I was late to the party, but I played Luck Be a Landlord last year and really enjoyed it. It’s a deckbuilder where you build combos by manipulating the icons in your custom slot machine. I linked above to the Steam page, but it’s on just about every platform — I played through it on iOS. TrampolineTales, the indie developer behind Luck Be a Landlord, released a demo for Maze Mice as part of Steam Next Fest. I got around to giving the demo a shot today and I loved it! The game is a slightly weird mix of Pac-Man and Vampire Survivors where time only progresses when you move. You pilot a mouse around a cardboard maze and collect XP gems to earn new weapons and passive effects. You’re being chased by cats and ghosts — the cats follow your path exactly around the maze, and the ghosts ignore walls as they move directly toward you. The time progression system is fun, and I found myself just squeezing through some tight spots by tapping the arrow keys. There’s some light strategy required to herd your foes away from the gems you want to collect. You can check out the Steam page for Maze Mice and give the demo a go on macOS or Windows. If you liked Vampire Survivors, I think you’ll have a good time with this as well.

I was recently on-site with a client and noticed that one person was using the new “Macintosh” screen saver that was added in macOS Sequoia. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a video of it in action. I knew that the screen saver had released, but I was very happy with Relay’s St. Jude screen saver by James Thomson. Happily it turns out that you can run two different screen savers on macOS if you have more than one monitor. To get this working under macOS Sequoia, first make sure your monitors set up as different “Spaces”. You can do this by heading to System Settings ➔ Desktop & Dock, and under the “Mission Control” section, make sure “Displays have separate Spaces” is enabled. Then you can head to System Settings ➔ Screen Saver, and turn off “Show on all Spaces” to the left of the preview thumbnail. Now you can use the drop-down below the thumbnail to choose which monitor you want to configure. I chose to set up the Macintosh screen saver on my secondary monitor, which is in portrait orientation. I set it to the “Spectrum” colour setting (same as in the example video linked above), and also enabled “Show as wallpaper”. This has the nice effect of having the screen saver ease out of its animation and into the desktop wallpaper for that monitor when you wake your machine. I switched to the Mac in 2002 with the release of Mac OS X Jaguar. Previously, I lived in the PC world and didn’t have much love for anything Apple-related. After I switched, I found myself curious about the earlier days of the Mac. This screen saver made me want to dig further into some of the details. A nice effect of the screen saver and its wallpaper mode is the subtle shadowing on the chunky pixels. I’m assuming this is a nod to the Macintosh Portable and its early active-matrix LCD. The screen on the Portable had a distinctive “floating pixel” look. I love how this looks, though I think it would have been a pain to use day-to-day. Colin Wirth produced an excellent video about the machine on his channel “This Does Not Compute”. You can see the some close-ups of the effect starting around the 2:30 mark. Watching the screen saver also had me curious about what version of system software was being shown off. Turns out it’s more than one. Two tools I used to start looking into this were GUIdebook’s screenshots section and Infinite Mac — a site that lets you run fully-loaded versions of classic Macs in your browser. I was most fascinated when the screen saver scrolled over versions of the Control Panel. Especially the version from System 1. You can see this starting at 0:12 in the example video. This thing is a marvel of user interface design. Pretty much everything that can be configured about the original Macintosh is shown, without words, in this gem of a screen. Low End Mac has a good overview of what’s going on here, but I feel like it’s the sort of thing you could intuit if you played with it for a minute or two. One thing I learned while writing this is that you can click the menu bar in the desktop background preview to cycle through some presets! My only nitpicks about this screen are that it uses a strange XOR’d cross instead of the default mouse pointer. I’m assuming this was to make it easier to edit the desktop background, but it still feels like an odd choice. Also, the box with controls how many time the menu blinks is one pixel narrower than the two boxes below it. This would have driven me insane, and I’m amazed it still looked this way System 2.1. The Macintosh screen saver shows its time based on your system clock. I use 24-hour time, and that’s respected in the screen saver even when it’s showing the original Control Panel. This, ironically, is an anachronism. 24-hour time wasn’t an option until System 4. The screen saver also includes a version of Control Panel from System 6. You can see this at around 9:08 in the example video. This Control Panel shows its version as 3.3.3 in the bottom left. I believe this makes it System 6.0.7 or 6.0.8. You can run System 6.0.8 using an emulator on Archive.org. While this version allows for many more options, it’s far less playful. This general style — with the scrollable list of setting sections on the left — started with System 4. System 3 had the last all-in-one Control Panel layout. System 7 migrated to the Control Panels folder, where each panel is its own file, and you could easily add third-party panels to the system. Anyway, this has been far too many words about a screen saver released eight months ago. If you find this interesting, I encourage you to give the Macintosh screen saver a go. I also recommend poking around at old versions of classic Mac OS. I had a lot of fun digging into this!

