Jay Castello 🌻

@jaymcastello.bsky.social

2530 Followers 390 Following

freelance culture writer 🍏 book & game editor ☕ narrative designer 🎲 short (& long) fiction author 📚 ace attorney podcast host @turnaboutbreakdown.bsky.social 🌈 basically if it involves words i'll do it 🌙 jaycastello.com 🦢 they/she

"Google Docs does not have a built-in setting to turn off the floating comment, emoji, and edit menu that appears when you highlight text. Workarounds Ignore it: Clicking away from the highlighted text or continuing to type will automatically make the floating menu disappear."
a venn diagram where the three circles are "no one can afford graphics cards," "running out of IP to remake over and over," and "ongoing strangling nostalgia effect," and the central overlap is "upcoming AAA "demake" trend."
"first-person shooter" "flesh-eating bacterium"
"What will it be, boss? The comfort of misery or the pain of change?"
Ch24 - Stories are really cool actually? Ch25 - Also parties? Also being transgender? Ch26 - Oh right, I have problems.
A youtube thumbnail saying "YOU'RE NOT NORMAL 6 SIGNS"
cinematic nomad copying dragononthegreat's tags: "i love how ali looms as a threatening force the entire video and she does try to commit murder suicide, absolute cinema"
50090 words
A view over a cliff onto farmland. It's foggy. There's purple heather on the edge.
A dry grass path leading into the distance under a blue sky. Tjere are runners far ahead
Half-Marathon in 3:26:05, down 33 minutes on my previous time
"what the FUCK is this game on about tbh"
Wheat and wildflowers
the UI for people liking this post. someone with a name written in arabic characters has liked it, breaking the style entirely, leaving the place where the name should be blank and instead putting it after the timestamp
A pop up in the bluesky text box that reads "The post you're replying to was marked as being written in Spanish by its author. Would you like to reply in Spanish?"
Ben Affleck smoking reaction image quote tweeted over a post hidden by a muted word.
Top notes: Linden blossom, apple, osmanthus, almond, clean notes Middle notes: Orange blossom, jasmine, honey, linen, cereals Base notes: Leather, musk, hay, animal notes, sandalwood
Discord text reading: there's NO score penalty for using hints on anthropeum??????????? i've been getting top 7% with one hand tied behind my back??? i will continue to do so for the moral of it Anthropeum.com · Jun 16 2026 🟦🟩🟩🟦🟨🟩🟦🟩🟨🟨 71,765 · top 6% of players today! fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you
A livestream of the earth from space. it's completely fucking dark on account of being nighttime over the north pacific
"For Design Room, Jay Castello has put together an oral history of Spore. There's a lot to enjoy in this oral history but what I love in any form that has talking heads, is moments of disagreement. Chris Hecker (design and lead engineer, procedural generation): The technology was super fun to work on. It was really challenging, but it was also a delight to make a computer do things that people hadn't seen before, and make it intuitive and easy for the player. Chaim Gingold (designer): [Animator John Cimino] was basically giving me his expert practice as an artist, and I was like, Right, we need to get people to be able to do that without necessarily teaching them how to do all of that. And that's where the idea [came from to make it] more like Mr. Potato Head. But talking about Mr. Potato Head kind of pissed a lot of people off because they were like, We're not making Mr. Potato Head. That's too simple and dumb. […] I think I mostly pissed off Chris Hecker, but other people too. I probably upset Ocean. Chris Hecker: I don't remember it bothering me. [Quigley says he came to the same conclusion of it resembling Mr. Potato Head on his own while looking at a topiary sculpture of a dinosaur at an art gallery.] I chosoe to read this as Chris and Ocean absolutely being annoyed by the Mr. Potato Head comparison."
A lake surrounded by cliffs.
Dad: How was your week? What day and time is a good catchup opportunity? Me: It was good. Just finding out what my plans are, you may need to remind me. Me: (20 minutes later) Sunday evening Dad: Ok, happy days. It might be quite late on Sunday as I'm clearing out some of the cottage all day. Me: Ok Dad: (40 minutes later) Sunday is your birthday!
Partway through The Sims Online's development, though, Wright's mind was elsewhere. At a Jack in the Box down the street from Maxis' offices in Walnut Creek, California, he described the next game he wanted to make to The Sims Online's design lead, Chris Trottier. He framed it as an exploration of the improbability of human existence, citing the Drake equation, which attempts to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe by considering the rate of star formation, the amount of planets that can support life, and other factors. "He was like, I want to do a game about all the things that had to happen for humans to exist, improbability upon improbability upon improbability," says Trottier. "I want people to have an innate, marvelous sense of how amazing it is that we ever happened in the first place. And they'll do it by experiencing one failure after another after another." This is the story of an improbable video game.
