Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Bridging feels seamless. Behind the scenes, it's a technical marvel - Werd I/O

2026-05-11T22:29:51.000Z

Link: Bridging on a budget, by Ryan Barrett at A New Social

I’ve been in awe of Ryan Barrett since I first met him over a decade ago. He cofounded Google App Engine and led engineering at Color Health. His Bridgy tool, which allows people on different protocols and networks to follow and converse with each other, is now the basis of A New Social, the open social web non-profit that he runs with Anuj Ahooja. (Disclosure: I’m on the board.)

This post about how he reduced Bridgy costs is brilliantly detailed. It’s a good look into what’s involved when you need to refactor and reduce cost at scale — and what’s remarkable is how effective this work actually was.

“The end result of all of this is that we grew from 2k users to almost 150k, added a ton of heavy new functionality, and still managed to optimize and cut down costs from $.15 per active user per month to just $.03 or so.”

But it didn’t come easily. When you’re connected to the kinds of firehoses that Bridgy needs to be, and serving the kind of traffic it’s starting to handle, every optimization really counts. Because it’s open-source, you can dig down into individual optimizations and follow along each exploration. It’s painstaking work and a demonstration of their commitment to financial responsibility. Try vibe coding that.

Bridgy (and its parent A New Social) exists to help make the individual protocols less important: everyone should be able to collaborate with everyone else regardless of which platform they’re using. It’s the kind of thing that feels easy in the moment — but as this post proves, it’s far from simple under the hood.

To maintain their independence, publishers are fleeing Substack - Werd I/O

2026-05-11T21:58:25.000Z

Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax, by Emma Roth in The Verge

If you weren’t all that bothered about Substack platforming and compensating Nazis, The Verge reports that there’s a new reason to be worried: it costs more and its much-touted network doesn’t count for much if you’re not one of its featured writers.

Sean Highkin of The Rose Garden Report is quoted in the piece:

““When I first joined up, [Substack] gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me, which led to a good amount of growth,” Highkin says. “But once I wasn’t one of the ‘new recruited talent’ they could tout, they stopped featuring me and I saw my growth stagnate.””

Ghost (with Ryan Singel’s Outpost) cost less than half and drove a significant increase in subscribers. It’s mentioned here alongside Beehiiv and Kit, but is the only truly open-source alternative. That means you can use Ghost’s services (as I do), but if you’re dissatisfied, you can move to another provider.

This is in stark contrast with Substack, which has been promoting social media style following relationships over true subscriptions, and only allows creators to export their subscribers should they choose to move. Similarly, Beehiiv starts with open protocols like RSS switched off by default, locking readers into its ecosystem.

That freedom is important. As Casey Newton says in the piece:

“The more important thing is that we have a home on the open web that we control, and whatever anti-creator changes Substack is forced to make in the future to live up to its valuation we won’t be affected by.”

Every media company, publisher, and individual creator needs to maintain their platform independence if they want to make independent business decisions. It’s good to see more people taking this step, and it’s good to see that they have options.

Asking platforms to do better won't work. We need to force their hands - Werd I/O

2026-05-11T14:31:51.000Z

Link: You couldn't create a more anti-news internet if you tried, by Matt Pearce

Matt Pearce, Director of Policy for Rebuild Local News, writes a behavioral economics inspired take on why our current embodiment of the internet is so bad for news and information.

In particular, he sees the introduction of “nudges” as being a pro-information feature that search engines, LLM interfaces, and social media platforms could introduce:

“Social media, too, could choose to feature quality news outlets as “defaults” or provide subtle “nudges” on content that prompt users to donate or subscribe to the news outlets providing high quality news videos on platforms like Instagram, which don’t pay for themselves.”

I happen to particularly agree with his implied criticism of newsrooms going deep on Instagram, which usually leads to vanity metrics going up and to the right but not necessarily to conversions, impact, or revenue. And I think it’s true that nudges across all these platforms would have the effect he’s hoping for. But I think the tragedy is that there’s no real reason why any of these platforms would actually do it.

The internet as it stands is perfectly optimized for the needs of these platforms: engagement, advertising revenue, and rapid growth. Adding pro-social nudges would add friction to their well-oiled loops and take users off-platform. That’s exactly why Google has moved from leading people to the best websites for a query to answering those questions on-page: its own needs are best served by keeping users in one place. For them to make different choices, they would need to be far more benevolent architects than they are.

So, one path forward is that they need to be forced to do it. This would need regulations to govern the features an information platform can provide, and could have very adverse side effects. We’re seeing increased regulations with respect to things like age verification, so introducing regulation is possible — but that age verification tech has become a surveillance layer that impacts freedom of speech for vulnerable groups. And if publishers go too far in that direction, for example by dictating that platforms share more ad revenue, the networks might simply stop supporting news content at all, as we’ve seen in places like Canada.

Another is to build new platforms that make better choices for the whole ecosystem: more interesting for readers, more supportive of publishers. We’re already seeing a resurgence in new open social web platforms as well as a regrowth in older technologies like RSS. But the incumbent platforms aren’t going to simply go away; any new pro-social platform has to directly compete with them while also building an ecosystem. Still, I think it’s more promising, particularly in a world where incumbent platforms are losing goodwill with the public. The kind of thinking that Matt’s done here is very useful in helping to design what those new platforms might look like.

We’re not in a great place and there’s a hard road ahead. I’m sure of one thing: asking existing platforms to do better is not going to work. So we need to take matters into our own hands.

WordPress powers 47% of the web. Now it's more social, too - Werd I/O

2026-05-11T13:31:54.000Z

Link: Radical Speed Month — The Reader Meets the Fediverse, by Mattias Pfefferle

We’re closer to the entire web being a social environment than ever before. That’s very exciting to me on two fronts. The first is that it’s always been the promise of the web that anyone could publish and be heard, and baking in social functionality is a huge part of that. The second is that it undermines the stranglehold that traditional social media platforms have had on the public discourse and democracy itself. We need movements like these to grow.

So I think it’s cool that WordPress.com just shipped some major improvements to its core reader:

“The Radical Speed Month bet: ship three protocol adapters in four weeks, and prove the Reader can become a universal aggregator. RSS / Google Reader API (so any reader app can use WordPress.com as a sync backend), ActivityPub (so Mastodon, Pixelfed, and friends show up natively), and ATProto / Bluesky (because that’s where a real chunk of the social-web conversation has gone). One Reader, every protocol you care about.”

