Told my wife recently that I think marriage should be fixed term contract, much like mortgages, with agreed terms and conditions, benefits and costs. Before the end of the term it can be renegotiated or you part under the terms of the contract. We've not had sex since that chat.

I'm an IT admin. Early 2000s I told staff to use an embarrassing password so they are never tempted to tell someone. Passwords stored in plain text. Found out who everyone in the office fancied.

When I was 9 I broke my bedroom window. To prevent my parents seeing I put a poster over my window. Well I'm now 18 and the other day, the poster fell off my window revealing no crack whatsoever. I asked my parents about it and they said they'd fixed it 2 days after it happened.

Just thought you might be interested to see the amount of complaints that have come in about the John Peel replies. And this is only about half of them coz can't be arsed to paste in all the ones that get sent to @anon_opin docs.google.com/spreadsheets…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When my wife wants my assistance in another part of the house she just yells my name. I refuse to move unless she actually says "Can you come here please", which she never does, so we're just stuck in a rut of her bellowing my name & me screaming back "WHAT?". It's pretty grim

Read Everyone Knows That “French” Is Code For “Fancy”

Client: "We have an international clientele, so we decided to give the restaurant a French name. We’re calling it..." *writing on the whiteboard* "...the Café Royale.”

Read Everyone Knows That “French” Is Code For “Fancy”

Dates and times are way more complicated than we usually think they are, especially when we're talking about historical dates and times. The solution, of course, is to always use someone else's work, whether it's a library or your language's built-ins, never implement date handling yourself.

For a long time, though, Java's date handling left something to be desired. Which is why Sven found this history lesson in his company's code base:

// Those annoying Germans have stolen 1 hour and 40 minutes from us on the 16th of may 1940
// and to this day they haven't returned them (like our bicycles).
boolean is16mei1940 = year == 1940 && month == 4 && day == 16;

// Before our neighbours came with the above 'suggestion' we did the same on the 1st of July
// 1937. We adjusted the time difference with Greenwich officially from 19 minutes 28 seconds
// to 20 minutes. We skipped the first 32 seconds after midnight.
boolean is1juli1937 = year == 1937 && month == 6 && day == 1;

// During the first World War the Netherlands decided that in the summer the clock
// would go back one hour, but in the first year this happened at midnight. Only a year
// later did people realise it was more convenient to do it at 2 o'clock in the morning.
boolean is1mei1916 = year == 1916 && month == 5 && day == 1;

calendar.setLenient(is16mei1940 || is1juli1937 || is1mei1916);
calendar.set(year, month, day);
calendar.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0);
calendar.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);

I'll let Sven explain the bit about the bicycles:

The comment about Germans not returning our bicycles is an old joke in the Netherlands referring to the second World War during which the Germans confiscated large numbers of bicycles from Dutch citizens during their occupation of the Netherlands.

Given how much of this centers on Nazi occupation and also World War I, I wouldn't call this a fun history lesson, so let's get into the code.

The setLenient function controls how strict date parsing is. From the docs:

With lenient interpretation, a date such as "February 942, 1996" will be treated as being equivalent to the 941st day after February 1, 1996. With strict (non-lenient) interpretation, such dates will cause an exception to be thrown. The default is lenient.

You'll note, though, that we're not using parsing here. Which raises the question of: why is this happening? I can't say that I'm sure. Perhaps the documentation is misleading and the original developer found an edge case? Do they explicitly want to disable lenient parsing for some future parse operation Sven didn't submit?

But then we set various properties. The set method is overloaded, as you can see here, but what you don't see is that there's a 5 parameter version which lets you set the year, month, day, hour, and minute, all in a single operation. So I suspect that this could easily be a one-liner.

But, as always, the real WTF is how complicated date times actually are.

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I'm a Vicar in the CofE. I use ChatGPT to write my sermons and - according to multiple parishioners - I'm preaching brilliantly every week. I'd feel guilty but the stipend is piss poor and this frees up many hours per week to actually do proper pastoral parish work. Fuck it.

Told my daughter I could poo potatoes. Took one to the loo one day and once I'd done my No. 2 ran downstairs to show her. Next day she told her teacher. Made for an interesting parents evening. Been told I'm not allowed to bring it up in the father of the bride speech

At the gym changing room this morning, some tosser had his phone on loudspeaker, having a full blown loud as fuck conversation whilst he got changed. I went over using the hair dryer that was right next to him. He ended the call. I've never used a hair dryer previously. Victory.

