So I came up with a variation that lets the audience decide when players have to tell the truth. It’s a blast to play because it has a similar effect on a scene as New Choice/Shoulda Said: it pushes players toward direct, meaningful offers that continuously heighten the narrative.

The game has caught on at Unexpected Productions’ long-running Duos show over the past couple of months, so I wanted to document it and share it with the broader improv community.

Be Honest With Them

_description

The improvisers begin a scene based on an audience suggestion. When the audience feels a player is being too polite or not saying what they really think, anyone can shout “Be Honest With Them.” The last player to speak then replaces their line with a more honest, direct response—sometimes blunt, sometimes surprisingly vulnerable.” The scene continues as if the original line had never been spoken.

^notes

Before the scene starts, coach the audience to yell “Be Honest With Them” when they feel a player is being too polite or not saying what they really think. Also suggest that the game works best when they don’t do it after every line.

As the game has caught on, I’ve seen improvisers coach the audience to yell “Be honest” rather than the full “Be honest with them.” I’d recommend using the full phrase, since it’s easier for the performers to hear clearly over audience laughter and chatter. And for some reason, it also seems to reduce the audience’s tendency to yell it after every line.

^Variations

Instead of using the audience, have the emcee ring the bell and call “Be Honest With Them.”

^tags

shortform, audience, scene, directed, justification

^{The author and Paul Furio, a cohost of the Cascade Improv Podcast, being honest with each other at UP’s Duos show. Photo courtesy Bill Grinnell Photos.}

Just when I thought I was done writing about how to make Facebook more usable for its original social media purposes, some wonderful person working on the mobile app decided to unbury the Friends feed. Now you can add a button right on the front page of your Facebook mobile app that launches a feed showing just your friends’ posts! Well, and ads. But no Reels, and no annoying “suggested” posts from people you don’t follow. (Also, no posts from pages and groups you’re a member of, if those are important to you.) Now you can just tap the Friends button at the bottom of the mobile app to see a feed with just posts from your friends.

Here’s how to add the button, which is not there by default:

1. Choose the Menu button (bottom right corner of the Facebook mobile app on iOS, the three-bar “hamburger” button in the top right on Android).

2. Scroll down to Settings & privacy, and choose Settings.

3. Scroll down to Preferences, and select Tab bar.

4. Select Customize the bar

5. Tap the box next to Friends and change the drop-down to Pinned.

   1. Optional: You might want to pin other commonly-used options, such as Events or Groups.

   2. Pin the Feeds option as well for quick access to your Favorites, Groups, or Pages feeds, if you use those.

6. Presto! Now when you open the Facebook app, you can just tap the Friends button in the bottom toolbar to get a feed without Reels, suggested posts, and other unwanted junk.

That’s it! I posted screenshots below showing the steps on an iOS device; Android should be nearly identical.

Screenshots of the process on iOS below. Tap the “Menu” button in the bottom right of the Facebook mobile app on iOS/“hamburger” menu button top right on Android, and then just follow this sequence to add the Friends feed to your app home screen. Android screens will look different, but the menu choices are the same.

And here’s the location of the Menu button at the top of the Android Facebook app (poorly drawn arrow) and the added Friends button (circled):

That’s it! Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back soon to talk about fun stuff like improv, computing history, and other distractions from the country that’s burning around us.

I was excited to see an ARC of John Scalzi’s next novel, releasing March 25, 2025, was available for preview. But reading the description of When the Moon Hits Your Eye, I tempered my enthusiasm. The moon has turned into cheese? Seriously, John? Speculative fiction often plays fast and loose with science, but this was pushing it—more liberties than a U.S. President at a porn star convention.

Subscribe now

This is the third in trilogy of fun explorations of the wackier fringes of science fiction, before Scalzi returns to the serious Old Man’s War series later this year. The first entry, The Kaiju Preservation Society, was entertaining but mostly forgettable, and not one of Scalzi’s strongest. The next book, Starter Villain, was absolutely delightful, a fun riff on the conventions of spy fiction, and evidence that Scalzi needs to continue to work cats into his work. Where would this one fall? The basic premise just sounded so… well, dumb… that if it was anyone other than someone I had total faith in like Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, or Travis Baldree, I’d have skipped it. But it was Scalzi, so I dove in.

