The Evening Standard has secretly agreed a £3 million deal with companies, including Uber and Google, to provide them with “favourable” news coverage, without telling readers. opendemocracy.net/uk/james-cusic…

kind of sad that nothing like emulation will exist in 10 years for obscure indie PC games on Steam like it does for obscure old console games that people forgot about, and many probably won't even exist online anymore anywhere

This is a bit scary/depressing: 5 people x 2 years

I really hope this is the case.

Epic will save us from Steam. No, hang on, Google will save us from Steam. That's what we need, what we've always needed. A big corporation that we can trust to save us from another big corporation.

Man, if you want to know anything about the essential nature of social media platforms, just check out what happened to Vine when the people on the service suddenly saw themselves as workers instead of users. From “Kids These Days”:

Well, shit.

This one might take the cake: using fake hairs or smudges to trick people into clicking mobile ads.

NEW: Apple lobbyists have been meeting with lawmakers in California to try to kill right to repair legislation. Using a disassembled iPhone, they are telling lawmakers that people who try to fix their own phones are likely to hurt themselves on the battery motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/…

Hey folks, today let's talk about the Epic Store sale, and why it's pissing off gamers and developers/publishers alike. Because it's easy to snark and say "lol, the Gamers™ are angry about a sale!" but this is a good deal more serious. To understand why, let's talk about sales!

Absolutely this. And it's wholly depressing that people literally and openly paid by publishers to help 'influence' their followings are considered more trusted than the press, who would be hounded out if they were ever 'caught' doing that.

"Independent music education channels ... are also struggling with record labels’ claims. Most of these channels aren’t amassing tens of millions of followers or views. It’s not just 2/3 videos they have to worry about, either. It’s almost every video." theverge.com/2019/5/24/1863…

Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. The DRM'd books will stop working. I cannot believe that sentence. "The books will stop working." I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time.

What's fascinating about this sorry episode is that while we talk about the "wisdom of crowds" to fuel algorithms, it just needs one foolish idea to take hold - corrupting the whole edifice.

what the fuck

Sentences I would happily never hear again: "I can't afford for this project to fail". This almost always means "I have unrealistic expectations of success, and refuse to have a backup plan".

You shouldn't stake your financial wellbeing on success, and you *absolutely* shouldn't stake your sense of self-worth on it.

I think this is a stronger point too. If your game doesn't stand out, you are also screwed. But the game is the ship, and marketing is the water. If your ship is crap, it'll sink, but if it has no water, it's going nowhere. x.com/cmayer0815/sta…