My wife is four weeks pregnant. She still does tests every day as can't believe it. Working from home one day I did one out of boredom. Obviously no lines showed. She saw it in the bin and panicked and did four more. Sorry.

If you listen to enough developers talk about how they made their games, you’ll hear a phrase pop up repeatedly. It will sound something like this: every game that reaches release is a minor miracle. The act of creating a game, particularly a modern AAA game, is a turbulent process – the industry is full of stories about an early idea that undergoes huge transformations: genres change, settings shift, mechanics are invented and dropped. Many projects stop here, unable to fulfil their promise. Of those that make it through, many games – possibly most – will be released as something fundamentally different to how they were imagined in the first place.

Sea of Thieves does not share that story. Go back and read early interviews with the team at Rare, and you’ll realize this very quickly. Its developers were openly discussing features that would come to the game, years before they were playable, or sometimes even in development – not all of them even made it to the launch version, but almost every single one would eventually reach its pristine waters.

Celebrating its fifth anniversary today, Sea of Thieves is a very different and (excuse the pun) rarer kind of miracle. It’s a project that set up its core vision from the very beginning and – through a wild prototyping phase, a full shift in game engine, the choppy waters of launch, and its enormous growth since – never lost sight of the unique game it wanted to be. I had the chance to visit Rare ahead of the anniversary, and spoke to six people who were a part of the project from the very beginning, talking through how they made this miracle happen, the challenges they faced, and how, despite almost 10 years of development, Sea of Thieves only continues to grow.

The original talk wasn’t about an open-world adventure game about pirates. It was a very different game about spies.

Spies vs. Pirates

In 2013, in a meeting room set at the heart of Rare’s leafy, countryside campus, a small group of minds set out to decide what was next for the studio. After three Kinect Sports games, there was a desire to try something new, something radical. The fruits of that conversation are playable right now in the form of Sea of Thieves, a success story for Rare that changed how the studio makes games, how it thinks about new ones, and even the company motto.  But on that day, the talk wasn’t about an open-world adventure game about pirates. It was a very different game about spies.

“The earliest germ of an idea came out of us playing a party game called Werewolf, which is all about subterfuge,” says Creative Director Mike Chapman. “It’s about a game that showcases soft skills: verbal communication, social dynamics, player psychology. We were thinking: Is there a game that could showcase things like that?

“And we actually started with, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if it was about secret agents?’ Wouldn’t it be cool if I’m there completing my mission with you, but then you get a voice over the intercom saying, ‘Drop him.’ And you’ve got players tearing each other apart.”

The key idea here was about freedom, the ability to not just complete missions the game sets you, but set your own personal missions in a world with other players. The team came up with a mantra to encapsulate this: “Players Creating Stories Together.”

A month into the process, the team decided that the theme of spies wasn’t quite right, and didn’t offer the range of experiences Rare were looking for – but that Players Creating Stories Together very much did. So they went back to the literal drawing board. They toyed with various settings: games about dinosaurs, vampires, and more. But one idea stuck fast:

“What we liked about pirates is that the roles are defined,” explains Studio Head Craig Duncan. “The term ‘crew’ is already a small group of people going on adventure together. You could almost take the principles of the game we were thinking about and go, ‘Well, yeah, there’s no roles and goals – pirates play by their own rules, governed by their own sense of adventure.’ That can be motivated by wealth, or the spirit of the sea. So once we locked pirates in it was like, ‘That’s it. That works.’ And then you start all the hard work.”

It’s at this point, in early 2014, that Sea of Thieves was truly born. Four years ahead of launch, the team already had the driving force that makes up the entire game we know today – a game that offered a sea-blue slate to write your own stories on, and one that would evolve with the players over time, feeding new ideas into the mix as it grew. Now they just needed to find some designers to make it.

Thankfully, a solution was about to literally walk through their door. Around the same time, Rare had organized a game jam, and now-husband and wife design team Andy and Shelley Preston had assembled a group to work on a prototype they called Dead By Dawn.

