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No comments onAlex Pareene on the link between the profitability and ethics of newspapers in the Columbia Journalism Review: In retrospect, it seems inevitable that American journalism’s professional norms around fairness and ethics emerged at a time when newspapers and magazines were good investments for normal financial reasons. Safe investments attract safe corporate investors. Corporations like clear…
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Like the original game, Life is Strange: Before the Storm has baffling lapses in writing quality and yet remains an beautifully touching and earnest story. What Remains of Edith Finch is great, but there aren’t that many mostly-realistic games like LIS these days.
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To celebrate The Space (an Arts Council/BBC-funded digital art body) being awarded £3 million to spend on 800 arts and culture organisations, here is my bridge-burning piece from three years ago on how they wasted ~£20m on laughably bad ‘digital art’.
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China’s Social Credit Score, and the distraction of Black Mirror
Adam Greenfield has a good introduction to the scope and folly of China’s new tech-driven social credit score in The Atlantic. On Metafilter, he also remarked on how he was disappointed by constant responses of “it’s just like Black Mirror!”: It makes me really sad that so much of the response to this piece has…
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I’m playing a whole bunch of story games for a Thing, and one is making me intensely motion-sick – even more so than the previous nausea-inducing champ, The Witness. I may have to resort to a YouTube walkthrough to make it to the end. Do devs just not test for these problems?
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Is it expecting too much of the BBC to want a comprehensive, fully searchable, and indexed list of Winter Olympic sports, with video clips plus chapter markers, preferably on the web and iPlayer? It’s surprisingly difficult to find my ol’ favourite Snow Cross wacky races.
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The New VR Arms Race: Kids vs Parents
Kids are gonna have cybersex, and parents won’t like that General-purpose VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are so expensive and fragile that we haven’t yet had to worry about how it’ll affect kids. VR is still like the PalmPilot PDA in 1997, an expensive curiosity for just a million enthusiasts. It has…
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Through an iPhone, Squinting
If you want a vision of the future, imagine your arm holding up your iPhone — forever It has been truly delightful to see all the imaginative augmented reality prototypes made by developers playing around with Apple’s new ARKit framework. It’s only been available for a couple of months, but developers have already gone to town with…
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Disney’s Giant Leap Forward
When Disney surveyed the public about a hypothetical immersive Star Wars hotel early this year, it felt like an idea from the future, not an actual commitment. Surely they’d wait until after the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge — already a highly ambitious and risky new park area — before starting work on a whole new hotel? But…