You're dimly aware of words being committed to paper as more memories crash the windows of your mind. FATIGUE RAISED: +1 1. Real words? I'm actually doing it? 2. Why would anyone do this to themselves on a regular basis? 3. No thinking, just write.
SGF being advertised as starting at 9pm GMT
An iced coffee sitting on a pole overlooking the river. There's a bridge over the water with a weeping willow on the left and a old fashioned pub on the right.
A photograph of a truck with yellow words painted on the back: "MANUAL SHIFT. I roll back at stops. This truck means nothing to me, stay off my ass if u value urs." Underneath, someone has commented "to those unfamiliar with manual transmissions: this is not a threat, this is a cold, hard declaration of fact. This will happen and there ain't a damn thing the driver can do about it if they wanted."
A list from the merlin app: wren, blackbird, blue tit, blackcap, Robin, goldfinch, long tailed tit, great tit
A still from the video, with the train stretching out in a curve along the right of the frame, but blurred with a hasty masking tool. The scenery is winter trees on hills.
words: 18384
A 35:48 minute 5k, 2 minutes faster than my pb
re: NEWS: [company name blanked] rolls out agentic AI + pentabyte-scale engineering to middleware management hey, what the fuck are you talking about
a tumblr post by dogweapon that reads "the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world"
"the neuroscience behind women's intuition" and 4 more - Your Weekly Stack: A digest of posts that's been assembled just for you
Lambs in a field
A cliff above green fields
"its hard to describe, but as am empath, i can say, i felt the birdy there"
screenshot from my smart watch telling me that my training status is excessive and im exhausted with 96 hours to full recovery
a partial wall, with green fields stretching on both sides
a screenshot from YouTube suggesting 100% of the views on a video are from men
A sheep and a lamb under a brooding sky
More often, the exchanges are vexing. The senior director of media relations for the country’s largest food-service lobbying group, the National Restaurant Association—the other NRA—tells me that no one from the group will be able to speak with me about free restaurant bread in any capacity, because it “isn’t a trend that we track.” I ask if someone might be able to chat with me about free restaurant bread anecdotally. “It’s not even something we could talk about anecdotally,” she responds. I ask if she will tell me what, in her personal opinion, is the best free restaurant bread in America. She never replies to me again. (Neither here nor there, but in 2023, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that this NRA used the $15 fee that restaurant workers pay to attend its mandatory food-safety course to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign against minimum-wage increases.)
a second place 5k finish in 38:40 and a new 10k PB in 1:20:51. It's 11 minutes faster than the last PB
bluebells under pale green beech
The box says "choose a password" and it's visible that i've typed in "completelyopentextbox." It's warning me my password can only be 10 letters long.
A cherry tree in full bloom. The blue sky behind it is lightly ombre
Akio from Utena saying "typically wicked girl's plots, eh?"
THE END
50000 words
17.81 km run
And then there were the spikes. In every direction, a forest of concrete pillars stabbed the air, leaning wildly at every angle and sometimes branching into new spears that seemed to reach towards me; a threat wanting to drag me back down below or else fling me into the horrifying vastness of the sky.
The linguist Thomas Sebeok was a member of the Bechtel working group. Building on earlier suggestions made by Alvin Weinberg and Arsen Darnay he proposed the creation of an atomic priesthood, a panel of experts where members would be replaced through nominations by a council. Similar to the Catholic church – which has preserved and authorized its message for almost 2,000 years – the atomic priesthood would have to preserve the knowledge about locations and dangers of radioactive waste by creating rituals and myths. The priesthood would indicate off-limits areas and the consequences of disobedience.
a map of the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, which has spiralling rectangular corridors around a central shaft
A tumblr post with the moon and the earth that claims to be taken by Artemis II and feature the dark side of the moon, but you can see the exact craters on every other image of the moon because it's the side that always faces us. (also the clouds are messed up on the earth because it's AI)
A white trig point on boulders
a cow behind a wooden fence gently sticking her tongue out