Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Celeste. Players of indie games on Switch are driven in great part by “nostalgia,” Nintendo said today at a Game Developers Conference event at which it revealed the top 10 best-selling Switch indie games, a list that includes Celeste, Stardew Valley, and Shovel Knight. “Nintendo fans really tap into those games that share inspiration, or…
Infamous YouTuber Logan Paul started a Twitch channel yesterday, and he reached 100,000 followers without streaming once. If you go to the channel right now, the chat alternates between spamming racial slurs and ascii penises. Following the Fortnite bandwagon has turned into a mess for the Paul brothers. The Paul brothers have a reputation for…
Image: Ubisoft Ubisoft appears to have avoided the hostile takeover the company’s bosses and workers have been fearing from the conglomerate Vivendi for the past three years.The mega-publisher announced today that Vivendi will sell off all its existing shares in Ubisoft and agreed to not acquire any more for the next five years. In another…
Hundreds of schools across the U.K. closed today after receiving bomb threats via email. The threats were later discovered to be a hoax tied to a Minecraft server rivalry. Over 400 institutions were affected, according to the newspaper Express, which reported that many schools evacuated their students upon receiving the emails threatening bombings.The Northumbria Police…
Game Workers Unite is a fledgling effort to get game devs unionized that’s formed around this year’s Game Workers Unite is a fledgling effort to get game devs unionized that’s formed around this year’s GDC. The organization was born of discussion surrounding an upcoming roundtable on unionization to be hosted by the International Game Developers…
Why we must end anonymity for online political ads. “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then … give it a little push every now and again … like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question…
In 2012, I wrote a piece for this website breaking down the payments my first band, Galaxie 500, was receiving from streaming services, which were just starting to become a dominant force in the music industry. Spotify had sent songwriting royalties of $1.05 for the 5,960 times our single “Tugboat” was played that quarter—split between the group’s three…
German researchers have discovered unknown persons are using bitcoin’s blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery, potentially putting the cryptocurrency in jeopardy. The blockchain is the open-source, distributed ledger that records every bitcoin transaction, but can also store small bits of non-financial data. This data is typically notes about the trade of bitcoin,…
AMP has caused quite the stir from a philosophical perspective, but the technology hasn’t received as close of a look. A few weeks ago, Ferdy Christant wrote about the unfair advantage being given to AMP content through preloading. This got me wondering: how well does AMP really perform. I’ve seen folks, like Ferdy, analyze…
Mo Norai has worked in Silicon Valley for a decade. He’s done stints at Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple, but only as a contract worker, meaning he has missed out on the tech giants’ storied perks, benefits and job security. So when he was approached last April by a recruiter from a company called Tech…