You should watch the film, it’s great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_M_uvDChJQ

Homer: “Reverse Psychology? Oh that sounds too complicated.”
Homer’s Brain: “Fine. DON’T use reverse psychology.”
Homer: “OK I WILL!!”

Since it was completely server-hosted it was incredibly fast. You’d open it up and boom, everything all up to date. The search was fantastic. (Say what you will about Google but they’ve always been great at search. Very fast and very good results.) The site layout was clean and minimal. It was just a really good implementation. Of course they murdered it.

If you used Gmail in the early days, and ever used something before it, you probably had a moment where you said “wow, this is what email should have been all along”. Reader was the same.

That’s what I did! Over time I stopped looking at Feedly though. I replaced it with Reddit and Twitter mainly. Now that those sites have become Pure Evil I switched over to Apple News. I already pay for the Plus thing as part of the family bundle so might as well use it. The “Following” tab works like a personally-curated RSS feed list. If you want an algorithmic approach, you can use the “Today” tab.

The one main feature it’s still lacking that I really want is a pure chronological list of everything from my Following sources/topics. I sent them feedback so I’m sure it will show up any time in the next 5-15 years.

My daughter wrote a report on video game development when she was in 5th or 6th grade. Through some connections we got an invite to go to Double Fine studios and have a sit down with Tim Schaefer. He is exactly what you would hope. Nicest guy in the world, absolutely loves what he does and loves talking about it. He gave my daughter a tour of the place, showed her how they thought about designing games, talked her ear off for more than an hour, gave her some keepsakes (design documents from some games they had shipped).

For Psychonauts 1, to really get inside the characters heads, they created their own fake internal Facebook-type site and play acted how all the characters would interact on social media.

You can download lossless with Apple Music and listen to it with no data connection.

Unfortunately the communities that I’m interested in didn’t really move. I tried very hard to just quit Reddit cold turkey, but instead I’ve dialed it back to only 4-5 core topics that I’m interested in. For general doomscrolling I mostly use Apple News now. I check Lemmy every day or two but it’s hard to get stuck in when the discussions I’m interested in aren’t really flourishing here. Hopefully it grows over time.

Cyberpunk 2077. I waited a year for the bugs to be sorted out, got it for half price, and it was just a very blah game. The Ascent is a way better game both in terms of being cyberpunk-y and also just being a fun game.

You can get a ps5 now for the price of a decent video card.

When I worked at Beats Music the office Wi-Fi was “Bits by Dre”.

You could start by messing around with GarageBand on an iPhone or iPad. It’s free, surprisingly deep, and you can wear headphones to not bother your SO.

I started in the industry doing 6502 assembly language programming and I’m still learning a ton from him!

Ben Eater. He’s been explaining the low level details of how computers work. Literally building a functioning computer from nothing but a cpu and a breadboard. Incredibly good explanations.

I love bad gear. I’ve got many of the things he’s made videos about and I always get a laugh out of the endless rapid fire meme onslaught.

Damn straight.

netflix has a plan with ads! https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831

amazon uses prime video as a hook to get you to sign up for prime membership (which itself has been steadily increasing in price).

i’d be shocked if HBO didn’t introduce an ad-supported price tier at some point in the future. that totally seems like zaslav’s MO.

“buy your software and have it forever” was not really true other than in the very early days. everything that was in active development like office, photoshop, all the pro music software i used, was updated regularly and had an upgrade cost. my music app had a paid upgrade every year like clockwork for $150. it was essentially a subscription in all but name. yeah i could stop paying and stay with the last version forever but operating system and hardware advances would make it so those versions would stop running on newer machines eventually.

I played through 1-3 again recently. Two is still amazing. The others are OK.

yep i have been a sodium citrate convert since i watched an adam ragusea video on the topic. https://piped.video/watch?v=KcM_MZoJWOo

i picked up a bag off amazon for cheap and it really is magic.