Good Morning Friends! This morning’s post is going to document a bit of a personal crusade I have been on for the last few years. In September of 2020, YouTube debuted the Shorts medium, which is a portrait mode video format that can have a maximum duration of sixty seconds. It seems that the idea was with Tik Tok eating their lunch with younger demographics… they would attempt to rebrand themselves into something that was more phone friendly. This was fine and I mostly was able to ignore it, until Google started pushing hard for existing content creators to start using the format. Overnight it seemed like many sites that I had previously followed were releasing more short content than they were long-form video, and as such, I started looking for ways to block it.
The YouTube home page has the ability to hide the shorts content for 30 days at a time, and I was mostly okay with this. However, there was seemingly no way to actually block it in my subscription feed. I am not sure how most people consume YouTube, but I tend to treat it like it was an RSS feed and much like consuming a blog roll, my default mode was to flip over to my subscriptions tab to see what was new from the various creators that I might be interested in. It has annoyed me to no end that in the middle of my 16:9 feed would appear these oddball vertical videos, breaking up the visual harmony of the screen. This isn’t that bad, but there have been days where the majority of a screen would be consumed by shorts that I could do nothing to remove.
I searched for some sort of addon to remove them for me. The closest thing I was able to find was this Mozilla Plugin that reported blocking shorts. I had a few problems, firstly I was not sure if I wanted to give a random plugin full access to my YouTube data. Additionally, as I have highlighted in green above, the plugin requires that you turn on autoplay in order for it to work. I really do not like YouTube autoplaying because I have the bad habit of just letting it run on in the background for hours. My core method of consuming youtube is as a podcast, with it either playing in the background or on another screen while I am doing something else. So while I don’t doubt the author of this plugin has pure intentions, it is also the only one they have ever published it is hard to view a track record. Basically, I decided against using it and continued my search.
Yesterday I hit a particular spot where I was frustrated by the fact that YouTube was not accepting my “hide for 30 days” on shorts from the home page. This prompted me to do some more searching and I must have varied my terms because I actually found something interesting. I found a filter list created for an addon that I have used for ages called uBlock Origin. Over on the website LetsBlock.it a user had uploaded a set of filters designed to remove shorts entirely from YouTube. Essentially you open settings for uBlock Origin and paste the script from the webpage linked into your “My Filters” tab. Upon closing out of the settings and refreshing YouTube, the changes will apply, and if working as intended… you should no longer see shorts of any kind. It seems to have some side effects of also hiding Shorts content from google searching as well. I am perfectly fine with that, but you might at least be aware of that.
Now I can consume my subscription feed without seeing those little YouTube Shorts speedbumps in the middle of it. I get that this is probably an entirely “me” thing, but just in case there were others out there eternally annoyed by this format, I would share how I removed them. I think mostly for me it is a side effect that I do not consume video content on my phone. This is combined with the fact that even when I do watch the occasional video clip on my phone… I do so without headphones and keep my phone on silent mode permanently. I really do not like my devices making noise, and since I am not a part of the orchard I never got used to wearing wireless earbuds all the time. That means my primary source of YouTube is while sitting at a 16:9 screen with headphones on, often while playing a game and it runs in the background.
Now with one dragon slain… I move my attention to Instagram. Unfortunately, this seems to be a tougher nut to crack, but I would love to find an easy way to block stories, reels, suggested content… and of course ads. Instagram is a platform for idly flipping through pictures that my friends have posted, and I use it exclusively for that. However, I seem to spend most of my time being served content that is not from any of the people I am following. Stories are easy enough to ignore, but I am never going to actually consume them regularly. Reels have the same problem as Shorts of being an attempt to turn Instagram into Tik Tok. However based on the limited research I have done, there isn’t an easy way to intercept this and filter things out as the Instagram UI is serving up ALL of the content from the same servers and largely treating it all the same. Oh well… I have to have a mission to keep me going and this will be one that I can chew on for awhile.
The post Drop Your Shorts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It is Monday and as is often the case you are about to get a rundown of the nonsense I have been up to recently. What started out as me poking my head into Cyberpunk 2077 looking for something to hold my attention, has turned into a proper replay of the game. At this point, I am starting to get closer to the endgame, and combined with the very excellent Edgerunners anime I am deeply engaged with this world right now. In theory, this will be my second full playthrough of the game, but I have started it over several times in the past without really gaining traction. I can’t say I am making all that many different choices than I did the time before apart from the inherit options that change from playing a femme V.
I am extremely happy with the wardrobe options that were patched into the game with the most recent update. Essentially now I no longer have to choose between looking cool and being functional. In my previous playthroughs, a lot of my early focus was trying to find the decent-looking gear that I could just keep upgrading. Now I basically throw on whatever item is better and ignore what the hell it looks like because I am always wearing this wardrobe outfit. I also really like that you can now go to any ripperdoc and just change your appearance on the fly. I’ve not actually done this because I am pretty happy with my current V, but having the option is nice nonetheless because I really did not love my original V appearance after a while… and mostly wore a mask as a result.
