About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time. The results are exactly what you’d expect.

Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub.

↫ Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis

That’s absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub’s reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders’ “AI” agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution.

This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don’t want to talk about. If these “AI” tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where’s the massive gains in software quality? Isn’t the story that “AI” tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we’re being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there’s no influx of great applications and other software, there’s no rise in software quality, nothing.

What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren’t applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their “AI” supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are – only to realise once the comedown hits they’ve got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of.

And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high – leaving everyone else to clean up their mess.

What a miserable workflow.

Today, Xbox was gutted. About 1600 people are being shown the door right now, with another 1600 to be affected in the coming year. Everybody knew this was in the works and has been bracing for it. But because Double Fine and Compulsion are being given independence and Undead Labs and Ninja Theory are being sold off (with the fate of Arkane Lyon still up in the air due to labor laws in France), some people are patting Xbox on the back. I have seen apologia for this move and praise for CEO Asha Sharma specifically for her candor. Fuck ‘em–you don’t need to hand it to these people.

Sharma’s “Resetting Xbox” memo is a masterclass in annoying and meaningless drivel. It speaks authoritatively in the first person as though Sharma has been there for longer than a handful of months, and the prose is muddy, tasteless, and confused. At one point Sharma ends one paragraph discussing Xbox’s ballooning portfolio and losing 64 cents for every dollar invested with “…we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision.” OK, I am sure that will help all the people out of a job right now.

She coyly returns again and again to the metaphor of “resetting” Xbox, a gaming metaphor I am sure she is smugly satisfied with because she uses it six times in what is ultimately a quite short missive. She talks broadly about the general profitability of Xbox while also stating that “the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history.” Hey Asha, quick question: could you elaborate on what is contributing to the hardware crisis? Could it perhaps be the company that you work for? 

The entire thing is full of the typical “move fast and break things” pablum you see in people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about but pretend like they do. At one point in the memo, Sharma states, “We will deliver success through a flatter organization that is built around makers (individual contributors focused on building), player-coaches (leaders who remain deeply involved in the work while developing their teams), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs) who own key decisions and outcomes” rather than what she sees as the company’s previous redundant layers of management. These are not the utterances of a person; these are false words delivered in a pitch only millionaires and billionaires understand. These are the words of a pain sponge whose primary interest in games extends to less than a year and whose main leadership experience is with Instacart and Meta. And while laying the blame largely on bureaucracy is a nice line–people hate red tape–I don’t think 1600 bumbling middle managers are losing their jobs today. It’s people who make games like The Elder Scrolls Online and Doom, or the people responsible for accessibility (a hallmark of Xbox). 

The entire memo is full of such wonderful brain gems such as “We know that great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger” and “It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio.” At one point Sharma states, “I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect.” A BILLION PEOPLE A DAY, Asha? Creating and connecting, via Xbox? You just sent 1600 people into one of the worst job markets in history for the industry, and you’re talking about an install base of a billion, are you fucking high?

These are delusional, careless, and tedious people who will never suffer consequences like these, attempting to massage a bad message so they can get patted on the back for it. It speaks of austerity and profit margins with a ruthless, mercenary logic that they refuse to apply to the other, money-burning parts of the company. And while I do not doubt Xbox could have been run more efficiently, the problem isn’t Xbox; it’s Microsoft. Nobody has ever loved Microsoft; it has only been tolerated, and increasingly less so with its embrace of AI and enabling of genocide in Gaza. It is a B2B SaaS company wearing a person costume and demanding love like Scarlett Johansson in Under The Skin. This entire charade is all in the service of a scam, the livelihoods of countless people being thrown into a furnace so Satya Nadella can continue to dick around with Copilot, an AI product so bad that I have no evidence to suggest that anybody has used it on purpose including AI perverts. 

You do not have to grant the upper management of Xbox plaudits for a kindly-worded bloodbath. They have done nothing for you and even less for the people who work, and worked, for them.

The news Wednesday that Sony was going to stop printing video games on discs has turned into quite the monumental event, finally making good on threats that date back as far as the launch of the Xbox One: namely that one day, and that day is very soon, we will no longer be able to truly own the games we are paying for.

Anyone who has paid attention to this kind of stuff for longer than yesterday will know we've been most of the way there for years. On console, many customers are buying games digitally (and have been doing so for a while), and even many disc-based releases have long been little more than glorified download keys. As for the PC, when was the last time any of you had a disc drive even installed, let alone bought a game that shipped on a disc?

(My personal answer is that I haven't had a disc drive on my PC since 2015, and that I think the last game I bought on DVD was...Dawn of War II?)

