Signal · dispatches
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Reporting on the systems, tools and people quietly deciding what the next decade runs on.
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The Storefront Rules Changed. The Shelf Did Not.
Eighteen months of forced openings handed developers sideloading, link-outs and lower fees. The install figures suggest almost nobody outside the top hundred apps has…
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Survival Week: Have You Played “Don’t Starve”
No tutorial, no map, eight minutes of daylight and three meters nobody explains. Klei’s sanity system turned madness into something you farm, and the…
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Unsplash: This Week’s Hottest Exploration Cities
Drone permits tightened, so photographers started climbing instead. Why this week’s trending list is dominated by cities built on slopes, and who is shooting…
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7 Days to Die: The Survival Crafting Game
Twelve years after it first appeared on Steam, the zombie carpentry sim has grown into something stranger and better. We spent a fortnight with…
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The Real Reason Mapping Shorelines is Complicated
A coastline has no fixed length, and in the Arctic it no longer has a fixed position either. Inside the unglamorous, faintly absurd work…
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The Pearl on the Atlantic: Welcome to Amazing Marrakech
Snow on the Atlas, frost in the courtyards and a medina that empties by nine. Marrakech in January is the version of the city…
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Pre-Historic Survival Game ‘Before’ is a Visual Masterpiece
Nine Hearths built a stone-age survival game where the art direction does the work a tutorial usually does. Six hours in, we stopped reading…
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The Seven-Year Phone, and the People Who Keep It Alive
Long support promises read as generosity in a press release. Inside the teams that must honour them they are a backlog, a hiring problem…
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Gotta Catch Em All: Our Guide to Gathering Pocket Monsters
Completing a national dex stopped being a test of skill years ago. It is now a logistics problem, and the players who finish fastest…
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We Suspect The Unsuspected Treks
The best meteor watching happens on trails nobody recommends. Notes from a winter of chasing dark sky on foot, and why the Quadrantids reward…
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