Delicious Digest #27 - Billie Cocaine, Pig Brains, and Home Circus

A tasty newsletter of what I’ve seen in (mostly) tech & games and thought was interesting. This week: Billie Cocaine, Pig Brains, and Home Circus.

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😳 Must reads of the week

◼ Epic vs Apple (and, let’s not forget, Google): Apple and Google removed Fortnite from the App Stores, but Apple was blocked by a judge from removing Epic’s full developer license, a move that would have affected the Unreal Engine severely and which felt retaliatory. Epic is forfeiting quite a bit of revenue to fight this. Legally, all this seems to boil down to how to define the relevant markets. See also: Ben Evans' take on “App stores, trust and anti-trust”.
Link

◼ TikTok, meanwhile, is now shy of a CEO and still up for a government-forced sale. Fitting these strange times. Link

🗞 News

◼ Google’s own engineers are confused by Google’s privacy settings. Don’t be evil. Link

◼ “The ecommerce surge” – great summary and insights on the effects of Covid-19 on ecommerce. Link

◼ Facebook is trying to get better at dealing with election ads. Kind of. Link

◼ Google and UC Berkeley researchers create AI that can remove shadows from images. AI is everywhere. Link

◼ “Elon Musk’s Pig-Brain Implant Is Still a Long Way from ‘Solving Paralysis’”. Elon does have a Steve-Jobsian reality distortion field, I am sure some people are convinced he’s invented space travel. Question is: will this really be a breakthrough or the next fully autonomous auto-pilot that is always juuust 1-2y away for the past >5y. Time will tell. Link
See also: “Astronomers warn SpaceX Starlink satellites may hinder scientific observation and discovery” Link

🕹 Games

◼ Mario Kart Live: Home Circus is the coolest, most Nintendo-y thing I have seen in a long time. Can’t wait to play with it. Link

◼ Marvel’s Avengers nets over 6m beta downloads for Square Enix, setting a new record for a PS4 beta along the way. Not too shabby. It launches tomorrow. Link

◼ Falls Guys, meanwhile, sold 7 million copies on Steam and became the most downloaded PS Plus game ever. Happy waddling! Link

◼ Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment seems to be off the market again as the publisher and franchise were “seen as having too much growth potential to sell”. Going out on a limb here saying that the overall Covid-19 growth spurt in gaming had something to do with it. Link

◼ Call me biased but Destiny’s new Guardian subclass looks finger-licking delicious. Yum! Link (Video)

◼ The German government has revealed a major funding programme for the national games industry, which will allow companies to claim back as much as 50% of development costs. Zis is fery gut! Link

◼ 4K Nintendo Switch coming in 2021? Link

◼ “Controllable Video Sprites that Behave and Appear like Professional Tennis Players”. Link (Video)

◼ Brazilian Studio Wildlife is now valued at $3b after raising $120m in funding. Impressive. Link

◼ The Verge’s “The Best Games of 2020” list. Apparently, those lists now come as early as Christmas candy in supermarkets… Link

😋 Tasty Tidbits

◼ “Billie Cocaine” – absolutely delicious Pure Internet Gold. I cannot hear either song now without the other and my foot won’t stop tapping! Link (Video)
See also: “Bad Mother”. Everything really is a remix, eh? Link (Video)

◼ “A camera made of 23,248 coffee stirrers, powered by a Raspberry Pi, and controlled with a Nintendo controller”. Absolutely amazing! Link

◼ This optical illusion will trick your brain into adding color to a black-and-white photo. Link (Video)

◼ “Mystery of Interstellar Visitor ‘Oumuamua Gets Trickier”. Hmmmm… when a scientific paper publication meets book publishing PR. Still, what if… Link

◼ Capturing insect flight take-offs and flying at 3200 frames per second. Nature as beautiful and ingenious as ever. Link (Video)

I work for King. All views in this newsletter are personal and my own. They do not represent the views of King or ActivisionBlizzard. This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only and no investment advice. This newsletter links to other websites and information obtained from third-party sources and I cannot ensure nor verify accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.