As a subscriber to The Verge & WIRED, it is rather annoying that the RSS feeds that both provide are littered with product recommendation listicles, designed to generate revenue through affiliate links. While they may be useful to some people, and generate an additional revenue stream, I am paying you. It is frustrating to still be advertised to, especially for something that promotes continual spending, something I'm cutting back on.

Just under 10 years ago was when I first registered this domain, but I've had some form of website on the internet for 13 years. Despite the readership of this website probably hovering around ~0, this has been a nice, quiet place to put things I'm proud of online. But as with anything, this site has evolved over time, and has probably had the biggest change in content philosophy over the past month.

YNAB is my budgeting tool of choice. It works, and I don't want the hassle of maintaining my own instance of Actual Budget . YNAB has support for Open Banking sync, which I do use. However, their API vendor, TrueLayer, continues to lack Chase UK Open Banking support, despite it being available for \~1 year now. Other tools, like Moneyhub, have supported it for yonks now. Using the direct bank API yourself is impossible (regulatory requirements), but you can use an intermediary vendor.

It's quite hard to relive history on reddit. I wanted to write a piece about "2015 CS esports", and one of the best ways to do so would be to view a "top of 2015" for /r/GlobalOffensive. Sadly, I couldn't find anything for this (at least not via a quick Google search). The closest I can find is rereddit, which is a platform feature to find the top posts for the entire website for a particular year or month, which is at least something.

Cheating is an increasingly endemic problem to multiplayer video games on PCs, and as a response, we've seen the "Cambrian explosion" of anti-cheats designed to combat this situation. However, a vast majority of these products are choosing to run with the highest privileges possible on your system: the kernel-level. This choice has caused a lot of scrutiny from customers over the possible ramifications of this decision on their usage of their computer: particularly, over the privacy, security and stability of their PCs.

Recently, CS professionals STYKO and EliGE have shared the fact that they have employed the services of aim coaches. Such moves are relatively new to Counter-Strike: while aiming is considered an important aspect to Counter-Strike, professionals usually improve their skill in this venture with deathmatching, or training with Counter-Strike maps such as "aimbotz", or full bespoke suites such as Refrag (EliGE partly owns Refrag, after acquiring it from ESEA). CS, as is typical, is late to the party.

Simple Mobile Tools are a set of open-source "shareware" apps. Examples of applications included in the suite include "Simple Gallery", "Simple Calendar" and "Simple Contacts". While the applications are open-source, the developer made money through proprietary app store versions. From the Play Store, the Gallery is only free for 14 days, before you are required to buy a licence. F-Droid and GitHub were options for acquiring fully-free binaries, but not often used by regular users.

The mundanity of seeing online CS during the pandemic has electrified a transition that was already happening - the end of tier 1 online events. The leagues were the last victims, with FLASHPOINT's last event setting the framework for future online events. But the pandemic also unearthed a deeper scar tissue within the scene - the economics stopped making sense a long time ago. The industry has tried to paper over this with agreements such as the Louvre Agreement - tournament organisers would sell a fixed number of slots, which would guarantee you access to tier 1 offline events.

North American Counter-Strike is dead, or in the middle of dying. Team Liquid, the prototypical NA team, now fields a primarily European roster, while Cloud9's roster is Russian. The remaining stalwarts in Complexity and EG are not competitive internationally. This death of the national team is framed as a problem endemic to North America. But one only needs to look in Europe to see that the concept as a whole, is withering away.