And man, was I surprised at how much thought I’ve given this damn book. On the surface, it tickles the same synapses as Scalzi’s other humorous works like Starter Villain and Redshirts. Over double the US RDA of cheese puns and snarky quips that will undoubtably be delightful when ready by Wil Wheaton in the upcoming Audible audiobook.

But what lingered was something deeper. When the fundamental reality of your universe shifts (and the moon turning to cheese qualifies), how does that affect people? Throw in a potentially world-ending threat, and Scalzi delivers surprisingly touching glimpses into how different lives—young lovers, rural preachers, billionaires and con artists—adapt to chaos.

The structure is both fascinating and frustrating, and is something I’d like to experiment with in my own writing. Each chapter focuses on a single day and a new character. Some figures reappear in different roles, but the protagonist isn’t a person—it’s humanity itself. There’s no villain, no problem to "solve," just a universe suddenly throwing out the rulebook. (Well, at least the rules about celestial bodies not spontaneously turning into dairy products.) This approach allows Scalzi to balance humor with poignant character moments, and it works—though I wish we got more time with some of the most intriguing characters.

I posted my Goodreads review yesterday, and yet today I still find myself writing more about it. That’s a lot of impact for a book about a cheese moon. The release timing couldn’t be better, with our political reality upheaved into a state of stupidity and insanity that a book that finds delightful moments in a time when everything seems to be falling apart is just what we need right now.

So you can definitely take this as a recommendation.

Preorder from your local bookstore, Powell’s, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or get in the queue now at the library.

Here’s my GoodReads review, reposted to save you a click…

I was thrilled to get an early read of this novel—I’ve devoured almost everything Scalzi has written. He’s a versatile and consistently entertaining writer, whether he’s tackling serious stories like the Old Man’s War and Interdependency series or exploring the delightful absurdity of Starter Villain.

Scalzi has never let me down. So despite a premise that made Kaiju Preservation Society sound like hard science fiction, I dove in. Earth’s moon has… turned into cheese? Potential snarky comments about Scalzi’s writing curdling in a similar fashion are so obvious that I’d be milking a cheap joke by making them—so I’ll grate-fully refrain before things get whey out of hand. And to my pleasant surprise, I loved this book.

I went in knowing nothing about When the Moon Hits Your Eye beyond a premise so ridiculous it felt like Scalzi had written it on a dare. What I got was a roller coaster of young love, existential dread, writer’s block, last chances, and the terrifying realization that the universe has suddenly stopped playing by the rules. (Oh, and a thin slice of billionaire karma.)

Each chapter unfolds over a different day, starting with the moon’s sudden dairy-based transformation and spiraling from there. You’ll meet fantastic characters, encounter surprisingly poignant explorations of reality and mortality, and find a bit of painfully observant commentary on how society reacts to the inexplicable.

All in a book about the moon turning into cheese.

Make no mistake—this novel does not take itself seriously. If you’re here for cheese puns, you will leave deeply satisfied.

If I have one complaint, it’s that some characters were so compelling I felt a little robbed getting only a single chapter with them, with maybe a supporting appearance in a later chapter. I’m not saying I want an Old Man’s War-length saga about celestial bodies turning into various foodstuffs, but I would love to spend more time with Lessa Sarah and Nelson, the cheese shop kids, or the Oklahoma guys.

But when a plate of just cheese leaves you wanting more after you’ve cleaned it off—that’s some damn good cheese. And this is a damn entertaining book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for the advance copy of this delightful novel!

PART I: Recapping the First 90 Minutes in 5 Learnings

Pictured: A Revolutionary France death sentence

1. All but a rare few French people are serious jerks.

2. Inspectors will NEVER forgive stealing a lousy loaf of bread.

3. Two people can fall in true, mutual love by merely seeing each other on the street.

4. Jean Val Jean is kind of a moron for not realizing until now that he really should consider moving away from the one town where everyone knows he has a criminal past.

5. Oh, and the French are revolting.

   This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

   ---

Part II: A Few Issues with the Script

Empanada, the girl raised with Croquet, spends 15 minutes singing of her love for Guy.*

She is then immediately fatally shot.

