@Starcross It's crazy. I vividly recall my friend's daughter when she was just a couple days old. She's 18 now.

I swear I just turned into the withered husk from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Xbox's Game Pass bubble has burst. This doesn't mean the whole thing will come tumbling down, but the IDEA of Game Pass that Phil Spencer was shilling has come crashing into the practical realities of the service.

All these acquisitions were made while GP was still growing rapidly, which created the speculation necessary to keep these mega-investments and acquisitions going, and it's not anymore. The torrent has slowed to a creek, merely "dependable" instead of "ever rising".

Combined with the actual money changing hands now from these mega-mergers and acquisitions, and Microsoft now needs profitability, which more than anything else is what's burst that bubble.

Phil promised something that IDEALLY could provide that, but in the real world can't ACTUALLY provide that on the scale Microsoft now needs.

They overinvested, and now 9000 more employees have been left holding the bag.

They won't be the last.

The death of G4 and the gentrification of the net are intimately linked. The timing isn’t coincidence. They are both markers of a transition—from something wild and participatory to something orderly and commodified.

But if there's hope, it lies in remembering how it all felt at the time. Not the exact platforms or aesthetics (though I'd love those back too)—but that sense of building, sharing, being part of something raw and communal. That spirit can still be reborn. But it won’t be handed to us by any corporation or algorithm. We’ll have to carve it out of the wilderness again, just like before. My fear is that because that's such a huge ask, nobody's going to want to try. And those who do will become discouraged and quit.

The tragic irony is that G4’s 2021 revival failed for the same reason the original died: it tried to rekindle the old flame in a world that had extinguished the campfire. It wasn’t that the creators didn’t care. It's that the internet culture that would have welcomed them back was no longer in the room. We’d all been ushered into branded stadiums, locked into feeds designed not for interaction but consumption.

G4 didn't die because people stopped caring about games or tech. It died because the culture that gave it life—the unruly, open, deeply participatory internet—was beginning to be paved over. As the Wild Net gave way to clean, corporatized platforms, the need for a channel that reflected the community was lost. Who needs X-Play when you have 10 million Twitch streamers and a thousand sanitized “influencers” offering embargo-approved reviews? Who needs Attack of the Show when YouTube serves up algorithm-tailored content from creators with management teams and brand deals?

But those replacements aren't really community. They're products.

It just occurred to me that, while the death of G4TV in 2014 was caused by a WHOLE LOT of factors unrelated to the colonization and gentrification of the net, its decline and downfall, and ultimate shuttering, was roughly timed parallel to these things happening in the internet. As the Wild Net was clamped down on and order imposed, the internet lost its heart, and with that, its voice.

G4TV was more than a network about games and tech. In its heyday, it embodied the chaotic, irreverent, hype-chasing but deeply human spirit of the early internet. Shows like X-Play, Attack of the Show, and even Icons felt like the televised version of the message boards, Flash games, fan wikis, and endless webcomic scrolls that defined that era. They were messy, passionate, sometimes cringey, but unmistakably alive. The hosts were nerds who became rockstars not in spite of their weirdness, but because of it.

Just do want to say briefly that Bob Vylan saying “Death to the IDF” was an important, strategic and, yes, brave thing to do. Of course it pushed the limit of what is acceptable, was shocking to hear at Glastonbury (i was shocked!), but that was the point.

He single-handedly shifted the Overton Window on what is said. And he was right: The IDF is a violent war organisation that kills unarmed civilians on a daily basis and should indeed come to an end. We all know this, actually. #Gaza

Honestly I'd give nearly anything for the "Wild West" of the 1995-2012 internet to return. Yeah the technology sucked, but every day was a new headline of firsts, and there was a thirst for innovation and revolution.

Now the digital frontier's been settled and gentrified a dozen times over, and those of us who first put our stakes down have been muscled off our properties by big corporations, same as countless frontiers in real life.

