Published work, shop talk, and stray thoughts.
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“Search in Bing for ‘how to uninstall Microsoft Edge,’ and you’ll find a Microsoft support page for how to uninstall Edge. It doesn’t tell you how to uninstall Edge.” (by Michael Crider) – https://www.pcworld.com/article/2602335/microsoft-support-page-lies-about-how-to-uninstall-edge.html
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Super Bowl streaming options, Fox streaming plans (Cord Cutter Weekly)
If you’re looking for the best way to watch the Super Bowl in 2025, the answer is more complicated than it should be.
The post Super Bowl streaming options, Fox streaming plans appeared first on Cord Cutter Weekly.
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The maker of Hypnospace Outlaw was a Klikker
Jay Tholen, whose Hypnospace Outlaw brilliantly captured the feeling of using the internet in the 90s, wrote about making games as a kid back then, including this:
[T]o my mind, making games was a highly technical thing that only large teams of grown-ups could accomplish, so The Games Factory was a reality-bending discovery. I was never not thinking about my next game project. I didn’t want to do anything else. School notebooks were now for mocking up game concepts, enemy beastiaries [sic], and level designs. I took my backpack to restaurants and other family outings and spent any downtime scribbling notes and sketches.
The Games Factory was the successor to Klik & Play, a no-code game development program, and was itself succeeded by Multimedia Fusion, all developed by Clickteam. Jay made a list of notable games that were made with these tools:
- Destruction Carnival (1997) by Charles Tomino
- SIEGE!! (2001) by Fallen Angel Industries (Beau)
- Eternal Daughter (2002) by Blackeye Software
- Entrance Gate (2002) by Jannis Stoppe
- Hell Creatures Rotten Corpse (2003) by Dreams Illusions Fantasies Software
- The Spirit Engine (2003) by Mark Pay
- A Game With a Kitty (2005) by Fallen Angel Industries (origamihero)
- Lyle in Cube Sector (2006) by Bogosoft
- I’m O.K (2006) by “Thompsonsoft” (mostly Derek Yu)
- Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns (2006) by Joakim Sandberg
- Knytt (2006) & Knytt Stories (2007) by Nifflas
- I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (2007) by Kayin
- Bonesaw: The Game (2008) by xerus
- The Spirit Engine 2 (2008) by Mark Pay
- The Sea Will Claim Everything (2013) by Jonas & Verena Kyratzes
- Freedom Planet (2014) by GalaxyTrail
- Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) by Scott Cawthon
- Baba Is You (2019) by Hempuli
These are just games made with Klik software itself. But there’s probably a fairly ambitious story to be written about how the community—which Jay and I were both a part of, but at different times—seeded an entire generation of cool indie game developers that went onto bigger things. (UFO 50 by Derek Yu et al is a triumph.)
(via the always-excellent Virtual Moose blog)
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Files are worth saving (Advisorator)
Computer files are under your control and can’t be taken away. That’s not the case with online-first tools.
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Another day, another company realizing that LLMs are the wrong tool for the job. (Gemini search in Google Photos is slower and less helpful than regular search most of the time.)
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The Clicks iPhone keyboard is as powerful as it is frustrating (FastCo)
The real magic of this BlackBerry-like keyboard has little to do with typing.
A funny thing happened after I stopped using Clicks, the keyboard case that effectively turns an iPhone into an oversized Blackberry: The phone by itself suddenly seemed punier.
– https://www.fastcompany.com/91270225/the-clicks-iphone-keyboard-is-as-powerful-as-it-is-frustrating?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss
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ATSC 3.0 stuck in neutral, Fubo price hike (Cord Cutter Weekly)
As 2025 gets underway, the story with ATSC 3.0 hasn’t really changed.
The post ATSC 3.0 stuck in neutral, Fubo price hike appeared first on Cord Cutter Weekly.
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“Adapt or die.”
Ryan Broderick in his excellent Garbage Day newsletter:
And like many Americans, I spent yesterday trying to process the new reality we’ve suddenly found ourselves in. One where I am aware that something is happening, but largely unable to actually figure out the specifics. And throughout the day a loop emerged. I would see a claim on a social platform like X or Bluesky, like SNAP benefits being affected by the freeze (it seems like they wouldn’t have been), try to verify it, and only get days-old Newsweek stories and a bunch of aggregation from Indian newspapers that have figured out how to game American search traffic like The Hindustan Times and The Times Of India.
Hoo boy does this capture how it feels to look for information online now.
Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.
I keep coming back to the old Jay Rosen phrase “optimize for trust” and how many media orgs have utterly failed that assignment.
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Advisorator’s 2025 plans (Advisorator)
As 2025 gets underway, I’m having a hard time reconciling my enthusiasm for technology with how much worse a lot of it’s getting.
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Marble Madness was better at home
Reading Marc Normandin’s Marble Madness retrospective got me thinking about NES ports that were better than their arcade counterparts. And that led me to a blog called Nerdy Pleasures that has a pretty good list of them, categorized in various ways. I was always blind to this as a kid because the arcade versions looked and sounded so much more impressive.
(That said, I always thought Marble Madness played better and looked more vibrant at home, and I never missed the trackball.)
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Netflix price hike, Comcast’s sports bundle (Cord Cutter Weekly)
Price hikes are always a fine time to reevaluate the value of a subscription.
The post Netflix price hike, Comcast’s sports bundle appeared first on Cord Cutter Weekly.
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Sports streaming isn’t one-size-fits-all
Good analysis by Andrew Bucholtz at Awful Announcing, looking at the emerging wave of sports-centric TV packages:
The wider point is that there isn’t one “future of live sports TV.” The future will be different for each consumer based on what specific content they want to watch. For some, an antenna with a mix-and-match selection of streaming services will be the most efficient (and the loss of Venu is a big blow for a lot of that group, with it providing ESPN before Flagship’s launch, providing FS1, and providing a good-looking bundling deal with WBD). For others, a sports skinny bundle like MySports may work better. For others still, a full MVPD package will be the way to go. But in all discussions of this, it’s worth keeping in mind that these are different products aimed at different people and that the only real future is individual.
Kind of like what I’ve been saying about cord cutting in general for the past decade.