Andy explains the concept: “It was a multiplayer experience where you had two teams within a map, and it was basically ‘build in the day, survive at night. But it had Sea of Thieves’ physicality, players running around together cooperating, using physical props to work together.”

A three-day jam saw Andy and Shelley’s little team get so wrapped up in their idea that they broke the rules and dedicated a month to the project, turning a tiny idea into a fully playable demo through relentless prototyping. Eventually, they decided to pitch it to Rare’s higher-ups – who happened be the people behind those early Sea of Thieves talks.

Andy grins as he recalls how well it went over: “[Producer Joe Neate] instantly said to [Creative Director Gregg Mayles], ‘See, this is what we should be doing, we should be building something. We shouldn’t be theorizing over paper one-sheets, we should actually be trying to build an experience together.”

Dead By Dawn was deemed a little too far outside of Rare’s normal output – but the way it had been made was exactly what the team behind the new pirate project had been looking for. Not long later, Andy and Shelley were called up to a boardroom, and told what they would work on next, with a familiar mantra at its heart:

“I can remember them standing in front of a whiteboard,” recalls Shelley. “It basically just said: ‘Players creating stories, sailing a pirate ship together.’ Everyone was really creatively open to what that could be like, and there was no real set remit. We just kind of jumped into a prototype and started creating.”

“Everyone was really creatively open to what that could be like, and there was no real set remit. We just kind of jumped into a prototype and started creating.”

Tools Not Rules

If you’ve watched Rare’s new documentary, you’ve seen the prototype. Created in the Unity engine, it was scrappy, ugly but, crucially, easy to work with. The team was able to come up with new ideas, and have them playable within the same day. It meant that Sea of Thieves emerged from the design depths incredibly quickly.

The game’s approach to ships – turning traditional gaming vehicles into something more like a level design players could move around through co-operation – came first. Then came the idea for a practically UI-less experience, asking players to interact with the world around them, not just follow a directional marker. Physical treasure, weather effects, and more emerged at high speed. The foundations of Sea of Thieves were set from the very beginning.

Andy and Shelley came up with a design principle for all of this: “Tools Not Rules”, the idea that everything presented to the player could be used more or less freely. You didn’t walk to a glowing marker on a mini-map to earn some coins – you consulted an actual map, rigged your ship, used a compass, scoured an island for clues, dug up the treasure, and returned it to an outpost. But along the way, you might accidentally head to the wrong island, find a different map, meet another set of players, and have an entirely different experience – an entirely different story.

The team was able to create a game so quickly that they became convinced they were onto something unique. In fact, they were so convinced by their ideas, they took another unusual step: they kept it a total secret, even from Xbox’s most senior leadership:

“The executives knew there was something,” Duncan explains. “But it was like, ‘Hey, we’ll let you know when we when we’re ready to let you know.’ And of course, when you do that, you create some veil of secrecy, which means people want to know more. And then it’s about how you play that to your advantage.”

Six months into prototyping, they finally revealed the game to their bosses, with Head of Xbox Phil Spencer and Creative Director Kudo Tsunoda asked to fly to Rare to finally find out what the team had been up to. But instead of simply watching a PowerPoint presentation, a controller was eventually put in their hands. Appropriately for the game in question, Rare didn’t want to just tell them a story – they wanted them to make their own inside the prototype.

You can watch a clip of that first ever playthrough below:

The executives played a version of Sea of Thieves that, visuals aside, was strikingly similar to the core of what you can play today. After that, they were shown an in-engine art diorama to see what it would look like – another facet of the game that stayed remarkably consistent from the earliest days of the project.

This isn’t the way games are normally revealed to executives – and it worked beautifully. Instead of talking about the business aspects of the game, the new players swapped stories about what had happened in their playtest. Spencer had played by the rules, and set out to find treasure with his crew. Tsunoda, on the other hand, betrayed his crew, stole their treasure and then jumped overboard to swim to another ship, and swung it round to start a battle. Rare hadn’t planned this out, but the tools they’d offered allowed it to happen organically.

The theory was proven out, and Sea of Thieves was formally greenlit.

The team was so convinced by the prototype, they took an unusual step: they kept it a total secret, even from Xbox’s most senior leadership.

