Profile avatar
michaelcrider.bsky.social
News/reviews writer for PCWorld. Formerly Android Police, Review Geek, How-To Geek, Digital Trends. Opinions are my own. I have a personal website, almost never updated: thegumshoe.com I write fiction: http://amazon.com/author/crider
512 posts 235 followers 180 following
Prolific Poster
Conversation Starter

Some complete jackass of a PR person has emailed me dozens of times, from three different addresses at three different domains to get around my blocks, begging for an interview with an AI CEO. At this point they're actively encouraging me to shit on this guy if I ever get a chance.

gonna be a fun lunch

This setup is SO FRIGGIN' COOL

"Oh, Michael, I love your chalet windows, they let in so much light!" "Thank you." "I bet they'd let in even more light if you, um, cleaned them." "They would. They would." "Why...don't you clean them?" "Because birds are fucking morons, and I'm tired of scraping their corpses off my deck."

Ah good we invented The Madness Rune from the classic novel Do Not Invent The Madness Rune

Don't threaten me with a good time

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

briefly put on the "green games showcase" and was immediately hit with an ad for a game filled with ai art from a developer with a big page about their crypto integration. and people wonder why i remain skeptical of this style of 'games can save the world' rhetoric.

The Fortnite Star Wars thingy is entirely skippable. Just a long hallway with a bunch of references, and a "here's what's coming next" thing at the end.

I worry that recommendation algorithms may be getting too good.

I am Ozymandias, king of kings! Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! If my math is right, I'm counting over 60 million damage in that final round. #9kings

This list is like the Avengers for people who only read airport books called something like "Leading Leadership for Leaders"

You betas just don’t understand that real men fight by whining about each other on their own dedicated social media sites they own specifically to insulate themselves from public mockery

"Sometimes it's like watching a wasp land on a stinging nettle: someone's going to get stung and you don't care." ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

the enemy of my enemy is not my friend but watching them smack each other in the nuts is still very funny

I checked out of the Continental after 3, when it was clear they could basically invent any situation or plot thread by pulling a Secret Assassin Club bylaw out of a hat. The action is still amazing, of course. But a little lore goes a long way, and it's gone way too far now.

Just gonna put this here, I'm sure I'll be needing it again

This guy's ball-crafting videos are fantastic, even when they're sponsored. www.youtube.com/shorts/ghOtH...

I don't think I've ever seen a sequence like this one where a clump of dirt from the pitcher kicks up from their shoes and explodes mid-air due to ball in the pitching sequence give the camera operators of this game an emmy for this moment from Oregon-Ole Miss

Froggy.

The Game Informer Magazine Archive Expands buff.ly/jXajHSi "we’re now growing that archive to include all Game Informer magazine issues, going all the way back to issue number 1, first published in 1991."

I'm just not gonna buy any new Gearbox games from now on. Not because I don't like Borderlands or Risk of Rain (I do!), and not because I can't afford $80 for a video game. Just because Randy Pitchford is a jackass who needs to shut the fuck up, and I don't want to give him any more money.

The hospital

Time to post it again.

Hey writers: maybe if we devote all our free time to writing the most disgusting Zuckerberg, Bezos & Sam Altman slash fic imaginable & posting it where ever we can, it will forever inform their AI models.

I've been trying to de-Google my life lately, and finally switch to DuckDuckGo for most searches. To my surprise, it made Google Discover a lot better.

"If thieves had to pay for the things they stole, they'd probably stop stealing things."

Open AI’s valuation is at $400 billion. They used about 190,000 books to train their plagiarism bot. Randomly saying 25% of their value comes from that stolen dataset, I think they owe the authors about $526,000 per stolen book.

Being forced to beg a corporation to stay alive, a corporation that profits from denying you care, is fundamentally inhuman.

Every comic creator's obituary is like, he created this iconic character who was in a movie that made $700 million last year. He died with a net worth of $12 after the publisher countersued him.

Damn. Far and away my favorite Star Trek author, and I know plenty of comics people who feel the same way. Check out his Sir Apropos of Nothing series if you want a darker, more cynical take on Discworld-style fantasy.

Tim Cook gave Trump a million dollars to stop this from happening and I for one am shocked that such a moronic fucking decision somehow backfired

When your friend bails on Thursday night dinner, so you can sit in a hot bath and eat chips

On this week's What's Next?, I talk about The Farmer Was Replaced, a game that has taught me how to write Python scripts from scratch in the guise of managing a small farm. Highly recommended! next.content.town/p/learning-p...

God dammit we TRIED THIS ALREADY

Just a heads-up: When you a) have a political prisoner whom you've detained in violation of their right to free speech and b) have to be *forced* to let them hold their one-month-old baby, you're the bad guys.