Finally the live service bubble is popping.
I hope the developers working on these projects get put on to something else, instead of shown the door as is so often the case.

Hell, in Canada they don’t care at all either.

Just bought Riven, I’m liking it quite a lot so far. I see why it’s a classic. Love the feeling of being dropped into a completely alien world.

I have a French Press

Hope it turns out well, the announcement trailer was a wicked vision of a wild artistic and sonic direction, but it seems like the actual development process has been quite troubled.

My early impressions are certainly quite positive, I love how experimental it is and very willing to explore new gameplay styles. Certainly curious to see what the metascore ends up being, probably higher than Link’s Awakening HD?

I’ve been a big Bethesda fan for years, no one else makes games that quite come close to their very simulationist style. I like Starfield, and now that it’s a year after launch I have finally found my angle on it to get the enjoyment out of it that I wanted. I think it’s a good game.

But it’s also a flawed game, it’s clearly not for you, and that’s okay too.

If the Play Store becomes required like that then Android’s already-shaky status as an open source base platform is going to go out the window. I’m glad there are non-Google distros of Android but there really needs to be more of a push to make a completely FOSS phone platform.

The tech savvy will just buy a Raspberry Pi and install yunohost on it.

I think the fundamental themes of the film were at odds with a compelling and historically relevant telling of the story of Napoleon. Mostly mindless repetition of two centuries-old British propaganda. I don’t see how an alternate cut could address the flawed approach this film had.

As an audio engineer, I was very confused about what this had to do with Direct Injection for a second.

Hey, don’t just blame the parents. In the back half of this article the author points out that social media harms youth no matter if their parents let them use it or not because of the social webs it creates. If you choose to keep your child off social media then they could just as easily end up isolated from their peers because everyone else IS using it.

This article strikes at a very salient set of points about smartphones and social media. As someone that specifically tries to only use federated social media because it avoids some of these dark patterns, I certainly agree with. I also use my smartphone without any notifications turned on, ever.

Unfortunately the author has a few paragraphs that miss the mark and strike me as coming from more of a centrist or right-wing “kids these days are too soft” which feels very off-base and disconnected from the issue. For example:

This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.”

The scare quotes around microagressions, a genuine issue faced my marginalized communities, is really uncomfortable and gives an unfortunate perspective on some of where this author is coming from.

Putting that aside, I really do feel like most of what is said here is on point. Reducing social media use is imperative. Designing smartphone UX that doesn’t shove notifications at you would also be a good idea. Getting younger people involved in communities and forming friendships is incredibly important.

As with what others are saying here, pulling out algo nonsense is good, however I do worry that it slowly devolves into something similar to what’s happening with Twitter where you can barely look at anything without being pushed to login. It’s unusable unless you have an account. Websites shouldn’t operate like that.

Monthly Active Users are unfortunately down for the past several months in a row. Something more needs to happen.