So this week's news is less of a bombshell and more of a milestone on a miserable journey, one that trudges us towards a future where we are all cultural tenants, forever renting products from a handful of companies and never truly owning anything. That sucks, but for now at least, the news compelled me to cheer myself up by going and cataloguing the depths of my remaining physical games collection, to take stock of the last video games I may ever own, and let me tell you: there are some stories, and some bangers, in here.

As someone who's worked in games media for 20 years now, and was obviously buying video games long before that, I have played more video games than I could possibly ever remember, let alone count. From a plastic box of half-forgotten C64 games that we got for free when I was four years old from "a friend at Dad's work", which are now long gone, through to the thousands of Steam releases I've downloaded in my current career but will never actually touch, most of that elusive tally are basically vapour to me now, games I may have played, but no longer own.

Everything in two drawers under the TV in my living room, however, are my keepers. For various reasons--some are all-time favourites, others just happened to come out on consoles released at a time I had both disposable income and a console that relied on physical media--taking a stock of them all today, in light of the news, has made me appreciate (maybe for the first time!) that owning these games has given me something more than just ownership.

Like, on one level I own these games so I can play them again if I ever want to, sure. But I've owned a lot of games over the decades that I don't own anymore, and I think what's kept some of these around is that there are so many cool stories and memories associated with them, which carry weight beyond the 1s and 0s held within their cases.

I imported (at great cost) the Japanese version of Odama on the GameCube, a medieval pinball strategy game where you could issue voice commands using a special, included microphone. Voice commands I could never get right, because I do not speak Japanese. I couldn't get some GameFAQS-translated soundbytes right either, and so for the most part it was basically unplayable. Still, cool box!

I've got two press packs for two different Uncharted games that recall a time when publishers would put some effort into the major game releases they sent to traditional games media, instead of just sending out a download. Both shipped in custom packages that spoke to the game's theme (2 in a Tibetan-inspired wrap, 4 in a pirate-themed book). They are both, I think, worth a lot of money. If there's ever an Uncharted 5, I probably won't even get code for it.

There's Wing Commander III, a PC game I saved up AUD$125 for in 1993, which in 2026 money would be AUD$300, or USD$207. This was a game whose minimum specs demanded a PC with a DX66 processor; I knew I didn't meet that, with just an SX33, but I was so into Wing Commander and wanted this game so badly that I spent all that money anyway. When I finally got it home it of course wouldn't work, but after two days of tinkering with a literal boot disk I actually got it to run! And was able to finish it, despite missions taking around 15 minutes to load! It remains maybe my finest ever technical accomplishment when it comes to video games.

Advance Wars Dual Strike is a game I played so much that tapping on its units permanently scarred the touchscreen of my original Nintendo DS (see above). I played it so much that, at my first proper office job, while others were taking smoke breaks, I used to sneak it into the men's toilets and play a mission or two. Until one day I came out of the cubicle after finishing a battle to find my boss standing there washing his hands. He looked at me, at the DS in my hand and asked why I, a 25 year-old man in a corporate setting wearing business attire, had a camera in the men's bathroom. I couldn't find an answer beyond "uh it's not a camera it's a Nintendo". I never tried that again.

I got Minish Cap the same time I got a Game Boy Micro. It's the only game I ever played on my Game Boy Micro. I must have got that thing over 20 years ago, and after I finished the game I don't know if I have ever had to charge its batteries since. Every year or two I flick it on to see if it still works. And yes, I just did it and yes, it still works.

My PlayStation Vita, another handheld with an excellent battery life, was basically my personal Persona device, because most of its life was spent playing Persona games on it. I was halfway through the latter when, in March 2013, my son was born, and as my wife recovered from the birth he slept on my lap for most of his first night, while I passed the time playing Persona 4 Golden. I cannot think of the game without thinking of that moment.

Most of these games have stories like this behind them. Guitar Hero II wasn't just played at parties, it was the reason for the parties. Animal Crossing, and the GameCube memory card within its case, is home to a character and a town that I cherish like something I'll pass down in my will. I played Wind Waker as a co-op experience with two friends, huddled around a TV and sharing a Wavebird, in a way that made us brothers for life.

Holding these boxes now, feeling their cartridges and discs in my hands, I realise that still having them after all these years doesn't just bring back memories of the games themselves, but physical stories about owning and enjoying them as well, and owning these games is part of keeping memories about family, friends and… work toilets alive.

And in a way that makes me even sadder. To think that if things keep heading the way they're heading, future generations (or this generation, really!) won't be able to experience and tell the same stories because everything they play--and both my kids play a lot of games--can't ever be held in their hands, passed around friends or kept in a drawer so you can dig it out every decade or two, like a photo album or family heirloom, and let some memories wash over you.