Yeah, Linux is cool and all, but did they make a VHS Instruction Video Guide of the Top 25 Features with Jennifer Aniston & Matthew Perry?

Eggs were somehow considered too expensive so Americans voted to totally destroy our disaster emergency response services, our National Parks, Medicaid, energy development, and cancer research services.

It’s completely and utterly insane.

“When is cancer political?" Medical researchers, patients decry Trump admin's layoffs, budget cuts - CBS News:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-is-cancer-political-medical-researchers-patients-decry-trump-admins-layoffs-budget-cuts/

America is the only country in the world that could bring in fascism and end up with worse trains

Well, there's some good news.

Four years after her passing ,the Nichelle Nichols Space Camp for girls 14-18 will open next year in Huntsville, Alabama.

Lt. Uhura will live on to inspire a new generation of space explorers.

Representation matters.

https://people.com/late-star-trek-actress-nichelle-nichols-honored-with-space-camp-for-girls-exclusive-11762359

My praises go out to Thor this day. A huge thunderstorm hit out of NOWHERE and dropped temperatures enough for me to go out and do some out of house chores. Pretty sure He also power washed my car.

ᚦᛟᚱᚱ ᛖᚱ ᛖᚾᚾ

Dr. Phil’s Son Jay McGraw Is Tied to Minto Money’s 700% APR Loans — ProPublica

"McGraw settled a federal civil suit that had accused him of playing a key role in CreditServe Inc., a financial technology consulting firm […] with interest rates that can exceed 700%"

If you borrowed $100 at 700% APR, compounded daily, and let it sit for a year, you’d owe $2,452.

Dr. Phil’s kid is a dirtbag. https://www.propublica.org/article/minto-money-dr-phil-son-payday-lending-alaska

@Starcross I for one appreciate just raising my voice a tad and having things happen.

Star Trek promised me this my whole fucking life, but Alexa keeps vacillating wildly between useful and complete garbage, Google Assistant is a SHADOW of what Google Now was, and Cortana was probably the only one I really trusted (more like at the time, I knew what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft would each do with my data and Microsoft's approach offended me the least), and she was almost always on the ball, but then Microsoft nuked her and Copilot just isn't even half as helpful around the house.

If you want to create a wiki, good for you, but please DON'T create it on Fandom, they're horribly exploitive, plaster ads and crosslinks to their other wikis on your site, and have some questionable ties. And if you decide to move it elsewhere later, you'll have to compete with your old site.

@Jaden3

My parents will always be like "well Floyd was a thief" as though that excuses extrajudicial killing ever. Police are not judges, they are not juries, and they sure as hell are not executioners. No cop should be killing ANYONE. "Well I feared for my lif--" Every cop knows the risks they agree to take when they signed on. You agree to be in law enforcement, you accept that you may be horribly injured or even killed in the line of duty.

But because we allow cops to kill, and on such flimsy unprovable justifications as "oh I totally feared for my life mister judge person, honest!", and then protect them with shit like a massively distorted systemic read of qualified immunity, and it's no wonder every police department from sea to shining fucking sea is infested with ultra right wing militia nitwits, racists, abusers, and guys who go on to become domestic terrorists.

5 years ago today. George Floyd was murdered by a racist cop who knelt on his neck and choked him for over 9 minutes.
I was only a kid back in 2020 but I remember seeing this on TV and it shocked tf out of me and knew it was cops v us.
Remember George today but also all the other black men murdered by cops.
Preciate if yall could boost this🙏🏿
#GeorgeFloyd #blacklivesmatter

@verge Or they could just hire people to do people things.

The Searchers, the longest running pop band in history (68 years!), have announced they’ll disband after their final show in June at the Glastonbury festival. They’re all well into their 80’s but they say the reason for their retirement isn’t at all that they’re tired of performing: it’s that the traffic driving from show to show has become intolerable.

Seems like one to file under #TheWarOnCars