She tells Guy of her love. He cradles her and says he loves her and will always be there for her in her life.

Then she dies.

Then a full minute of combat or talking or something else unmemorable happens. A minute having passed, Guy then feels distant enough from Empanada to sing of his undying love for Croquet.

(* We call him Guy because it’s a French name and I can't hear clearly enough to catch his name. Also, it is fitting, because though he is instantly lovable, he is also amazingly generic.)

Then he passes out and Jean Val Jean sings of something that was unintelligible with the acoustics of the corner I was sitting in, but whatever it was, he holds this sustained high note at the end of the song for like 45 seconds, which gets a huge round of applause and makes the ghost of Whitney Houston rise briefly from the grave.

Then a little boy sings of the glory of child soldiers and is immediately shot dead.

When Empanada was the first to die, Fabio said the battle would be won in her name. 10 minutes later, everyone is shot dead except Guy and Jean.

First, Guy sings of Croquet, and now this. Empanada gets no respect.

Oh, and at some point Jean lets the captured Inspector escape. The Inspector finds good in Jean Val Jean, and he cannot reconcile a world where he can see good in a bread thief, so he jumps off a bridge and kills himself. Seriously. This happens.

Jean Val Jean carries Guy’s body through the sewers, beneath Arkham Asylum. (I think; it gets a little unclear here.) He passes out and is robbed by Croquet’s former foster dad, because if you think it’s a small world where you live, you obviously haven’t been to France.

Pictured: The Penguin from Gotham, added in 2022 in case you're reading this on the Internet Archive in 2144 or something.

Jean wakes up, carries Guy home, and with her love still strong even though Guy has somehow become the Penguin from the Gotham TV show (seriously: outfit, cane, hair, limp, all of it), Croquet nurses him back to handsomeness.

Then they get married, Guy punches foster dad (because small world) at the wedding, and finds out Jean Val Jean was the one who saved him.

Knowing Croquet is safely in the hands of our generic hero, Jean goes off to die of shame for having stolen bread to feed a child 35 years before.

The ghost of Croquet’s hot mom appears and thanks Jean for raising her daughter, and says "come to heaven and I’ll show you some real thanks."

Croquet and Guy show up and say Jean must live and stay with them. Jean looks at Croquet’s mom, who is now, creepily, joined in beckoning him to the afterlife by Empanada's ghost. (Don’t do it, Jean! Empanada may be dead, but she’s still jailbait. Jeez, dude!)

Jean Val Jean decides eternity with Hot Ghost Mom is somehow preferable to sitting around and cramping Croquet and Guy’s generic passion, and immediately dies.

In Heaven, Jean joins the Choir of Dead Ineffective Barricade Revolutionaries, who apparently know how bad the acoustics are in my corner, because they start singing about whether I can hear the people sing.

Pictured: No, I actually can't hear the people sing. Not clearly, anyway.

Guy and Croquet are apparently concerned as well, because they sing along despite not being ghosts.

Then everyone bows and I run to beat the crowd to the bathroom.

fini

• Resources for taming Facebook’s tracking of activities outside of the app

• Making ads more relevant and hiding the offensive, scammy, or stupid ones

• Blocking ads and suggested posts completely on PC and Mac

If you missed the first two articles in this series on making your Facebook experience less horrible, check them out:

• Make Your Facebook Feed Less Horrible — how to show posts from all your friends, without “suggested” crap in your feed

• Taming Facebook: Favorites and Unfollows — create a feed with posts from your 30 favorite people/pages, and unfollow annoying folks without unfriending

Finally at the last entry in my “Facebook has gotten really shitty, but I’m staying around because friends, how can I make it tolerable?” trilogy. Can’t say I’m not anxious to move on to happier topics, but if I can help y’all snag back control of your communication with friends from the monetization fiends in Zuck’s empire, it’s worth the effort.

Facebook Tracks You Even When You’re Not Using It 🤮

Facebook is free because they’re monetizing you, showing you ads and using your activities to sell more ads. (Except in Europe, where thanks to the EU government rules FB users can pay a monthly fee to enjoy an ad-free experience.) I’m actually okay with that contract in general. I’m using the service, and if I’m going to see ads, I’d rather they be relevant to my interests.

