My first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System. My most-used video game console was probably the Super Nintendo. But the actual game I played the most in my childhood was on neither of these. It was on the Nintendo 64. GoldenEye 007. And it’s back.

(Re)launching today on both the Xbox and Nintendo Switch, it’s a port of the classic. The Xbox version brings visual upgrades while the Switch version brings online multiplayer. The amount of hours lost this weekend for a certain cohort of children born in the 1980s and 1990s will be endless.

It’s a funny thing. Most adaptations of movies into games were bad (and vice versa used to be the case too, though both have changed in recent years). And while GoldenEye is a decent enough James Bond movie, I believe Pierce Brosnan’s best, it’s not one of the most iconic ones. And the game came out nearly two years after the film. Hell, it was released just a few months before the next Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies.

But the game was just in the right place, right time to work, with the right team making it. Rare, a British firm (later acquired by Microsoft), had had huge success with Donkey Kong Country on Super Nintendo, and was able to take advantage of the 3D graphics and crucially, four controller ports, on the Nintendo 64 to make GoldenEye 007 a phenomenon. The third highest-selling game on the console behind just Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64.

My friend Brad who lived up the street from me had what was at the time, a truly massive 60”+ TV in his basement. And four controllers. The amount of hours lost playing that game in that basement now baffles the mind.

The Good Stuff

🛟 The Inner Ring

This essay is not new. It is from 1944. It wasn’t even an essay at first, but a speech, given by C.S. Lewis at his Memorial Lecture at King’s College in London. But it’s fantastic. It rings just as true today, on so many levels. Scoundrels abound.

💆‍♀️ On Self-Respect

On the topics of great essays of yesteryear, here’s Joan Didion writing on the notion of self-respect in 1961. It’s just outstanding writing. And she wrote it at the last-minute after another author failed to file their own essay on the topic. And she wrote it to an exact character count.

✍️ Putting Ideas into Words

Staying on the topic of essays, but switching to something more contemporary, here’s Paul Graham on the power of writing to clarify your own thoughts. This is more or less how I live my life and have for decades now. And this doesn’t just mean publishing your words. Sadly, a lot of this practice for me in recent years has been in the form of emails.

💲 ‘Economists Can’t Predict the Effects of New Technologies’

A good interview with economist Tyler Cowen. You’ll note that he credits blogging for his success and, per above, that while reading (and conversation) are great for gathering information, it’s only through writing that you’re forced to decide what you actually think about something. He also wants an AI chatbot to come along that will help him effectively live forever.

💩 The Shit Show

Switching things up, Craig Hockenberry gives his raw, painful assessment of the current state of Twitter — and more specifically, the Twitter ecosystem. His Iconfactory birthed not just Twitterrific, but also the notion of a Twitter bird and the word “tweet”. They also, of course, make several other apps. I personally love Tot (a simple note-taking app — on my homescreen!) and Wallaroo (a wallpaper app). RIP Twitterrific.

The Quick Stuff

• Attention: after years of saying they wouldn’t do it, In-N-Out is headed east. Eat your heart out, Shake Shack. 🍔

• Hugh Jackman would like you to know that he didn’t take steroids to get into form as Wolverine — and also that he didn’t know that the wolverine was an animal and not a wolf man hybrid. Go Blue? 🐺

• Speaking of, Jason Gay makes the case for why Jim Harbaugh should stay in Ann Arbor (which, it seems like he is — for now…) 〽️

• Did you know that Rolls-Royce sells well over half of the world’s cars priced over €250k? Ferrari sells one-third of such cars. and Lamborghini sells basically all the rest. Where’s that Apple Car? 🏎️

• There’s apparently science behind why kids love those huge planet/stars comparison videos on YouTube. And presumably why I like them too. 🪐

• Elise Stefanik sure seems to be a new, more viral variant of opportunistic political climber. Or, as we less politely call them: phonies. 🗳️

• Still, could be worse. You could be Kevin McCarthy. His embarrassment led to a truly great headline: Leopards Eat Kevin McCarthy’s Face 🐆

• The parallels of cricket and baseball go way back. And they may be about to collide in the U.S. And baseball could probably learn a thing or two. 🏏

