Riley MacLeod

@rcmacleod.bsky.social

8096 Followers 791 Following

Co-founder of Aftermath, a worker-owned site about video games, the internet, and everything that comes after. riley [at] aftermath [dot] site. Previously: Kotaku, Washington Post. Trans; he/him https://aftermath.site/

Reddit struck a $60 million-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train AI models. But with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is ending soon.

“I loved every minute of working on accessibility for Xbox titles, and I’m heartbroken I won’t be around to help anymore,” they said. “The future of Xbox accessibility is going to be something that takes a long time for players to feel. Individual studios still have their accessibility culture that they’ve built up over many years.”

It’s not a question of whether each remaining development team cares about accessibility, but rather if they still have the resources to properly implement each feature and design. The former employee explained that games releasing within the next year are relatively finished in terms of accessibility testing and feature roadmaps, but there’s no certainty what the future of Xbox accessibility looks like beyond 2027. This is in large part due to cuts not only affecting the internal full-time Xbox accessibility team and individual studios’ employees, but also contractors who provided critical services like accessibility testing. They said that without a centralized accessibility support network, the “standards and prioritization frameworks that helped save teams time and energy” no longer exist.

“That support structure, while on paper didn’t look like it was doing anything, was actually educating and connecting developers, and providing the framework to take a massive list and then narrow it down to what would be most impactful for disabled players,” the former employee said. “If we think about games like Forza, their innovations came from Game Accessibility Workshops. But who is left to run the Workshops if Xbox’s research headcount has been cut, and there are no dedicated accessibility researchers?”

Netflix July 2026; Again, we're just getting started here. We're scratching the surface in terms of what we think the total potential of the space offers for
us. You're going to see us continue to calibrate and refine our level of investment here, which is still very small relative to our overall
content spend based on demonstrated performance based on what is working for our members and what's delivering returns to our
business

Trump called mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt” and made an appeal for new limits to be put on the method that he has aggressively criticized since the 2020 election. But Trump himself voted by mail in a March special election in Palm Beach County, Florida. (From the Washington Post)

While he’d retained his job, Hahn told me the layoffs were a major disruption. “As a producer, my role is to build roadmaps that help us see when we’re gonna get the game done. And obviously, all of those are out the window if you no longer have the people there to do that work.”

“Our studio has a custom game engine that is built upon that legacy of people with a vast amount of experience being able to update it and build it. And a lot of those folks were kicked to the curb,” Hahn said. “So now there’s folks standing around, not sure who to ask that question that they would have asked that person who had those decades of experience.”

When asked, every attendee could point me to a former coworker whose contributions to ZeniMax had been invaluable — and whose talents Microsoft had chosen to walk away from. Talk to her, they’d say; she designed the armor worn by the Dragonborn in the Skyrim key art. Talk to that guy, with the cowboy hat and handlebar mustache; he designed a bunch of Bethesda’s iconic weapons.

Jury duty assembly rooms at 320 Jay Street (Kings County Supreme Court) in Downtown Brooklyn are notoriously known for being freezing cold. Because the central air conditioning runs high, the rooms frequently fluctuate between feeling chilly or drafty.To stay comfortable during your service, keep these tips in mind:Layer up: Bring a sweater, heavy cardigan, or a light jacket that you can easily take on or off.Pack a scarf: A thick scarf can double as a wrap or blanket while sitting for long hours in the waiting room.Warm beverages: Consider bringing an insulated thermos or buying a hot coffee or tea from local spots nearby before entering the building.Could you share when your summons date is, or let me know if you need help finding accessible public transit routes to the courthouse?

Seth Lewis, incoming distinguished professor of AI and media studies at the University of Virginia, is more torn. “It’s probably an open question whether this is a net positive or net negative,” he said. “To the extent they’re clearly doing public affairs reporting around statehouses — this is something that has been rapidly, vastly diminished over the last couple of decades. We should cheer any more reporting being done in areas where we seriously need it.”

