It took so long to make in part because the devs simply couldn't work on it for a while, both for financial reasons and a general unhappiness with where it was going. Routine did get a re-reveal back in 2022, now with added support from publisher Raw Fury, with a couple of engine changes mixed in somewhere amongst the decade and a bit development period.

Like so many other cowardly and complicit tech CEOs of this age, and the companies they lead, Microsoft’s actions (or in this case, inaction) has done nothing today but remind us of something we already know: we should be spending our time and money elsewhere.

I truly wonder for those who post transphobic content to their social media, if they’ve actually talked at length to a trans person and heard their stories. If they haven’t they might just learn we’re humans just like you, and we want to live and have the same rights as everyone else without discrimination.

These problems reportedly stem from EA's generative AI tool, ReefGPT. It's said that the AI keeps adding incorrect code to projects, which have to be fixed by the developers who don't want to work with the tool in the first place.

AI that’s easier to talk to is an AI you’ll want to talk to more—and potentially pay more to access. If an AI chatbot with a warm, friendly face “earns your trust,” you’re a lot less likely to listen to the AI skeptics that generate what Microsoft calls “a lot of noise around AI.”

There’s too little investment in the web as a platform, too much focus on routing as much of the web experience as possible through a specific product or service offering, and it’s increasingly tough to even tell one of these Chromium forks apart from the other.

Musk stated during an xAI stream in February that the company was launching an AI gaming studio, saying: “If you’re interested in joining us and building AI games, please join xAI. We’re announcing it tonight, let’s go.”

Tech leadership at seemingly every level appears to suffer from a very particular kind of brain rot that can’t help but have them seeing each other as more deserving of the benefit to the doubt than any of the people they claim to be serving with their products and services.

Gold trinkets are emblematic of the Apple Intelligence flop era, right when they need to be channeling peak Steve Jobs one-more-thing energy. It's not too late. And if he gets mad, tell him he's holding it wrong.

While scientists are still trying to figure out why exactly the orcas have it out for boats at sea, some have suggested that it's simply a sign that they're having fun.

Who is Andrew W.K.? Is Andrew W.K. real? Who is the real Andrew W.K.?

It’s a choice in favor of the people who prey on others and who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those they hate.

As the New York Times reports based on insider sources, Meta has announced internally that it will be splitting its AI division into four separate groups: one focused on research, one on so-called "superintelligence," one on products, and another on infrastructure.

It’s incredible how, nowadays, the natural response to engaging with other people’s “content” online is to look for that sinister angle that must be there to create engagement, conversions, or sales. And I completely understand it, because that’s exactly the level to which we’ve ruined the internet, and it feels like there’s no way back.

Arguably the most striking artwork Struzan created that year, though, doesn’t feature any actors at all. Depicting a human, parka-clad figure framed by an icy landscape, Struzan’s poster for John Carpenter’s The Thing is minimal, surreal, and filled with menace. Its brilliance is all the more surprising given that Struzan managed to paint it in a matter of hours rather than days.

A blog is for the person writing it. It's for the person who built it, who's hosting it, who's spending hours tweaking it until it looks just right (and spending countless more hours redoing the whole thing again and again).

I’m happy to announce you can now buy the unofficial IndieWeb heavy metal shirt or tote bag from CottonBureau.com. The sales of these print-on-demand products ($2 from each shirt and tote) will make their way to a donation to IndieWeb.org’s Open Collective.

I don’t think you get to have it both ways. That is, you don’t get to, as it were, borrow charisma from all the hype and then disavow every failure to live up to it as someone else’s naive mistake for believing the hype.

This newspaper sucks, man. It doesn’t suck because it posted something dumb that betrays the paper’s poor commitment to video gaming’s wider place in our culture and artistic landscape. It sucks because it’s doing to games, and AI, what it seems to be doing to every other important beat of the 2020s: taking the worst people at face value.

I just want to be clear here: the price of my plan did not change. Instead, Microsoft moved me to a new plan that contained generative AI features I never asked for; a plan that cost a lot more than I was already paying. Then it lied to me, claiming my existing plan had increased in price and that there was no version of a plan without generative AI — until I tried to stop paying them altogether.

All of which sounds incredibly dystopian; the idea that faceless, unaccountable payment processors--which enjoy vast monopolies over the world's commerce, and by extension its marketplaces--can wield their power so swiftly, as they've increasingly been doing now for years, is downright terrifying.

The studio is also sunsetting the original 2017 game Splitgate in order to reduce server operation costs, which according to Proulx and Bagamian, cost the company "hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past couple years."

We understand no tech company is perfect, and that the problem is bigger than Spotify. But at the very least, Apple Music and Tidal—where we will be hosting our playlists moving forward—care about sound quality, have higher per-stream rates, and don’t seem to be daring music lovers to hate them every single week.

What we’re seeing right now is not innovation, we’re seeing people struggle to contend with the reality that it’s over. They’re coping with the fact that the innovation phase for computing devices has finished. They’re grasping for continued relevance.

I refuse to believe there is anything you are getting there, whether it be social or professional, that is worth the constant exposure to and indirect support of an outwardly fascist social media platform.

There’s just no reason to support Microsoft’s gaming endeavors at this point. It’s had plenty of time to get things right; it’s not going to. The company’s other endeavors aren’t looking great, either.

None of those people were responsible for calling it the Xbox Series X But Also Series S. The person answering phones at Arkane didn't bet the farm on Game Pass becoming the next Netflix then...not becoming the next Netflix. An artist paid to draw spaceships for a Halo game didn't decide that Xbox should mean an actual Xbox but also kinda mean an Oculus Quest 3 and some handhelds and cloud services but also not really.

They are not charming. They are not building anything. They have scooted along amassing billions of dollars promising the world and delivering you a hill of dirt. They deserve our derision — or, at the very least, our deep, unerring suspicion, if not for what they’ve done, but for what they’ve not done.

I’ve watched this story loop around resolution like a broken record for years, clinging to the hope it might land somewhere bold. I’m not that teenager chasing trainwrecks anymore—I’ve got bills, better taste (in trashy anime), and better manga to read.

One of the most viral Robotaxi freakouts shows one of the not-exactly-self-driving cabs braking repeatedly when driving near police cars, blowing through an intersection, and swerving into oncoming traffic — all within the brief 20 minutes that the ride was filmed by its backseat passenger.

While reporting on the company, it has been hard to imagine what rock bottom will be, because Meta keeps innovating bizarre and previously unimaginable ways to destroy confidence in social media, invade people’s privacy, and generally fuck up its platforms and the internet more broadly.

Musk’s interest in politics, which kicked into a new and more expensive gear when he went all in for Donald Trump during the 2024 election, was always going to invite more scrutiny for his business empire. But the grassroots movement, which began as a post on Bluesky, has become a boisterous, ragtag, and visible locus of, sorry to use the word, resistance against Musk and Trump.

All because the Dodgers are afraid of offending the 32% of Los Angeles County voters who cast their ballots for Trump in the most recent presidential election, many of whom don’t expect ICE agents to ever show up at their workplace.

Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change.