rebeccarobota

1) When I came across this article about basketball players turned broadcasters, what it made me think of was a faceoff on The Floor where a former baseball player was up against a former WNBA player on the topic of basketball players.

It was really clear the baseball guy never watched the WNBA. He did get some of their players but missed too many and lost the match, whereas the female player did just as well with both sexes. I thought, for once, misogyny did a man in.

2) Another month, another rotten experience with healthcare providers. ( Read more... )

3) Being on Board Game Arena, I have not bought a physical game in some time. However while they have a great assortment of games, including well known ones, what they don't have is media content games. So when I saw this game on clearance at Wal Mart a while back, I decided to give it a try.



We finally broke open the box this past weekend. Right off the bat it seemed like a cute game full of Ted Lasso callbacks. ( Read more... )

1) I finished the series Hacks. I was very ambivalent about the show's first season, and was not enthusiastic about the second either. But I definitely get that in order to end where we did in the last season the two characters had to start poles apart. So I felt like the final season was a huge payoff to viewers who had stuck through the show all the way through. Would definitely recommend.

I was reading a good article (about TV shows on the tech industry) that included this: "the show is uniquely skilled at depicting the complicated mix of emotions that animate creative partnerships, and makes a strong argument for the idea that your true soulmate is the person that you most love making stuff with." It was talking about a show I loved, Halt and Catch Fire, but it applies equally well to Hacks. The fact that both shows featured female partnerships is a real bonus.

2) I had wondered a while back why Disney was partnering with Max to do a bundle (whereas Hulu + Disney + ESPN was all in-house, so an obvious option). Apparently, it's because bundling is very successful in keeping people subscribed. "Two years ago, only 10 percent of every new subscription for a major streaming service was for a bundled offering…Now, bundles account for a third of all new subscriptions, and 28 percent of all subscriptions, double the share in 2024." ( Read more... )

3) I was commenting over on Pillowfort about Tumblr's latest move to make commenting more prominent on the site. As I said there "As a totally anecdotal point, I rarely follow Tumblr links anymore because so often I'm blocked from seeing the linked content. But when I do get through I'm often surprised how little response I see the posts getting." So I'm wondering if this move is because, between the repeated exodus of people and the blocking of content to visitors, that the site traffic is actually in sharp decline. One way to make it more obvious people are active and to encourage them to speak up, is to surface comments more prominently.

1) Stand with Wikipedia workers: Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia."In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream."

"This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie."

2) The American Prospect decided to do away with programmatic ads. A month later, people are spending twice as much time on the site. "“The reader’s attention, behavior, and personal data become a commodity, packaged and resold through a supply chain riddled with fraud, opaque middlemen, and unscrupulous actors…We’re reporting on court cases where it shows that Google is found guilty of being a monopoly, or Facebook is engaging in certain practices with its advertising,” he said. “And yet we were sitting there, in some way facilitating the continuation of this business model. And the contradictions, I think, became too great.”

3) Having posted about the dog at the Farmer's Market last time, thought I'd share the flowers we got there: