Mike McQuaid recently blogged that he's joined the POSSE Party. He reached out a couple times to say he was scraping my own site to figure out how I accomplished certain things (like the iMessage previews for my takes section, but in general it must have been straightforward enough, because he didn't need me at all to get up and running. Kind of cool to see that he can teach his 20 year old blog new tricks.

In his LinkedIn post sharing it:

In practice, this looks like building your own version of a single-serving social network on your own site and exposing RSS/Atom feeds to other services to consume. Justin recently released POSSE Party which makes this easier by cross-posting to various social networks. I've complained for a while about (anti)social networking so I'm always up for new ways to use social networking less.

Naturally, he does a better job than me summarizing what the hell POSSE Party is for. When I'm too close to a project, it's hard to zoom out and talk about it like a normal fucking person.

If you don't count Halo LAN parties, I probably sank more time into Knights of the Old Republic on the original Xbox than any other game. By taking the classic tabletop mechanics they were known for and theming it with a setting that didn't bore me to tears, Bioware really hooked me. I even played through every campaign quest of the middling The Old Republic MMO, which are hundreds of hours I'll never get back.

Last night, this announcement just dropped, as reported by Jordan Miller at VGC:

Announced at The Game Awards, the game is being directed by Casey Hudson, the director of the original Knights of the Old Republic game.

"Developed by Arcanaut Studios in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic is a new single-player narrative-driven action RPG and spiritual successor to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic," according to a press release.

"Led by Casey Hudson, Game director of the original Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect trilogy, the team of veteran game developers and storytellers at Arcanaut Studios is crafting an epic interactive adventure across a galaxy on the brink of rebirth, where every decision shapes your path towards light or darkness."

And with this teaser:

To learn that the director of both KOTOR and Mass Effect is coming out with a new game in a similar setting is really exciting. Hudson took some well-deserved shit for Mass Effect 3's ending, but he's spent enough time in the wilderness at this point to earn another shot.

Because I'm a glutton for punishment, from time to time I'll, "rub an LLM's nose in it," when it fucks up a task. I know the chatbot can't learn from this, and I know I'm just wasting 8¢ of some idiot investor's money, but I do it anyway.

But wait, there's more…

Dion Lim wrote a pretty good angle on what the market correction will actually do:

The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.

Now, with AI, we are once again surrounded by dry brush.

I think in one of our discussions before our Hot Fix episode, Scott Werner and I used the same analogy—that a recessionary fire will be necessary to clear the overgrowth and make room for companies better-adapted to the post-AI world to innovate—and the author seems to have picked up that metaphor and run with it.

I think the important thing to take away here is that most people hear this and their instinct is to hide. "Well, a fire is coming, I should sit on the sidelines and wait things out." Apart from the foolishness of trying to time the market, this is especially bad advice amid a market wildfire. One of the most actually-useful pieces of advice I've offered founders and investors over the years is the importance of investing through into and through the downturn.

My preferred way to do that is, of course, profitably. However, if you're ever going to tolerate operating at break-even margins or (God forbid) a loss, the best time to do that is when everyone else is cashing out, laying people off, or closing up shop. Hunker down through the cleansing and the act of persevering will generally see a company emerge as a far more resilient operation that finds itself in a far less competitive environment.

I learned this during the Web 2.0 during the Great Recession. Pillar Technology started hiring some of the most talented, most engaged developers in central Ohio and southeast Michigan throughout 2009-2011 when other firms were still hobbled by downsizing. And they paid a premium, too (I nearly doubled my salary to work there!). But when they came out the other end of the recession, they were five times the size, sold into half a dozen verticals, had developed a national profile of clients, and the owner was able to cash out to Accenture for a high-eight figure exit.

When other people get scared, get aggressive.