I also made a bit of progress in Diablo III Season 27 this weekend. As always I am keeping my season tracker on D3Resources updated to show where I am in the process. Basically, I am down to the stuff that is less fun to do… aka complete 3 conquests, complete a set dungeon, and extract a bunch of cube powers. I cannot believe that so far I have found six cow sticks but not a single puzzle ring, which means I have yet to get a Greed kill for that achievement. I started farming bounty caches in case I want to do the dumb and easy method for getting Avarice. I need to sort out which of the other conquests I am going to go for. I really really hate set dungeons, but at some point, I need to buckle down and get that completed so I can move on with my life. Basically, I have enough crap in my stash to do the extractions because I tend to hold onto a bunch of crap until I have finished the set dungeon given that I am never quite certain what set I will be going for.
I continue to poke my head into Path of Exile, but my stays are shorter each time I do. Playing both Diablo III and Path of Exile at the same time… I have come to realize that I enjoy the gameplay of Diablo more and the loot chase of Path of Exile more. I hate the process of getting geared in Path of Exile, but once you are geared… the loot grind remains slightly more exciting. There are so many aspects of PoE loot that could be added to D3 to spice things up a bit. Like imagine that you had a chase item, that was the equivalent of a Chaos Orb that would take any item and turn it into an Ancient version, or a similar item that was like a Divine Orb that would turn any item into a Primal version. I also think D3 could benefit from officially having an SSF mode that you could turn on and get unique rewards from. We’ve seen seasonal items like the Angelic Crucibles that come in and change the way the game works and it would be cool if more of those stuck around and continued to flesh out the loot chase.
Finally, I am still playing some New World every day. Mostly I log in and farm enough resources or craft enough items in order to get 3 gypsum bags and the gypsum you get from an aptitude chest. Then I port out to Shattered Mountain and craft two gypsum casts for whatever gear I am working on leveling. In doing this gradually I have capped sword, shield, spear, hammer, great axe, hatchet, and all armor slots to 600 expertise and am now working on void gauntlet and blunderbuss. This feels a little pointless given that my intent is still to reroll as soon as the timetable for the launch of the Brimstone update is a bit more certain. Mostly I am fine with it taking a little bit because I am hoping my friend Ace finishes their move so they can join in the reroll nonsense properly. I think my goal in the reroll is to level up Armoring and Weaponsmithing up to 200 so that I can make another set of Voidbent armor, mostly because I like the look of it.
The post The Edgerunner Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
We have one of our smallest shows in a really long time as we are down an Ammosart, Grace, Tamirleo, and lose Kodra about halfway through the show. This leads to a bit of an odd feeling show. Tonight we burn through a bunch of small topics starting with congrats to ChainChompBraden who beat a Mario Maker 1 map they built seven years ago… and have been grinding away on for thousands of hours. From there we talk about the Donkey Kong Adventures DLC for Mario and Rabbids. We talk about what appears to be the endless spoiler season of magic these days as Warhammer 40k, Dominaria United, Unfinity, and Brothers War fade into each other. We talk a bit about Rhythm games and while not inspired by Trombone Champ we talk a bit about that game as well. Bel talks about the early woes with Torchlight Infinite and how they appear to be buying legitimacy by hiring David Brevik as a consultant. Finally, we talk about what appears to be the second death of G4 Television.
Yesterday The Verge broke the story that Google is shuttering Stadia and will be refunding all purchases. I guess it is good on Google for refunding those purchases, but it does make me question how much they actually made on the platform as a whole. I know I never spent a dime on it, but still had pro access to the service for a few months. You could get the starter bundle of hardware shipped to you if you had a paid subscription to YouTube. Last year if you bought any single game on the service, they would also ship you the hardware for free. Both of these promotions tell me that no one actually wanted to pay money for the service or the hardware and as a result, they had many units just warehoused and waiting to be shipped. Admittedly I have both a Steam Link and Steam Controller when they did similarly nonsense liquidation practices to get rid of stock.
I would love to say we all saw this coming. I’ve been pretty vocal over the years about just not really understanding the value proposition of the network. However, it seems that specifically, developers who had partnered with Stadia did not see this one coming. Yesterday in my travels I came across the above twitter thread where a developer was set to launch their game in just a few days on the platform. It seems as though this decision was not widely communicated until the article and official blog post were released. I feel bad for the folks who worked on the Stadia project because in spite of all of my complaints the technology was actually really good. The big problem however is that a reasonable product offering never really coalesced around that excellent technology.
I think Google made the false assumption that if they created the technology, the games side of the equation would just sort itself out. I have had the benefit of being on this blog platform for almost fifteen years at this point, and as a result, I have all of the images that I originally used when I talked about the not-great lineup of games at launch. That is it folks, an image I clipped from a website showing the games that would be available on Stadia day one. It looks less like the launch of a new platform and more like a Humble Bundle deal from five years ago. Worse yet, and this is something I am going to dive into a bit further is that most “core” gamers that they were marketing the system towards already had access to these titles.