Ripping Up the Roadmap

After this came the tough part. Sea of Thieves was intended to be made in the separate Unreal engine, so much of the work after this point became not about improving on what the team had, but recreating the Unity version in Unreal. It was a far slower process than they had been used to, forcing them to unite the mechanics, art, online elements, and more, rather than steam ahead on design alone.

In pure mechanical terms, the version of Sea of Thieves that emerged at launch was in some ways less advanced than the prototype it had come from. Some features had to be deprioritized in order to get the game out in time, leading to a version of Sea of Thieves that offered the spirit of what Rare was aiming for, but not at the scale it had planned for. The response was tough, but fair – players liked what they had, but didn’t feel like they were able to do enough with it. Rare changed approach:

“We ripped up our roadmap,” says producer Joe Neate. “As soon as we launched, we were like, ‘Okay, a whole new captaincy system, that’s not what people want right now.’ They want more of the ingredients in this world, right? They don’t want another system to just build on top of the ingredients you’ve got – and so, straightaway, we changed our plans then.”

For a time, development became primarily about responding to players, not building back to the prototype vision. The Megalodon was added to allow for PvE interactions between players. AI ships were added to allow for more combat opportunities without griefing other players. The team began working on the narrative Tall Tales, to give players a goal, without compromising on the more organic story ideas the game world offered.

But, as time went on, the team began to find opportunities to build back what they’d been playing behind closed doors for so long. The prototype, and the clarity of that original idea, was so strong that it became a blueprint for what was to come.

Everyone I speak to on the team has a different answer for exactly when Sea of Thieves matched their original vision for the game, but it’s generally agreed that the one-year Anniversary Update was a watershed moment. A year after launch, the game wasn’t just matching the prototype for mechanics, it was introducing ideas the team never would have thought about in the same way without the influence of its players. This was truly the evolving experience the team had dreamed of, a game and a world that reacted to the people inside it, and a space where players really could create their own stories.

From there, the process of continuing to develop Sea of Thieves has been a mix of building on those original ideas, and adding ones the team never could have foreseen. Ship fires, captaincy, and burying treasure for other players to find came out of the game’s earliest plans. Meanwhile, game-wide votes on the future of the Golden Sands outpost, and the enormous, unexpected Pirate’s Life update – a crossover with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean – emerged as new opportunities and technical advances popped up.

But key to every one of these additions is that you can categorize them all as new ways for Players to Create Stories Together. No matter how difficult the challenge, or how wild the idea, Sea of Thieves has lived by its own game development code, as steadfastly as its pirates stick to their own.

“I think 10 years of Sea of Thieves will feel like a long time – but also, we’ll blink and be there. And I still think we’ll have unfinished business when we get to that point.”

Sailing for the Horizon

That unique vision has led to another unusual situation: 5 years in, Sea of Thieves still doesn’t truly have imitators. While it sits within an increasingly busy world of game-as-service titles, there’s nothing quite like this game, from its mechanics, to how it releases new content, to its community.

“There was a time before the game came out when we were kind of looking over our shoulder going, ‘Someone is going to beat us to the punch,’” says Art Director Ryan Stevenson. “And even while we’ve been out, no one else seems to be doing it.”

“It’s not a template is it?”, adds Shelley Preston. “It’s not an easily copyable idea. It’s a reflection of a group of people in a certain time and their creative way of thinking around our take on a pirate game. That’s very unique to us.”

That ability to make a game that’s so unique to Rare that it doesn’t exist already, and continues to be unique, was such a lightbulb moment for the studio that Rare even changed its company motto in order to make more games like it. Head to the bottom of its website, and you’ll read: “We create the kind of games the world doesn’t have.” Sea of Thieves was the starting point for that ideal – and it’s one that’s helping to guide the still-mysterious Everwild, and whatever else the team might cook up in the future.

But Sea of Thieves’ tale is far from a closed book. At five years old, there’s much the team wants to add. In fact, they recently had a meeting to plan out the next five years. I hear about ideas for smuggling mechanics, the option for players to be rewarded for protecting other players from griefers, and even a mechanic for ‘painting’ screenshots that Chapman once told me about, two years before the game had even launched (and you can even see in the gallery of prototype screenshots above).