“But on the other hand, there are big issues of access that I would have questions about,” he said. “Journalists could be reduced to mere raw-material suppliers for this new information ecosystem.”

In Irish Gaelic, "focáil leat" translates directly to "fuck off". It is a vulgar phrase used to tell someone to go away or leave you alone.If you are looking for the vastly more common, polite, and friendly Irish greeting instead, you might be thinking of "Go n-éirí leat" (pronounced guh nye-ree lyat), which means "Good luck!

MAGA Media’s Traffic Meltdown: Traffic to right-wing media sites continued to crater in June, with every one of the 20 largest right-wing outlets posting year-over-year declines for the second consecutive month, according to en exclusive sneak peak at The Righting’s latest analysis of Similarweb data. Seventeen of the 20 sites suffered double-digit drops, led by The Blaze (-55%), Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire (-50%), The Federalist (-49%), and Donald Trump’s X clone Truth Social (-48%). Bari Weiss’ The Free Press was also down 21% since last year. Ouch! Some news publishers also saw declines, including CNN (-35%), The WaPo (-27%) and The NYT (-10%).

► “The ongoing negative trend in traffic is bad news for news websites,” The Righting chief Howard Polskin said. “It’s surprising because a war with Iran and volatile gas prices should be driving more visits to news outlets. Consumer dependency on A.I. for their information needs is certainly one factor depressing visits, but news fatigue and the growing popularity of other platforms like podcasts and YouTube cannot be ruled out.”

The story “Guthán, facs, agus ríomhphost” from the book An Ghaeilge ó Lá go Lá

An bhfuil tú ag lorg cabhair le téarmaíocht ghnó ar nós "íoc agus seachadadh" (Pay and Collect) nó ag iarraidh an frása "gabh mo leithscéal" a úsáid chun íoc i siopa? Tá leaganacha éagsúla den fhrása seo ann ag brath ar an gcomhthéacs:Íoc agus bailigh: (Pay and collect) Is minic a úsáidtear é seo i siopaí ar líne nuair a íocann tú ar an idirlíon agus nuair a théann tú ag piocadh suas na hearraí go pearsanta. Ag íoc i siopa: Má tá tú i mbialann nó i siopa, is féidir a rá: "Gabh mo leithscéal, an féidir liom íoc le cárta?" (Excuse me, can I pay by card?) Íoc agus scaoil saor: Ciallaíonn sé freisin íoc as rud éigin chun é a fhuascailt nó a scaoileadh saor. An bhfuil tú ag iarraidh íoc ar líne agus earraí a bhailigh, ag iarraidh íoc as rud éigin i siopa, nó ag lorg aistriúchán cruinn i gcomhthéacs faoi leith? Inis dom agus is féidir liom an t-eolas nó an frása ceart a thabhairt duit.

There’s another trick I only learned today, after more than a decade of experimenting in Dunwall. Shoot a Wall of Light from a distance, and it’ll flare briefly, reacting to the bolt and swallowing it whole. If that shot should coincide with the instant a guard trundles through the gap, then they’ll be incinerated along with it. From an assassin’s perspective, it’s a clean kill, carried out from a distance and leaving no trace.

Heartstopper in Irish
“Bhuel is maith liomsa thú agus tá tú uaim ar an bhfoireann!”
“Haha! Go maith!”
“‘Is maith liomsa thú’” x 6

A page from An Ghaeilge ó Lá go Lá, with a line drawing of people in a music store

The museum closed at six, and with just marathon overnighters left, I realized I was in it now. I chatted with a Seaport employee I’d previously seen performing sea shanties, a lifelong passion of theirs. When I asked them if 2021’s sea shanty boom had been good for their career, they told me that actually the biggest effect they’d seen was from the soundtrack to Assassin’s Creed games, from which kids visiting the museum regularly make surprisingly obscure requests.

