over the last year developer Mike Simone (MikeS) has been working hard implementing high-quality composite¹ and s-video output capability in the MiSTer FPGA project.

he's finally done cooking. result? largely fantastic. look at that shot of NES Gun.Smoke in composite. it's exquisitely analog, perfectly imperfect (the display is my PVM-2950Q). i love it and am excited about likely adopting composite video, and sometimes s-video, as my daily driver for various consoles.

but, getting ahead of myself. let's talk about how this is working, why i like it, and that time two of Sonic's creators went on record shit-talking Sega's penny-pinching on the Mega Drive.

They tricked me into taking out a loan on a tooth! They removed it! That should be a free service!

I was impressed by most of this article in Curbed, which did some actual reporting on the discrepancy between landlords saying rents in New York City were surging "because people came flooding back" and the fact that, according to all data, people did not actually come flooding back. The reporting goes to impressive shoe-leather lengths -- the author even contacts the New York City Water Board for clarification on how much waste they processed in 2021! Then comes the end, which identifies the culprit as The Algorithm -- specifically, that of RealPage, a Texas-based "property management software" company that sells software-as-a-service to computerize the process of landlords doing landlord shit -- and leaves it there. This section of the article contains a lot of "it's hard to know who all their customers are" and "if this happened, it could do this" speculation, but few specifics. Naturally, I wanted to know more.

(source: RealPage's training video for AI Revenue Management, 2022; it just gets more infuriating from here, folks)