In practice, that means that you can read updated content from the web via RSS, the Fediverse, and ATproto from the WordPress dashboard — and connect any compatible reader app to that dashboard to make reading more seamless. (I’m a die-hard fan of Reeder Classic, and it sounds like that works.) WordPress is now compatible with reading the whole open social web.

But, of course, it’s WordPress, which is a publishing environment at its heart. It’s supported RSS forever, and has supported the Fediverse for a while. Now it supports Bluesky, too. Unlike most readers, which are read-only environments, you can interact with those sources right from your feed, including by publishing posts and replying to other people’s.

That’s something the indie web community has been thinking about forever: people like Aaron Parecki have been building their own interactive readers using open web standards, and I remember working on a simple prototype at an IndieWebCamp in Portland.

But it’s also an idea that has become more powerful as the open social web has grown. There are millions of people to interact with – all of whom might be publishing from their own websites, on their terms, free from intermediation. May it continue to grow and spread.

Find blog posts with missing featured images - and missing alt text - without a plugin - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-11T11:34:39.000Z

WordPress has the concept of "Featured Images". They are the images which show up when you share a blog post on social media or, on some themes, as the "hero" image.

How can you quickly and easily find any posts which don't have a featured image?

For this, I use WP CLI - it allows you to run complex WordPress actions and queries using the command line. After you have installed WP CLI you can get started.

Missing Images

On the command line, run:

wp eval 'foreach(get_posts(array("post_type"=>"post","post_status"=>array("publish"),"posts_per_page"=>-1,)) as $post){if(get_the_post_thumbnail($post)==""){$post_type_object=get_post_type_object($post->post_type);$link=admin_url(sprintf($post_type_object->_edit_link . "&action=edit", $post->ID));echo $post->post_date . " " . $link . " " . $post->post_title . "\n";}}'

Here's the code in a slightly more readable format:

foreach ( 
   get_posts( 
       array( "post_type"      => "post", 
              "post_status"    => array("publish"), 
              "posts_per_page" => -1,
       ) 
   ) as $post) { 
      if( get_the_post_thumbnail( $post)== "" ) { 
         $post_type_object = get_post_type_object( $post->post_type ); 
         $link = admin_url( sprintf( $post_type_object->_edit_link . "&action=edit", $post->ID ) ) ;
         echo $post->post_date . " " . $link . " " . $post->post_title . "\n";
      } 
}

That will print out:

2024-05-02 12:34:11 https://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123&action=edit "A post about sausages" 
2023-09-13 20:55:52 https://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=456&action=edit "I like cheese"
2021-12-31 15:43:33 https://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=789&action=edit "Touching computers"

You can then go and edit each of those posts to add a featured image.

Missing Alt Text

Adding alt text means that people who can't see images will still be able to understand what the picture represents. Here's another one-lines to find all featured images with missing alt text:

wp eval 'foreach (get_posts(array("post_type"=>"post","post_status"=>array("publish"),"posts_per_page" => -1,)) as $post){if(simplexml_load_string(get_the_post_thumbnail($post))["alt"]==""){$post_type_object=get_post_type_object($post->post_type);$link=admin_url(sprintf($post_type_object->_edit_link . "&action=edit",$post->ID));echo $post->post_date . " " . $link . " " . $post->post_title . "\n";}}'

And, in slightly more readable form:

foreach (
   get_posts( 
      array( "post_type"      => "post", 
             "post_status"    => array("publish"), 
             "posts_per_page" => -1,
           ) 
   ) as $post) { 
      if( simplexml_load_string( get_the_post_thumbnail( $post ) )["alt"] == "") { 
         $post_type_object = get_post_type_object( $post->post_type ); 
         $link = admin_url( sprintf( $post_type_object->_edit_link . "&action=edit", $post->ID ) ) ;
         echo $post->post_date . " " . $link . " " . $post->post_title . "\n"; 
      } 
}

Again, that lists the datetime of the post, its edit link, and its title.

No, if you'll excuse me, I have about 873 posts which need updating 🤯

Hey you, start communicating! - Kev Quirk

2026-05-11T08:25:00.000Z

Hey you, start communicating!

by David Jamieson

David talks about why it's good to reach out to authors when you read their content. Even if it's just to say hi.

Read post ➡

Hard agree with David's comments here - he and I regularly exchange emails, actually. I try to reach out to authors whenever I read something that resonates with me. I'll also try to share their work via posts like this too.

For me, blogging is the original social network; just because we're on our own spaces doesn't mean we can't be socially connected. That's why I offer comments, and a reply by email link on all posts, including my RSS feed.

So yeah, start communicating! 🙃

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Fear is information. - Westenberg

2026-05-11T03:52:45.000Z

The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The language is typically martial - as if fear were a hostile enemy, camped at the gates of your better self.

But this is sloppy thinking that comes at a cost.

When the body floods with adrenaline // the mind locks onto a single threat, the system is doing what it evolved to do: reporting on the state of whatever it is you care about. The signal bypasses the conscious mind almost entirely; which is why you can spend years lying to yourself about what you want and still flinch at the wrong moment when the thing you value comes under threat.

My basic claim is this. When someone (anyone, everyone) is afraid, they're telling you what they actually value. Their fear is a noisy, but no less precise indicator of both the surface threat and their underlying stake. A founder who keeps delaying their launch has a private worry that has almost nothing to do with the launch itself; they're deathly afraid of the dissonance between who they've been telling people (and themselves) they are and who the market will reveal them to be. The surface object of the fear is misdirection; the actual content is a value statement signed in the writer's own hand.

You can argue with the rationalisations that get layered on top of the stake, but you can't argue with the signal itself.

People will lie to you about what they want, and they'll lie to themselves with even greater conviction. But their fear won't lie, because it can't. It's older than language and it runs on a circuit that doesn't consult the part of the mind responsible for maintaining a neat // tidy story.

If you want to know what someone actually values, pay attention to what they protect.

A client who keeps fixating on the timeline is afraid of something other than the difference between three weeks and four. Their fear is tied to a board meeting, or a budget cycle, or personal pressure. A prospect who keeps circling back to price is using the price as a placeholder for a deeper fear about whether they'll be able to defend their decision if it all goes sideways.

If you read the fear correctly, you can stop arguing with the placeholder and start addressing the actual stake.

Your own fear works in much the same way; it's drawn from a part of you that doesn't bother with self-deception. When you flinch at sending an email, you're exporting data about that relationship. When a project keeps slipping in your calendar - whether or not you've admitted to deprioritising it - your behaviour is an indicator. The thought of having that one conversation you've been putting off makes your stomach turn because you're responding to a real assessment of the stakes that the "refined" part of your brain has refused to acknowledge.

