The games industry's self-induced traumatic brain injury

Pluralistic: The games industry’s self-induced traumatic brain injury (17 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"No matter the reason, there is nothing good about the games industry's decades-long project of erasing its own past. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game developers, and it's bad for games. No art form can exist in a permanent, atemporal now, with its history erased as quickly as it's created."

I couldn't find the oil & filter type in my car's manual, and the table of contents wasn't helping me, so I just asked AI (specifically Brave's ask feature) and it gave me a page number. The page was 396 - a general maintenance overview page. While it didn't have the information I was looking for, that page mentioned page 243 which had the specs that I needed. Maybe it's not a good sign my dumb self couldn't find it, but I'd say it was pretty impressive of the tool that it could point me to the right page on a random car manual (at least in a round about way).

Android Developers Blog

Android developer verification: Early access starts now as we continue to build with your feedback

News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.

I don't know exactly what the "advanced flow" to install 'unverified' software is going to look like, but Google backtracking on requiring their approval to install apps on your phone is certainly a good thing to hear. I'm sure they're going to make some sort of really inconvenient hoop to jump through, but I guess just about anything is better than outright preventing it. As always, though, it's a good time to de-Google you're phone if that's something you'd be up to. It puts a nice little buffer in between you and Google's shenanigans. It's rather nice to be able to treat my phone as ... *checks notes* ... my phone.

While technically true, I feel like "human settlement" is a rather odd way to describe a town.

Rather Impressive Image Compression

Can you tell the difference between the two images above? At first glance, probably not. If you look at them side by side long enough, at least in ...

Quick blog post about AVIF, a new (relatively speaking) and pretty efficient image format. #blog #blogstr #avif #photography