What I am not okay with is Facebook watching everything else I do on phone/PC to target those ads. And they do that by default. Which is akin to saying “You didn’t ask me not to root through your wallet.” Facebook tracks your activity in other apps and on other websites, and is also nosy on sites where you opted to “log in using Facebook” instead of setting up a user name/password combo.

The good news is that you can turn this off, so that Facebook’s insanely detailed profiling of you will at least just focus on what you do on FB itself. When you turn these settings off, the wordsmiths on Facebook’s talented content design will try to dissuade you by warning you that your ads may become irrelevant. That’s bullshit: I’ve had these settings disabled for a long time and I’m still getting ads for Star Trek, cat stuff, Star Trek cat stuff, and large winter beanies to fit my incredibly huge head. (Still trying to figure out why FB accurately knows my staggeringly large hat size.)

Subscribe now

Turn off Meta’s External Tracking

Here’s the process for limiting how FB uses your info outside of their own service:

1. Open the Facebook app on your phone, or go to Facebook in your web browser, and open the Menu. (Bottom right corner on the app, top right corner on the website.)

2. Choose Settings & privacy, then choose Settings

3. Choose See more in Accounts Center

4. Select Your information and permission

5. Choose Your activity off Meta technologies. Choose Manage future activity and then Disconnect future activity to turn off tracking of what you do outside of the Facebook app. This will also clear your previous tracking history.

That’s it. You’ll be slightly less monetized, and Facebook will be rooting less through stuff it has no business looking at.

Mute Scammy and Crappy Ads.
And Ads That Make Fun of Your Butt Size

Most of the Facebook ads I get are actually things that are interesting to me: comedy shows, NASA and Star Trek clothes, toys that will entertain my cats for 1-6 minutes… But so many of the sellers are scammers at worst, profiteers at best. Generally if you do see something you want advertised on Facebook from anyone other than a known major company, a quick search on Google or Amazon will show you the same product for significantly less money. (Found a fun Pink Floyd-inspired cat t-shirt that was advertised on FB for $35 for under $20 on Amazon, from the original designer.)

If the Facebook ad does seem like a really good deal, remember what us Gen X’ers learned about caveat emptor from The Brady Bunch: buyer beware, because a deal that’s too good to be true probably is. Mike Brady was no fool.

Anyway, sometimes you get ads that not only don’t interest you, they’re just flat out annoying. Facebook somehow correctly determined I have a huge noggin and offered me ads for giant winter beanie hats. However, Facebook obviously does not have the technology to note that, while my buns won’t make a Kardashian lose sleep, I do have a butt, you jerks.

I can’t believe I essentially just gave these guys a free ad. Anyway, ensuring I never see it again is easy, at least.

Just click the … menu next to the advertiser’s name, and then choose Hide ad. You’ll never see this ad again.

Of course, though FB will likely take your deciding to hide an ad into consideration during future sessions, there’s always the chance you’ll get a different ad from the same annoying advertiser later. To avoid that, select the name of the advertiser at the top of the post to go to the advertiser’s Facebook page, then click the … menu and choose Block to never see content from that company on FB again. Yeah, my ass is talking to you, GrooveLife.

Well, maybe GrooveLife just thinks I might want to buy these as gifts. Now I’m going to have to start looking at my guy friends’ butts to see if I should stock up on these next Christmas.

Cleaning Up Suggested Posts

Honestly, the best solution is to just use the Friends and Favorites feeds, where you won’t see Suggested Posts at all. But if you have reasons to use the main feed, you can at least stop the stupider pages and people from appearing more than once.

Just click the … menu next to the title on any post that’s marked with Follow, then select Hide all from (page name) to stop getting Suggested posts from them. Or select Block (page’s) profile if they’re particularly moronic and you never want to see them anywhere on Facebook.

You can, of course, choose Show more or Show less to attempt to fine-tune the suggested post content. But that feels like you’re just encouraging this invasive feature, when it should be opt-in, or at the very minimum, something you can disable.

The Nuclear Option: Block It All with F.B. Purity

If you browse Facebook on your computer, the F.B. Purity extension can automatically block not just ads, but other garbage you didn’t ask for, such as suggested posts and Reels containing anything other than cute cat or dog videos.