• Not sure I would have imagined that one of George W. Bush’s daughters — now Jenna Bush Hager — would control arguably the most powerful book club since Oprah, but here we are. 📚

• In other Nepo Baby news, King Charles III will be on the pound in ‘24. 💷

Speaking of Nintendo…

I have never felt so old…

My Stuff

🌅 A Sunrise That I Know I’ll Never See

A few quick thoughts on ‘Andor’…

🦣 Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight

Mastodon vs. Twitter? Come on…

📖 Daunt is Righting the Barnes & Noble Ship

James Daunt does it again…

🏈 The Cute and the Curious

Michigan’s playcallers fucked around, found out…

⌚️ Minimum Viable Technology

A time, perhaps, for Apple Watch owners to lay down their iPhones…

This will take some getting used to…

Hello from 35k feet. The last time I was in the sky, just over a week ago, SVB was in the midst of collapsing. It feels like two months ago. What a surreal time to be alive. Which I suppose every generation says because it truly is all relative. Which just makes me worry about what our children will have to deal with... But at least maybe they won’t have to put up with Twitter in times like these? Anyway. At least the WiFi is working!

The Good Stuff

✈️ The 747 Retirement

Since I’m flying… here’s a nice farewell to Boeing’s 747 aircraft and a look into what’s next by Adam Clark Estes. Not the far-flung or pie-in-the-sky stuff. But just where the aviation industry is likely headed in the next several years. Increments, but hopefully they add up. The 747 will be in the skies for a while still, of course. They’re just not making new ones. Goodnight, sweet prince.

🍄 Maximizing the Joy at Super Nintendo World

With the opening of Super Nintendo World in LA, Andrew Webster sits down with Mario, Zelda, etc creator Shigeru Miyamoto on translating his digital creations in to the real world. Pretty much all feelings of wonder I can recall having these days tie directly back to the stuff I loved as a child. This, I suspect will qualify. I mean, you enter the park through a goddamn warp pipe. See Webster’s follow-up on the park as well.

🫖 “…And They Make Tea”

A fantastic pre-eulogy of Twitter by Paul Ford. Several LOL parts. But I also like (and increasingly believe myself) his high-level notion that look, maybe we weren’t meant to be connected to everyone on the planet. It’s one of those ideas that sounds perfect on paper and is rancid in reality. We were promised flying cars, and what we got was basically all seven sins at scale in real time, all the time.

👩‍🎨 The UI Race in AI

I like the way Casey Newton frames his thoughts on who might win in the AI arms race. Basically everyone agrees that yes, AI is awesome and fascinating and the future in many ways. But no one yet knows what exactly that looks like — quite literally. What’s the UI that makes all of this really sing? Is it really a text box? Something tacked on to a search engine? That seems unlikely. So there’s a race on the product side to nail this. Also, don’t sleep on voice coming back around again with this far better technology?

🍿 A Hollywood Ending

Nothing too outlandish in what Jason Kilar lays out as to what he imagines Hollywood looks like in the near future. But it all feels right — and, selfishly, is in line with a lot of what I’ve written dating back years. Kilar, of course, has seemingly been one-step-ahead of much of this (and, sadly, perhaps one click too early for his own good) so his is a good perspective as we exit the all-out arms race of streaming and enter a more nuanced era of consolidation and, hopefully, a focus on quality and presentation.

The Quick Stuff

• Apparently, the only growth demographic for wine is those over 60, which is sad. And teetotaling trends aside, seems to also be a massive branding/perception issue. Where are the wine ads? 🍷

• The flip side is soft drink makers going “hard” — both in spirit(s) and advertising to court the youths. With truly awful-sounding drinks. But it’s rather fascinating how they’re doing it, getting around rules from 100 years ago… 🥤

• You know what can beat a machine at Go? A human aided by another machine to exploit a weakness in said machine. It doesn’t have to be us versus them, folks! ♟️

• You know Toblerone chocolate? Maybe not, but I’m sure you’ve seen the packaging. But it’s about to change because it turns out you can’t use images of the Swiss Alps if you’re not fully made in Switzerland. 🗻

• AI + Radio? It’s being tested where I grew up. (And am coincidentally flying over right now!) Hello Cleveland! 📻

