Linked List / February 2026

Jank ➶

New PC games website by Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell, and Graham Smith.

Jank is an independent arts and culture website about PC games. Whether a blockbuster or a hobby project, we want to celebrate any game that is bold, new and inventive. Even if that means that it’s a little janky.

We are supported entirely by generous readers via site memberships. No ads. No AI. No influence.

We publish news, reviews, interviews and analysis about video games, solely motivated by what we want to say and what our audience wants to read. We have no need to chase pageview traffic or to pander to marketing teams, platforms or search engines.

We believe that videogames are for everyone.

Check out their favorite games of the decade so far, to which I added the following:

Three additions from a space-head in need of more space:

  1. Elite: Dangerous Odyssey (2021) has excellent in-a-space-suit sound design, an infinite legs-to-ground scale ratio, and the promise of becoming a modern Frontier: Elite II.

  2. Flight of Nova (2022) is a sort of 3D Kerbal Space Program for patient cargo delivery sim drivers partial to good ambient music.

  3. Delta V: Rings of Saturn (2023) brings an open-worldish version of Asteroids to life, and has patch notes that never break character. I seem to read more about video games than play them currently, and now you’ve all made this problem worse by creating this site…(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

And Caldwell’s article on AI:

An LLM does not have thumbs to feel the drift of invisible friction in a platformer. It does not have ears to suffer clichéd dialogue, nor eyes to appreciate a cleverly reused asset. And no matter how many facsimiles of human sense organs it might adopt in code, it will not share the common, mundane, and sublime humanity that exists between you and I. You and I both shit. So when I write that playing Borderlands 4 is like having an attack of diarrhea, we are co-existing in a moment of embarrassing human frailty. Whether you agree with my fecal assessment or not, you must concede: an AI cannot join us in this toilet stall.

Good stuff.

✶ Published

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