I've caught myself avoiding decisions for weeks at a time, generating elaborate justifications for the delay, when the actual reason was a single, one-line fear I would've been utterly embarrassed to say out loud.

But the fear is almost always right.

Even if it's usually wrong about what to do with the information…

Fear is excellent intelligence, but it's not much of a strategy. It tells you what's at risk with high fidelity, and what to do about that risk with all the sophistication of a small mammal in a patch of tall grass; the amygdala, after all, rarely understands either long games or leverage. If you let the part of you that knows what's at stake dictate your response to that stake, you'll spend your life flinching away from the things that matter to you and into the things that look superficially safer.

This is why so much of the advice we give // receive about fear is suspicious of the concept without quite understanding why. People do get controlled by their fear, and that control does produce bad outcomes; but it's a mistake to conclude that fear is therefore a corrupting influence and that it has to be smothered. The fear is fine - useful, even. The problem is letting an instrument designed for tactical reflexes write the plan.

Acknowledge the fear and read it carefully; and refuse to be moved by it until you've understood what it's telling you.

Then decide whether the information changes the plan.

But stop treating fear as either a master or an enemy. It's an instrument, and like any instrument, you have to read it and you have to choose what to do with the data it offers.

The list of things you're afraid to lose is the most accurate map you have of whatever you've built your life around. If you want to know what actually matters to you, watch what your nervous system does when something’s threatened. The list might not match the vision document you'd recite on a podcast, but it's much closer to a source of truth.

I find that clarifying rather than depressing.

The world is not as opaque as the official explanations make it look. People are constantly broadcasting what they value, in a frequency older than speech, on a channel they can't turn off. You only have to learn to listen to it, and be willing to listen to yourself.

The discipline is the same in both directions; read the signal carefully, and then decide what to do with the information, free of any pressure to obey it.

[RSS Club] A Sneak Preview of Upcoming Posts - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-10T11:34:38.000Z

Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers!

As a little thank-you for being a member of RSS Club I thought I'd show you some trailers for upcoming blog posts.

I use the brilliant Editorial Calendar Plugin to organise all my scheduled blog posts. Here's what you can expect over the next month:

I tend to write in bursts - rather than once per day - and then spread the posts out. As I'm going on a long break soon, I want to make sure there are plenty of posts in the queue. There are also a bunch of posts scheduled over the next few years on specific dates.

Of course, if I unexpectedly die, I guess they be posthumous…

I'm also working on what will be (I hope) a reasonably big political story. I'm under embargo until my media partner publishes it - but I hope it'll go live in the early hours of Tuesday. Stay tuned 😊

If there's something you'd like to see me write about, please drop me a comment via your favourite method.

I'm off GitHub - Kev Quirk

2026-05-09T15:50:00.000Z

Ok, that's it. I'm officially off GitHub. First I moved all of my private repos to my Synology, which was extremely easy to do. I did that around a week or so ago and it's be working great.

Then I had to start sorting and moving all my public repos to Codeberg. Many were archived as I no longer maintained the projects, which left me with just 7 actual repos that I needed to move.

Pure Blog/Comments and Simple.css were the most challenging as they all had other people who relied on them, but I managed to get them moved with a little bit of messing around.

The others were super simply, I used Codeberg's migration tool to migrate the repos over, the ran a command locally to point my repos to a new target:

git remote set-url origin git@codeberg.org:kevquirk/[new-repo].git

That's it! Repo migrated.

Thoughts on Codeberg

It's fine. And I don't mean that negatively - there's a lot less going on in the UI than on GitHub, but everything is still familiar and similarly laid out. There's been almost zero learning curve moving from GitHub to Codeberg, so props to the Codeberg team for that.

I've applied for a Coderberg membership as I think it's important to support the open source projects we use, so hopefully that will be approved soon.

Overall I'm very happy with the move. All the old GitHub repos have had their README.md files updated to point to Codeberg, and they too have been archived.

So that's one less piece of big tech I need to rely on.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Canvas is open source, but its cloud services ransomware attack really hurts - Werd I/O

2026-05-09T13:51:02.000Z

Link: 'The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History': Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech, by Jason Koebler at 404 Media

I started in edtech. When I graduated with my Computer Science degree, I returned to the university to work at the Media and Learning Technology Service. There, I discovered that all the edtech software at the time was so bad — the learners hated it, the teachers hated it, the administrators hated it, and I have to assume the people who made it also had a deep-seated contempt for it — that it actively made learning worse. Worse, these platforms were charging institutions huge amounts of money for the privilege.

Because I was an avid blogger at that time and knew that people were learning from each other on the web all the time, I built a prototype social network for learning and tried to give it to them. They told me they didn’t want it (in a way that was much ruder than that). So I quit my job and ended up releasing it under an open source license so it wouldn’t be centralized and hold institutions hostage. That act of hubris set up the entirety of the rest of my career.

Which brings me to this article:

“Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas.”

Ian Linkletter — a librarian who has been an active, and in my opinion, unceasingly correct edtech critic — is quoted as calling this “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history”. It need not have been the case; Canvas is theoretically open source. But you can’t make money with open source alone, and self-hosting is not something most institutions want to undertake. Canvas is a huge codebase with real quirks that is non-trivial to self-host, and the maintenance and infrastructure costs are real.

It’s also not clear that self-hosted infrastructure would be more resilient: a university could be subject to a ransomware attack with very little recourse. At the same time, the centralized nature of Canvas’s core offering means every institution that uses it, including over half of all US higher education institutions, were in a hard place right in the middle of final exam season. Access is coming back, but at the time of writing, it hasn’t been fully restored. It’s a hard lesson about the dangers of putting everything in the cloud.

Note published on May 9, 2026 at 1:42 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-05-09T13:42:31.000Z

A recent CoinDesk survey found 73% disapprove of government officials having crypto business ties, yet 55% weren’t aware of Trump’s involvement, and only 17% knew he co-founded World Liberty Financial.

This underscores why my work at Citation Needed is so necessary.

https://www.citationneeded.news/signup/

Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp ★★⯪☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-09T11:34:20.000Z

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it.

The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence.

A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We rejoin the story every few years to see how our protagonists are progressing.

It mostly works and pushes us to consider how much the path of our life is influenced by factors outside of our control.

I have a real difficulty with books about violence. All of the characters are unsympathetic - trapped by tyrant but also trapped by their own inaction. I also struggled with how pedestrian and limited it was. In a world where you can read anything, why would you choose to spy on your horrible neighbours? Like a tawdry soap-opera it offered nothing more than misery and heartbreak. Fine if you need that sort of substitute empathy, but it left me feeling grubby and unsatisfied.