• How much thought when into the game Oregon Trail? A lot. 🐂

• I didn’t always agreed with NYT film critic A.O. Scott, but I always read his thoughts on films. And as he steps away after doing the job for 24 (!) years, it’s hard not to appreciate his accomplishment. 📽️

• If we’re ever to do any truly long space travel, we’re likely going to need to figure out how to put our bodies into a state of hibernation for long periods of time. It’s being studied. 😴

• Maybe folks from Medieval times can help? (Probably not.) 🥱

• Jony Ive designed the new red nose for Britain’s Red Nose Day. And, of course, it’s great. Clever design — in how it works. 🔴

• But it’s not quite as good as his emblem design for the upcoming coronation of King Charles — similar to his Terra Carta work with the then-Prince. Just fantastic. 👑

Humbling…

My Stuff

👧 The Toddler Arcade

Nickel and diming kids within mobile games is bullshit.

🕵️ Here’s Another Clue for You All

A few thoughts on ‘Glass Onion’

🍎 The One That Says “iPad Pro”

A few *very* brief thoughts on the M2 iPad Pro

📲 Looking Back at My 2022 Homescreen

The biggest changes are undercover…

😎 Apple’s New Reality

Some thoughts on the clearly forthcoming ‘Reality Pro’ headset

🐦 A Tale of Two Twitters

‘For You’ is good. Breaking other clients is bad.

💻 Apple’s Inevitable Touchscreen Macs

Obviously…

🐋 The Way of Watering Down Records

About those ‘Avatar 2’ box office headlines…

Elegant

I sent my first newsletter almost exactly seven years ago. The world, and my life, were very different then. It was August of 2016. Barack Obama was still President, nearing the end of his second term as we all barreled towards the 2016 election. We all remember what happened next... I was just wrapping up a vacation in Europe with my wife. Over two years away from our first child being born. Now I’m here living in Europe, waiting on our second.

Anyway, I was thinking about this first newsletter today as our youngest just watched Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (after my wife read her Roald Dahl’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — power swap by Hollywood there, ampersand and all). That first newsletter — which, sadly, no longer resides online because The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter killed off the Revue newsletter platform on which it was sent, so it now just resides in my inbox vault — was entitled “In a World of Pure Imagination”, because Gene Wilder, the star of said movie, had just passed away.

In the quiet moments before the wonderful chaos, I’m finding myself thinking, as I often do, about content. And I think I have a plan. A giant, unified plan. Finally. But it will take some time as I take some time. Stay tuned, in a few months. ✍️🍻

🕵️‍♂️ My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise

Caity Weaver humorously tries to track down where Cruise actually lives — likely somewhere in England — as he’s become something of an enigma in modern life. Unlike seemingly every other actor on social media, Cruise only seems to exist in the real world when he’s promoting his movies (which he does relentlessly). I appreciate this reclusiveness, it is a bit odd for a celebrity in our modern world, but it also adds to his mystique as the last “true” movie star. One where we don’t know (and track) his every Starbucks order.

⚓️ How Sapporo Sank Anchor Brewing

If, like me, you were shocked by the news that Anchor Brewing, the 152-year-old iconic San Francisco brewery, was going out of business, this backstory as to why will probably just make you angry. Let’s hope someone —the employees?! — steps in to save them.

🌁 What If San Francisco Never Pulls Out of its “Doom Loop”?

Speaking of SF, the title and certainly the images (!) are a bit much here, but overall, this feels like a fair look at the city — where I lived and watched degrade over the past 15 years — by Tabby Kinder and George Hammond. Still, there’s some hope…

📱 The iPhone 15 Pro is a Step Toward Apple’s Dream

Mark Gurman, as always, seemingly has all the key details about the iPhone 15 ahead of its launch. The key upgrade this year will clearly be the first chip built with the 3nm process — which should both lead to a nice speed jump and, more importantly, better battery life. But the real hardware upgrade (beyond the switch to USB-C) will likely be the mute toggle becoming an “Action” button, just like the Apple Watch Ultra has. Say goodbye to the constant swiping left to open the camera app. (Also, StandBy is great.)

🛢️ The Mother of All Pivots

Scott Galloway on the Gulf States attempt to pivot from oil. The “Neom” project is the most forward-facing effort, but there are hundreds of other elements to the pivot, both large (tech investing, buying sports teams) and small (marketing luxury and trying to lure the world’s wealthiest people).

