Maybe I wasn’t the only one who hit PAUSE during the nerdy guy’s dream-speech, because it seemed odd that he got all the lines so close to the show’s end. How many minutes left? Yikes. The speech itself was a polarizing decision: Hello, I’m a character you’ve never met. I’m going to tell you all a very convenient, easy-to-analyze, symbolically precise dream about how I don’t feel noticed by anyone, and this will resonate with someone who’s been the center of attention in every room, bar, and bedroom he’s entered in the last ten years.

But of course finales can be polarizing. NYT:

. . . series finales now tend to fall into two categories. The first is the ambiguous ending, exemplified by the final moments of “The Sopranos” — “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey, Tony Soprano looking up from his diner booth, the shot abruptly cutting to black. Genuine artistic decision or not, the value of this approach lives in its eternal interpretability. It’s perfect grist for the online recap and think-piece mill, ensuring that the work will always have a place in the cultural conversation.

That’s what Weiner did. You can read the ending two ways. Either Don stayed on the mountain OMMMing his way to inner peace - at least until he left because he’d burned up all the good will - or he went back to McCann, and that smile on his face was the idea for a new campaign.

I prefer the latter, because the idea of all that sixties swank and style ending up with hippie drivel “Let me tell you how your feelings about your feelings make me feel” might actually be preferable to bottling it up for 25 years.

Anyway: it was fun. I'm glad it worked out for everyone. 

GAMES This is the oddest story in gaming I’ve read in years. Kotaku

The Pastebin postulates that maybe the game was an alternate reality game used by a cult as a recruitment tool, the idea being that anyone that solves it would be worthy of gaining membership.

And it’s inside a Kanye West game. The whole long strange story is here. You almost expect Mischief Man to show up.

Related:

It’s from this:

Doom 4. Longer trailer here; a whole 90 seconds, if your attention span can take the strain.

It’s not the shotgun sound that makes it Doom. It’s that door sound. Twenty years later and it still makes me sit up and wonder what’s next.

NOPE I'll leave you with today's headline that I wasn't going to click on, no way, no how, see you later, g'bye: