Weekly Digest

Life
Got out early on Saturday in the hope of a good sunrise. Weather was perfect and not only got some cracking images but it was good to get out and about. Got a walk in through a totally deserted forest – loved it.

Media
All or Nothing:Manchester City – enjoy a good doc and this one on Man City is well worth a watch. They got some amazing access to both manager and squad.

Links

25 Years of Edge

August 1993 and the UK saw a new type of gaming magazine. Edge was a serious look at the gaming industry and focussed on technology, the studios and in depth stories on the development of games themselves. I loved it and have blogged about Edge a few times over the years.

I’m still a subscriber and enjoy getting a physical copy each month. It’s read cover to cover and joins the full collection of Edge magazines that I’ve been close to ditching a couple of times but glad I held on to them even if the shelves storing them collapsed recently. They do weigh quite a bit.

Edge launched at a key time. The first PlayStation came out a year after launch in 1994 and a few years later saw the launch of the PS2, Gamecube and the first Xbox. It was a golden age with lots of hardware and game studio changes and Edge was often the first to break stories, have exclusive game previews and conduct interviews with developers that no one else could get.

The internet quickly changed the magazine market but Edge has survived mainly thanks to it’s original content. In the past I’d decide game purchases based on Edge reviews but not anymore. Games are often out for 4 or 5 weeks before a review will drop through the post. They are still a great read and the rare Edge 10’s still something to covet but they don’t make or break a game anymore. Looking back at issue 1 feels like ancient history – they had 2 pages dedicated to format charts and Syndicate was number 1. Rise of the Robots was previewed, just one of the many games that looked amazing but was actually terrible. Issue 3 was previewing VR which took some 23 years to land in anger – you can’t say Edge wasn’t ahead of it’s time. It was also when import games were king and paying £80 – £120 for a game wasn’t unheard of as it would take 6-9 months to land in the UK.

One last noteworthy aspect about Edge is the covers. Some of them have been amazing featuring exclusive art, use of different finishes and in pre-internet days and sometimes still today would reveal a new piece of hardware or preview of a game. Don’t get me wrong, some of them have been awful but they give a great visual history of the last 25 years of gaming. Click on the image to the right to see all 323 covers or visit my Edge Magazine Covers Flickr album to see them in detail.

Hard to believe that 25 years have passed since that first issue. I’ll also confess that I didn’t buy the first one and had to order a back issue after a few months. So glad I did! It seems unlikely with the pace of change, but here’s to another 25 years of the worlds best gaming magazine.

Weekly Digest

Life
Too much social media angst. Instead thinking about money, pensions, shares…you know, really positive thinking 🙂

Media
A quiet weekend so treated myself:

Batman Begins – Well made with great performances. A new darker Batman.
The Dark Knight – The best bad guy performance in a superhero film. Ledger lifts this and alongside a great story and some strong performances this still feels fresh despite it being 10 years old.
The Dark Knight Rises – Good but not great, the overall film just doesn’t land and despite the ball of rage that is Tom Hardy it doesn’t match The Dark Knight.

Watched them all in 4K and HDR. Batman Begins looked OK but the other two really shone especially the sections shot in IMAX format. There’s also an obvious difference between a 4K Blu-ray and 4K streaming. Tried some scenes on iTunes which was also 4K and HDR and the difference was notable.

Links

Breaking My Twitter

Over the years there’s been many issues with Twitter. Basic at the start, constant fail whales and then tremendous growth coupled with every brand, company, personality and interesting folk like you and me jumping on. I loved it. Then we saw hashtags, conversations, trending topics, filters, muting, timeline syncing and many many other features driven by third party app’s and eventually (mostly) adopted by Twitter themselves either by implementing and supporting a feature or buying a much love third party app.

Then Twitter needed to make money and grow to try and match Facebook et all.

So in come adverts, messing with timelines and deciding what I should see and in what order, showing my friends retweets…the list of decisions that alienated me as a user was long but that didn’t matter as I could use Tweetbot or Twitterrific to let me use Twitter how I wanted to use it. That only lasted so long.

Twitter fired the first warning shots to third parties by limiting how many users they could support. Then they started changing and updating API’s. That was the first sign that the writing was on the wall for third party apps. From today they are trying to strangle third party apps by shutting down old API’s and limiting what third parties can do. Arse.

While the API’s might be buggy, slow, costly I can understand that issue if it was maintained by a third party but they are written and supported by Twitter. The official mail they’ve sent out to their staff today smells of bullshit:

The User Streams and Site Streams APIs that serve core functions of many of these clients have been in a “beta” state for more than 9 years, and are built on a technology stack we no longer support. We’re not changing our rules, or setting out to “kill” 3rd party clients; but we are killing, out of operational necessity, some of the legacy APIs that power some features of those clients. And it has not been a realistic option for us today to invest in building a totally new service to replace these APIs, which are used by less than 1% of Twitter developers.

They’ve killed the API’s and decided not to replace them. They’ve decided to strangle the third party app’s that have driven so much of what Twitter is now. They quote that less than 1% of dev’s used the API’s killed today but I’d bet that a large proportion of influential and what I’d call power users are making use of these third party app’s that are now being neutered. They also talk about understanding why people use these third party app’s instead of their own. Maybe because you’ve killed them – where’s the Twitter app for Mac? How’s Tweetdeck? They’ve also published a blog about these changes which read’s as a big ‘fuck you’ to any user of a third party app and particularly developers of these services. I don’t think I’ve seen a company shoot itself in the foot in public more than Twitter have recently.

The mess they’ve got in to over the last 2-3 years around how toxic their platform is and the inability to take action on haters, abusers and nazi’s beggar’s belief at times. Despite that there’s so much value on Twitter which I why I stick around. So, what to do?

You could do like many are stating and deactivate your account from tomorrow. You’ve got thirty days to change your mind and it’s about trying to change Twitter’s direction…almost a ‘take back control’ moment which hopefully has a better outcome than the last campaign to use that slogan.

You could also move to another network. Mastodon has been around for a couple of years and is seeing some pretty good growth over the last two weeks thanks predominantly to Nazi’s. Go figure. It’s a bit more confusing to use than Twitter and I can’t see brands, politicians, celebs etc etc moving but it’s got potential for the tech community as has micro.blog which is a paid option for hosting your short form content. Again it’s niche but the conversation is good and toxicity levels low if not non-existent.

I’ll be investigating the latter two options and looking at how best to trim down my Twitter use which will be hard as I still have a lot of time for the platform. I surface great content through it and love the interactions that it offers. If Twitter would focus on dealing with toxic users and gave me some better app options even if that meant paying for, in my eye’s, an improved service then I’d be happy. Unfortunately it looks like a change in leadership is required for any of this to happen as the direction of travel is breaking my Twitter.

Weekly Digest

Life
End of another great sporting event in Glasgow. This one was a wee bit different in that the time trial passed my street. The speed these top cyclists can reach is impressive.

Media
Deadpool 2 – more of the same and pretty average.
Succession – off to a really strong start.
No Mans Sky – still enjoying. Updates have delivered a much better game.

Links