It’s a plug-in for browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, and it automatically filters your feed. Of course, browser plug-ins can carry security risks, but F.B. Purity has been around for years, is actively used by hundreds of thousands of people and hasn’t shown any risks or nefarious intentions — as far as I can tell, it’s just useful donationware. The only real “downside” is that you’re very likely violating Facebook’s terms of service (you’ve read those thoroughly, right?) by using it, and decreased ad revenue from all the people using the app might mean Zuck has a little less cash for doomsday art his underground bunker in Hawaii.

There are detailed instructions for installing it and configuring options on the F.B. Purity website. Just be warned: After using this, the Facebook experience will be so much better on your computer that you’ll be pissed when you have to go back the dumpster fire of the unfiltered feed on your phone or tablet.

Instagram’s Spying Too

Instagram also watches your Internet activity. Here’s how to turn it off:

1. Open Instagram on your phone and tap your profile picture at the bottom right.

2. Tap the menu (three horizontal lines) button in the top right corner.

3. Tap Accounts Center

4. Scroll down to the Account settings section, and tap Ad Preferences

5. Tap the Manage Info header, and check out each setting. Turn off Activity information from ad partners, Ads from ad partners, and Ads about Meta.

As mentioned, social media activity should never be thought of as private. Your activity is still tracked in detail with every privacy protection turned on. But making these adjustments will at least reduce Meta’s nosiness leaking into your other Internet activity, and vice versa.

That’s A Wrap for Now. Till New Suck Happens

The tips in these articles won’t stop Facebook from screwing with your feeds, but they can at least make them more tolerable.

Ironically, many of us would spend more time on Facebook—exactly what the company wants—if they’d just give us direct control over who and what we see. But after working in tech for a couple of decades, I don’t think this is a matter of them misunderstanding their users. It’s about how these companies function internally.

If you’re a Meta employee working on Facebook (or “the blue app,” as it’s called inside Meta), your success isn’t measured by user satisfaction. It’s judged by one thing: engagement. Your job is to ship features that drive measurable increases in usage metrics or ad revenue.

Making it easy to ignore scammy ads, unwanted features like Reels, and Suggested posts from people you’d cross the street to avoid would be the best thing Facebook could do for its long-term success. But that wouldn’t boost short-term engagement, which means a bunch of blue app product designers would risk getting laid off. So, expect Facebook to keep getting worse, not better, for those of us who just want to connect with friends and family.

But don’t despair. If the crap factor rises, watch this space—I’ll be here with tips and tricks to keep the suckage as low as possible.

Disclaimer: I used Meta’s AI tool to create the promo image for this article. As a writer I am very respectful of the need to employ human writers, artists, musicians, and other creators. It felt appropriate for this article to use Meta’s own tools against them, since AI costs them money, and the degeneration of the Facebook feed is what resulted in me having to write these damn things in the first place. Be absolutely assured that I absolutely will hire artist friends and not use AI in normal situations.

Resources

A Guided Tour of the Data Facebook Uses to Target Ads — Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mad at Meta? Don’t Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data — Lena Cohen, Electronic Frontier Foundation

You can set up to 30 people and pages to be “Favorites” on Facebook, which will (1) give them higher priority in your main feed, showing their posts higher in your feed and more frequently, and (2) add them to another feed that will only show your Favorites. I covered how to find Favorites and other feeds in my previous article.

To add a person or page to your Favorites list on your phone’s Facebook app:

1. Go to their profile page (either by searching for them or clicking their name in your feed).

2. On their profile page, tap the … menu, then tap Following.

   

3. In the dialog that pops up at the bottom, change the option from “Default” to “Favorites.”

To add a person/page to your Favorites using Facebook in a web browser:

1. Go to their profile page (either by searching for them or clicking their name in your feed).

2. On their Profile page, click the Friends button, and then click Favorites.

   

Unfollowing: When their posts are NOT your favorite thing

If there are people on Facebook who you want to remain connected to, but you don’t want to read their posts unless you specifically go to their profile page, you can Unfollow them. They will remain connected to you as friends, and can reply to your posts, but you will not see their posts in your feed. They won’t be notified you’ve unfollowed them.