👻 Social Media is Doomed to Die

This post by Ellis Hamburger, who previously worked at Snap, from April still very much resonates. Even if they growing to a massive scale, all social media services eventually die by their own hands due to cheap engagement tactics to ramp monetization. From Facebook on down, it’s inevitable.

The Quick Stuff

• It’s morbid, but if you really want to know what happens to the human body when a submarine implodes while heading down to the Titanic, this is the piece for you. 🚢

• What will happen to Christopher Nolan’s 11 miles of IMAX film for Oppenheimer once it’s out of theaters? 🎞️

• While he’s back to chess, this is a fun read about Magnus Carlsen’s detour into poker while he was seemingly bored with the game he has dominated for so long. ♟️

• Maybe don’t just blindly believe (and cite) that Sensor Tower data… 🙅‍♂️

• AI was used to create the “perfect” James Bond — and it looks a lot like a young Clive Owen? (Though yes, a bit like Aaron Taylor-Johnson too. My dark horse money is still on Richard Madden.) 0️⃣0️⃣7️⃣

• There’s apparently a replica of San Francisco at a theme park in Japan. 🌉

• Ever wonder why some directors get their name in the movie title marquee (it’s not always just the obvious marketing element)? 📽️

• Quite the backstory for David Gilmour, the man who created Fiji Water, who died recently at 91. 💧

• Another founder with an interesting backstory, Bill Oesterle, Co-Founder of Angie’s List, who died way too young at 57. 📝

• Before the Hollywood strikes likely pushed everything back, Heat 2 was seemingly progressing nicely as Michael Mann’s next film… 🤞

• Hints of Quentin Tarantino’s next (and supposedly last) film… 🎥

• To discover a new type of gravitational wave, scientists had to “hack the galaxy” to use it as a detector. 🔭

• As we approach 100 years post-Hindenburg might (new types of) airships make a comeback? 🌬️

• Salt Life, the random, generic slogan that became a massive brand. 🧂

• Allbirds, the massive brand that became a random, generic one. 🐦

• Keita Takahashi created Katamari Damacy 20 years ago and now gets nothing from its continued success. He did have an (indirect) hand in helping to create Slack though! 🕹️

• In terms of cities being constructed as grids on a 0 to 1 scale, Chicago gets a 0.89 while London gets a 0.015. 🏙️

• The creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, bought and revitalized this wacky and tacky restaurant in Colorado. 🌴

• There are likely many ripple effects from the deal to bring Lionel Messi to the MLS. And my god it seems to be working out for everyone. The latest brilliant maneuver by Apple. ⚽️

• I still cannot believe Michael Lewis was shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried when FTX collapsed. Here’s a fun quick interview ahead of the book. 🪙

• Did Tim & Eric nail the AI revolution 13 years ago? Sure seems like it. 🏄‍♂️

• Did the T. Rex have lips 65 million years ago? Sure seems like it. 🦖

• Are French people just lazy? Now we’re just full-on asking questions. 🇫🇷

Oh yes, Tweets no longer render here, of course, so here’s a screenshot…

My Stuff

🏀 Gradually, then Suddenly, Obviously

ESPN set to let traditional cable television bleed out…

🎤 All Bangers, All the Time

Some thoughts as Succession ends…

🔪 The Shiv

A few quick thoughts on Succession’s finale…

😎 Apple’s Vision Pro & Meta’s Vision Oh No

Some initial thoughts on Apple’s position versus Meta’s…

🙄 These Used to be Serious People

Zuckerberg vs. Musk. Literally. Who gives a shit?

💸 How Apple Should Have Framed the ‘Vision Pro’ Price Point

A little bit of the old Steve Jobs plain talkin’ distortion…

🥽 Apple’s Vision Ramp

How will Vision Pro scale?

🪡 Meta Threads a Needle

Some quick, initial thoughts on Meta’s Threads service

🐛 Once Bitten

A no-joke very bad centipede bite…

The Name’s Bond, A.I. Bond

Hi there, this is just a post to let you know this newsletter is currently in hibernation mode. You can instead find me writing at: Spyglass.