The beautiful thing about a vision as clear but as horizon-wide as Players Creating Stories Together is that the team feels like they’ll never truly run out of ideas – they’ll keep making new things as long as there are players to enjoy them. Chapman puts that drive to keep creating succinctly:

“I think 10 years of Sea of Thieves will feel like a long time – but also, we’ll blink and be there. And I still think we’ll have unfinished business when we get to that point.”

Anniversary Activations

The Sea of Thieves team are doing plenty more to celebrate the game’s fifth anniversary. Here’s what’s going on for the rest of the month:

• The feature-length Voyage of a Lifetime documentary made to mark the fifth anniversary premieres today, March 20, on the Sea of Thieves YouTube channel: youtube.com/seaofthieves
• There’s still time to pick up the Lustrous Legend Figurehead as a free anniversary login bonus – just take to the waves in Sea of Thieves before 10am UTC on March 22.
• Set a course for New Golden Sands Outpost to find the time-limited fifth anniversary picture wall where pirates can pose and take selfie portraits for posterity!
• The Pirate Emporium will run an extended Anniversary Sale until March 28, with up to 60% off cosmetics from classic sets, Rare heritage ranges and items themed around Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean.
• A special Community Weekend runs from March 25-27 with free gifts and in-game multipliers in the community’s hands – find out more in the anniversary article at aka.ms/SoT5thAnn

Sea of Thieves Deluxe Edition

Microsoft Studios

☆☆☆☆☆ 79

★★★★★

$49.99 $39.99

Get it now

Xbox Live Gold membership required to play on Xbox One; sold separately. ========= Celebrate five years of Sea of Thieves with this special edition, which includes a copy of the game with all permanent content added since launch, plus a wide-ranging assortment of extra cosmetics and collector’s items. In addition to the 2023 Edition bonus content – Hunter Cutlass, Hunter Pistol, Hunter Compass, Hunter Hat, Hunter Jacket, Hunter Sails and 10,000 gold – this edition of the game comes with a further Deluxe Bundle containing the Black Phoenix Figurehead, Black Phoenix Sails, Crab Dab Emote, Deck Hide Emote and 550 Ancient Coins for use in the Pirate Emporium.

Sea of Thieves 2023 Edition

Microsoft Studios

☆☆☆☆☆ 942

★★★★★

$39.99 $31.99

Get it now

Xbox One X Enhanced

PC Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass

Xbox Live Gold membership required to play on Xbox One; sold separately. ========= 2023 Edition Out Now Celebrate five years since Sea of Thieves' launch with this special edition of the game, which includes a copy of Sea of Thieves itself with all permanent content added since launch, plus a 10,000 gold bonus and a selection of Hunter cosmetics. The Hunter Cutlass, Pistol, Compass, Hat, Jacket and Sails will ensure you cut a formidable figure as you set sail for adventure! About the Game Sea of Thieves offers the essential pirate experience, from sailing and fighting to exploring and looting – everything you need to live the pirate life and become a legend in your own right. With no set roles, you have complete freedom to approach the world, and other players, however you choose. Whether you’re voyaging as a group or sailing solo, you’re bound to encounter other crews in this shared world adventure – but will they be friends or foes, and how will you respond? A Vast Open World Explore a vast open world filled with unspoiled islands and underwater kingdoms. Take on quests to hunt for lost loot, forge a reputation with the Trading Companies and battle foes from Phantoms and Ocean Crawlers to Megalodons and the mighty Kraken. Try your hand at fishing, make maps to your own buried treasure or choose from hundreds of other optional goals and side-quests! Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life Play the Tall Tales to experience Sea of Thieves’ unique narrative-driven campaigns, and join forces with Captain Jack Sparrow in Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life, an acclaimed original story that brings Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean sailing into Sea of Thieves. These immersive and cinematic quests provide around 30 hours of the ultimate pirate adventure. A Game That’s Always Growing With each Season bringing in new game features every three months alongside regular in-game Events and new narrative Adventures, Sea of Thieves is a service-based game that’s still growing and evolving. Check back regularly to see what free content has been newly added, and see how far you can climb through each Season’s 100 levels of Renown to earn special rewards. Become Legend On your journey to become a Pirate Legend you’ll amass loot, build a reputation and define a unique personal style with your hard-earned rewards. Adventurer. Explorer. Conqueror. What will your legend be?

read this thread about cake

nitter.net/JuliusGoat/status/1637831819818151940#m

This part. Chefs kiss.