If companies like Sony and Microsoft want to take away our ownership of video games, to break our tangible connection with the classics we play and love, there's little we can do to stop them other than refusing to buy their games going forwards. But everything in these drawers, all these physical boxes containing lived memories and games I can still play? They can never take those away.

🚨 Next Thursday! Join me and Amos Kennedy Jr! 🚨

We will discuss my new book and have shenanigans. It’s free!

This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

Looking around at [gestures] everything, it feels like we’ve all put maintaining friendships on the backburner. This is making me lonely and probably makes other people lonely too. How can we fix this?

TL;DR: Get a dog.

Ok, it may be a little bit more complicated than that. But also, get a dog. Dogs force you to leave your house even when you don’t want to leave your house because if you don’t, they poop in your house. And then you’re not just lonely, but you’re lonely and cleaning up dogshit from your favorite rug, so loneliness turns to sadness and you start spiraling so hard you don’t even notice that your dog has jumped on the couch and is taking a second shit there. Dogs force you to go to the dogpark, where you’ll meet your neighbors and possibly even learn their names. You will absolutely learn their dogs’ names, but even people in the dogpark have a little trouble connecting with one another.

Now, I get that some of you might not want dogs, or can’t have dogs, for a multitude of valid reasons. So we’ll keep going. (Sidenote: some of you may be saying, “But Mike, I have a cat(s)!” That’s nice. Cats are not pets. They’re psychotic sets of knives and razors that live in your home and demand tribute. When a dog shits on your carpet it will look at you like it is well and truly ashamed to have done that to their best friend. When a cat shits in your house it’s because you’ve asked it to, even setting up a special box for it to do so, which at best it will take as a suggestion, shitting somewhere in the vicinity of the litter box and then looking at you like “Clean it up, fuckface!” Then it will slash you with one of the razors attached to its toes. It may sound like I don’t like cats, but that’s not true, I just think lumping cats in the pet category along with dogs does cats justice. And cats would agree.) (Also, I’m allergic to cats.)

I am as far from answering your question as a cart turd is to a litterbox.

Let’s talk about the pandemic instead. (Yay!) And let’s finally acknowledge that the pandemic broke us. Those of us who survived were very lucky to have survived, which is not to say that we survived unscathed. We did not. We spent months avoiding human contact, and then even more months still kind of avoiding human contact, and then years basically still avoiding human contact. And some of us, for reasons that are our own, needed to avoid human contact a little harder and longer than others. The pandemic did things to it, and the fact that we, as a society, mostly decided to pretend it never happened, means that at some level it is still doing things to us. (Also, having a pandemic sandwiched between two slices of fascism makes for a fantastic shit sandwich.)

In April of 2021, I got my first dose of the Covid vaccine. This was thirteen months after the initial lockdown started. Thirteen months of living in a small apartment, with two other people and a small dog that gave us a reason to go outside. If I remember correctly, I then had to wait a month to get my second dose, and another two weeks for vaxmaxxing. And that’s the date I circled in my calendar. That’s the date I could, theoretically, go back outside and “do things.”

When that date rolled around I hopped on the train, still masked, and went to play pinball. Again, still masked. I took it off for a brief second, not really sure if I was being brave or stupid, and then someone started walking in my direction. I freaked out and immediately put it back on. Which is when I realized that it was going to take a while to come back from [gestures] all this. And while the date circled on my calendar certainly meant something, it didn’t fix the fact that I’d withdrawn from society for long enough that I had to relearn a lot of social cues. None the least of which was the very tangible reality that proximity to another human being might lead to death. (And as I am writing this on Pride month, it’s only fair to acknowledge that there are human beings walking amongst us who have been through life-threatening pandemics triggered by human proximity twice in their lifetimes.)

If you are reading this, the pandemic didn’t kill you. But there’s certainly a chance that it broke you. As it did me.

Sometime during the first year of the pandemic, one of my best friends moved away. This was someone I got together with semi-regularly. It was a move he’d been planning before the pandemic. But there were talks of a big goodbye party, ample hanging out before the move, seeing some shows, sharing meals, etc, etc. All of that was replaced by the nightmare logistics of moving three states away in the middle of a pandemic, including discussions about whether going to the bathroom during a long drive would kill you. In the end, even the promise to drive by and honk on his way out of town had to be abandoned because of last minute shenanigans with movers. People just disappeared on you.

