25 Years of Edge

August 1993 and the UK saw a new type of gaming magazine. Edge was a serious look at the gaming industry and focussed on technology, the studios and in depth stories on the development of games themselves. I loved it and have blogged about Edge a few times over the years.

I’m still a subscriber and enjoy getting a physical copy each month. It’s read cover to cover and joins the full collection of Edge magazines that I’ve been close to ditching a couple of times but glad I held on to them even if the shelves storing them collapsed recently. They do weigh quite a bit.

Edge launched at a key time. The first PlayStation came out a year after launch in 1994 and a few years later saw the launch of the PS2, Gamecube and the first Xbox. It was a golden age with lots of hardware and game studio changes and Edge was often the first to break stories, have exclusive game previews and conduct interviews with developers that no one else could get.

The internet quickly changed the magazine market but Edge has survived mainly thanks to it’s original content. In the past I’d decide game purchases based on Edge reviews but not anymore. Games are often out for 4 or 5 weeks before a review will drop through the post. They are still a great read and the rare Edge 10’s still something to covet but they don’t make or break a game anymore. Looking back at issue 1 feels like ancient history – they had 2 pages dedicated to format charts and Syndicate was number 1. Rise of the Robots was previewed, just one of the many games that looked amazing but was actually terrible. Issue 3 was previewing VR which took some 23 years to land in anger – you can’t say Edge wasn’t ahead of it’s time. It was also when import games were king and paying £80 – £120 for a game wasn’t unheard of as it would take 6-9 months to land in the UK.

One last noteworthy aspect about Edge is the covers. Some of them have been amazing featuring exclusive art, use of different finishes and in pre-internet days and sometimes still today would reveal a new piece of hardware or preview of a game. Don’t get me wrong, some of them have been awful but they give a great visual history of the last 25 years of gaming. Click on the image to the right to see all 323 covers or visit my Edge Magazine Covers Flickr album to see them in detail.

Hard to believe that 25 years have passed since that first issue. I’ll also confess that I didn’t buy the first one and had to order a back issue after a few months. So glad I did! It seems unlikely with the pace of change, but here’s to another 25 years of the worlds best gaming magazine.

Weekly Digest

Life
Too much social media angst. Instead thinking about money, pensions, shares…you know, really positive thinking 🙂

Media
A quiet weekend so treated myself:

Batman Begins – Well made with great performances. A new darker Batman.
The Dark Knight – The best bad guy performance in a superhero film. Ledger lifts this and alongside a great story and some strong performances this still feels fresh despite it being 10 years old.
The Dark Knight Rises – Good but not great, the overall film just doesn’t land and despite the ball of rage that is Tom Hardy it doesn’t match The Dark Knight.

Watched them all in 4K and HDR. Batman Begins looked OK but the other two really shone especially the sections shot in IMAX format. There’s also an obvious difference between a 4K Blu-ray and 4K streaming. Tried some scenes on iTunes which was also 4K and HDR and the difference was notable.

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Breaking My Twitter

Over the years there’s been many issues with Twitter. Basic at the start, constant fail whales and then tremendous growth coupled with every brand, company, personality and interesting folk like you and me jumping on. I loved it. Then we saw hashtags, conversations, trending topics, filters, muting, timeline syncing and many many other features driven by third party app’s and eventually (mostly) adopted by Twitter themselves either by implementing and supporting a feature or buying a much love third party app.

Then Twitter needed to make money and grow to try and match Facebook et all.

So in come adverts, messing with timelines and deciding what I should see and in what order, showing my friends retweets…the list of decisions that alienated me as a user was long but that didn’t matter as I could use Tweetbot or Twitterrific to let me use Twitter how I wanted to use it. That only lasted so long.

Twitter fired the first warning shots to third parties by limiting how many users they could support. Then they started changing and updating API’s. That was the first sign that the writing was on the wall for third party apps. From today they are trying to strangle third party apps by shutting down old API’s and limiting what third parties can do. Arse.

While the API’s might be buggy, slow, costly I can understand that issue if it was maintained by a third party but they are written and supported by Twitter. The official mail they’ve sent out to their staff today smells of bullshit:

The User Streams and Site Streams APIs that serve core functions of many of these clients have been in a “beta” state for more than 9 years, and are built on a technology stack we no longer support. We’re not changing our rules, or setting out to “kill” 3rd party clients; but we are killing, out of operational necessity, some of the legacy APIs that power some features of those clients. And it has not been a realistic option for us today to invest in building a totally new service to replace these APIs, which are used by less than 1% of Twitter developers.

They’ve killed the API’s and decided not to replace them. They’ve decided to strangle the third party app’s that have driven so much of what Twitter is now. They quote that less than 1% of dev’s used the API’s killed today but I’d bet that a large proportion of influential and what I’d call power users are making use of these third party app’s that are now being neutered. They also talk about understanding why people use these third party app’s instead of their own. Maybe because you’ve killed them – where’s the Twitter app for Mac? How’s Tweetdeck? They’ve also published a blog about these changes which read’s as a big ‘fuck you’ to any user of a third party app and particularly developers of these services. I don’t think I’ve seen a company shoot itself in the foot in public more than Twitter have recently.

The mess they’ve got in to over the last 2-3 years around how toxic their platform is and the inability to take action on haters, abusers and nazi’s beggar’s belief at times. Despite that there’s so much value on Twitter which I why I stick around. So, what to do?

You could do like many are stating and deactivate your account from tomorrow. You’ve got thirty days to change your mind and it’s about trying to change Twitter’s direction…almost a ‘take back control’ moment which hopefully has a better outcome than the last campaign to use that slogan.

