Extremely cool idea.

They would never do this (a ‘smart’ product that doesn’t need constant cloud service calls), because it would encourage people to store their own music collections on their own file servers (and apply that to everything else). Would not make certain stakeholders happy.

iPod Touch with similar form factor and tactile buttons, reframed as a universal remote/home automation tool. Accompanied by little compute cubes that can mesh network to manage house stuff, as a LAN no cloud, AI harvesting, or service grifting. Context-centric computing.

It also seems wild that never happened. Easy to forget how Sierra, Infocom, LucasArts were pushing the boundaries of programming interpreters and inventing game engines as a new category of software. Making an art-based story on the computer wasn’t something just anyone in publishing could do.

I agree. It’s something I know I will come back to in some different way eventually, but thinking about the existing story worlds and source material, a boy can dream.

There is probably a lot more in lots of different genres and mediums, but that specific thing of representing late 20th C small town NZ in vibrant 2D and bringing the characters and scenes to life is an unscratched itch.

I think my ideal niche IP would be turning cult NZ 1980s cartoons like Footrot Flats or Terry & the Gunrunners into classic graphical adventure games, or worse, adapting Ronald Hugh Morrieson novels into that form.

The tiny bat exploring a dangerous cavern

An elf with a very 90s game aesthetic

A bellshroom

Avoid the green slime

I made a game in 3 days for #ldjam

Fling a bat and explore levels using echolocation. Like billiards but weird.

Let me know how it plays for you? Thank you!

castpixel.itch.io/ping

!!!

I feel like when fossil fuels were described as unsustainable some large portion of readers assumed it meant only ecologically unsustainable (it is!) but not politically/economically, which is a much more fragile system than biosphere en totale.

this is in no sense how it should have happened. but it is precisely because we find ourselves in a situation that requires war, death, and destruction to get well positioned political actors behind accelerating energy transition that we should demolish fossil capital as decisively as we can

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

It's very funny Goldsmith's smooth-brained claims that Jesson never explained why "flexible and adaptive" business was "morally inferior" when Jesson wrote entire books explaining this. A hagiographer.

Mainly the politicians did their job of funding and supporting the pipeline, and let the experts handle design and implementation

Iirc Joyce was doing the right thing for this, while simultaneously doing the complete wrong thing for Auckland mass transit.

Interestingly, they learned and adapted based on mistakes made with NBN in Australia. Key feature is they used more expensive initial installation methods to understand the problem and massively reduce costs as the rollout continued, and that approach had backing of politicians.

The UFB rollout. Rare example of a large infrastructure project not bogged down by premature convergence, cost overruns and management problems.

one milkshake to bring them all and in the yardness bind them

A flatscreen display on a "smart" water fountain, demanding to be reconnected to the internet.

In 1999, I was playing a decker in Shadowrun, and tried to distract a guard by hacking a water fountain to overflow, and my GM said "why would a water fountain be on the network? That's fucking stupid. No you can't try."

Well it's 2026 and I just want you to know, Phil, that I FUCKING CALLED IT!

If a message isn’t getting through, it’s not necessarily because of lack of presence on a platform, it can be due to lack of organic pickup and amplification. Don’t need to be posting full time on here to influence here.

Even if I'm smoked out, I can't be scoped out
I'm too ill, I represent Park Hill
See my face on the twenty dollar bill

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This topic is particularly on point at the moment given today's MBIE webinar on public research funding priorities.

Please boost the signal here and on other social platforms and through your networks.

#NZPOL

Urine and faeces are stored in the thigh pads (Stilgar 1:18)

Need to Know ‘President’ Bowen cancels UN trip as oil fire reignites fuel crisis The news | Energy Minister Chris Bowen will not attend a major international summit critical to his role as the global head of climate negotiations, as a massive fire at one of the nation’s two remaining oil refineries slashed domestic fuel production. What’s happening | Bowen today ruled out imposing rationing in direct response to the inferno at the Geelong refinery, which supplies 10 per cent of Australia’s fuel, after the facility’s operator, Viva Energy, said it would be able to meet shortfalls with additional imports. “This is not a positive development. This is not good timing. And this is a setback,” Bowen said.

The huge blaze burned out of control through most of the night. Image: Nine News The details | The blaze was only extinguished at around midday today, and caused damage to Viva’s petrol production facilities, as well as forcing an indefinite decrease in the plant’s output. Bowen, who was last year appointed as the United Nations’ top global climate negotiator – known as COP President of Negotiations – was set to attend the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Germany next week. Today, he notified his international counterparts that he would not be able to attend. Why it matters | The withdrawal is the latest in a series of setbacks for the government’s climate and energy plans as the fuel crisis takes priority over environmental matters.

One of the worst traits of legacy media (honestly worse in Australia than other places) is intense literal-mindedness and weird non-overlapping boxes used to sort and report information.

Absolutely. There’s a quote from Geoffrey Palmer where he says they had a great deal of fun being a reforming govt doing Rogernomics, and as bad as that was, I think it is a point people need to accept. There isn’t a magic formula to copy Mamdani comms, it’s authenticity of actions matching words.

Will leave to the reader to decide if that’s an analogy or doesn’t look like anything to me (*cough* Wikipedia poisoning, model collapse, common data sets impossible to fix, etc)

I work in one of the most asbestos laden buildings in Christchurch. It survived the earthquakes and is reaching its EOL. Demolishing it would be so expensive and time consuming it’s basically impossible to redevelop without running up huge net losses.

I do think there’s a difference between “we’re taxing the parasite class” and “we’re taxing the parasite class (with joy and laughter)”

Not enough people have read The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, so don’t have a memetic fictional reference point for an Australian oil refinery exploding as a clown show.