Monthly Archives: February 2022

Article note: Well, that's going exactly as expected. The controller I got as a freebie will be a fun bit of ephemera one day in the not-too-distant future.

Enlarge / How much longer can Stadia stay aloft? (credit: Google / Aurich Lawson)

As Stadia continues to cling to life inside Google, a new report from Business Insider's Hugh Langley sheds light on what the cloud gaming division has been up to for the past few months. As usual, the report is not promising.

According to the BI report, the "Stadia consumer platform" has been "deprioritized" inside Google and now only takes up an estimated 20 percent of the Stadia division's time. After Google closed its only first-party studio last year (before it had ever produced a game!), a blog post hinted that a white-label service would be Stadia's future. We saw a bit of what that would look like in October when AT&T released a cloud version of Batman: Arkham Knight that was secretly powered by Google Stadia. BI reports that service will be called "Google Stream" and that "the focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream."

The white-label Stadia service would work a lot like the way Google Cloud Platform works—companies that don't want to run their own cloud gaming service could just use Google's back end and distribute their games however they want. Like with Batman, presumably there are no branding requirements necessary and no need to plug into the Stadia store or the rest of the Stadia ecosystem.

Article note: It took me a minute to figure out what they were going on about about because the article is all emotional pleas no content. They're talking about Sodium Nitrite. The extremely common preservative/curing agent used in meat curing and sausage making (its why hot dogs have that pink color). Its LD50 is like 71mg/kg, it's less dangerous than most cleaning products.

Article note: Narrator: it isn't. If the power companies were extractive enough to decline standard strip-heaters in equipment before, they've pocketed most of the repair money and slapped a band-aid on it.

Enlarge / Texas Governor Greg Abbott, center, during a press conference at the Capitol on June 8, 2021, in Austin, Texas. He signed two bills into law to reform the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (credit: Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)

Nearly one year ago, the state of Texas suffered a debilitating power outage to its independent power grid amidst one of the coldest Arctic freezes in decades.

During this power outage crisis, 246 people died, and homeowners and businesses suffered an estimated $200 billion in damages as pipes froze, melted, and then burst. In the aftermath of this crisis, the Republican-led legislature vowed to shore up the state's power grid. Critics, however, said the state officials only took care of the power companies at taxpayers' expense and left power-generating facilities at risk to extreme cold.

Now, we may be about to find out the truth of the matter.

Article note: Cute.