If you've been following the Big Tech's War on Users series, things get heavy over there. Let's take a breather. This one is about taking a gaming handheld I grabbed on sale, wiping Windows off it, and actually enjoying my games. It's a nice change of pace — same underlying philosophy of owning your own setup, a lot...

A follow-up to Sony Forgot What Won Them the Console War Quick update on the Sony situation because this one is almost too on the nose. A California judge granted preliminary approval of a $7.85 million settlement in Caccuri et al. v. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC — a class action accusing Sony of violating federal...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Let's go back to E3 2013 for a moment. Microsoft had just announced the Xbox One with a suite of DRM policies that made the gaming community lose its mind. Always-online requirement. 24-hour license checks. Restrictions on used game sales. The internet was furious, and...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Sort of. More of an afternoon footnote that got interesting. I found out about it scrolling Mastodon. Someone posted the PC Gamer article. Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a speech this week warning that the AI industry is a bubble headed for a 2008-style financial...

When I started this series I figured I'd be documenting slow burns. The gradual squeeze. The quietly updated terms of service. The feature that disappears in a patch note nobody reads. Nobody told Nvidia. Hello Phobos.                                                       Over the past week I wrote about Jensen's...

Microsoft just had what might be their biggest "we hear you" moment in years. On March 20th, Windows president Pavan Davuluri published a landmark blog post promising to fix Windows 11—for real this time. Faster File Explorer. Movable taskbar. Less Copilot everywhere. Fewer ads. The ability to pause updates for as long...

It's been a couple of days and I thought perhaps we'd move on — next entry in Big Tech versus users, something for my server, maybe even touch on Microsoft promising to make Windows 11 better (which I'm still liable to circle back to, because that is a whole thing in and of itself). Instead, this happened today. So...

Remember when I wrote about the AI bubble making your gaming PC more expensive back in February? I warned that AI infrastructure spending was going to have real consequences for gamers—that the same companies hoarding memory chips and GPU production capacity were going to squeeze consumers out of the market. Well,...

Remember when I wrote about OpenAI's $288 billion infrastructure bet back in November? I warned that the AI bubble was going to have real consequences beyond just "creating shareholder value for a beautiful moment in time." Well, it's happening faster than I expected. And if you were waiting for Valve's new Steam...

Remember when Steam Machines flopped spectacularly in 2015? Valve does too. But in November 2025, they announced they're trying again—and this time, they're bringing an entire ecosystem. Meet the Steam Machine (a living room PC cube), Steam Frame (a hybrid VR headset), and a redesigned Steam Controller—all launching...