much as you possibly can, thus exposing the one piece of the package that you are the least likely to see, something is revealed; these papers are “Made in Belgium”. Is nothing sacred these days? What has become of this country when we have to outsource the manufacture of our “Finest” cigarette papers to a country that’s actually been barred from the Eurovision Song Contest three times because their previous year’s entry was so bad? How terrible does a song have to be to not be good enough for Eurovision standards, exactly? Belgium has won just once in 45 entries, and that was in 1986 with the youngest ever entrant. Obviously the tactic of waving around thirteen year old jailbait singers in order to win got someone annoyed, because the minimum age has since been raised to fifteen. Belgium won’t pull that stunt again.

I digress. The point is that we have Belgians making our cigarette papers for us. It’s bad enough that it happens, but it’s been hidden from us, too.

Happily, it appears that we’re not the first to notice this sneaky Belgian connection. Slightly altered packaging has started to appear on the streets and in our tobacconists. No longer is “Made in Belgium” concealed in the nether regions of the pack. It’s graduated to the fine print. The “Australia’s Finest” text remains, as does a selection of Australian-oriented trivia. The trivia questions are probably there to encourage reading of the “safe” side of the packet, and keep our suspicions at bay. Well, no more.

In the next installment, we will explore whether some of the trivia presented on the packs is actually true. After all, they’ve deceived us once. It mustn’t happen again. Maybe Mount Isa isn’t technically the world’s largest city by area. How far from the sea is it actually possible to get while staying in Australia? We’ll also compare the Great Wall of China to the big dingo fence in detail, and see how they stack up against each other.

Stick around.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w-58hQ9dLk]

Is there an online petition  we can sign to get a dinosaur species named after him?

What exactly is a duck?

Ducks are birds that belong to the bird family Anatidae, along with geese and swans. Ducks are sometimes referred to as waterfowl. They can live for up to 12 years depending on the breed.  The ducks most people recognise from farms and in ponds is the pekin duck which is a descendant of the mallard duck bred in China over 1000 years ago. Ducks are kept for food providing both meat and eggs. Ducks feathers from the eider duck called “eiderdown” are used in bedding and clothing. Ducks are also kept as companion animals.

What makes ducks so freaking sweet?

1. They waddle. They waddle because they have webbed feet to help them swim.
2. Their webbed feet don’t feel the cold due to blood vessel layout and a natural heat exchange process.
3. Ducks live on every continent except Antarctica.
4. Ducks are waterproof because of the structure of their feathers and the oil they spread from the uropygial gland near their tail while preening themselves.
5. Ducks are omnivorous, opportunistic eaters and will eat basically anything – grass, insects, meat, bread, rocks, and fingers of annoying children.
6. There are shoveler ducks that sift mud for food with their broad beaks. Diving ducks have long thin beaks with saw like edges to grab fish. Dabblers eat plants, seed, small insects and other animals by dunking their head underwater to reach things on the bottom or in underwater vegetation.
7. One species, the Argentine lake duck, has the longest recorded penis in the bird kingdom at 42.5cm. It also happens to be shaped like a giant corkscrew. Some scientists postulate that the long length is actually so male ducks can use a penis lasso to subdue female ducks.
8. Cakes baked with duck eggs will rise slightly more and taste slightly richer due to a higher protein content in the whites.
9. Drakes are male ducks. Hens are female ducks. Ducklings are baby ducks.
10. Scientists have observed cases of homosexual necrophilia in ducks.

Famous Ducks

Ducks have been a long-time favourite for children’s books and stories. Here are some famous ducks and a little bit of trivia about them in no particular order.

Ferdinand

Ferdinand was the duck in the 1995 movie Babe. He spent the entire movie trying to be useful so that the Hoggetts wouldn’t dine on his tasty flesh.

Daffy Duck

The Warner Brothers’ Daffy Duck has been gracing our screens with his presence since 1937 when he first appeared in the Looney Tunes short “Porky’s Duck Hunt“. He is famous for getting shot in the face by Porky Pig and having his bill spin around his head. Disturbingly the Internet does NOT appear to have an accurate count for the number of times he has been shot by Porky Pig. Suffice to say it’s more times than 50 Cent.

Donald Duck

Walt Disney’s Donald Fauntleroy Duck has been around for even longer than Daffy, having been created in 1934. He is primarily known for is quack-ish, semi-intelligible speech and his incredibly short temper. He is also one of the only Disney characters to have an official middle name which was shown in the 1942 short film “Donald Gets Drafted“

Count Duckula

Count Duckula (a personal favorite of the author) originally appeared on the British TV show Danger Mouse and was popular enough that in 1988 he was spun-off into his own series that lasted for five years. Count Duckulas main rival is the mad scientist and vampire hunter Dr. Von Goosewing whose name is a spoof of Abraham Van Helsing who hunted the original Dracula.

Rubber Duckie

Seasame Street’s muppet Ernie had a bath toy called Rubber Duckie that he loved so much he wrote a song about him. The accompanying song sung by Jim Henson reached number 16 on the pop music Billboard in September 1970. In 1992 roughly 28,000 rubber ducks and other rubber bath toys called Friendly Floatees were lost overboard in a shipping accident. These toys and their movements around the worlds oceans have been used to track ocean currents by scientists.