To be fair, the characters in the book address this:

‘Why read them if they make you feel bad?’

‘Because I’m hoping one of them might feel like me,’

It isn't a bad book - although it does veer into cliché a little too often - and the structure is interesting enough. But I found its subject matter too distressing to be enjoyable,

Book Club Discussion

This isn't the sort of book I'd normally pick up - but it was chosen by the book club I attend. The majority of readers rated it higher than I did. Here are some of the things we discussed.

The central message sees to be that, no matter how hard you try, the tragedy which infects your life can never be escaped. I found that depressing and disempowering. The domestic dreariness was stifling and just left me irritated with the passivity of the characters.

The evil father is an arsehole - but a one-dimensional arsehole. I get that there's a risk to humanising an antagonist, but other than a brief mention of his back-story there's nothing about him. I didn't want a justification for his actions, but he felt like a cartoon villain.

Even when one character gains a moment of happiness, it is offset by another's misery. No matter which path is chosen, someone always ends up broken.

Are we "destined" to meet the same people, no matter what path we take?

How Many Mildliner Mix Colours Are There? - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-05-09T10:58:44.000Z

A couple of weeks ago Ben was kind enough to send me a 3-pack of Mildliner Mix pens — two-colour highlighters made by Zebra. This led me down a path of looking for the second set called "Cool" but the price of shipping meant I would have been paying ~£5 a pen which I wasn't willing to do.

Then this week, as I am want to do, I went over to Stationery Pal (that website is riddled with ads just a heads up) and they had a big banner on the home page about a ten pack of Mildliner Mix so I ordered them immediately. And if my maths is correct, ten is more than six, which is how many I was aware of until that moment. This was the image they had which I downloaded so I could update the Mildliner site.

I started adding them to the site and noticed that one of the colours I already had, Red and Gold, isn't going to be in the pack I ordered. I went back to Zebra's website and there's no mention of these additional colours, just the original six. So eleven is the number.

I'm down a rabbit hole now thinking about rebuilding the reference site, working out how many of the dot and stamp marker versions there are, and if there's a secret extra one in the brush versions like there is in other ranges. Very normal stuff.

A new website, and a focus on small business - Johnny.Decimal

2026-05-09T04:02:40.000Z

For me, looking back through this website’s version history is like watching the final scenes of Interstellar. Years fly by; visuals of who we were two, three years ago. Three years feels so close but then you see this page and: no, it just can’t be! That page looks so old.

And so it is again. What started as an ID born in Japan – 41.14 New design language – became an all-consuming project. As they do. I don’t even remember when it happened. One day I wasn’t rewriting all of our websites, the next day I was, and the git history tells me that was about 10 weeks ago. Time has lost all meaning.

The major change is that there’s just one website now: johnnydecimal.com. Last year I created JDHQ as its own thing because at the time integrating it with the main site would have been impossibly difficult. But the goal was never to have two websites.

I still like the term ‘JDHQ’, and will continue to use it to refer to the interactive parts of the site: the bits where you sign in and do a thing. (You can create a free account now.) It has a bright future; more below.

A focus on small business

Before I talk more about the website, a point that I think is more important. We’ve made a decision to focus all of our efforts, as a business, on helping other small businesses.

There’s so much overhead when you run a business, and when you’re small, you have to do it all yourself. With last year’s Small Business System (SBS) we hoped to give you a space to put everything: a hundred less decisions to make. Our dream was always to expand to become your ‘operations layer’, to provide you ops manuals and guidance and support. So that’s what we’ll be doing from now.

You’ll find a calendar you can subscribe to in the sidebar of your SBS. The first events – 4× welcome Zoom sessions spread across timezones – are scheduled for next week. There’s also a WhatsApp group for our small business customers. Our job now is to support you: to make your life easier. Tell us what you need to succeed.

Information will still flow to the rest of the system. Problems solved for small business are problems we all face; tools built to help them will help you at home.

No more numbers

The previous site assigned an ID to every page. This was a cute affectation – and that sidebar table of contents was a crowd favourite – but ironically limiting.

The Johnny.Decimal system wasn’t designed to hold a preset list of pages in a specific order, but that’s what the old site did. This is in direct conflict with one of the major benefits of the web over print: you can update a website whenever you want. By giving each page a number, I inadvertently made the old site behave like a book.

As a result, it scarcely changed. There’s content that I haven’t published because I would have had to figure out how to fit it into the structure. That’s no way to run a website. So the numbers have gone.

(Technically, we do still have an ID for each page on the site. These are IDs in my own SBS and they allow us to store the artefacts for each page, e.g. the diagrams. You’ll see these IDs in the figure reference numbers. They’re meaningless and confer no order; which is how it’s meant to be.)

‘Aspirationally calm’

Our design goal was to make a place of calm. The internet is very shouty these days. There’s a lot competing for your attention. I wanted our place to be somewhere you could relax.

So there’s a lot more room. And maybe less of what gave the old site ‘character’? The ▒ shade characters at the start of headers have gone. The thick borders have gone. The line-drawing ‘brackets’ around navigation items have gone. We did try adding some of that back, but every time we decided: no. Too busy.

I’ve been using this design for a month or so and when I go back to the old sites they’re jarring. We refer to them as ‘the old clunkers’. The new place is cohesive, I hope. It’s simple. Because Johnny.Decimal’s job isn’t to get in your face and be all clever. It’s to help you get your work done and then get out of the way.

I have a lot of plans for JDHQ. This section got long, so I recorded a roadmap video. I’ll do these at the start of every month from now.

Housekeeping

Until an hour ago, there were 4 mailing lists: the ‘public’ list that anyone could sign up to, and a list for each of our products. These latter lists were intended for product updates, but I never used them.

I’ve collapsed the lists. There’s just one now and if you got an email today, you’re on it. If you don’t want to be, there's an unsubscribe link in the footer.

The site now has a version history whose entries appear in the RSS feed. The RSS feed remains the best way of keeping up to date – see RSS: a public service announcement if you don’t know how it works.

Thank you

We can only do this with your continued support. Thank you – especially to those of you who become lifetime members. It makes a massive difference.

I say it every time, and I’ll say it again: tell us what you need. You ask, we make.

Serendipity - James' Coffee Blog

2026-05-09T00:00:00.000Z

The steam of the espresso machine — of focusing in the milk to make sure it is just right, of tapping to remove the bubbles, of preparing. Soft instrumental music plays in the background, more upbeat than the music to which I was listening earlier — easing me more into the day. How the smile of a barista lights up my day. Of noticing the care and attention put into the latte art.