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

Reading the memo, I can’t help but think about Arkane Lyon, whose fate is currently in flux as Microsoft negotiates under French labor laws. The studio is making a Blade game, and previously made Deathloop and the Dishonored series. Its US arm Arkane Austin, which made the well-received Prey and less well-received Redfall, was closed by Microsoft in 2024. I don’t personally care much about Blade–the MCU is impenetrable to me–but Dishonored is one of my favorite series: the kind of immersive sim gameplay that’s seen me spend days of my life replaying its levels, set in a distinctive, unique world. The games might not have been breakout hits, and I’ve long given up on any serious hope of more of them, especially when the games I do have will last me a lifetime. But whatever happens to Arkane Lyon, it’s hard to imagine this new Bethesda or this new Xbox being willing to put its money into games cut from the same cloth, into niche genres or wholly-new worlds that might not pay off.

Since 2018, we have aggressively expanded our studio portfolio while the number of games created each month across the industry now outpaces the last ten years combined. We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. 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; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset XBOX, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision.

The majority’s position is thus fundamentally inconsistent. It credits the West Virginia Legislature’s concern
that a class consisting of transgender girls like B. P. J. is
large enough to pose an existential threat to girls’ sports,
but at the same time holds that this class is too small to be
protected by the Equal Protection Clause. In other words,
this potentially overbroad generalization is both necessary
to furthering substantially the State’s interests in girls’
sports and effectively irrelevant to assessing the classification’s lawfulness. The Court’s equal protection precedents
neither require nor support this contorted logic.

Mr. Archibong added, “Influencers will drive volume, and culture will drive attention.” His post contained a subheadline explaining the rationale for Arena: “Betting as Conversation.”

Casaim thart agus siúlaim liom. Tá Daid le ceangal! "Tá rogha agat, a chaitín,--bain úsáid as do dhorasín, anois díreach--nó ní rachaidh tú amach arís, go deo!" 'Breithlá sona' mo thóin!

Is fuath liom barróga. Go háirithe le linn siesta. Agus tuigeann Sibéal é sin go rímhaith. Nach mór an crá croí í?

A tiny bunny!

Hellgate 2026 livestream

Xbox’s aims for its participation in this story are abundantly clear. As I wrote previously, the company and its execs can’t sit around being sad about their own decisions. They need to portray themselves as making tough choices to put the company in a better position, aggressively on the up and with a clear plan for the future. This story does that, with the added bonus of not having to speak to a gaming audience who might be motivated to hold their feet to the fire or who might have the context to poke holes in the story they’re laundering through EW. If you’re Xbox, this is a great story at a great time in a great outlet, talking to the new audiences you hope to attract to your movies and TV shows and to the entertainment industry power players you want to get on board.

But as gaming outlets close or get converted to SEO and AI slop, and as major media companies pull back from gaming coverage, stories like this read as painfully tone-deaf to anyone who understands gaming as something that existed before its early covid boom, or who cares about the industry enough to know why it needs rigorous reporting. It is simply telling the story a company wants to tell, at a time when that story is of particular use to that company. That's a job for PR, not a journalist and their outlet. The real story is messy and complicated, and it also involves people--Booty and Sharma, sure, but also the game creatives it speaks to who surely find themselves in the complicated position of hyping their games while worrying about their fates. By going wide without going deep, and by prioritizing the company above the real people involved, the piece not only doesn't tell the whole story, but lets down both the people the writer spoke to and EW's readers.

Here's how I'm currently dealing: I play for about 20 minutes until the game stops working. Then I disconnect and reconnect my Bluetooth dongle, resetting the whole situation. I play until the game breaks again, then repeat.

Trump was also unsparing with Bezos, who is portrayed by Haberman and Swan as transactionally obsequious in indulging and doubling down on Trump's criticisms of The Washington Post, as well as sending Trump a selfie featuring himself and his then-fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, over text.

When Trump and Bezos dined in December 2024, according to the book, Trump told Bezos, “This Washington Post is really unfair. You've got to take better care”—a remark that prompted Bezos to commiserate with the incoming president.

