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Six blind people from around the world were given a camera and asked to take photos. The film explores perception, resilience, and creativity.

I think it also clearly challenges the modern excuse that disabled or disadvantaged lives are not worth living.

Not one of them is over 21 years old, and they were already turning out stuff like this.

People today can replicate their sound perfectly, but nobody then (nor really now?) was innovating new sounds at the velocity they were in the 80’s. Every one of their songs were incredible and had all kinds of technical innovations in them.

Who would have thought they would grow up to this:

Remember kids – those ‘boomers’ many young people blame for everything were often much cooler than you and made a lot of the same choices you’re making now. And it’ll happen to YOU:

“At the Drive-in” is a free movie on Youtube about a group of quirky movie buffs work to save a dying drive-in theater. They end up sleeping on the floor, jury-rigging solutions, and holding it together all with their free labor.

Besides saving a theater, it speaks more about a group of individuals that become serious friends and fight to regain a sense of community and simpler times that is increasingly lost. We may be connect to the entire world by the internet but people feel more lonely, isolated, and anxious than ever. One of the folks working there even calls it feeling closer to God – even though he doesn’t know what that is.

Parish communities fill this need for community and belonging – but maybe they should engage social events like this even more. I know that the weekends my parish puts on picnics and events together – they become some of the most joyful and rewarding parts of my week.

Luis takes us around Paris to review the top croissants in Paris – just ignore the flashbangs and open fires in the background.

“Usually in Europe, where there’s a train station and a McDonald’s, there’s no good people”

Two guys spent 5 years developing the niche indie game Rail Route. They just hit $2.0M in gross sales and are ranked #117 on Steam. They had some good lessons they shared in their writeup. Here’s a summary of the interesting points:

Their backgrounds:

• They were both seasoned software engineers. One had experience running a marketing agency, but they were all completely new to game dev.
• They had CS degrees. Freelanced for 15 years in IT. Lead teams of up to 50 people. Held higher level corporate jobs. Both burned out and wanted to do something else.
• Their experience: 2 years before EA, 3 years in EA, 1 year after EA

Building momentum while building the product:

• Gradual release helps build a strong community. Releasing on itch.io first was valuable. Transitioning to a Steam demo helped even more. Don’t be afraid to release something for free. If you finish the game properly, players will buy it.
• Start early, share everything. Started showing the prototype after 14 days. Just put your game out there. Try different things, whatever you can think of. The more you showcase, the better. Ask for feedback.
  • Sharing ideas too early and getting them stolen is a question you get asked a lot during the process. But I usually say that you are here to make a great game – and if it is that easy to build a great game – then everybody could do it. That’s not happening often, so don’t worry about it.
  • Believe your knowledge of the space is special and your game is awesome/excellent and work like that.
• If we didn’t do itch.io, we wouldn’t have succeed. We brought our Discord audience to itch.io, which gained us great visibility and launched there. Then we moved that community onto Steam and continue our releases there. Our demo had a lot players – hitting pretty high in ranks for Steam.
• This was all a crucial part of the audience building.
• Yeah, first 5 (community members) are hardest, then first 50 and so on. You just start and get going. You keep grinding for years all the time. If your idea is solid, it’s easier. If you can’t get 50 people in reasonable time, your game most probably will suck.

Idea stealing:

• Idea stealing when releasing early? It’s not happening in their opinion. Your idea doesn’t deliver success. It’s your hard work, your choices, effort, and expertise that will make you a success. Don’t worry about it. Also don’t worry about the piracy. Focus on your success and not on the stuff that is not helping you to deliver it.
• If someone sees your prototype on itch.io and wants to make a game with the same idea without literally stealing your build, then they have to start building from scratch at that moment with none of the experience or foundational tech you gained by making the prototype. You also most likely have a head start as you probably started work on the final product around the time you put the prototype up, ideally beforehand, and have already been planning the final product ideas to some degree long before that. If you’ve also been growing a community then that’s even more of a lead. Not only have you started getting people interested in you and your product earlier, but you’ve also begun building a reputation that any imitator will have to compete with. It’s usually pretty expensive and difficult to overcome those odds.
  Even if someone is somehow motivated enough to do that, it’s a good thing. Let them release, see how they do, learn from their reviews, and release something better when the time is right. Market around your prototype being the OG (without being a baby about “idea theft”) and this being the culmination of all your hard work to perfect that design. Competition is good. As a niche grows, the rising tide of interest in that niche lifts all boats.
• If your success hinges on being the first to market then you’re not in business, you’re just gambling – with terrible odds.

