Adi Robertson

50 Years of Text Games is a newsletter by Aaron Reed (author of the fantastic horror novel Subcutanean) about the history of interactive fiction — from stuff even non-IF fans probably know about, like Oregon Trail, to deep cuts like a version of Doom for blind players and a parser game in a nonsense language. Reed collected the essays into a great-looking 600-page limited edition print run, and there’s still some copies left before it’s set to ship in June.

KOSA is perhaps the biggest of the myriad child safety bills from state and federal lawmakers, and it’s back in Congress after its initial introduction last year. The bill mandates a variety of parental controls and other requirements for online services. Lizzo likes it; about 100 civil liberties and LGBT advocacy organizations don’t.

Why? We don’t know.

I’ve been hearing this as received wisdom for years: never plug your phone into the USB charging ports at hotels or airports, because hackers will hijack it. But an Ars Technica deep dive concludes that while this is possible, it’s very complicated — and for the average person, not much of a threat.

I’m pretty bad at bullet hell games, so I’m not sure I’ll be playing Luna Abyss any time soon, but boy the early footage looks great:

After New York’s MTA announced it was leaving Twitter yesterday, The Verge contacted Bay Area Rapid Transit — which like the MTA was knocked offline earlier this month by Twitter’s API changes — to see if it would follow suit. “We are continuing to use Twitter while closely monitoring the situation,” media relations manager James Allison tells us.

The language has been praised for fixing the broken pieces of New York’s 2022 right to repair law, and it was added yesterday to legislative packages in both houses of state Congress. Those packages still need a final vote, though, so we’re waiting to see if it remains intact.