I think one of the biggest problems with Stadia was its marketing and who it thought was the core audience. A lot of effort was spent marketing stadia towards core gamer audiences including the big reveal taking place at E3… a core gaming event. Even this commercial from the launch of the platform seems to indicate that Stadia is a replacement for PC and Console gaming, and that core gamers should want their console to have “no smell”? However, the ideal audience for Stadia was the person who USED to play games regularly but life has now gotten in the way. Someone with maybe an Xbox 360 from the glory days of playing COD with friends, and just fell out of the upgrade cycle and now maybe wants to dip in and play with their buddies again. The idea of just buying a game without a hardware lock-in is likely incredibly appealing to that audience.
The problem is that dream never really fleshed itself out. Even Destiny 2, one of the launch titles that was given away to every single member… was isolated so that you could only play with other Stadia users. It was not until two years later when Bungie focused on cross-play functionality that Stadia finally became open to actually playing with already entrenched Destiny 2 players. This same story played out on a few other games so the idea of using Stadia as a way to jump-start into group play never really worked either. Again the tech was great and could have been this awesome in-between option for folks who did not have the time or desire to maintain hardware, but that reality never fully materialized.
There was a very snarky tweet floating around yesterday essentially presenting the facts that Stadia has had what could have been a massive headwind over the last few years. It is true, the pandemic and boom in gaming caused so many other platforms to thrive. The global chip shortage and insane aftermarket prices drove people to look for other alternatives. Even the very rough launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and the high system demands, made Stadia one of the best platforms to play that game on. None of this was really enough to every truly jump-start this platform. What the snarky tweet does not go into however is just how stiff the competition for the cloud gaming space has been.
In very short succession Stadia had GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming (XCloud), Amazon Luna, and the aging PlayStation Now infrastructure getting a fresh coat of paint. In all of those cases, they were offering a similar streaming platform with its own baked-in library of games, and other than Luna… some significant benefits to choosing those platforms. Let’s talk about each of them a bit.
GeForce Now
It was really hard to find a number of games that you can play on this platform because it supports multiple existing storefronts… but one site indicated that you could play 1311 games. The huge benefit of GeForce Now is that you can bring your existing game licenses from Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, or UPlay and then are only really paying for the streaming service itself. It was not trying to be a new competitor on the game buying landscape and as a result, remains extremely competitive if the games you want to play are supported.
Xbox Cloud Streaming
If you have Xbox Game Pass you have access to Cloud Streaming as part of that and can play 186 games completely through streaming. This library continues to grow as the Game Pass ecosystem expands and since you are not paying any additional fees on top of that service, it is a really compelling offering. Even more compelling is that Microsoft has gone out of its way to make Cloud Streaming work on unaffiliated platforms like the Steam Deck.
PlayStation Now or Whatever they are calling it today
This was another service that I had a hard time getting data on, but based on one site they indicated that there are 750 games available through streaming. I do not think the number is that large, but regardless…. it is a large library that you now gain access to through various premium tiers of the PlayStation Plus subscription. This is the oldest of the streaming infrastructures, but it still seems to work remarkably well.
Amazon Luna
I really feel that Amazon Luna is another service that doesn’t really make much sense. I fully expect we will be hearing that Amazon has canceled it any day now. The service supports 96 games based on a wiki post, and some of those games require additional subscriptions to UPlay in order to access. As bad as I personally feel the product offering is… it does not push aside that this is also a direct competitor to Stadia and that if you have an Amazon Prime subscription you are getting access to several games each month on Luna.
Stadia
While Stadia was a better product offering than Luna, it doesn’t really stack up to any of the others. If you pay for the now $9.99 a month pro subscription you get access to 57 games. Then you can purchase another 233 games for the full market price through their storefront. I think what ultimately killed the service is trying to be its own unique competitor to the other storefronts. It never seemed to be able to cut the deals required to get the games it needed on its platform. Cyberpunk 2077 was the one shining example of a must-play game actually playing as good if not better on the platform, and even it was not enough to make the service viable.
I guess one of the sad things is that Stadia works extremely well on the Steam Deck. Granted this has nothing to do with anything that Google did and relies entirely upon the legwork that Microsoft did with the Edge browser and full native support for the Steam Deck controller, but it still worked beautifully. I do wonder what will happen to the Stadia tech now because it really did work extremely well. Will they rebrand this and try and turn it into something that they sell to publishers in order to let YouTube users launch directly into game demos while presentations are being streamed? There are a lot of possibilities here, and I really hope that it isn’t just going to rot somewhere in a git repository. If anything I think my biggest fear is that the takeaway is going to be that cloud gaming is dead.
I am thoroughly committed to cloud gaming, and I use Parsec streaming every single night to play my gaming desktop across my network from my laptop. In my working world, I use a Microsoft Azure Virtual desktop as my daily driver system. I think hardware virtualization is going to become the reality for the consumer in the same way that it is for server infrastructure currently. It is absolutely certain that gaming will be coming along for this ride, even if it is only to augment the processing power of existing console hardware. Stadia died because it never could quite create a product offering that made sense, not because the technology was bad. I expect to see cloud gaming as a continued presence for years to come.
The post The Death of Stadia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
