Delicious Digest #30 - Censoring, Sausage King, and Boiling Frogs

A tasty newsletter of what I’ve seen in (mostly) tech & games and thought was interesting. This week: .

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😳 Must reads of the week

◼ “DALL·E: Creating Images from Text”. This GPT-3 for images, generating images from text descriptions such as “a chair shaped like an avocado”. Uncanny. AI is everywhere. Link

🗞 News

◼ “imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin”. Bitcoin, in a funny nutshell. Link
See also: NFTs are becoming a thing. Maybe. Probably. Inevitably. Link

◼ Adobe predicts 2021 creative trends: “Compassionate collective”, “Mind boosting color”, “Comfort zone”, and “Breath of fresh air”. Phew, glad we got that sorted out. Link

◼ “Silicon Valley’s “boiling the frog” moment?” – Ben Evans has some insightful slides on European Tech Unicorns. Link

◼ App Annie’s published it’s yearly “State of Mobile 2021” report. Lots of interesting charts and figures, not just on games. Link

◼ Five star ratings are useless – but how emotional people talk and write about a product can be highly predictive for future success. Link

◼ MIT’s Technology Review on “How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation”. Link

◼ Amazon’s warehouse workers in the US voted against unionization. Link
See also: Amazon added 427 thousand employees in 10 months, now employs more than 1.2 million people. Link

◼ “Apple reportedly developing an Apple TV with a built-in camera and speaker”. Can it bake and eat my cake too? Link

🕹 Games

◼ “From ‘Fall Guys’ to ‘Among Us,’ How America Turned to Videogames Under Lockdown”. Link ($)

◼ Epic’s investing quite a bit of money into growing their Games Store, losing roughly $330m in 2020 from minimum guarantees to 3rd parties. This will be interesting to watch. According to Tim Sweeney, it’s just an investment and players spent $700m (total lifetime?) on the Epic Games Store and it has about 56m MAU. That’s impressive but >60% of that revenue is Fortnite and one can assume so is the MAU. Link

◼ Speaking of Epic and investments: they just raised $1b additional funding (an evaluation of $29b) to “build the metaverse”. Hmmm… Link

◼ Roblox had a soaring IPO, so they had to release some interesting figures: 31m DAU, $1.24 billion bookings, and more interesting stuff. Link

◼ Zynga has shut down Farmville on Facebook at the end of 2020. Marc Pincus shared some stories on the game’s history on Twitter. Link

◼ Age of Empires IV is coming back! Here’s to hope that this means good RTS are coming back too. Link

◼ PlayStation is apparently looking into bringing its biggest franchises to mobile. Link

◼ “Twitch sets new record with over 2bn hours watched in March”. I am more amazed by the fact that GTAV was the number one game watched. What a juggernaut. Link

◼ “Could Apple and Google pull the plug on mobile game monetisation?”. No. Link

😋 Tasty Tidbits

◼ “Russian ‘Sausage King’ killed in sauna with a crossbow”. I didn’t read the article. It can never be as good as this headline. Link

◼ Fortnite? Nice one? Throw a knife?! How many can you hear? Note: this might drive you mad. Link (Video)

◼ 1980s Mercedes Benz Dealer Salesman Training. Link (Video)

◼ “Ice Dropped Down Borehole in Antartica Creates Unusual Sound”. Indeed it does. Link (Video)

◼ Hamsterkauf is Zeitgeist. Zee germans know zee rite vords! Link

◼ “Photographing” the magnetic fields at the edge of a black hole. Science, at its coolest. Link

◼ Winners of the 2020 World Nature Photography Awards. Link

◼ A real lightsaber anyone? My yes, by all means! Link

◼ “Deep Nostalgia”. Eery or creepy. Hard to tell. Link

◼ “I’m being censored, and you can read, hear, and see me talk about it in the news, on the radio, and on TV”. True Story. Link

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.