I have not been to a coffee shop in days, and so this morning – a morning where a drizzle of rain hung over the air, a refreshing air – I felt like I was seeing all of the rituals associated with making a cup of coffee from a new perspective. The care the barista puts into preparing a drink, the sound of the steam wand as it froths milk, the rapport between the staff members.

A hand-crafted (decaf) flat white was the best possible start to the morning on a day where the only thing I had planned was to have a coffee, read a bit of a book, and wonder “should I go see that movie I want to see?” The movie was The Devil Wears Prada 2. I had not seen the first one, but lots of actors I like appeared in the second one so I thought I would go see it.

Less than an hour before the morning screening, I booked a ticket. I usually like to prepare more, but perhaps my mind was already made up that I wanted to see the film and I was yet to realise it. It has been a year since I was last at the cinema, so I revelled in the chance to go again to see a movie that looked good. In summary, after watching the movie, I was impressed, and left excited to watch the first one too.

As I left the movie theatre, on the fourth floor of a shopping centre in the heart of the city, I heard the sound of bagpipes. The fourth floor has an open roof and so the bagpipes could have been coming from anywhere. I felt so much at home in hearing them. Where else in the world could I leave a movie screening and hear bagpipes? That sound was a portend for what was to come.

While I didn’t necessarily have a plan for the day, the more hours that passed the more I started to piece together things I was thinking about this week. I have started to get back into Magic: the Gathering, watching a few videos online of people playing games. I decided I wanted to go to a trading card shop to at least inquire about what has changed in the format since I last played seriously, nine years ago. It turns out, a lot has changed, but the worlds I could learn about are exciting.

On my way to the trading card shop, I noticed a crowd of people lining the streets on Waverley Bridge, the scene of a painting I really love. I stopped for a moment and overheard people talking about the event of the day – the tartan parade, dedicated to celebrating all things tartan. Last year, I had encountered the parade under similar circumstances: I was walking around and happened to be in the place where the parade was about to start, not knowing the event was scheduled. A lot has changed since last year, too.

Having fifteen minutes or so before the parade was scheduled to begin, I got some lunch and waited. Then, with great excitement, I watched the event from beginning to end – an hour of pipe bands, dancers, people from clans across Scotland, people who work for charities in Scotland, and people who have come from all over the world to celebrate tartan. There was a pipe band from Switzerland and contingent of people from Peru, Italy, and more. I love seeing so many people coming together — in so many outfits and from so many places., I wrote as I was surrounded by music and colour and stories and life.

Early on in the parade, a larger-than-life (paper?) unicorn was carried by several people. “A unicorn!” remarked a child nearby with great excitement. I was surprised for a split second until I remembered the unicorn is our national animal, my favourite fact to share with people I meet from other places in the world. I can think of no better animal to represent the Scottish attitude than the unicorn – welcoming, playful, and always able to bring colour to a room.

There were also people dressed as dinosaurs at the parade for a reason I can’t remember. Nonetheless the dinosaurs made me laugh the kind of laugh where you feel nothing but pure joy. The emcee for the parade had some playful banter with the dinosaurs who roared, saying something to the effect of “I’m glad I’m up here” (on the double-decker, open-top bus with tartan livery from where the emcee announced all the groups in the parade) to the dinosaurs below. I’m having a good time, I thought.

I walked for miles today, from the coffee shop to the theatre, stopping for an hour afterwords to watch the tartan parade, to the card game store and back. Serendipity was my best friend. Then, just as I was getting ready to go home, I saw someone I haven’t seen in months. Seeing them smile and wave as I did the same, my world was brightened, to an extent where despite my best efforts to describe what I was feeling it was impossible to do so. I felt so much less alone than I had the moment before.

The small things – the warm morning coffee, the smile and wave from a friend, the unicorns; the serendipity of walking without a plan and being open to what you see – really do make life special.

Published on Citation Needed: "Issue 105 – The new boogeyman" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-05-08T15:12:45.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Issue 105 – The new boogeyman

A crypto billionaire who escaped fraud allegations after investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump family’s crypto projects is now accusing them of fraud

Notable links: May 8, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-05-08T14:31:42.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy

This feels like a vital exploration to me:

“What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national plays—often with good reason—but without deliberate examination, we risk stifling the imagination of a developing field.”

This is part manifesto, but also part call to action and invitation to participate. Funding for news has often been reactive, filling gaps, but what does it mean to intentionally design a genuine ecosystem with dynamics that support production of, and access to, the civic information we need that is a prerequisite for democracy to function?

I love how genuinely participative this is: rather than a bunch of people trying to be smart inside institutions, this requires that the people who struggle the most to find information are active co-designers. That feels non-negotiable to me. There’s been a pushback against inclusion and equity in news and everywhere recently, but there’s no other way to build an ecosystem that genuinely serves everybody. We’ve all got to own it. We’ve all got to take part. Everyone needs to be represented.

I have high hopes for this, and I love that the effort exists. It’s something we should all support.

Some Rationalization May Finally Be Coming for Newsroom Intermediaries

In his latest post, Dick Tofel talks about a need for consolidation in organizations that support newsrooms (and, in fact, in newsrooms themselves).

“Devoting limited resources to competing services where one offering is superior not only leads those using the inferior service to poorer results, it also subsidizes entirely unnecessary administrative costs at the inferior service. And in circumstances where competing services are roughly equivalent, mere duplication can also be inefficient—and, as noted above, may place an administrative burden on already over-stressed client newsrooms. Time is one of the scarcest resources of all.”

I’m worried.

This isn’t a criticism of Dick Tofel: he calls out the benefits of competition and the difficulty of determining winners in a market. But I do think there are two more things to consider.

The first is that I don’t believe any intermediary service designed for newsrooms is optimal. That’s not a criticism of them, either: every service has room to grow. Any time you remove competition from a market and hand it to a single privately-owned player (nationalized services are another thing entirely), the offerings stagnate because the driver to improve has gone away. Just ask anyone who remembers the web’s Internet Explorer wilderness years before Firefox disrupted them and forced widespread standardization.

The second, and probably most important, is that funders are a narrow group of people with a narrow set of perspectives. Unless they’ve done the work to be representative and inclusive in their work and culture, they may miss how one service serves a community better than another and erroneously mark them as duplicative. Or to put it another way, if there is any consolidation in any American market, I don’t trust that organizations run by women and people of color won’t be the ones to lose out.

