YouTube introduces an ad-free tier, changes its mind. YouTube’s offer is to rival TV ad revenue for content providers. They’re also going hard on AI content creation tools to allow creators to pump out more videos to keep eyeballs. Of course, to pay for all of this, they’ll continue to flood the platform with ads.

YouTube competes with Netflix for viewers' time. Unlike Netflix's walled garden approach, YouTube offers a mix of subscriptions, memberships, and creator payouts. However, YouTube has been steadily adding more viewing interruptions than Netflix. At some point, this may become so annoying that viewers will go elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Google is tweaking this plan for the worse, as it will soon add adverts to short videos. The company has seemingly started sending emails to customers who are using the Premium Lite tier, informing them about the change that begins later this month, on 30 June.

Fantasy game books for kids in the 80s and 90s. You’d flick through them in the bookshop, and there was something dangerous-looking every few pages. It was great. You’d wonder, ‘I’ll have to fight that?!’

This time of year I enjoy looking at all the new games I won’t have time to play. But then I see most of them are built on the jittery, traversal-stuttering mess that is Unreal Engine 5. Then I’m relieved I won’t have time to play them.

The next time you go to pay at a supermarket, look up. I remember doing this years ago at the Amazon Go in Seattle and being disturbed by the arrays of cameras looking down. Supermarkets are catching up. You’ll take something off a shelf soon, and a camera lens will stare back at you from the shelf.

Mac development hero, Bill Atkinson, has died. He leaves a lot of fingerprints on modern computing. He also created the Venice font. The only original Mac font not created by Susan Kare.

Ballerina. Now that Keanu’s knees have given out, the John Wick stunt show needs a new face. That face is Ana de Armas, and she’s fine. Two hours, which I found long, but you know what you’ll get with this John Wick continuation. Nothing else to say.

I have low expectations for Ballerina (John Wick spinoff). But as it’s pouring rain outside, let’s take a look.

Rogue One is more enjoyable to watch right after the finale of season 2 of Andor. In 2016, who’d have thought there would be an Andorverse? Well, besides creator Tony Gilroy.

Apple’s WWDC 2025 is next week. And when it comes to major releases, to paraphrase Sean Connery:

Captain Ramius: Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess against our old adversary - macOS hardware obsolescence.

Tonight, sleep. Tomorrow, world’s best uncle.

I’m in the queue to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order. There’s over a hundred people here. Nintendo will be around forever.

I’ll say one thing about Laurene Powell Jobs, in 2020 she said she was going to donate the family fortune.

"I’m not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that,” she added. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."

I raised an eyebrow at that as Steve wasn’t known for philanthropy. But her fortune is now half what it was when the article was written. Apple and Disney have both done well over the past five years, so that isn’t a decline in portfolio value. It’s giving.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Devil’s Candy doesn’t need a review. People set out with the best intentions and a lot of money. They made an unloved movie from a popular novel. That’s it. 

But I’ll mention that Melanie Griffith puts in a better performance in film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. Needy and damaged in the book, but dynamite on the screen.

Tom Wolfe despised the characters he wrote about in his novel. De Palma is ambivalent about the characters in his. Perhaps that’s why the book reading audience rejected the movie. The movie characters weren’t reptilian enough.

Today I finished reading the 30th anniversary edition of The Devil’s Candy, covering the torturous filming of Brian De Palma’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” While the movie is a dud with fun moments, nothing in this book screamed it was a fiasco. I’ll rewatch the movie before I review the book.

Season 2 of Andor shows you how good Star Wars should be. The World War II occupied France storyline. How ambitious people can slide towards hideous acts. The timeline compression that keeps the story moving. All the episodes work.

I took my nephew into a Warhammer store for the first time. But my mother was with us. Proving you can never be too young or too old to learn about the grim dark future.

This won’t go well.

This does raise a question: is Dark Sun coming back? One of the big reasons that WotC gave for not releasing the Mystic or the Psion was that there was no book for it to accompany.

Source: Bell of Lost Souls

Dark Sun is a post ecological collapse setting where social stigma, tyrannical rule and slavery are core themes of the setting. D&D 5.5E is about not offending people. The current writers can’t deliver the grit Dark Sun fans would like.

The Phoenician Scheme

A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative.

Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is amoral. But he’s a striver, and he’s so likeable that even enemies who want to see him dead can’t help but like him.

Liesl, Korda’s 21-year-old estranged daughter played by Mia Threapleton is the morality absent in the Korva genes. Threapleton plays the role of a pipe smoking trainee Nun deadpan and it works. She has moments where she looks like her mother, Kate Winslet. That passes when she pulls a knife on someone while giving them a dead eyed stare down.

Michael Cera is an actor who can set my teeth on edge, but he gives a marvellous performance in this as a bug loving academic, Bjørn Lund. He has a Nordic accent that I’ve heard in person and the comedic intonation is spot on. While del Toro is the standout of the picture, Cera is a close second.

What’s the story? It doesn’t matter. The Korda fortune will either continue for generations or it’s riches to rags for the family. Our three characters go off and their adventure decides the outcome.

It’s a tight 105 minutes, and I appreciated it didn’t overstay its welcome. I’ll watch this again when it gets a home release.

Moving day from Typepad has completed and it’s over now. Except for DNS propagation and SSL cert autoupdates. Both of which are like air travel; you have no control, so sit back and assume you’ll get to your destination eventually.

When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter

I finished reading Graydon Carter’s memoir “When The Going Was Good” last weekend. Committed to getting the most value out of the least amount of personal effort, he succeeded. Carter’s lazy ambition is impressive. I couldn’t guess to how many hours of the week he spent eating at some work related event. The man’s social battery appears endless.
 
The book, true to its title, recounts the magazine industry’s fall from influence and subscribers. Tech’s peak: TikTok boasts of free workplace wine. In publishing before the 2008 crash, it was how many months a writer may need to spend living at the Beverly Hills Hotel to cover a courtroom case.
 
Regardless, the title “When the Going Was Good” reflects some current tech industry sentiment. If AI holds even a quarter of the promise hyped, a lot of executive types in tech will pack a cardboard box the way executive types in glossy publications had to. Having destroyed so many industries, AI will speed up tech's self-cannibalization.