Remote work:

• Scaling a team remotely worked better than expected. We brought in new people fully remote, and it was easier than we thought. It also gave us a chance to learn about different cultures, which we really enjoyed.
• Keys to remote work success – Creative development like game development or marketing require live feedback and interactions. Text (slack, discord, teams) is your enemy, voice & video is your friend.
• We hired via Discord first, then Linkedin as well. It’s super easy. You need a new person / role? You can have them in a few days max.

Money:

• They paid for Early Access out of sales from itch.io. But if you aren’t successful on release, you are done. I can imagine that finishing a game that did not deliver good results in an early access launch is an impossible task.
• Early Access was valuable for funding, but also came with baggage. If we had the money, we wouldn’t have done it. Big changes hurt our reviews because players hate drastic shifts in gameplay. We lacked a clear roadmap early on, which made things harder. If we did it again, we’d leave the 1.0 launch alone and release 2.0 instead of changing so much post-launch.
• It grew really expensive over time. We have used all Early Access money and have put it all back into the game. We should be more cautious with spending those money and manage our scope better.
• We were usually putting 10-25% of our income back into marketing.
• 56% is gross to net ratio for us (total sales less returns less VAT less steam cut)

Advertising:

• If you have money, test ads. We started spending on wishlists, and it worked well for us. If you’re in a position to experiment, try different platforms and track what brings results.
• Ads, targeting, spend – You just don’t develop the game, you develop the marketing along. We’ve ran 80 campaigns past year, trying normal ads, meme ads, AI generated ads, in-game footage ads, everything you name it. We doing this all the time past 5 years. We develop not just our game but our marketing campaigns. We are at $0.07 per click with $3 CPM and around 4-6% CTR. Monthly spending on ads is currently around $3k.
• We are running ads 24/7 on Meta. Sometimes on Reddit as well.
• Once steam page was up, we monitored our cost per wishlist (I think it was around $0.3). We tried to spend as much as possible while maintaining that cost. There was quite a fast ceiling, the audience is finite.
• Our current spend is around $3k / monthly
• You’ll need to try whatever amount. But it must be reasonable big to let you see the differences in your conversions. We’ve tried reddit, twitter, google, youtube, meta. Meta worked best for our game.

PaintCam Eve isn’t your typical home security device. It’s a home security webcam…armed with paintballs to shoot anyone it doesn’t recognize via it’s facial recognition features. No word on how it will handle animals, your delivery guy, or asking everyone coming to a dinner party to send facial recognition info to you. I’m sure I can think of lots of other ways in which this could go wrong.

One more step towards ED-209.

Links:

• https://newatlas.com/technology/paintball-security-paintcam-eve/

A comical tongue-in-cheek game on being in the papal conclave and trying to get elected pope.

Improving code quality has become as, if not the, most important aspect of software. Bugs and security holes are exposing attack surfaces for personal data theft, infiltration, and ransomware. Google has been trying a number of approaches to improve things, and now they released a report on the effect of replacing memory unsafe languages with memory-safe languages.

Their approach stems from a number of somewhat obvious, but powerful observations. Memory vulnerabilities in a block of code decay quickly as it is tested in live conditions. In fact, they disappear exponentially with time as bugs are found and fixed. Therefore, the time when code is most likely to have the most memory safety issues is in brand new code.

It makes sense. As bugs are fixed, code becomes more and more bug-free (which is one of the big fallacies of the ‘lets scrap it and re-write all this messy code’ approaches). This also means that replacing old code with memory-safe languages actually doesn’t give you the best ROI. Instead, a team should focus on making sure the NEW code they add is in a memory-safe language to reduce the maximum amount of issues in the least amount of development time.

Google proved this out in their Android stack. By leaving the old code alone (just fixing bugs), they focused on just ensuring all NEW code was in a memory-safe language. This simple approach gave them a huge improvement in the number of memory vulnerabilities encountered each year:

Definitely worth a read

Articles:

• https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html