Just wrote my Halo review, which turned into a bigger essay on many other things surrounding it. I know most people won’t listen, remake bad, Xbox bad, whatever - but I’m very proud of it.

I think — and I will write about this somewhere soon if I can — that internet discussion has fostered an overwhelming preference for “source material” as a standard, in a way that I think is detrimental to art. It’s better, I believe, to consider adaptations as part of one’s body of work.

Joshua Rivera@jmrivera.bsky.social · 21h ago

here: a unifying theory of Christopher Nolan, the bard at dusk aftermath.site/christopher-...

Im not even in these niches yet I feel like it perfectly illustrates why I wanted out. The second my TikTok presence got pushed from edu to ragebait and arguing - and now that’s most of YouTube, too - it was over Fuck all of this

Josh Gondelman@joshgondelman.bsky.social · 5h ago

This is such an great feature (Rebecca is great!), and I've been thinking about it for a few days. IMO, "Influencer" in the ten-years-ago sense was really a LOT of jobs (spokesmodel/copywriter/etc.) but now it's morphing, at least in part, into "intentionally annoying person" which feels worse.

This is such an great feature (Rebecca is great!), and I've been thinking about it for a few days. IMO, "Influencer" in the ten-years-ago sense was really a LOT of jobs (spokesmodel/copywriter/etc.) but now it's morphing, at least in part, into "intentionally annoying person" which feels worse.

The Influencer Recession

Once upon a time, lifestyle influencers could post cute photos and make millions. Now they are forced to pivot.

vulture.com

The board of a Michigan township agreed to rezone a terrain to make way for a data center. Residents opposed to the data center forced a vote on the matter, and they blocked the rezoning tonight: www.mlive.com/news/ann-arb...

every work program when you open it now: hey can you even read

Somebody asked me on Reddit why people who use AI to generate Recomp projects are currently being rejected from the communities and what they can do to fix this. I might tweak parts of this to be a more general blog post at some point, but this should be of help to anyone in a similar situation.

I pay $10 a month for Kagi, & it is worth every bit of it. Google's front has devolved into a digital amalgam of old yellow pages, Sears catalogs, and coin-operated trinket machines, while the back end scans our family photos, reads our emails and deletes our work at will.

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 7h ago

If Kagi (with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google - a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of *thousands* of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation - could also do so. 14/

DoesItPlay? has always been a voluntary effort in between families and day jobs. Our goal is to have people go full time and bring you more tests, more content, and the most complete test database on the web. For that we need support. Pls join our Patreon:

A contrasting take to the “moral imperative” argument is @doctorow.pluralistic.net's. Really interesting read.

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...

thenerve.news

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 6h ago

You will be surprised to learn that I do not believe there is a “moral imperative“ to teach educators about AI.

This is 💯 not true. It is never a choice between ‘taking big tech’s money and doing nothing’. A stronger moral imperative is NOT to take the money and the strings attached to it - particularly if you do not and cannot yet understand the implications

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 6h ago

“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”

Nobody ever explained to me what a passkey is or how they work. Websites just started asking me for passkeys like it's something we talked about.

This is my favorite retro game con, they put out the good stuff, and it's in a funky air and space museum. I'll be there lecturing, projecting slides into a giant IMAX theater showing Nintendo's abandoned attempt NES as a home lottery system. Later I will sip beer and play Barbie Fashion Designer.

LI Retro@liretro.bsky.social · 3d ago

Import retro games are more than just foreign exclusive titles, they’re completely different experiences like a rapid-fire light gun Famicom game found only in Japan as seen here with @frankcifaldi.bsky.social of VGHF. Check out the Retro Import showcase this week, Aug 7-9 at LI Retro. LIRetro.com

WordPerfect had this in the mid-1980s iirc 40 years of progress!

Heather Burns@heatherburnstech.bsky.social · yesterday

The most terrifying enshittification I've discovered has been learning that Microsoft Word documents no longer auto-save if you are not saving them to one of their own proprietary cloud services. I'm slapping control-S like it's 1999.

I’m looking for something like a RPi that can drive ~4 displays I have multiple TV wall setups and can’t justify big cpu GPU towers for that Needs to be able to just feed video or browser pages to each screen

Also meaning: They’re in murderous hands

Jason Schreier@jasonschreier.bsky.social · 18h ago

EA officially goes private tonight, meaning: - EA will no longer trade on the NASDAQ for the first time in 36 years - All stockholders of EA (including many employees) will receive $210/share - EA will take on $18 billion (!) in debt, putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest

never stopped and thought about how funny it is that playstation all-stars battle royale has fat princess on the cover. fat princess is, in fact, the only female character on the ntsc/pal cover of playstation all-stars battle royale. what a time capsule

it really seems like some genres can’t exist in the indie space due to scope, team size, budget etc. My two examples are big spectacle action games like classic God of War and big character-party-driven RPGs like BioWare games. Easy to say “just play indies” - but how do we get these, then?

Is it weird that when these kinds of demos are available, I almost wanna just play them FIRST then go into the full game? Reminds me of how i started games as a kid

Wario64@wario64.bsky.social · 18h ago

Monster Hunter Wilds Prologue demo out now Steam store.steampowered.com/app/2246340/... US PSN store.playstation.com/en-us/produc... Xbox www.xbox.com/en-us/games/...

It was so damn depressing to watch every TV writer who was willing and eager to have open, intelligent conversations about their process get hounded off social by a combination of aggressive stans and belligerent wannabes defending the right to be a shithead to creatives

C. Robert Cargill@crobertcargill.bsky.social · 18h ago

I keep thinking about the discourse from the other day suggesting writers are gatekeeping writing information for ourselves and I just think back to 2019 when every writer was out there giving away writing advice until one by one each stopped because social media blows and we can't have nice things.

SteamDB and its ilk hardly tell the whole story www.rogue.site/editorials/s...

Steam charts don’t tell you how successful a game is

People use Steam charts websites to inform their discussions about which games are doing well, which games are failing, and which games are likely to get shut down. Unfortunately, they don't show what...

rogue.site

Hope y'all are ready to boycott EA permanently

Just finished season 1 of BEEF 👀

name that game from a TV show!

So much for Cloudflares anti-AI stances

'It is, in 2026, quite clear that only certain people are allowed to treat the internet as their own playground.' Marie Le Conte writes on the handful of high-profile legal battles challenging an industry that has operated with unfathomable impunity https://bit.ly/4w38TuK

For women, the internet was freedom. Then the tech bros b...

From nude deepfakes to gagging orders, a handful of high-profile legal battles are challenging an industry that has operated with unfathomable impunity

bit.ly

theres some real cognitive dissonance to how sentiment around Xbox is lower than ever and yet every little thing they say or plan they announce is given endless headlines; as if it’s a big deal and they’re not just laying the tracks in front of the train here

On this day in 2005, 21 years ago, Gamecube game Pokémon XD - Gale of Darkness was first released. This game was a sequel to Colosseum and had you return to Orre to try and stop Cipher again and rescue Shadow Pokémon www.serebii.net/xd/

This is what happens when YouTubers intersect with their real industries. I was just talking about this last night. CARPENTER USES HAMMER TO DRIVE NAIL AMAZING STRATEGY SECRET META 2026 FOR MORE JOIST HANGING

Alanah Pearce@alanahpearce.bsky.social · 3d ago

ok I am in the camp of people that thinks Obsession is exceptional but also every second headline I see about it basically amounts to “filmmaker used standard filmmaking technique to make film!!!” and I’m sort of losing my mind