You could also move to another network. Mastodon has been around for a couple of years and is seeing some pretty good growth over the last two weeks thanks predominantly to Nazi’s. Go figure. It’s a bit more confusing to use than Twitter and I can’t see brands, politicians, celebs etc etc moving but it’s got potential for the tech community as has micro.blog which is a paid option for hosting your short form content. Again it’s niche but the conversation is good and toxicity levels low if not non-existent.

I’ll be investigating the latter two options and looking at how best to trim down my Twitter use which will be hard as I still have a lot of time for the platform. I surface great content through it and love the interactions that it offers. If Twitter would focus on dealing with toxic users and gave me some better app options even if that meant paying for, in my eye’s, an improved service then I’d be happy. Unfortunately it looks like a change in leadership is required for any of this to happen as the direction of travel is breaking my Twitter.

Weekly Digest

Life
End of another great sporting event in Glasgow. This one was a wee bit different in that the time trial passed my street. The speed these top cyclists can reach is impressive.

Media
Deadpool 2 – more of the same and pretty average.
Succession – off to a really strong start.
No Mans Sky – still enjoying. Updates have delivered a much better game.

Links

Weekly Digest

Life
Weather finally broke and while it’s been great to have a proper summer I loved having a bit of cooler, fresher and wetter weather again. One thing though – why couldn’t it have waited just one more day so I could have shot the blood moon. Bastard weather.

Media
Mission Impossible Fallout – best of the series and a cracking summer blockbuster. It’s a Tom Cruise vehicle but the supporting cast really do well to. Henry Cavill stood out not just cause he’s bloody huge but I can see him being the next big action star. Kudos to Laing Yang who really needs his own film to truly shine but biggest props to Christopher McQuarrie and the stunt team. The action was top notch and the set piece’s coupled with some great locations outdid the best of Bond.

No Mans Sky – Another great update adding multiplayer, better graphics, more missions….and much much more. I might have just bought this for the Xbox.

Links

Weekly Digest

Life
Impressed yet again with Apple support. Fixing my iPad screen which has a small brightness issue and couldn’t do enough to make sure I was satisfied with the fix.

Media
Darkest Hour – loved it. Oldman was really good.

Links

Moving Hosts

I’ve hosted my websites via DreamHost for years. Good price, excellent uptime and ok performance. Recently though I’d been starting to see the shared hosting plan I was on creak at the seams. My needs were pretty minimal but it looked like I would need to move to one of their VPS plans. It’s at this point all the podcast adverts rang in my head…so I tried Linode.

Linode’s front page says ‘hosting for developers’ which as Shak keeps saying isn’t me! However the plans looked appealing and I took advantage of an offer to try it for a month for free and so far it’s been really good.

Linode is a bit different to the hosting I’m used to. You pick a Linux distribution, tell Linode where in the world you want it deployed and boom – you have a Linux server that’s all yours. That means root access and ability to install whatever you like…but also means you are responsible for security and keeping the server updated.

Linode supports many distributions and also has an excellent set of tutorials and guides. Within a day I’d migrated a domain and WordPress website over to Linode from DreamHost. Performance was superb compared to what I was used to. I actually enjoyed controlling Apache directly, setting up redirects and getting to grips with installing security certificates.

Last weekend I migrated this blog. I’ve stuck with WordPress for now but starting to look at static site options so I’m more in control and rely less on plugins. Again the performance of WordPress on Linode is excellent and the website migration was pretty trivial. Next up is the podcast which will be a little more involved but hopefully not too bad.

If you are using shared hosting and thinking of moving to something more beefy then consider Linode. Requires more effort but being this in control of my sites is something I wish I’d done years ago.

Weekly Digest

Life
Great week off work. Needed the break and stayed away from checking mails which was good for the brain. Enjoyed the good weather – Scotland looks great in the sun, bugs and all. Also enjoyed the World Cup. Well played France, unlucky Croatia and something I didn’t expect to say…well done Russia. All the talk of violence turned out to be…all talk.

Media
Gave up and deleted some unwatched The Handmaid’s Tale. Plodding and miserable – there’s enough of that in real life without spending hours watching a drama which looks to have no hope.

Finally watched Ready Player One. While some of it was good, I found so much to dislike. The race for the first key was tiresome, the relationship between Art3mis and Parzival was rushed, there was some changes to the plot which didn’t work for me and the ending was just too saccharin sweet…but it’s Spielberg so probably no surprise. Just read the book and skip the movie. Or watch this homage from Gunship.

Links

Weekly Digest

Life
Scorchio week, well it was for Glasgow. I like nice weather but it’s a bit too hot for me. Also a good week at work with some positive news after a lot of hard graft…although you wouldn’t know it looking at the loons on Twitter. Just shows you should ignore much of the opinions on there or at least question if they are truthful and from a reliable source.

Media
The World Cup is eating up much of my time…and it’s been a cracker.

Reporting Trump’s First Year – loved this. First episode showed behind the scenes at the New York Times.

The Handmaids Tale – well made but it’s just so fucking grim. If it doesn’t reveal it’s hand soon I’m bailing.

Westworld – season 2 finale answered some questions but also posed quite a few more. Loved it.

Links

Weekly Digest

Life
A bit of sun and warmth…makes watching the World Cup in the house all the more enjoyable 😂

Media
Just over a week into the World Cup and I’ve really enjoyed it. Been the best start to a tournament in years.

Mario Tennis Aces on the Switch is a really nice game. Tough multiplayer!

Also giving Fortnite a proper go. Who knew that the most popular game in the world actually plays well.

Links