“The people there are terrible,” Bezos allegedly replied, complaining about the business side of The Washington Post he had hoped to make profitable. “They don't listen. My other companies, they listen.” (This exchange was earlier reported by the New York Post.)

You seem to be cut off! "I'm loath to" means you are reluctant or unwilling to do something. If you'd like to finish your sentence, I can help you:

Work through a tough decision you are hesitant about.
Phrase an email or message where you have to decline something politely.
Explore alternatives so you don't have to do the thing you're avoiding.

Let me know what you were loath to do so we can figure it out.Could you finish your thought or tell me what situation you are facing, so we can figure out the best way to handle it?

Amount charged: 509
Allowed amount: 517.71
Amount covered by plan: 0
Amount applied to deductible: 517.71
Copay/Coinsurance: 0
Total amount you owe: 517.71

Heartstopper in Irish

Prestige and awards aren’t the same thing as money, which Xbox appears to be in a panic to recoup, with Sharma’s memo noting slim profit margins and revenue declining by half a billion dollars in the last five years. Even games that players love don’t inherently spell cash in Xbox’s pockets. But if showcasing the kinds of stories games can tell is the “goal,” as Booty has it, and if new games like South of Midnight are a key part of what Sharma thinks Xbox does, then it’s hard to imagine the calculus here.

And it’s hard to imagine which, if any, of the other smaller studios under Microsoft’s umbrella could be safe. Fears are already swirling around studios like Double Fine and Arkane (the latter of which already saw its Austin arm closed in 2024)--while these are both speculation, they show how anxious fans are to try to predict Xbox’s thought process, and highlight how hard it is these days to understand what a company thinks comprises a game or a studio that’s good enough to deserve to keep existing. It feels like nothing but non-stop fistfuls of cash are enough to keep a studio off the chopping block, the Minecrafts and Call of Dutys that Sharma calls only part of Xbox’s value. But what’s the other part–what are the “new IP” if they aren’t the award-winners, aren’t games doing new things with story and setting that help games be something more than the stereotypes non-players have of them from those CoDs and Minecrafts, aren’t the smaller studios putting out games players love?

Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.” He notes that most of them “have no media skill whatsoever” and have “never sought the spotlight,” so he contends that “there’s a massive power asymmetry.”

A livestream of the Kennedy Center with 26,476 people watching

Two newsletter headlines in an email inbox:
New Torment Nexus just dropped
It's complicated

and I always thought :: bertolt brecht
And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.

A book: I Am Not Good: The History Of Cheating In Video Games

"The AI revolution is bringing change but also historic opportunities," Dina Powell
McCormick, Meta's president and vice-chair, said via release. "Skilled workers electrified rural America one pole at a time. They manned the factories that built the arsenal that won
World War II. Now, a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American strength in this new age."

A big green moth that looks like a leaf

But what's really distinct about The Backrooms from other supernatural spaces is they look so deeply mundane, and so man-made. Parsons said in a recent interview with horror producer/director James Wan for A24 that, to him, The Backrooms represent mediocrity. People falling through space into this zone could just embody a feeling of being stuck in general, in dead end corporate office jobs and suburban sprawl. Nineties media was inundated with stories capturing the inherent alienation of corporate office spaces–from Office Space to The Matrix–, which makes it a fruitful period of time for The Backrooms series and movie to be set in. In our present, it echoes a culture that feels so utterly stuck inside nostalgia for corporate products of the past that it can only seemingly endlessly reproduce more of what's already existed, to diminishing returns. So in The Backrooms we have this big garbage dump, this hoarder's house for the entire world's population just spat out incoherently and haphazardly. It's deeply grotesque but also deeply bland, the end result of a culture that creates massive amounts of pointless waste. And it feels totally alien and inhuman as a result.

It’s a goat! A goat!

But all the workers who spoke to Aftermath agreed that those working under the new structure would see their pay drop drastically, and worried those offered the PPS would feel forced to leave the site because they simply couldn’t afford to work there anymore. Luddy wrote that some TheGamer workers see the PPS as “a form of ‘soft-layoffs,’” a sentiment echoed by those who spoke to Aftermath. “No one is actually considering this,” the worker told Aftermath, saying that affected workers have been “making it clear that they would leave if they are put on this.”

