Jitsi test starting in 10 minutes. If you are interested in the Federated Video Co-op Initiative, you are welcome to join. For the next 30 minutes, we will be discussing the co-op and answering questions while testing the feasibility of using Jitsi for Steering Committee and AGM meetings.

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Everyone knows Donkey Kong. Fewer people remember that it kicked off a lawsuit where Nintendo was sued by Universal Studios for allegedly infringing King Kong. That case is deranged enough to justify its own write-up. What interests me more is the officially licensed King Kong game released in 1982 for the Atari 2600—one year after Donkey Kong was released. It is, functionally, a Donkey Kong clone. Nintendo didn’t try to stop it. Probably because the lawsuit was still unresolved and losing would have created injunction risk and licensing chaos. Awkward. But Nintendo unequivocally won after Universal’s claimed rights collapsed under its own prior legal positions. The court didn’t just dismiss the case. It called out Universal for bad-faith bullying of Nintendo’s licensees. The King Kong cartridge itself was part of that paper trail. Thereafter, the licensed King Kong game immediately stopped mattering. I’ve played it. Compared to Donkey Kong on the same hardware, it looks awful. The controls are worse. Movement feels like you’re steering a damp sponge. Still, it’s not unplayable. The climbing works. The jumping mostly works. I had fun with it. Part of that is because Tigervision tried harder than people remember. This was their first cartridge release. The game shipped with eight variations, including speed changes, two-player modes, and “magic bombs” that could fling you up a level if you timed things right. It’s still a clone, but it’s not a completely lazy one. King Kong didn’t vanish from games after that. In 2005, there were multiple tie-ins for Peter Jackson's King Kong movie, and some of them were genuinely solid. Then in 2023, we got Skull Island: Rise of Kong, which answered the question: what if a modern King Kong game shipped with no shame at all? Meanwhile, Donkey Kong just kept climbing. After years taking the backseat to Mario, Donkey Kong Country dragged him back into relevance. This year, Donkey Kong Bananza is getting Game of the Year nominations. That trajectory is earned. King Kong still pulls box office numbers. However, Donkey Kong is now getting movies too. King Kong shows up because he always has. Donkey Kong shows up because he's part of the shared Mario cinematic universe. And now King Kong’s 100th anniversary is coming up. He’s already in the public domain in his earliest form, which makes him suddenly very attractive to game developers. Expect a lot of Donkey Kong–style platformers starring a very familiar ape, all carefully staying on the safe side of the line. History doesn’t repeat. It reskins.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the stock market is actually pretty dull right now. There hasn’t been much movement. The NASDAQ Composite hit an all-time high of 24,019.99 on October 29. Today’s high sits at 23,296.05. Despite the constant doom-and-gloom headlines, we’re only about 700 points off that peak. And honestly, I wish it were more interesting.