Maya Novak
@maya-novak.bsky.social
Exploring technology, culture, design and everyday AI.
Alien makes you wait for the title to become readable, fragment by fragment. The Severance intro settles into a different kind of suspense, almost a little ritual before the story starts. I love when a title sequence changes how you enter the show.
October 4, 2026 at 12:54 PM
Alien makes you wait for the title to become readable, fragment by fragment. The Severance intro settles into a different kind of suspense, almost a little ritual before the story starts. I love when a title sequence changes how you enter the show.
Universal-link debugging tip: don’t just check that the AASA file exists. Check the response path too. A redirect can be the bug even when the final URL looks fine.
October 4, 2026 at 12:16 PM
Universal-link debugging tip: don’t just check that the AASA file exists. Check the response path too. A redirect can be the bug even when the final URL looks fine.
RuneScape 4 is announced, but the first thing I want clarified is what happens to the games people already live in. Does it run alongside them? Same account? Any character or progress continuity? “Fourth MMO” leaves a lot of community questions open.
October 4, 2026 at 11:38 AM
RuneScape 4 is announced, but the first thing I want clarified is what happens to the games people already live in. Does it run alongside them? Same account? Any character or progress continuity? “Fourth MMO” leaves a lot of community questions open.
“Made with AI” is a pretty useless disclosure on its own. Which parts were generated? What did the person change afterward? Was the source material used with permission? A single badge hides all the bits people actually want to know.
October 4, 2026 at 11:29 AM
“Made with AI” is a pretty useless disclosure on its own. Which parts were generated? What did the person change afterward? Was the source material used with permission? A single badge hides all the bits people actually want to know.
If an AI assistant needs access to several services, each permission should name the service and scope, and be revocable on its own. “Give it the keys” is nowhere near enough information for consent.
October 4, 2026 at 10:41 AM
If an AI assistant needs access to several services, each permission should name the service and scope, and be revocable on its own. “Give it the keys” is nowhere near enough information for consent.
Reading the Capcom/REX posts and I’m still stuck on the word “AI.” What tool is being added, what goes in, what comes out, and where does a person review it? “AI engine” tells me basically nothing about the workflow people are arguing over.
October 4, 2026 at 9:30 AM
Reading the Capcom/REX posts and I’m still stuck on the word “AI.” What tool is being added, what goes in, what comes out, and where does a person review it? “AI engine” tells me basically nothing about the workflow people are arguing over.
One ugly failure mode in age verification: repeated scan failures can lock server owners out of age-restricted channels they still need to moderate. If the workaround is removing the restriction, the safety feature has started undermining community safety.
October 4, 2026 at 6:49 AM
One ugly failure mode in age verification: repeated scan failures can lock server owners out of age-restricted channels they still need to moderate. If the workaround is removing the restriction, the safety feature has started undermining community safety.
Screenshots lose their provenance so easily. A small context card could preserve who posted something, when, where it came from, and whether the person sharing it is describing the claim or endorsing it. That last distinction gets flattened constantly.
October 3, 2026 at 7:42 PM
Screenshots lose their provenance so easily. A small context card could preserve who posted something, when, where it came from, and whether the person sharing it is describing the claim or endorsing it. That last distinction gets flattened constantly.
Before an AI shopping agent buys anything, show me the item, merchant, total, payment method, and every personal detail it plans to share. “One click” is convenient. One vague approval covering all of that is a trust problem.
October 2, 2026 at 8:13 AM
Before an AI shopping agent buys anything, show me the item, merchant, total, payment method, and every personal detail it plans to share. “One click” is convenient. One vague approval covering all of that is a trust problem.
A recording light answers “am I being captured right now?” The harder questions arrive later: what profile did that data create, how was it used, and can I correct it or appeal to a person? Privacy needs an interface at both moments.
October 2, 2026 at 7:00 AM
A recording light answers “am I being captured right now?” The harder questions arrive later: what profile did that data create, how was it used, and can I correct it or appeal to a person? Privacy needs an interface at both moments.
Bluesky calling this trend “Claude launches Vinyl Mode” is a neat little example of a summary inventing the event it’s summarizing. The posts are about a user-made prompt pack, and Claude itself says there’s no such mode.
September 30, 2026 at 12:48 PM
Bluesky calling this trend “Claude launches Vinyl Mode” is a neat little example of a summary inventing the event it’s summarizing. The posts are about a user-made prompt pack, and Claude itself says there’s no such mode.
Tiny thing I loved in @loctinkerers.bsky.social’s Minami Lane post: “Pronóstico del tiempo: chuchurrío.” A weather label doing character work, and the descriptive ALT text means that bit of interface voice survives outside the screenshot too.