This isn’t anyone’s intention, but reducing competition at any level — funders, intermediaries, newsrooms, distributors — has the potential to create monopolies that become gatekeepers for vulnerable communities who need more support, not less. I don’t think that’s what the moment we’re living through needs. We need more ideas, more approaches, more funding, more communities served, and more diversity. The people who want to shut down an effective, independent press want to create a monoculture. The way to combat that is not to create another one.

Report on Burnout in Open Source Software

This bleak report on burnout in open source software communities from last year has been doing the rounds. I think it’s clearly indicative of where open source is at (and its trajectory), but the solutions aren’t immediately clear — we know this because similar concerns have been anecdotally highlighted by various people for well over a decade. However, this is the first formal research report I can remember reading.

It’s pretty stark: 60% of open source maintainers work unpaid, 60% have quit or considered quitting, and 44% cite burnout specifically.

From the author:

“In my report, I draw upon a combination of academic literature and OSS community discussion to identify 6 factors that contribute OSS developer burnout: difficulty getting paid, workload and time commitment, maintenance work as unrewarding, toxic community behaviour, hyper-responsibility and pressure to prove oneself. I then make 4 broad recommendations for how to address it: pay OSS engineers, foster a culture of recognition and respect, grow the community and advocate for maintainers.“

The thing is: who is going to pay OSS engineers? Every attempt to get downstream users to pay out of the goodness of their hearts has failed at scale. There are certainly corporate sponsors of OSS maintainers already, when there’s a clear link between an open source project and a company’s bottom line. That could certainly be a broader standard, but there are also a ton of open source projects that tie less obviously into bottom lines, or are useful for communities outside large corporations.

Beyond the lack of direct compensation, it’s also a pretty thankless job. Downstream users will often make demands of maintainers that don’t take their contexts into account; people who are unpaid and overworked find themselves treated as if their users had paid them large sums of money. Open source users communities can sometimes also be wildly detached from reality; I’ve had people tell me that the solution is to move beyond a money-driven society or to have a revolution to overthrow capitalism. I mean, sure, whatever, but is that going to happen tomorrow? In the meantime there’s rent to be paid and food to buy.

The answer may be that, actually, open source doesn’t work very well except (1) in mutualistic co-operative communities (2) as a strategic move by corporations who want to change the markets that affect them in some way (3) as a self-promotional way to gain more widespread recognition for your abilities. If that’s the case, maintainers should go into it with open eyes: if they’re successful, their work will be used by people who make a bunch of money without compensating them in any way.

If new maintainers understand that they’re voluntarily signing up for extraction, I think it’s uncomplicated. If they think they’re going to “win” open source and make a living by giving their work away for free, they may be sorely disappointed.

I can never talk to an AI anonymously again

On first read, I found this a little bit sobering:

“But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.”

Kelsey Piper plugged in 125 words from an unpublished essay and asked Opus 4.7 to identify the author. It listed her as the most likely answer.

I was skeptical, so I did the same: a few paragraphs from an essay, which I plugged into an account that isn’t connected to me. Here’s what Claude said:

“Based on the style, themes, and specific concerns in this snippet, my best guess is Ben Werdmüller.

Several signals point this way: the framing of the open social web as a movement rather than a technical project, the explicit linkage between Mastodon/Bluesky, journalism, and broader liberatory politics, the critique of newsroom demographics ("very white, very coastal, wealthy"), and the historical framing of the early web as an anti-gatekeeping movement. Werdmüller writes frequently about all of these topics together — he works at ProPublica on technology, has a long history in the IndieWeb and federated social space (he co-founded Elgg and Known), and his personal blog regularly weaves these exact threads.

The voice also fits: declarative, slightly polemical, comfortable making sweeping movement-level claims, and willing to name class and racial dynamics directly rather than hedging.”

I’ll take that as a compliment! But it’s impressive that it was able to figure it out without searching.

But those are topics I write about regularly. When I gave it a snippet of my short fiction piece Sharing is Caring, it wasn’t able to find a match:

“The passage has hallmarks of contemporary speculative/dark YA or literary sci-fi short fiction — body-swapping or consciousness-transfer premise, a class-inflected ethical horror (poor family selling a daughter's body to a wealthy disabled girl's family), tight close-third POV, terse interior monologue in italics-style cut-ins ("Sure. No. Not a problem."), and the bleak ironic kicker about an eighteenth birthday. That cluster of moves shows up in writers like Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Alice Sola Kim, Karen Russell, or in anthology pieces from venues like Lightspeed, Tor.com, or various YA dystopia collections — but none of those is a confident match.”

Again, I’ll take the comparisons as a compliment, but there isn’t enough of my fiction out there to make a real suggestion. That’s going to be true of most people’s writing — unless they’re publishing really regularly on the web, and have been for a while, the models might not know about them. Kelsey had a slightly different result: a school progress report was still identified as hers. But clearly, the reliability here is shakier.

In other words, we’re a little way’s off from AI being able to identify most people quite yet. But if you’re publishing regularly, out in the open, you should expect your work to be fingerprinted. That does have implications for dissidents and people writing anonymously who have previously done so under their real names.

Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker - Joel's Log Files

2026-05-07T21:01:23.000Z

Metal Gear Solid is a very cool franchise, that is apparently a bit of a mess when it comes to its story and the connection between each game and all of that.

I am not as attached on it as I am on Resident Evil. I did not spend countless hours watching video essays about Metal Gear, or Hideo Kojima or the history of it all.

I first came in contact with the series when Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain came out back in 2015. I remember I saw the first part of a let’s play of some Spanish YouTube creator and was very intrigued by the idea of stealth, and the graphics.

It didn’t take long for me to find out about Peace Walker for the PSP. I eventually tried it out, but I gave up on it after 4 hours or so, when one of the boss fights proved too much for my teenager brain who refused to look up a guide. It was one of the first games I tried on the system based on internet recommendations, no friend of mine had talked about Metal Gear to me before!

Nowadays, the franchise seems to be back on the spotlight with the Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta remake, and with Konami more active in the gaming world overall—they are going to release a new 2D Castlevania soon!—so I thought I may as well check this game. After all, if I beat the archaic Resident Evil games, a PSP title shouldn’t be that hard, right?

I played it on original hardware, no save states or fast forwarding was used for this title, yay!

Cover of the game

Story

In this game we follow Snake, or Boss, or Big Boss (again, confusing story or something), a highly trained soldier/spy/agent who has abandoned his allegiance to any nation, and decided to form his own military organization: “Militaires Sans Frontiéres” (Army Without Borders, MSF for short) with the goal of providing aid to smaller nations and do good things overall—as much good a private army can do at least?