Today, Alec Watson posted a video titled “Algorithms are breaking how we think” on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. The whole thing is excellent and very well argued. The main thrust is: people seem increasingly less mindful about the stuff they engage with. Watson argues that this is bad, and I agree. A little while ago I watched a video by Hank Green called “$4.5M to Spray Alcoholic Rats with Bobcat Urine”. Green has been banging this drum for a while. He hits some of the same notes as Watson, but from a different angle. This last month has been a lot, and I’ve withdrawn from news and social media quite a bit because of it. Part of this is because I’ve been very busy with work, but it’s also because I’ve felt overwhelmed. There are now a lot of bad-faith actors in positions of power. Part of their game plan is to spray a mass of obviously false, intellectually shallow, enraging nonsense into the world as quickly as possible. At a certain point the bullshit seeps in if you’re soaking in it. The ability to control over what you see next is powerful. I think it would be great if more people started being a bit more choosy about who they give that control to.

Yesterday, the Mastodon team announced it would be handing over control of its project to a new non-profit organization. The timing of this announcement is perfect given everything that’s happening with WordPress, Meta, and… well, everything else. To date, I think Eugen Rochko has done an excellent job stewarding Mastodon, but I also might have said the same thing about Matt Mullenweg a few years back. Why gamble when you can set up safeguards? Not to dwell on the WordPress, but I came across a shockingly prescient post from 2010. It lays out potential conflicts of interest between Automattic and the open source WordPress community. 1 Just about every warning from this post has come to pass in the last few months. It’s exactly these sorts of things that Mastodon looks to be trying to prevent with this new organizational structure. The re-org should also give Rochko more time to focus on product design, which sounds like a win in my book. At this point, I don’t think Mastodon will ever take over the world, but it’s a cozy place with stellar 3rd-party clients. It’s also where a large contingent of the Apple/tech cohort continue to hang out. Bluesky has really taken off, but Mastodon is still a big part of my social media diet. Yesterday also saw the launch of the Free Our Feeds campaign. I’m honestly not sure what to make of this, but I think John Gruber had a great take. The organization is requesting “$30M over three years” to launch “a new public interest foundation that puts Bluesky’s underlying technology on a pathway to become an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire”. Only, that’s also Bluesky’s goal. I’ve written before about my hesitations around the protocol powering Bluesky, and I think that a competing “AppView” would be welcome — but it’s unclear if that’s what Free Our Feeds is going for. They mention wanting to build a second “relay”, though I don’t know if they’re talking about a Relay in the AT Protocol sense. Another canonical Relay would be a good start, but wouldn’t counter any issues if Bluesky started going off the rails. I wish the Free Our Feeds people all the best, but I hope they provide a more detailed plan soon. Until then, I think I’ll just continue to donating to Mastodon’s Patreon. Just watch out for the comment section. It really hasn’t aged well. ↩

Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this is a bit gauche, but it seems like fair marketing given everything that’s going on. It should be noted that many sites are leaving for Pressable — owned by Mullenweg’s company, Automattic — because of a sweetheart deal. But the drama ramped up quickly after WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against Automattic on December 10th. The injunction required that WP Engine be allowed to access WordPress.org resources, and that Automattic stop interfering with WP Engine plugins, while the trial moves forward. Ernie Smith wrote an excellent piece with more details on outcome of the injunction, including a note about Mullenweg quitting a community Slack instance with a hammy message. Mullenweg complied with the injunction, though the “loyalty test checkbox” text was changed to a still-required note about pineapple on pizza. On December 20th, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org would be on holiday break for an unspecified amount of time. In a post on the WordPress.org blog, he again mentioned