• Brad Frost’s list of bullshit:

    Popups, jargon, junk mail, anti-patterns, sensationalism, begging for likes, tracking scripts, marketing spam, dark patterns, unskippable ads, clickbait, linkbait, listicles, seizure-inducing banners, captchas, QR codes, barely-visible unsubscribe buttons, 24-hour news networks, carousels, auto-playing audio, bloatware, sudden redirects to the App Store, telemarketing, ticked-by-default subscribe buttons, “your call is important to us”, pageview-gaming galleries, native advertising, the list of bullshit goes on and on and on.

    I’d like to nominate the hidden/tiny source link at the end of a news item. Sites that do this and hijack the entirety of the interesting content in an article that they’re linking to are pretty much the worst kind of sites.

  • There are not many people I trust to make recommendations about funding another crowdfunding campaign from people who have already failed to ship a documentary once, but you should read the full argument from Jason Scott. Here’s just a part:

    Way back in 2012, I posted something, talking about how worried I was that a documentary that looked and sounded great seemed to have disappeared. I’d looked far and wide to contact the filmmakers, and nothing. But I wanted to at least put my voice out there, in case they wanted to talk to me. Unlike people who talked big about what they wanted to do, the small amount of footage I’d seen from the documentary looked so fantastic that I very nearly quit doing documentaries.

    Like a lot of people, I’d pre-ordered the blu-ray edition for the forthcoming film, and I’d waited. And waited, and then nothing came of it, websites went down, and I squirreled away the trailer and other footage I’d seen, sad beyond belief such a promising work seemed to be doomed, destined for the shadows of promises and wishes.

    Then, in 2014, I got contacted by one of the creators. Yes, they were alive. Yes, they had a lot of pieces of the movie. And yes, they’d run into incredible financial problems, gone bankrupt, lost homes, had massive layoffs… yes, as expected, there had been some incredible shitshow and the production company was essentially gone. They’d had to go into other directions, and put the project into a box and refund whatever they could afford to refund, and make a living.

  • Tasos Lazarides has a huge list of updates to the version of Minecraft for phones and tablets:

    These are just a few of the additions in this huge update, and you can see now why I said this update really changes the game up and brings mobile gamers closer to being able to play the full PC game on the go.

    It’s 2015 and Mojang is still paying for the mistakes of using Java to develop Minecraft by almost just now coming up to the features of the Java version of Minecraft in this just-updated C++ Pocket Edition.

    Cross-platform game development can be easy when you use the right technologies. Java is useful for prototyping. Java is not useful for shipping a truly cross-platform game in 2015. I never thought I’d say this but it feels like Microsoft might just have been the right steward for Minecraft. I’m not sure they have the balls to ditch the Java version entirely and open up a desktop version of Minecraft to modifications and tinkering in the face of whatever backlash it’ll create, but I hope that Mojang, and Microsoft, do it.

  • Here’s three hours of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain at 720p60. I can’t believe how well MGS V has merged open-world exploration and stealth action along with X-Com style base building and each component is done better than any other similar game. Some games stagnate as sequels stack up, MGS isn’t one of them.

    With every sequel Metal Gear Solid sheds its skin and becomes something new. Kojima fools us each time into thinking that this new MGS is like other sequels and to buy it in the comfort of finding something familiar. The band-aid is ripped off quicker than ever in Metal Gear Solid V, in a little more than an hour you will already be surprised and then find yourself doing similar things to what I’m doing in that video and there are still many more surprises ahead.

  • Metal Gear Solid V launched last night on Steam and today on consoles. This is supposedly the final Metal Gear Solid game from Hideo Kojima after some discord internally at Konami who have basically done everything they can to get out of the console game business choosing instead to focus on pachinko and mobile games. The only other big game coming out of Konami after Metal Gear is soccer.

    MGS V’s Windows version was to be released a few weeks after the console versions but it shipped on-time and looks great. Reviews are overall extremely positive and the PC Gamer report on the technical aspects of the Windows version is positive. The game runs very well on my machine, and the only real technical disappointment that PC Gamer failed to mention is that the companion app for tablets and phones, iDroid, will only link with the console versions of MGS V.

    I stayed up until 2AM playing last night after it unlocked around 9PM Pacific. MGS 5 is just that good.