Anyway, the story is set somewhere in the 70s, and begins when a mysterious professor and a teenage girl called Paz (Peace in Spanish) ask him for help to uncover a military operation in Costa Rica. While Paz is oblivious to the situation and is genuine in her pursue for pacifist ideals, Snake and his friend Kaz can tell the “professor” is has some ulterior motives at play here. Alas, they agree to help out given Paz’ enthusiasm, and because there’s something fishy going, and Snake wants to seek answers.

As Snake makes his way through enemy terrain, finds new characters, and learns more about the secret military activity in the region, we will realize that there are nukes in Costa Rica, unmanned AI technology, and worst of all, a Metal Gear, a bipedal weapon able to deliver a nuclear bomb from any position in any terrain, called the Peace Walker, powered by an AI built on the image of Snake’s very own mentor. Snake’s mission is to do everything in its power to stop a nuclear launch that would send the world into disarray.

Explaining all that in just two paragrphs feels like a diservice to the game, honestly.

The story is full of twist and turns, revelations, betrayal and ethical dilemmas. I cannot stress enough how strong the writing and plot development of this game is. There are a couple of things that go on a bit of a roundabout way, but I found the conflict to be extremely interesting, and I loved the characters that we met along the way.

There are also lots of cassette tapes with extra dialogue before every mission, which contain story and information about the characters, areas, history and concepts mentioned within the game. These are fully voiced, so it never feels like you are just reading a whole encyclopedia of each character. I listened to all the tapes and it was very entertaining.

Snake’s development is great too. He has a cool demeanor, but we’ll soon see that there is a lot of regret and trauma in the things he has done in the past. Either way, he has a lot of great moments and fun interactions with the characters during cutscenes and on the cassette tapes, doing his best to inspire others and command the situation.

The rest of the cast is not far behind, Kaz is cool, Paz is inspiring, we’ll meet other characters like Amanda, who leads los Sandinistas, a resistance who want a revolution to free themselves from the americans and corruption, and are happy to join you to achieve it. There’s more characters and they have a lot to say, but no need to mention it all here.

Overall, I really loved it all, the dialogue, the discussions on nuclear deterrence, the political intrigue, plenty of conversations about AI and its military use. All of it is handled quite well and it even holds up and feels familiar with some of the things going on today, 16 years after the game’s release. Good stuff.

Snake looking very cool with a drawn comic artstyle

Gameplay

The game features two phases, which reminds me a lot of something like Fire Emblem, normal missions, and base building management.

The missions are done in a map divided by section (similar to old school Monster Hunter), each section with enemies patrolling in a certain pattern, carrying weapons and ready to alert everyone as soon as they spot you.

Snake has a variety of equipment: rations, radar, grenades, sleeping guns, assault rifles, and heavier weaponry which can be picked before each mission. One of the main items is the Fulton Recovery System, which let’s you take unconscious enemies or rescue prisoners, to recruit them to your team.

The movement set is great, you can walk or or crouch, lay down, hang from ledges. You can hide behind walls, knock to call an enemy’s attention, use close quarters combat (CQC) to incapacitate enemies, among other things.

As the adventure progresses, enemies will get tougher too, wearing better armor (which make the sleeping gun less effective) and be more resistant to CQC in general. Even then, most of the missions can be completed without ever having to fight or alert the enemy, this is the case even for some of the boss fights.

When a mission is complete, you return Mother Base, where MSF manages its operations. You can assign personnel to different teams, such as Combat, R&D, Medical, Mess Hall and Intel. The members of each team affect different parts of the gameplay. The most noticeable is the R&D team, which will let you unlock new weapons and level them up.

As you recruit more people, the base will grow, and members of the MSF can be sent to missions. The game has a CO-OP element similar to Monster Hunter, as many missions can be done in multiplayer as well, there’s also PVP modes. I didn’t engage in any of these though.

Boss battles in the game are pretty great. However, the limited controls of the PSP are a big negative. Aiming weapons is not ideal in any of the available control schemes and some of the boss fights will need some precision.

There are a few different styles of battle. Some are against military vehicles, which are accompanied by infantry. These can often be completed with pure stealth, using smoke bombs and approaching enemies from multiple angles to get rid of the infantry and make the captain come out of the vehicle, confused as to what’s going on. Of course, you can just dispatch enemies with gunfire if that’s more of your style. All the vehicles can be seized for your use in MSF, so the less you damage them the better.

Some soldiers surrounding a tank, a boss fight for Snake to defeat!

The boss battles against AI machinery are different. They unmanned weapons are much bigger in size and feature a variety of attack patterns. However, the weakspot on them is pretty clear and you can make use of different equipment to stun them and allow you to deal a lot of damage.

The game features plenty of items to aid you on your way, but they can run out as well, so being mindful is important, although requesting aid is also possible with certain equipment you unlock later in the game.

All in all, I enjoyed the constant cycle of mission -> manage base -> listen to debrief files -> repeat.

There are also lots of side quests to train marksmanship, recover files or ~~kidnap~~ recruit more members for MSF. You can also replay any mission and get more resources like that.

As you recruit more personnel, the base will grow and you will be able to send them to their own missions, which will let you level up faster and the like. You can eventually develop your own Metal Gear, but I didn’t delve deeper into that mechanic, since it requires grinding boss fight missions to acquire materials to build it, and I didn’t feel like doing so.

There is one big, HUGE bummer featured in some parts of the game though… the absolute worst quick time events ever. Many are pretty easy and normal, but some are truly horrendous stuff. For example, if you are knocked down, you’ll have to move your analog stick like a maniac to stand up again. There are also cutscenes featuring sections where you’ll have to press the same button AS FAST AS YOU CAN, and there will be some that just have a very very short time frame to perform. This is the one really big miss of the game, as there’s no accesibility option to disable these. Some people will never complete this game because of that terrible mechanic. Don’t feel bad about using the Turbo function of your emulator if that’s how you plan to try this game.

The Pupa, one of the many unmanned vehicles Snake will need to destroy

Art

The art direction is top notch. The game has incredible 3D graphics that are truly at the top of what the PSP can manage, shoulder to shoulder with the God of War games on the system. All the characters, weaponry and vehicles are modeled with incredible detail. The most impressive feat of course is the size and the scale of some of the boss fights, which rival Monster Hunter’s Ancient Dragon quests, with textures and character models similar to Portable 3rd.

Maybe the comparisons make no sense to you, but seriously, it’s mindblowing. The game is as close as it gets to PS2 quality, and with the small screen it’s just perfect. The performance is also fantastic, without any noticeable performance issues other than the loading screens which could be a bit long for a modern day gamer.

