Article note: That's pretty cool. In addition to other things, these are the people doing most of the Wine/Proton work, and having them be in a state less prone to private equity whims is a good thing. It looks like a much weaker form of employee ownership than a CoOp or something, but still leagues better than what usually happens these days.
Article note: I actually thought the concept was _super_ cool (a human-scale closed Starship for days-long RP) but uh... yeah it was niche and _absurdly_ expensive.
Disney World is shutting down the Galactic Starcruiser, the immersive Star Wars-themed hotel that costs around $5,000 for a two-night stay. In an update on Disney’s website, the company says the Starcruiser will host its final guests from September 28th to the 30th.
“We are so proud of all of the Cast Members and Imagineers who brought Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser to life and look forward to delivering an excellent experience for Guests during the remaining voyages over the coming months,” Disney’s update says. “Thank you to our Guests and fans for making this experience so special.”
Article note: Progress toward gibsonian decks (particularly the description from Idoru).
My desire for _decades_ from HMDs has been "Comfortable for extended text manipulation" and no one has delivered, but maybe it's finally happening.
Article note: This looks like a ridiculous amount of fun that I don't have time for right now.
Are you a hacker who happens to miss their Blackberry? Looks like there’s a new product that’s just your speed: the “Beepberry.” It literally grafts the keyboard of a Blackberry Classic onto a pocketable custom board designed to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero W, all paired with a 400 x 240 “Memory LCD” screen that looks like it was ripped from an old graphing calculator — but is a bit more sophisticated.
Beepberry is designed by Eric Migicovsky, founder of the gone-but-not-forgotten Pebble smartwatch and more relevantly co-founder of Beeper: the hacky all-in-one messenging app that stuffs every service from WhatsApp to iMessage (using a jailbroken iPhone) into one place.
I’m excited to introduce a little side project I’ve been working on:...
Article note: Oh boy, attempting regulatory capture on the current dangerous-only-because-humans-are-dumb-panicky-dangerous-animals hypetrain. That sure is a bad look.
Article note: There have been plenty of disappointments for B5 followups (...both because some didn't come to fruition and because some probably shouldn't have), this sounds both promising and credible.
Babylon 5 is coming back as an animated movie, series creator J. Michael Straczynski revealed last week, and today The Hollywood Reporter has the exclusive on what it’s about: Sheridan traveling through the multiverse in search of a way home.
The basic synopsis, via THR:
“Travel across the galaxy with John Sheridan as he unexpectedly finds himself transported through multiple timelines and alternate realities in a quest to find his way back home. Along the way he reunites with some familiar faces, while discovering cosmic new revelations about the history, purpose, and meaning of the Universe.”
As Straczynski hinted, many of the original surviving cast members are returning, including Bruce Boxleitner (Sheridan), Claudia Christian...
Article note: Because perverse incentives.
The vendors aren't building devices for customers, they're building profit-seeking vessels for VCs and megacorps.
If you build good devices, they need to work offline, without a subscription or external connectivity, and they need to freely interoperate over open standardized interfaces... and those conflict with the profit-taking misfeatures that attract funding.
Article note: Connected health gadgets are a mistake.
The value proposition to the manufacturer is almost entirely in terms of data harvesting, and health data is about as personal as it gets.
Plus, they're now bricking the devices since they didn't monetize them in the reprehensible ways they considered.
...Now can we get some decent offline health trackers?
Amazon is discontinuing its Halo project, including the Band and View fitness trackers and the Rise bedside sleep tracker, making the devices useless on August 1. Amid the company's largest-ever wave of layoffs and reports that even the popular Alexa voice assistant has failed to bring in money, this wasn't surprising. It's still sad, though, to realize that countless devices will become obsolete and at huge risk of becoming e-waste (despite Amazon telling customers to recycle devices through its recycling programs, all costs covered).
But perhaps it's just as well, because a report from The Verge today claims to peer into Halo's last attempts at survival. And the Halo that Amazon reportedly tried to realize is one we're happy not to encounter.
Halo reportedly creeped out its own creators
Reported plans for Halo could have pushed products to gather more data on how users exercise in order to provide virtual rewards, to offer recommendations, and to track performance. However, the features Amazon is said to have explored sound potentially invasive, collecting uniquely personal data.