being “compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers”. He also invited people to fund legal attacks against him by signing up for WP Engine services, and hoped “time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year”. This was the first time WordPress.org had ever gone on break, and it was another instance of Mullenweg using a core part of the WordPress community to send a message. WordPress.org returned to service on January 4th, but plugin and theme updates weren’t being reviewed during the holiday break. I’m all for giving volunteers breaks, but this came as a surprise to the community and there was initially no indication when the break would end. Mullenweg’s “woe is me” language around maybe, possibly, being able to find the resources to reopen a core piece of WordPress infrastructure didn’t help things. It further cemented that Matt Mullenweg’s current mood is an important function of whether or not the WordPress community operates smoothly. While WordPress.org was on break, Mullenweg also reached out to the WPDrama community on Reddit, asking what drama he should create in 2025. A couple of years ago, this sort of thing would have been some tongue-in-cheek fun from a person who’s always been a bit of a goof. These days it comes off a bit differently. Then yesterday happened. Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. This action is blamed on the “the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded by Silver Lake”, which I think is a gross mischaracterization. WP Engine definitely did not start this. Automattic noted it would focus its open source hours on “security and critical updates”. The other hours would be redirected to for-profit projects like WordPress.com. This means that the community will be expected to take up the slack if it wants WordPress to improve. I also really doubt that 45 hours a week is enough time to keep WordPress secure and bug-free. And you know what? In a normal world, that would be fine. I’d be all for it! If the community were to take control of the open source project, I think that would be ideal. The problem is that Mullenweg has final say over some very important parts of the WordPress community. He also seems recently to be acting more childishly and impulsively than usual. Another thing that came to light yesterday was that the WordPress Sustainability committee was shuttered after a core member, Thijs Buijs, stepped down. In a post on the WordPress Slack, Buijs cited the “2025 drama” post on Reddit as the reason he was leaving, and called for a change in WordPress community leadership. In response, Mullenweg responded in part with “[t]oday I learned that we have a sustainability team”, and closed the channel. The WordPress Sustainability Team had four core members, and 11 people who had contributed on GitHub. As far as I can tell, they were all community members, and none were Automattic employees. Even if it wasn’t producing amazing results, I can’t see what harm it was doing. The sin was pointing out something stupid that Mullenweg did, and having a member wanting change. The optics, especially given current world events, are definitely not great. The wildest part of this to me is that there’s video of Mullenweg — live on stage at Word Camp Europe in 2022 — requesting the creation of the Slack channel he was turning off. Guess that slipped his mind. All of this bodes poorly for the open source version of WordPress. I think it’s perfectly fair for Automattic to switch gears and focus on for-profit projects — it’s a company after all. The problem is that there’s a void being left. Automattic had, for better or worse, lead the development of both the commercial and open source pieces of the WordPress ecosystem. Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but Mullenweg still holds all the keys. In the announcement, Automattic said that WordPress.com would be updated to be more in line with the open source version of WordPress. This also makes sense to me, as WordPress.com has always been a weird version of the software. Of course, having slight differences to the core WordPress experience is the argument that Mullenweg initially used to call WP Engine a “cancer”, but who’s keeping track? I’d also like to point out again that Automattic invested in WP Engine in 2011. It also acquired Pressable in 2016, likely because it was a hosting service that offered a “real” version of WordPress, unlike WordPress.com. It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found. In the meantime, if you’re a WordPress developer, you may want to look into some other options.