To unfollow, just repeat the steps outlined above, but instead of selecting “Favorites,” choose “Unfollow” from the menu. Now you’ll only see their posts if you go to their profile page directly.

The Detailed Version

Let me preface this by saying that this Substack is not all going to be about using Facebook. Stick around and I’ll have some fun journalism stories and plenty of other non-Zucked-up content.

But the events of the past few weeks, along with an increasingly junk-filled main feed, have led to a lot of folks getting fed up with the network. I’ve managed to tame Facebook to the level where I can see posts from people I care about and keep in touch with friends and family, and I want to share these tips so that you don’t get frustrated and become less connected with people you care about due to FB’s relentless drive to maximize engagement at the expense of a quality experience.

If you missed my previous post, check it out to see how you can access a feed that shows all of your friends (and ads), without additional junk thrown in. The great thing about the Friends Feed is that it shows you all your friends’ posts, so you can keep up with the friends that FB doesn’t usually deem interesting enough to you to include in your regular feed. The bad thing about the Friends Feed is that it, well, shows you all of your friends’ posts. So if you have a friend who reposts every funny meme they come across, for example, but nothing personal, those posts are going to add a lot of junk to your feed. That was what Facebook’s main feed algorithm was supposed to tame, before the company started throwing in Reels, “suggested” posts, and other junk.

The good news is that there a couple of tools you can use to make the Friends Feed post deluge more manageable. Favorites let you pick up to 30 friends and pages and see more of them in your main feed, and directly access a feed showing just their posts. And the Unfollow setting lets you mute people who are too prolific in their posting, or who post disturbing, annoying, or untrue content, without taking the nuclear option of unfriending them completely. After a little bit of tweaking, you can see every post from your favorite cousin, while putting your flat-earther high school prom date on mute.

Favorites: The Posts You Don’t Want to Miss

Use the Favorites feature to keep must-see posts front and center, especially from friends Facebook’s algorithm buries. You can mark up to 30 friends or pages as Favorites, and Facebook will boost their posts in your main feed. Even better, a separate Favorites feed shows only their updates. (Well, and, of course, ads.) I covered how to find Favorites and other feeds in my previous article.

To add a person or page to your Favorites list on your phone’s Facebook app:

1. Go to their profile page (either by searching for them or clicking their name in your feed).

2. On their profile page, tap the … menu, then tap Following.

3. In the dialog that pops up at the bottom, change the option from “Default” to “Favorites.”

Because Facebook just loves to experiment with interface changes, the steps to get to the Unfollow/Default/Favorite selection might be different on some pages. For example, on this page, you’d tap “Following,” and then tap the “Feed” button to change it to a Favorite.

To add a person/page to your Favorites using Facebook in a web browser:

1. Go to their profile page (either by searching for them or clicking their name in your feed).

2. On their Profile page, click the Friends button, and then click Favorites.

Unfollowing: When their posts are NOT your favorite thing

If there are people on Facebook who you want to remain connected to, but you don’t want to read their posts unless you specifically go to their profile page, you can Unfollow them. They will remain connected to you as friends, and can reply to your posts, but you will not see their posts in your feed. They won’t be notified you’ve unfollowed them.

To unfollow, just repeat the steps outlined above, but instead of selecting “Favorites,” choose “Unfollow” from the menu. Now you’ll only see their posts if you go to their profile page directly.

It Shouldn’t Be This Much Work

Wrapping by setting up the soapbox… It’s ridiculous that you have to juggle alternative interfaces, manually curate follows, and install browser add-ons just to make social media tolerable. Back in the day, I was thrilled to have an easy way to keep up with old classmates, far-flung friends, and ex-coworkers.

Now, younger users have flocked to services where they can manage connections on their terms—in other words, they don’t use even use Facebook. Meanwhile, longtime Facebook users are jumping ship for BlueSky and other networks. The harder it gets to stay connected, the less likely we are to bother.

I’m still on Facebook because my people are, but there’s a massive opportunity for a new social network that prioritizes actual communication over ad impressions. The more Facebook users pushes away, the less reason the rest of us have to stick around.

