2025 May Retrospective

I must be getting really old, I mean – I didn’t even notice that May flew by just like that. But hey, are you ready for some more Stronghold Crusader Definitive Edition news?

Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition

Final Destination

The Final Destination franchise should need no introductions, I hope.

Please try to avoid driving close behind trucks carrying logs; if you know what mean.

Jekyll Theme

It’s been a while since I touched the look and feel of this blog in any significant way, and I feel like it’s time for a little bit of a refresh. I’d really like to extract the theme into its own standalone Jekyll theme, which in turn could be reused for some of my future projects that will need a web presence of some sorts.

Would also be nice to make it all a bit more mobile friendly. I mean this is not like absolute drop everything style top priority or anything, but it’s something that I’ve been slowly making some steps towards.

Breaking up Google

The idea of breaking up Google, and forcing it to share their search data, as well as selling Chrome has been circulating in the press for a few months now.

The breakup of the Bell System is being used as an example and success story, proving why this would be a good thing. Well, it is anything but a success story – and this breakup was the reason why the U.S has one of the worst and most antiquated network infrastructures in the world. It’s an embarrassment really. People are paying premium for services that wouldn’t be considered competitive even in the third world.

Chrome getting into hands of some other entity would be one of the biggest blunders in the history of the information super-highway, bar none!

If this goes through it will most definitely signal the beginning of the end of the so called free market. It might make more sense for Google to just sunset Chrome, and call it a day.

Platform Fees

There are two recurring discussions in the game industry. One is the ever so imminent indie-apocalypse, and the second is the existence of so called platform fees. Both of them come up every so often – just like tuberculosis.

The recent development around Apple allowing app developers to use their own payment system has made some noise. Most people were celebrating this as a victory. I mean, socialist brainrot is a hell of a drug. It’s pretty crazy how people don’t seem to understand that any platform that offers a certain level of visibility that would be rather difficult to attain is absolutely entitled to charge a fee in order to allow one to reap the benefits of said visibility.

People seem to want to have it both ways. Have the visibility and the features for free, and force the hand of the platform in order to avoid having to pay a cut; which usually would end up being around 30% or thereabouts.

Naturally whenever this conversation rears its ugly head, the attention will shift to Valve and Steam sooner or later – with the argument being that 30% is too much, and all the services that Steam provides simply do not justify such a high percentage. This of course is total and utter nonsense, and anybody who has used the storefronts or launchers of the competition could absolutely destroy this so called argument.

Socialism never sleeps and never ceases to amaze me at how effective it is at infecting the minds of people who ordinarily should know a lot better.

Let me make my personal stance on this matter perfectly clear; It’s not for the government or some judge to decide what private companies can and cannot do it. The market will sort itself out, there’s no need for divine intervention by people who have never ever ran a business in their lives.

Monday Dad Joke

I thought that it might be a good idea to include a so called Monday Dad Joke each month; generated by an LLM of course – in order to stay in vogue with the times, and spice things up a wee bit.

Q: Why did the computer go to art school on Monday?

A: Because it wanted to learn how to draw a better “byte”!