Why do we feel attraction for the past? Why do we look at the ‘old web’ with dreaming eyes? Why do we see old protocols and feel the lure of the past? Why do we feel nostalgia for old technology? In this article, I explore my reasons behind the retro-computing nostalgia.

I know, I know: everybody loves Hades, the Super Giant’s latest jewel. These days, it is impossible to read any online game magazine without reading articles about it. This game has been on everybody’s mouth since its official release on September 17th.

And for good reasons.

Hades managed to raise the bar of the roguelike genre just when the genere started to become stale and boring. There are many reasons for this success but, in my opinion, Hades’ greatest accomplishment is that it was able to provide a glaring example of a roguelike with a solid storytelling.

Let’s be honest: nowadays, almost every AAA game looks the same. They are all action games with RGP elements and a crafting system and some kind of open world. It is almost like playing the same game over and over again. The latest God of War (2018) is a good example of this year-long trend in the gaming industry that I called The Convergence. Let’s talk a bit about this.

Swift is a pretty language that hits a sweet, sweet spot: it is a compiled language built around LLV, it is modern, it took advantage of decades of programming language design efforts, and it is esthetically pleasing. It is the kind of language that could have taken a lot of market shares. Unfortunately, official Windows support will come only with version 5.3. It may be already too late to wash away the “iOS Language” stigma.

At the beginning of January, I put my hands on a dirty cheap Play Station 4 because, in the new house, I have no space for a gaming PC. Since then, I decided to make up for a bunch of games I missed in the last years starting from these two: Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017) and The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013). I approached them with diametrically opposed expectations, and in both cases, my expectations were very wrong. So I started asking myself why I was wrong and what I look for in games and narrative media.

It is about a month that I am trying Apple Arcade on my iPad. During this month, I realized that it made my iPad a totally legitimate gaming platform. I had zero games on my phone and my iPad; now, I have four, and two of them were meaningful experiences. In short: I had fun on a mobile platform after years.

Unlike many, I am usually fine with the subscription model: I understand why it is useful for the developers and I think that, if priced correctly, it is not bad for the users for the vast majority of use cases. However, I often ask myself if the model will be sustainable when the big majority of the apps will be subscription-based.

I dislike Go. I dislike it a lot. Nevertheless, I usually do not bash on it because I am deeply convinced that people should use whatever they want and they like. Many people I respect use Go. I mean, this blog run on Hugo, that is written in Go! How could I be one of “those guys” who always bitch about what other people enjoy?

However, sometimes, I fall into watching discussions in the go community, and they are so absurd I cannot shut up. 

Today, during my daily web crawling, I found this article by Matt Mullenweg. I will not dwell in details, you can read the full story in the linked post. But I try to give you the core of the announcement: WordPress just decided to abandon React. This is a big news, with many implications and a few lessons to learn. Let’s go by steps.

The Context

You are probably asking yourselves: why? A perfect summary is explained u/A-Grey-World comment on Reddit:

If there is something that I learned from my daily struggle with procrastination, is that every day you just have a limited amount of decisions. Every day, you can only do 5, 8, maybe 10 meaningfully decisions. After that you will start doing mistakes, get tired and, in general, doing wrong.

What can be surprising of this, is that doesn’t matter how important the decision is. Look at a traditional day: you wake up and you need to decide what to eat for breakfast, what clothes to wear, if it is better to go to work using the car or public transportation. You have literally just waked up and you have already depleted the big part of you decision pool for the day. And none of that decision is meaningful for your work, your career, your family, your affections.