Acclaimed actor Lance Reddick has died at age 60, per TMZ reporting. Police found his body at his home this morning, and while cause of death has not been determined, it is believed to be of natural causes.

Suffice to say, this is devastating news. Lance Reddick brought gravitas to a variety of roles over the decades, perhaps most prominently as Cedric Daniels on The Wire, but video game enthusiasts may know him for playing Sylens in Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. He also starred as Albert Wesker in the recent, ill-fated Resident Evil Netflix series, and he voiced Commander Zavala in Destiny 2 (where players are currently paying tribute to him).

In recent years, Lance Reddick had additionally become known for playing Charon, concierge at the Continental Hotel in the John Wick franchise, and before he died, he had been promoting John Wick: Chapter 4. According to TMZ, he was actually scheduled to promote the movie on The Kelly Clarkson Show next week.

These days, age 60 is a frustratingly young age to die, making his passing rather shocking. However, his body of work speaks for itself, and the characters he’s brought to life are already fondly remembered. Lance Reddick has died, but he will continue to live on in his performances and in our memories for many, many years to come. Some posthumous releases are on the way as well, such as his role as Zeus in Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+.

I often favourite hideous items on Vinted to look back at when I need a laugh. However my bf logged into my account looking for present ideas and I'm now the proud owner of a pair of mustard pleather trousers and set of animal print headscarves. Worst birthday ever.

Once the family are in bed, I often enjoy a few quiet hours casually gaming. I've done it so regularly that I've inadvertently trained the dog to recognise the Xbox power down noise to mean that it's time to be let out for piss before bed and she instantly waits by the back door.

ASMR videos don’t really do anything for me, but I could watch videos of gears and mechanisms doing their thing all day long. I watched this video of 20 mechanical Lego widgets being combined into one useless machine, absolutely rapt. Bevel gears, rack and pinion, camshaft, worm gear, universal joint, Schmidt coupling — this thing has it all.

See also Gears and Other Mechanical Things and a Treasure Trove of Over 1700 Mechanical Animations. (via the kids should see this & meanwhile)

It’s Oscar night! Which means I’m curled up on my couch, watching the ceremony and doing data entry, updating my spreadsheet tracking the illicit distribution of Oscar-nominated films online.

The results are in, and once again, nearly every nominee leaked online in HD quality before the broadcast. All but one of this year’s 30 nominated films leaked online — everything except Avatar: The Way of Water.

But not a single screener for a nominated film leaked by Oscar night — for the first time in the 20 years I’ve been tracking it.

What Happened?

For the first five years of the project, every year from 2003 to 2007, over 80% of screeners for nominated films made their way online. And now, not one screener leaked.

If you’ve read my past reports, you’ll know this is the culmination of a long-standing trend.

Oscar voters still get access to screeners for every nominated film, now entirely via streaming. But they typically get access to screeners after other high-quality sources for the films have appeared online: typically from other streaming services or on-demand rentals.

This is a huge difference from 20 years ago. Back then, screeners were highly-prized because they were often the only way to watch Oscar-nominated films outside of a theater. Theatrical release windows were longer, and it could take months for nominees to get a retail release.

But over time, things changed. The MPAA, often at the behest of Academy voters, was committed to the DVD format well into the 2010s, which became increasingly undesirable as 1080p and 4K sources became far more valuable than 480p resolution.

A shift from theaters to streaming meant more audiences demanded seeing movies at home, shrinking the window from theatrical release to on-demand streaming and rentals. Then the pandemic put the nail in the screener’s coffin, as people stayed home.

You can see this trend play out in the chart below, which shows the percentage of nominated films that leaked online as screeners, compared to the percentage that leaked in any other high-quality format.

In last year’s analysis, I wondered if the time between theatrical release and the first high-quality leak online would start to increase again, as more movies return to theaters and studios experimented with returning to longer windows. That appears to have happened, as the chart below shows, but there may be another contributing factor.

Last December, Torrentfreak reported on the notable lack of screener leaks, mentioning rumors of a bust that may have taken down EVO, the scene release group responsible for the majority of screener leaks in recent years. (Update: Three days after the Oscars aired, those rumors were confirmed. Portuguese authorities arrested EVO’s leaders in November 2022.)

