There's No Stuff Worth Knowing for the Week of March 27, 2023

Apologies, my friends.

Welcome back to Stuff Worth Knowing! Each week, I'll round up news related to tech, video games, film, television, anime, and more.

Actually… let nix that this week.

This week was a busy one for me, with a ton of work and travel. I generally write the newsletter on a Friday evening after the day job, and between two work events and returning home, that just wasn’t possible. So, there was a lot of stuff worth knowing, but there’s sadly no Stuff Worth Knowing.

That said, I am going to offer up the stories I would’ve written about in the newsletter.

Video Games 🎮

E3 Is Cancelled: Despite taking a shot at a revitalized show with ReedPop running it, E3 has been binned this year. Original story from IGN, but the linked story adds context.

Activision-Blizzard and Netease Partnership Fell Apart Because of Bobby Kotick: The New York Times reports tensions between Activision CEO Bobby Kotick increased after NetEase invested into Destiny and Destiny 2 developer Bungie. A call between Kotick and NetEase CEO William Ding only increased the ire, as the former felt the latter would ruin the deal with Chinese regulators. Speaking of the acquisition, Japanese regulators approved the deal this week.

Tech ⌨️

“The TikTok Ban” Is Much Bigger Than TikTok: The U.S. Senate is trying to move forward on the RESTRICT Act, the bill that is supposed to allow the government to ban social video app TikTok. Of course, folks have noticed that the bill would be so much more, with some calling it the “Patriot Act of the Internet”.

Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm Goes Open-Source: Musk fired so many engineers that he’s turning to the world to fix Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm. It’s up on GitHub and Twitter released a blog post explaining part of it. Folks who have looked into the algorithm have already found some fun stuff, like the boost given if the tweet author is… Elon Musk. (At the same time, Twitter’s source code was leaked on GitHub.)

Twitter Cuts $1,000 Company Verification Fee For The Biggest Companies: Twitter is rolling out Verification for Organization, which will cost companies $1,000 per month at minimum to keep going. When many companies stated they wouldn’t pay, Elon reversed course slightly: the top 10,000 organizations by follower count would be exempt from the program. The news comes from an NYT story about Musk trying to meet with FTC chair Lina Khan, but getting shut down.

AI 🤖

A Bunch of Tech Folks Want AI Companies to Slow Down: The New York times reports on an open letter written by a number of tech folks, asking AI companies to maybe not move so fast and disrupt so much. Funny, as Musk is one of the letter’s signatories and a recent report by Semafor showed that he tried to take over OpenAI, as he’s done with other companies in the past.

Film, Television, and Streaming 🎞️

Disney Says Bye To Marvel Entertainment’s Ike Perlmutter: The crotchety conservative chairman has been removed from Marvel Entertainment by its parent company. Perlmutter hasn’t had a ton of power at Marvel recently, but he was a big part of the company coming to Disney in the first place. Perlmutter was a part of bigger executive cuts at Disney.

Netflix Drops Lisa Nishimura, VP of Independent Film and Documentary: Would you get rid of the person that brought you Tiger King, Making a Murderer, American Factory, and The Power of the Dog? I wouldn’t, but I’m not Netflix, who did just that. Bizarre.

Star Trek Expands With Starfleet Academy and New Seasons of Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks: Despite Star Trek: Discovery ending with Season 5, Paramount isn’t moving away from Trek as a whole. Not only did Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks get orders for additional seasons, but the network announced the younger-leaning Starfleet Academy.

The Night Agent Renewed For Season 2 Already: When I watched the trailer for this, it looked like the most basic action espionage show. Still, it’s done amazing numbers for Netflix, proving the power of creator Shawn Ryan (S.W.A.T., The Shield, The Unit, Lie to Me, and Timeless). According to Deadline, the numbers are so good that it’s one of the quickest Netflix renewals ever.

Layoffs 👷

Electronic Arts Lays Off 700 Employees: EA reported a net income of $1.04 billion for the last twelve months in its last financial statement. Despite that, the company has axed 700 employees.