When I was a kid, friends just happened. And as I say that as a kid who didn’t have a lot of friends, but there was always a small squad who hung out together after school. You played ball together, you committed minor crimes together, you sat on the stoop together, and you hung out in the basement of the one kid in the group who had an Atari 2600 waiting for your turn to play, you found dead bodies together (that may have been a movie). The expectation was that they would be there for you every day. Giving each other shit, begrudgingly sharing their candy and Atari joysticks, and later—covering for you with your parents when you were somewhere you weren’t supposed to be

(Sidenote: the best thing we were as kids was bored. We complained about being bored so much. And in our boredom, we came up with all sorts of shit to do. Not all of it legal, sure. But all of it was part of the amazing process of the human imagination coming up with things to do to not be bored. It troubles me that kids aren’t allowed/encouraged/etc to be bored anymore. I’m a fan of understimulating children. Let them figure their way out of it. If you leave a kid alone in a room with a large cardboard box they will eventually turn it into a fort, or a spaceship, or a stage. Let kids be bored. It’s so good for them.)

As you get older, hanging out takes a little more work than when we were kids. There’s planning involved. There’s responsibilities and obligations to work around. Maybe we have our own kids, and they’re the priority. But every once in a while, you find a magical afternoon where you’re both free, and you find yourselves sitting at a bar, or across each other at a picnic table, or sharing a meal, or a pinball machine, and it all comes flooding back. The easy chats, the light-hearted arguments about which band sold out when, the rekindling of old memories, and more recently an “in memorium” of friends who’ve passed.

The pandemic, sandwiched between two slices of fascism, has really fucked with our ability to maintain friendships. But it wasn’t alone in that. As society turned house-bound, a lot of the things we couldn’t go to decided that they could come to us instead. Meals were being delivered. Household goods were being delivered. Clothes were being delivered. Cat litter, for that razor-wielding beast in your house, was being delivered. And for a while, this was necessary. (I’d also like to acknowledge that for some people, for reasons that are their own, this remains necessary.) And slowly, having things come to us, went from being a necessity to a preference. I know this because as I bike home through The Mission—a neighborhood that has every flavor of restaurant at every price point, and in abundance—I will pass dozens of delivery scooters dropping off food at apartments that are less than twenty feet from clusters of restaurants.

And the greatest sin of all might be a tech industry that’s exploiting your loneliness by offering you friends that don’t exist. If a tech company can pull the plug on your relationship with a software update, it’s not a relationship. And if you are promising broken, lonely people that you can deliver software solace that doesn’t require them to leave their house, you’ve jettisoned your own humanity.

If you are lonely inside, go outside. People are interesting. And most of them are outside.

In December of 2020, while still locked down in my house, I received news that a friend of mine had died, also locked down in his house. He was my age. (This is becoming more and more common.) We have kids the same age. And we used to hang out together, on the regular, when our kids were young. But I moved away. And the promises to stay in touch, which were heartfelt on both sides, eventually waned. We talked less and less as time went on. Eventually, getting to the point where we hadn’t talked in a while. Not for a good reason, mind you. Just time. And lack of effort. But there’s never enough effort to contact the dead.

Yesterday, I received word that Om Malik had died. (Again, my age.) I hadn’t talked to Om in a long time. But we’d had enough conversations over the years that I really enjoyed chatting with him. We didn’t agree on everything, which made the conversations more fun. One of the things I remember about Om was that he had a certain glint in his eye and a slight smirk if he was about to say something that was going to piss me off. He wanted me to know it was coming. He wanted me to appreciate that he knew it was coming. Then he’d say it, and sit back, waiting for the reaction he knew was coming. He was a good egg. And I’m sad we lost touch. I’m even sadder the opportunity to make up for it is gone.

At some point while reading this, I bet a name popped into your head. Maybe someone you haven’t hung out with in a while. Maybe someone you just hung out with and wanna do it again. Maybe someone who moved away and you haven’t seen in a minute. You should reach out. Text. Call. Whatever. And here I’ll tell you the secret: make it simple. Don’t overcomplicate that shit.

“Wanna do dinner tomorrow?” is better than scheduling something far off in the future, which gives you both too much time to flake on.

“I’m going to see Backrooms tomorrow. Wanna come?” is better than a vague plan about seeing a movie sometime in the future.

“Been missing you. Wanna catch up?” is a wonderful thing to text a friend.

Might they say no? Of course. But they might also say yes. We’re broken. We gotta keep shit simple. No complex planning. No calendar bullshit. No ranges of dates. No pencilling shit in. We are very much in “Get in loser. We’re doing crimes.” territory.

Stop reading and text someone you care about. Now.

🙋 Got a question you need answered? Ask it!

📓 My new book, How to die (& otherstories), is full of essays like this. Some are depressing! But also, some are not. Honestly, I think most are not.

💸 If you’re enjoying this newsletter, and can spare $2/mo, it helps me keep doing it.

📄 This essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates is long, and every word of it absolutely brilliant. I encourage you to read it.

🍉 Please donate what you can to the children of Palestine. It’s a genocide. We’re funding it.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate what you can to Trans Lifeline. And if there is a trans person in your life please remind them they are loved.

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