Regardless of the reasons, it seems clear that no release group got access to the Academy Screening Room, where voters can access every screener for streaming, or perhaps the risk of getting caught outweighed the possible return.

Closing the Curtain

In 2004, I started this project to demonstrate how screener piracy was far more widespread than the Academy believed, and I kept tracking it to see if anything the Academy did would ever stop scene release groups from leaking screeners.

In the process, this data ended up being a reflection of changes in how we consume movies: changing media formats and increasing resolution, the shift to streaming, and shrinking release windows from theaters to streaming.

I didn’t think there was anything the MPAA could do to stop screeners, and ultimately, there wasn’t. The world changed around them and made screeners largely worthless. The Oscar screener appears to be dead and buried for good, but the piracy scene lives on.

And with that, it seems like a good place to wrap this project up. The spreadsheet has all the source data, 21 years of it, with multiple sheets for statistics, charts, and methodology. Let me know if you make any interesting visualizations with it.

Thanks for following along over the years. Ahoy!

I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch Fire:

When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.

My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence. What follows is my (relatively brief) attempt to explain where kottke.org came from and why it’s still going.

It’s an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since I experienced that “thunderbolt that completely changed my life” — it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses and organizes an ever-growing share of human information and activity. As a web designer in the 90s and early 00s, I helped companies figure out how to use the web for business, but the core of my own personal experience of the web has always been self-expression and making websites for individual humans to read & experience.

I started making personal websites shortly after discovering the web, first using Notepad and then a program called HTML Assistant. My first site had an audience of exactly one — it lived on a 3.5” floppy disk and was mostly a jazzed-up version of my bookmarks file that I carried back and forth from my dorm room to the physics lab. When I was finally able to finagle public server access, I launched a site called “some web space” (all lowercase, because 90s)¹ that included a hand-drawn graphic of swiss cheese and a bunch of links related to Pulp Fiction. This is me right around that time:

That tiny baby Jason loved cheese, Quentin Tarantino, and the World Wide Web, bless his little heart.

Anyway, the sites I built then were terrible at first, but I was obsessed and slowly they improved. some web space turned into a site called 0sil8, which became a playground of sorts for my experiments in writing and design. Every few weeks/months, I’d create a new “episode” to put up on 0sil8 and gradually I gained an online following and became part of a community of folks who were likewise experimenting with the web.

Around this time, more and more of what I was reading online were diaries and these things called weblogs.² The updates on weblogs & diaries were smaller but more frequent than on other personal sites — their velocity felt different, exhilarating. But by the time I actually got interested enough to start my own weblog, there were so many of them — hundreds! maybe thousands! — that I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested. I forged ahead anyway and on March 14, 1998, I started the weblog that would soon become kottke.org. It was called Notes and here’s what it looked like:

I’m not gonna go through the whole history of the site, but it eventually took off in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Since 2005, kottke.org has been my full-time job and supports my family. I’ve met so many people from all over the world through my work here, including many life-long friends and my (now ex-) wife. I’ve spoken at conferences and travelled the world. I got to be on TV. I launched a membership program (which you should totally join if you haven’t already) that has given the site an incredible boost as it powers through its third decade.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of kottke.org, I wrote this:

I’ve been reading back through the early archives (which I wouldn’t recommend), and it feels like excavating down through layers of sediment, tracing the growth & evolution of the web, a media format, and most of all, a person. On March 14, 1998, I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little about actual real life. I was a cynical and cocky know-it-all. Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.

But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself. What the site has become in its best moments — a slightly highfalutin description from the about page: “[kottke.org] covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity” — has given me a chance to “try on” hundreds of thousands of ideas, put myself into the shoes of all kinds of different thinkers & creators, meet some wonderful people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to call my friends), and engage with some of the best readers on the web (that’s you!), who regularly challenge me on and improve my understanding of countless topics and viewpoints.

I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you. I feel so so so lucky to have had this opportunity.

That all still rings incredibly true and I cannot improve upon it as an explanation of why I’m still here doing this moderately anachronistic thing. Thank you all so much for reading. ♥

P.S. You can read my thoughts on past anniversaries and view some previous site designs here: 10 years, 18-ish years, 20 years, and 24 years.