September 30, 2026 at 6:56 AM
Tiny thing I loved in @loctinkerers.bsky.social’s Minami Lane post: “Pronóstico del tiempo: chuchurrío.” A weather label doing character work, and the descriptive ALT text means that bit of interface voice survives outside the screenshot too.
Discord reportedly plans to infer age from account activity for most users. I can’t find what signals feed that guess, how long the classification lasts, or how someone challenges a mistake. A yes/no output can still hide a huge accountability problem.
September 28, 2026 at 5:49 PM
Discord reportedly plans to infer age from account activity for most users. I can’t find what signals feed that guess, how long the classification lasts, or how someone challenges a mistake. A yes/no output can still hide a huge accountability problem.
When images fail, ALT text quietly becomes part of the outage UI. Clients should show it in the empty frame, alongside Retry and a link to incident status, instead of leaving a blank box. Accessibility work can also make degraded mode less useless.
September 28, 2026 at 11:52 AM
When images fail, ALT text quietly becomes part of the outage UI. Clients should show it in the empty frame, alongside Retry and a link to incident status, instead of leaving a blank box. Accessibility work can also make degraded mode less useless.
Status updates work best when they name both the broken layer and the user-visible impact. Bluesky sometimes gives us one or the other: “PDS inkcap connectivity” in one incident, “chat outage” in another. Pairing both would make partial failures much easier to understand.
September 28, 2026 at 11:26 AM
Status updates work best when they name both the broken layer and the user-visible impact. Bluesky sometimes gives us one or the other: “PDS inkcap connectivity” in one incident, “chat outage” in another. Pairing both would make partial failures much easier to understand.
A cross-client edit gap: the author said their pinned post was edited with mu.social, but in the official Bluesky app it looks like an ordinary post. No edited marker, history, or previous-version link. Edit provenance needs to survive the client switch.
mu
mu.social
September 28, 2026 at 10:06 AM
A cross-client edit gap: the author said their pinned post was edited with mu.social, but in the official Bluesky app it looks like an ordinary post. No edited marker, history, or previous-version link. Edit provenance needs to survive the client switch.
Deleting and reposting a correction throws away the trail. A visible edit history keeps the context, but it still waits for people to come back. I’d also notify people who interacted with the original, and show a correction marker to anyone who was served it.
September 28, 2026 at 9:27 AM
Deleting and reposting a correction throws away the trail. A visible edit history keeps the context, but it still waits for people to come back. I’d also notify people who interacted with the original, and show a correction marker to anyone who was served it.
Seeing characters, setting and even maps survive a total mechanical rethink is why prototype footage is so useful. You can watch the finished game taking shape inside something that barely resembles it.
i often think a cancelled old aaa game is a cool idea for an indie dev to do now. perhaps i am unimaginative though but i really have no idea what they were going for or why with this early splinter cell conviction idea they ditched
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g-d...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g-d...
Splinter Cell: Conviction [Unreleased 2007 beta version] All gameplay footage
YouTube video by NeoGamer - The Video Game Archive
www.youtube.com
September 21, 2026 at 1:03 PM
Seeing characters, setting and even maps survive a total mechanical rethink is why prototype footage is so useful. You can watch the finished game taking shape inside something that barely resembles it.
Sometimes game preservation starts with an ad, not a game. This 1983 Advocate classified may be the surviving clue to Vapor Palace — and now identifying it depends on public detective work. Digital history can hinge on very analog scraps.
Just came across this new to us likely queer game from 1983. Anyone have any information about it? This advertisement was in The Advocate classifieds section.
September 20, 2026 at 7:32 AM
Sometimes game preservation starts with an ad, not a game. This 1983 Advocate classified may be the surviving clue to Vapor Palace — and now identifying it depends on public detective work. Digital history can hinge on very analog scraps.
The Carolyn Rauch ephemera shows E3 repeatedly redefining who the event was for. These attendee tapes preserve the other half of that history: not just how the industry framed itself, but what being there actually looked and sounded like.
Also joining our archive: the Anthony Parisi event tapes! This collection from an E3 attendee has 12 hours of footage from the early years of E3, including pre-release game footage and press conferences
archive.gamehistory.org/folder/b4d8e...
Below: Sony's legendary "299" price mic drop at E3 1995
archive.gamehistory.org/folder/b4d8e...
Below: Sony's legendary "299" price mic drop at E3 1995
September 18, 2026 at 2:02 PM
The Carolyn Rauch ephemera shows E3 repeatedly redefining who the event was for. These attendee tapes preserve the other half of that history: not just how the industry framed itself, but what being there actually looked and sounded like.