Howard the Duck

Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck was created in 1973 by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik. The comic itself is considered existentialist and the main joke, according to the writer, is that there is no joke and that “that life’s most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view.”

It was made into an incredibly, incredibly bad movie in 1986 by George Lucas but more recently has been thrust back into the spotlight by being the special cameo character in a Marvel after credit scene prompting speculation that a new Howard the Duck movie may be in the works.

The Duck Hunt Duck

Most people between he ages of 28 and 34 should instantly recognise this duck. Duck Hunt was published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System game and made its initial debut on April 21st, 1984 in Japan and October 18th, 1985 in North America.

Games are pretty Grouse, but what is it that we actually get out of them? At the end of the day, have we actually achieved something? Is it true that time spent enjoying yourself is never truly wasted? Given the finite nature of existence and the ultimate futility of human endeavour, is all activity ultimately pointless? Am I opening this article with far too many rhetorical questions?

Whether you play games to make you forget your life for a moment, to improve yourself in some vaguely defined way, or just something to illustrate to yourself that you’re just as susceptible to Skinner Box programming as a mouse, ultimately you just end up pushing a button to make a number bigger. There are a good few browser-based games kicking around at the moment that not only reduce gaming to its bare fundamentals, but play with those elements in an entertaining way.

Candy Box 2

Candy Box 2 and its precursor (surprisingly named “Candy Box“) are probably the most familiarly game-like entities you’re going to find on this list. While it starts with an empty screen and a number getting larger (your “candies”), eventually you unlock pieces of a fairly complex adventure game with puzzles which has led to  a comprehensive wiki detailing solutions to various challenges for people who’ve become stuck.

It’s all done with some pretty good, if simplistic, ASCII art and the dedication to the candy-as-currency and indeed candy-as-pretty-much-everything theme is obviously a labour of love. Give it a go, you can always save and come back as you’re not so dependent on waiting for that ever-increasing number like you are with …

Cookie Clicker

Click the cookie, and receive more cookies – that’s the core of this game with no end. This is probably the most shameless of the recent crop of “make a number bigger” games. Click to make more cookies, then spend cookies as currency to buy upgrades that make more cookies for you, until the entire universe and the spacetime continuum itself is being warped solely to your cookie-producing empire.

The tone of the game shifts beautifully from light-hearted fun into a comically dark and foreboding atmosphere as your “Grandma” cookie-producing units from early in the game begin to shift and awaken as “Grandmatriarchs” but I won’t say too much about that because, well … spoilers. I found it immensely amusing that in a game devoted solely to purchasing upgrades, it actually made me hesitant to keep purchasing some on my first play-through.

Clicking Bad

Cashing in at the time of the rise of both Cookie Clicker and Breaking Bad in our popular culture, Clicking Bad gives us the excitement of clicking a thing, with the added bonus of two counters that go up – your cash, and your “batches” of meth. Keeping things in balance with the possibility of DEA raids and IRS audits that threaten your stockpiles, plus factors like batch purity add an interesting angle that makes this more than the opportunistic knock-off it might appear at first glance. Not as much a fully realised game as Candy Box, but open-ended, so it’s there as long as you can derive some satisfaction out of making numbers bigger.

Also unlike the previous entries, the good folks at the Clicking Bad factory have supplied an Android app so you can obsessively make numbers bigger while draining your phone battery on the train. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

Particle Clicker

A recent arrival, and the catalyst for my navel-gazing retrospective, Particle Clicker gives us a three counter incremental experience where one can accumulate data, reputation and funding. There’s frequently something new to click on, thus keeping up the illusion that you’re actually achieving something very well. Lots of jokes abound about students and researchers that’ll provide passing amusement for anyone who’s spent any time in the world of academia, but in the end, you click a thing, and some numbers get bigger and you get rewarded by being allowed to click on a different thing – and isn’t that what life’s all about?

Particle Clicker was created at CERN Webfest, by people who will probably go on to create things that actually benefit humanity. The source code of the game is available at GitHub, so go check it out and maybe you can be the first to bring us the four counter game we’re all desperately waiting for.

Feature photo by levyfulop

Aphex Twin blimp at Oval Space?! pic.twitter.com/AfShgjgBIQ

— Jid (@JidLind) August 16, 2014

http://syro2eznzea2xbpi.onion

— Aphex Twin (@AphexTwin) August 18, 2014

The Tracklist:

01. minipops 67 (source field mix)
02. XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix)
03. produk 29
04. 4 bit 9d api+e+6
05. 180db_
06. CIRCLONT6A (syrobonkus mix)
07. fz pseudotimestretch+e+3
08. CIRCLONT14 (shrymoming mix)
09. syro u473t8+e (piezoluminescence mix)
10. PAPAT4 (pineal mix)
11. s950tx16wasr10 (earth portal mix)
12. aisatsana

Thanks to Aaron Static for the heads-up.

Photo by lenore*

Once you’re done there, you’ll want to hear what celebrities may or may not have said about things that  may or may not have been the Booty Coconut. These Fools Be Known people are nothing short of geniuses.

A lot of things used to be Grouse. Now very few things are Grouse, because we stopped looking for them.

We’re getting back to work very soon.