P.P.S. I wrote a separate post about this yesterday, but if you find value in what I do here, I’d appreciate if you’d support the site by purchasing a membership. And to everyone who has supported the site over the years, thank you so much!

P.P.P.S. Last one: I’m gonna write more about this later today, but I’ve turned ordering back on for Kottke Hypertext Tees for the next 24 hours or so. Go get ‘em!

P.P.P.P.S. Ha, I’ve thought of one more thing: I’ve turned comments on for this post! kottke.org used to allow comments on every post, but it’s been almost 8 years since the last time they were on. I figured it would be fun to try them out today. No idea if they’re even going to work or how long they will be available, but let’s try it out. If you’d like to share how long you’ve been reading the site or leave any memories or observations, feel free. My inbox is open as well. Ok, that’s really all for now! Thank you!

Update: A bunch of comments got hung up in a spam filter in my CMS that I didn’t even know was active. They should be all through now…sorry about that!

1. Fun fact: when kottke.org started, I wrote everything in lowercase. At some later point, I switched to mixed-case and went back through the old entries and edited them to use mixed-case too.↩

2. Peter Merholz wouldn’t coin the word “blog” until sometime in early 1999; they were known as weblogs before then.↩

The Oscars are this weekend and in this video, some of the nominees — Paul Mescal, Rian Johnson, Todd Field, Camille Friend (hairstylist for Wakanda Forever) — read rave reviews of their work from Letterboxd. Watch to the end — Ke Huy Quan’s letter, and his reaction to it, is especially wonderful.

Ten years ago, I met the founders of Letterboxd in New Zealand. The site was tiny then and had just gotten out of invitation-only mode. But they were enthusiastic and had a vision of making an online space for discussing and reviewing movies. It’s wonderful to see the site become such a key part of the film industry. (via @jasonsantamaria)

In a Twitter thread, Meta (formerly Facebook) Head of Commerce and Fintech Stephane Kasriel announced that they would be "down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses". Meta had only launched its support for NFTs in Facebook and Instagram partway through last year — a bit late to the NFT craze, which had largely cooled by that point.

Mark Zuckerberg had once talked about eventually using NFTs for Meta's metaverse projects, suggesting that eventually "the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, [could] be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places". It sounds like that plan may no longer be on the table now.

• Tweet thread by Stephane Kasriel
• "Meta is killing NFT support on Facebook and Instagram" , Engadget

I sometimes sit with my father as he winds up phone scammers, pretending to be a wealthy senile old man - for up to 90 minutes. It's been 50 years, but we've finally found something to bond over.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Hogwarts Legacy.

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Dead Space (2023), Hi-Fi Rush, Forspoken, Pentiment, High on Life, and The Callisto Protocol.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about the end of silent protagonists and how comedy in games should be more than quips.

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For additional context surrounding the game, we have an explanation of the J.K. Rowling controversy tied to Hogwarts Legacy.

Transcript

Yes, Nick, I promise not to get us demonetised in the first thirty seconds. So, as I’m sure you know, Hogwarts Legacy is based on the work of JK Rowling, who is a massive TERFy C-word. As such, reviewing it puts one in an awkward position online, as the feeling in some circles is that even acknowledging it is giving oxygen to her and her horrible C-word opinions. But damn it I have a job to do and I feel bad for the no doubt hundreds of ground-level people on the dev team who probably think she’s a C-word as much as any of us at this point, so how about this: I’ll review the game strictly on its own merits, but start out by affirming as clearly as possible that I think JK Rowling is a – we’re past thirty seconds now, right? Cunt. Does that offset things enough? The game’s set in Victorian times and none of the Harry Potter characters from the books appear in it, so if it’d make you feel any better you could just squint and try to convince yourself it’s an adaptation of The Worst Witch. Or Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic. Or the Spellcasting 101 series. Or Discworld. Or any of the other ten million things that came up with the idea for a nerdy schoolboy wizard BEFORE JK Rowling got her sallow TERFy hands all over the concept.

My dog knows where all the Pokemon Go Gyms are in my town. Every time I'm out with him and stop to take one down, I subconsciously slip him a treat. Now he stops at each location himself out of habit.