Luddy told Kotaku that some workers are in “open revolt” in Valnet Slack against the changes. Workers who spoke to Aftermath said that TheGamer’s senior leaders, including the editor-in-chief, weren’t told about the PPS ahead of its announcement, and that workers at the site have been trying to get more clarity from Valnet leadership. The worker said the mood at the site is “bleak” as people struggle to understand how to square the new payment structure with current expectations around their hours and output, calling the situation "heartbreaking."

Status Scoop | The Verge Diverges: The Verge Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel has been quietly shopping the technology news site for a new owner as it prepares to be spun off from Vox Media following James Murdoch’s deal to acquire some of the digital conglomerate’s assets. Status has learned that Patel has been taking investor meetings this week in search of a buyer who would be a good steward of the outlet. A spokesperson for Vox Media did not comment and it was unclear who Patel had met with.

The official plan for the Vox Media entities that were not included in the Murdoch package—which also include Eater and SB Nation—is to form a new publishing company headed by Ryan Pauley, as Status first reported earlier this month. Vox Media boss Jim Bankoff also said in a memo that the company has “no plans to separate” the remaining assets. But let’s be honest: everything has a price. And ultimately it is hard to see how the outlets won’t eventually be sold off, whether all at once or one by one, à la G/O Media. Indeed, AdWeek's Mark Stenberg reported Thursday that Jay Penske is in talks to acquire all of Vox Media's remaining brands. According to Stenberg, it's all or nothing for the Hollywood trade mogul, who already owns a large catalog of outlets. A spokesperson for Penske did not respond to a request for comment.

The vote on the “gay-only” version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act on Nov. 7, 2007, rocked the LGBT movement and prompted protests against the Human Rights Campaign and gay former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who backed the bill, arguing it was the best that could be done at the time.

New York Magazine, the podcasts and Vox.com will operate as a subsidiary of Lupa Systems — which will be called “Vox Media.” Other former Vox Media properties Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo and The Verge are not included in the transaction.

As a man with a library science degree and thus a nerd about searching for information generally, stuffing search tools with AI is also bad for everyday people’s ability to understand and query systems, if you’ll bear with me through a little rant. Everyone faces a challenge when exploring a new library catalogue or work database or figuring out boolean operators in Google, but learning to talk to a system in its language is one way we get a sense of how its creators structured it and their worldview and priorities. Going through a system’s results also teaches you how to think about them critically: Are they what I’m looking for, are they trustworthy, what information do they connect to and reveal? Google Search is probably one of the first and primary places that people experiment with and grow their information searching skills; spoonfeeding them AI summaries while obscuring or bypassing the source of the information might seem convenient, but it’s just robbing them of the chance to develop vital information literacy skills that they need more than ever in an AI-obsessed world.

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Peretti said the company will undergo “significant” cost cuts ahead of Allen’s arrival, which often mean employee layoffs.

In the announcement, Allen said his focus will be “expanding into free-streaming video, audio and user-generated content”.

Allen, who owns 13 local television networks and 10 HD television networks, suggested that BuzzFeed will use AI to try to compete with YouTube “to become another premiere free video streaming service”.

In many states, around 10 percent of people who are still insured have chosen less generous coverage by picking so-called bronze plans, which carry deductibles as high as $10,600 a year.

In addition to an executive shuffle, Microsoft has only pushed further into AI in recent months, with the company reporting $54.5 billion in revenue from its cloud business, marking a 29 percent year over year increase. “We are focused on delivering cloud and AI infrastructure and solutions that empower every business to eval-max their outcomes in the agentic computing era,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the press release. “Our AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37 billion, up 123% year-over-year.” Revenue earned by Azure and other cloud services went up 40 percent.

Scott Pilgrim in Irish!

The Writing Irish
American Catholic Fictions