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Image credit: RPS

Sundays are for realising that he’s coming. That he’s inevitable. That, in a way, he’s already here. You feel him in the back of your mind. Grinding his teeth. Picking his nose. Raking his nails across the palms of his hands. He hungers, a snarling hunk of robo-man-flesh yearning for the time his clarion call rings out through the space between each of our psyches.

Something terrible and insidious this way comes. He glues a cookie-cutter short back and sides hairdo to his usually bald bonce. He cries out to the great corporate entities for money and wares to show off. He dusts off a tombstone engraved with the words ‘please wrap it up’. He howls at the moon. AWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Adrian Edmondson? "NO," he yells, jumping on stage. "IT IS I, KEOFF GEIGHLEY." You gasp in horror.

"GIVE ME THE THINGS," he bellows at the crowd of damned souls. Shit, better say something. Has he read about someone wandering around the Kowloon Walled City, a square of British controlled-Hong Kong which ended up a densely-populated and largely lawless enclave of China prior to its demolition in the 90s? Has he read about Rick Lane doing that in Minecraft for a feature over at Peacefully Crying Gamer?

Nonetheless, the map does provide some sense of what a foreboding place The Walled City would have been to navigate. Most of its alleyways are alarmingly narrow, following no obvious logic in how they twist and turn, making it easy to get lost despite its relatively small footprint. One factor the map doesn’t represent is how those alleyways often appeared more like tunnels, due to how the sky was often blocked out by masses of overhanging objects, such as cables, awnings, balconies, and informally constructed bridges.

"MORE THINGS!" Christ, this man never gets enough, does he? Fine. You resolve to give him another before resorting to lobbing your fellow show attendees at him like sacrificial stage-invader missiles. Has he though about The Outer Worlds 2’s lack of inventory limits meaning you can never end up interacting with some of the ten billion things you pick up? You can’t tell, so you fire Jen Glennon’s piece for Kotaku at him regardless.

By the time I finished The Outer Worlds 2, I was carrying 142 weapons, 110 pieces of armor, and 98 helmets. Many of those were duplicates: I had an egregious seven identical copies of a single uniform that I hadn’t worn once. I’d put on a wonderfully daffy-looking helmet and robes I found in a hidden cache on Golden Ridge somewhere around the midpoint of the game and wore them straight through to the end because they were good enough and looking at them made me giggle.

On the stage, KEOFF is now doing a Fortnite dance while dressed as a sexy nurse. "HERE IS ONE OF THE THINGS," he bellows, "BUT I STILL NEED MORE THINGS". You lock gazes with the Phil Spencer lookalike, who’s now playing the xylophone while riding a unicycle, his eyes narrowed like Clint Eastwood. Right, er, it’ll have to be technologist Simon Fondrie-Teitler reporting that a $600 toilet camera, which snaps pics of your droppings, isn’t end-to-end encypted like its manufacturer claims, as outlined with some extra context by 404 Media.

"I think everyone has a right to privacy, and in order for that to be realized people need to have an understanding of what’s happening with their data," Fondrie-Teitler said. "It’s already so hard for non-technical individuals (and even tech experts) to evaluate the privacy and security of the software and devices they’re using. E2EE doesn’t guarantee privacy or security, but it’s a non-trivial positive signal and losing that will only make it harder for people to maintain control over their data."

"COME ON, WE NEED LE BIG SHOW CLOSER, ONE LAST THING," KEOFF demands. He’s now lying astride Hideo Kojima, gently reciting the seven times table in a terrible Frech accent. You dig deep. It’s Erin L. Thompson for the London Review of Books, recounting the tale of Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, a smuggler of Ancient Egyptian artefacts.

Dick Ellis, the lead investigator of ‘Operation Bulrush’ (the biblical name for the plant that papyrus is made from), recognised that sending such easily identifiable stolen artefacts to a museum was ‘such a dumb thing to have done’ that the farmer couldn’t possibly be the brains behind a smuggling network. Ellis called the Devon police to ask if there were other Egyptophiles in the area: Tokeley-Parry had recently reported the theft of an Egyptian stone head from his workshop.

"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH, BIG FINISHHHHH," KEOFF exclaims.

Then, you notice that he looks a bit like Vyvyan from classic British comedy show The Young Ones. You stand up and point. "Hang on a minute, you are just Adrian Edmondson, this time dressed as the Game Awards bloke!" "DRAT," he squeals, cartwheeling into the arms of a cheaply-hired Phil Spencer lookalike. "FOILED AGAIN!"

Edgy teen classic I’m Not Okay (I Promise) by My Chemical Romance plays as the pair make their escape and go back into hiding until Fummer Sames Gest.