Every action of the game has animation work to match, when you walk, faster or slowly, the way enemies react and change behaviour, etc.

Huge props to the UI design as well. I found managing the base became a breeze, with a very practical UI that hasn’t dated a single day. The menus were cool and there was something to read or learn at any time.

Most of the cutscenes however, are not done with 3D animation.

Instead, this game features comic-style cutscenes, with dialogue bubbles and a scrappy-looking artstyle that looks absolutely awesome! I must admit that 16-year old me was very, very dissapointed by this for some reason, but reality is that the style holds up excellently to this day, and allows for some absolutely thrilling panelling and action shots. There are also some very emotional scenes, flashbacks and quiet moments that feature strong silouettes or changes in the color palette that are incredible to see, and realistic cutscenes wouldn’t be able to compare.

Snake looking very cool, this time in a high quality animated cutscene!

Music & Sound

The soundtrack has a very military style to it. It is actually very similar to what Into The Breach does, mostly staying in the background, but pretty present when you are managing Mother Base.

During missions, usually set in forests, swamps, jungles and military facilities, a lot of the sound will remain atmospheric, the chant of birds, the steps and hums of the enemy, the crickets singing, and trees swaying will be most of what you hear. Sound is another of the factors to take into account when making your way through each section of the enemy territory.

All the sound design is excellent too, and rather satisfying.

Music is affected by the actions you take, of course. If an enemy manages to get a glimpse of you, you’ll definitely hear the “What’s that?”, as the music becomes more suspenseful and you feel the enemy getting cautious as it walks in your direction.

If you are completely discovered, the surprise sound that made the series iconic will play, and music will start to be more stressful, alarm bells will sound and the enemy radio will request for backup, as they go into an alert status. All of this is perfectly made clear with audio queues and I honestly love it.

The sound of the AI enemies is also worth bringing up. Each of the bosses has a certain character to it, and they will also “sing” during cutscenes and during the fight against them, all of this is also a hint to get familiar with it, of course. It’s all rather excellent.

There’s nothing but praise for the voice acting as well. David Hayter is Snake, simple as that, and this was his last game before Kojima became kinda obsessed with getting a hollywood star to play the rule. Konami, for all its mistakes, brought him back for the Delta remake, so that’s fun.

The rest of the cast is equally amazing. All the extra story and details shared via cassette tapes is so fun to play through. I listened to all of it, it was really enjoyable.

Some more of the comic style artwork, the character design and contrast here is awesome

Overall

What can I say? This is a fantastic title with excellent production and passion behind it, it plays like a miracle on the PSP and is only really limited by a couple of dumb decisions, and a little bit by the hardware itself. I loved going through all of it, but here’s a list with some good stuff, bad stuff and other thoughts about it:

The good

Story, voice acting, graphics, sound effects, music, UI design, it nails it.
The writing, the intrigue, thought provoking moments and suspense.
Artwork and cutscenes with a comic book style.
Missions are rather short and self-contained, perfect for portable gaming.
The cast of characters and the interactions with Snake are interesting.
Base management and some customization to upgrade equipment.

The not so good

Quick time events that are super obnoxious.
Limited controls due to the PSP’s lack of a second stick or L2 and R2 triggers.
Annoying button mashing and stick wiggling mechanics.
Loading times can be a bit annoying, nothing unusual for a PSP game.
Way too many extra missions can be repetitive.
Base management can feel like a grind sometimes.
There’s an extra ending that requires dozens of hours of grinding.

Some tips and reminders

You need to keep the arsenal in check for every mission, some things are only useful against bosses and the like.
Just use turbo button controls if you emulate, save yourself the button mashing headache.
Get familiar with the available control schemes of the game, some are better for boss fights such as “Shooter Mode”.
Don’t forget to use the radio for extra tips! You can also get extra info from enemies under your grip.
Try to ~kidnap~ recruit everyone and there will be tools later to see which enemies are worth recruiting more later too!

There’s a couple more things I could say but I’ll leave it here for now. This game is truly awesome, I was on the edge of my seat multiple times and I really jaw-dropped at some of the moments and the fact that all of this was running on a PSP in the first place.

You can get this game on the PSP of course, but there’s a new release of it coming out in the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol.2, which will release on August 27th 2026, so maybe waiting for it will be best!

Give it a try either way, it’s worth a shot.

This is day of 63 #100DaysToOffload

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Plugging the gaps won't save news. It's time to redesign - Werd I/O

2026-05-07T13:50:49.000Z

Link: An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy, by Lillian Ruiz, Simon Galperin, and Jennifer Brandel at News Futures

This feels like a vital exploration to me:

“What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national plays—often with good reason—but without deliberate examination, we risk stifling the imagination of a developing field.”

I have high hopes for this, and I love that the effort exists. It’s something we should all support.

I've found just the right paper for my Bottom Hole problem - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-07T11:34:54.000Z

A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show.

During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper:

Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from all the other shots, the prop is based on a real newspaper.

So I decided to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out what was used to create the fake newspaper. The quest took me o'er hill and dale. Through the rough hinterlands of Hammersmith and into the nether regions of Wimbledon. By which I mean - I used lots of online archive sources.

And it nearly worked! I found all of the internal pages. I also found the back page:

That's from The Surrey Herald - but that's a paper with lots of regional editions. None of which had the right headline.

So I emailed my (frankly asinine ) request to Surrey Museums. They were polite, but unable to help. Their website gave a clue though - the location of the archives of the Surrey Herald:

Surrey Herald: Chertsey, Addlestone and Byfleet edition (also Walton, Weybridge and Hersham edition Feb 1979 to 1999 at Elmbridge Museum)

So I contacted the fine people at Elmbridge Museum who were happy to rummage through their microfiche for me. I expect, much like Indiana Jones, the archivists had to knock down fake walls, find a mystic box containing the treasure, and then dodge various snakes and villains to retrieve the priceless artefact. Or they may have a well designed archival system which is a pleasure to use. I don't know.

Anyway! All of which is to say that they very kindly sent me a quick scan of the front page of Surrey Herald's Walton, Weybridge and Hersham edition from November 3rd 1994.

Here it is in all its glory!

That's a perfect match for what's seen on screen:

Hurrah! Another mystery solved thanks to publicly funded museums!

What have we learned today?

Archivists are lovely, generous, and helpful people.
Museums are brilliant.
Not everything in the world has been digitised.
There was quite a lot of news that day no matter what the drunken hacks at the Hammersmith Bugle say.
We do not know if centenarian Elsie Bartlett was aware that her photo featured in this seminal part of British comedy.