Not that it’s any comfort to The Surge‘s characters. Through found audio notes, environmental cues, and the occasional direct encounter, the game has a haunting way of weaving various personal plotlines into the story. Seeing them through to their tragic ends is one of the The Surge‘s high marks. As a tech journalist I naturally gravitated toward the story of Hackett, whose subtle stutters and stammers in the game’s later videocasts hint at a growing discomfort with playing the company shill. We eventually learn that he was once an award-winning journalist, who switched over to corporate PR to better provide for his family. This tends to work out handsomely for the PR people I know in real life; not so much for Hackett.

Making an effort to log some thoughts about the random video games I end up playing, starting with ... 2017's The Surge! jarednewman.com/blog/2026/03...

Super Brass 2, by Super Brass 10 track album

Guess I'm buying some Korean smooth jazz/funk today #bandcampfriday neoncityrecords.bandcamp.com/album/super-...

From the baseball community on Reddit: Baltimore Orioles with AI Art On their Broadcast for the first game of Spring Training Explore this post and more from the baseball community

hey, this sucks www.reddit.com/r/baseball/c...

Here's every cool tech thing the AI RAM crunch is ruining A running list of electronics getting delayed, discontinued, or more expensive.

I was having trouble keeping track of everything that's been delayed, discontinued, or made more expensive because AI data centers are hogging all the RAM. So I made a running list: www.fastcompany.com/91495430/her...

Image of the Yeti in the skiing Windows game SkiFree eating the player

Breaking: Tragedy at the Winter Olympics

Love to have AI mark my newsletter sign in page as malicious

When you're next furious that MN kids are going hungry, well, there's a fund for that; & when you're livid that brave observers may struggle with rent, there's one for that; & when you're heartbroken about pets being left behind when their owners are kidnapped, well, there's a fund for that, too.

Bring back karaoke

Not even a pity mention that maybe Verizon dislikes missing out on international roaming fees when customers buy cheap eSIMs for travel

Once again this was a great time

A paper drawing of a stone face with an orifice where its mouth should be, and a message that says “Dare to put your hand in? The mouth of truth. The honest are healed and filled with joy. Try it now.”

Also CES

Two humanoid robots, sprawled face down on the floor. I think they might be dead.

CES

IMO it's more of a HROOMMPH than a BRAAAM

TIL there is a term (and corresponding Wikipedia page) for the low brass sound, popularized by Inception, to produce a dramatic effect in movie trailers - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAAAM

Tech giants promised ‘ambient computing.’ We got digital billboards instead The screens we’ve installed everywhere have started to turn against us.

Meant to share this earlier! Our smart fridges, Echo devices, and car dashboards are just glorified advertising surfaces now. www.fastcompany.com/91432377/sam...

Toshiba M550 TV Review from a site called VARGE, URL is pcvarge.com, with a logo that looks very much like The Verge but in red.

I don't know about you, but I get all my TV reviews from THE VARGE

Bending Spoons scoops up AOL in $2.8B debt-fueled deal : Dial-up dinosaur finds yet another corporate home as Yahoo waves goodbye

Who had "Evernote buys AOL" on their bingo cards? www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/y...

Rodney Dangerfield on stage

"So I told my wife I'm in Skate or Die, and I ask her why she's smiling. She knows I cant skate!"

Electronic Arts totally stole Ariel and Rodney Dangerfield's likeness for their Skate or Die/Ski or Die series, didn't they?

Sources: Microsoft asks its Xbox unit to hit 30% “accountability margins”, or profit margins, and Xbox canceled products, cut jobs, and raised prices to meet it From Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

Translation: Someone's got to pay for all this AI stuff www.techmeme.com/251023/p21#a...

I feel you should all know about this blog that has spent the last decade attempting to document every type of sandwich in existence - www.sandwichtribunal.com

I just swiped up on my paper notebook because I was running out of room to write on the page, how's your day going?

Also, Go Blue.

Technically that fall under under the "cheapest path to local games" heading. Peacock would cover everything except the 8/31 and 9/27 ABC games, per ESPN's Where to Watch guide - www.espn.com/where-to-wat...

A savvy cord cutter could time it so one month of ESPN's service would cover both.

Also IMO if you inadvertently push a swastika to a portion of your userbase, the explanation for how that happened should be a little more thorough than "our bad."

Certainly I've left money on the table by not hosting my newsletters on Substack.

On the upside, I don't have to worry that my readers might inadvertently get a swastika in their push notifications www.techmeme.com/250730/p21#a...

Got it. Should be fixed now!

Thanks. Outlook seems to hate the deal emails, which come from a Discourse address. I’ll send something out.

Probably just getting Cord Cutter Weekly emails, right? I think I know why that might’ve happened and can fix it.

It’s a pain to set up and more of a pain to monetize, but you can self-host with Sendy (which you pay for once) and it uses Amazon SES to deliver the emails, which is based on volume. I send to about 45K weekly and it costs about $20/mo.

Tough bc mobile more locked down. PlayOn would work but have to record from a PC or use cloud credits. (And have to anticipate ahead of time what to watch.)

I wonder if the MultiSkipper extension would work with Orion on iOS, which supports desktop Chrome extensions. Haven't tried it though.