In the meantime, I’ll do one more article on how to minimize Facebook’s intrusive tracking of your activity. Then it’s on to things that are more fun!

You can view a feed on Facebook that only includes Friends (and ads), no “suggested posts,” random Reels, etc. Here’s how to access that on the phone app:

1. Tap the Menu icon in the bottom right corner of the Facebook app. (Top right corner if you’re viewing Facebook in your phone’s web browser.)

2. Tap Feeds. (Do not tap “Friends” here, that’s the friend-management page.)

3. Tap Friends at the top of the screen.

Ta-da! You now have a feed that’s somewhat de-crappified. You can add a Feeds button to the phone app’s main screen so that you can skip step 1 in the future:

To add a Feeds button to the mobile app:

1. Tap the Menu button on the main Facebook screen.

2. Tap Settings & privacy.

3. Tap Settings.

4. Scroll down to the Preferences section and tap Tab Bar.

5. Tap Customize the bar.

6. Tap the button to the right of Feeds and select Pinned.

Check out the original post below if you want a more detailed step-by-step with screenshots, if you want to access the Friends feed on your PC/Mac web browser, or you just want to empathize with my grumbling about the enshittification of social media. New to Substack and I erred too far on the side of detail in the original post and it gave me an opportunity to explain the acronym “TL;DR” to my mom. — Denny

The Long Version (V1.0)

Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022, referring to the gradual degradation of on an online platform’s functionality. Facebook’s business model is built on “maximizing engagement,” and in an attempt to get you to spend more time on the platform, the company has started dropping all kinds of chaff in your main feed: recommended posts from people you don’t follow, Reels, marketplace listings, and of course cubic buttloads of often-scammy advertisements. Add in an algorithm that makes its own choice of which of your friends’ posts it thinks you might want to see and you have a really poor experience and a friends list curated by a money-making algorithm.

In the short-term, FB is likely seeing engagement with all of the junk they’re throwing in your feed (tech companies are insanely metrics-driven, logic and humanity be damned), and questions like “But what if we run off our users in the long term with these changes?” don’t figure in when you have an industry where people have to show short-term gains in order to get decent job reviews.

The good news is that Facebook has two features that can dramatically deshittify your experience: The Friends and Favorites feeds. I’ll focus on the Friends Feed here, and in a future article I’ll show you have Favorites can ensure that you don’t miss posts from your closest friends and family members.

The Friends Feed

Unlike the default Facebook feed, which is chock full of suggested posts and other things you never asked for nowadays, the Friends feed just has your friends. (And ads, so many ads.) Here’s what you’ll see:

• Posts from all of your friends, not just the ones FB’s algorithm thinks you will engage with.

• All of those friends’ posts. So if you have a friend who reposts every meme that amuses them, you’re going to get those too. So you might have to unfollow those folks to keep the feed manageable. (Or talk to mom about her social media practices.)

• Lots of ads. There are browser extensions that can temper those, and actions you can take to make ads more appropriate or less privacy-invading. I’ll cover that stuff in a future article as well.

It’s not a perfect experience, but if you’re on Facebook to connect with friends, it’s far better than the default.

Finding the Feed (Mobile)

On the default setup for the Facebook phone app, the Friends feed is three taps deep in the interface. To access the feed:

1. Tap the Menu icon in the bottom right corner of the Facebook app. (Top right corner if you’re viewing Facebook in your phone’s web browser.)

   

2. Tap Feeds. (Do not tap “Friends” here, that’s the friend-management page.)

   

3. Tap Friends at the top of the screen.

   

Next to Friends, you’ll see other options. I’ll cover these in more detail in a future post, but a quick overview:

• All: Show posts from your Favorites, Friends, and Groups and Pages that you follow. This is a good alternative to the main Facebook feed if you don’t want to miss the posts from your favorite cat-appreciation page.

• Favorites: You can mark up to 30 friends or pages as Favorites, so you won’t miss any of their posts in your main feed, and to have them appear here.

• Groups and Pages: Groups that you’re a member of, and pages that you follow.

Facebook likely buries these feeds because the company would likely prefer that you use the more monetizable main feed. If you prefer these feeds, though, you can add a link directly to the main screen of your Facebook app, putting your Friends feed a tap closer. To add a Feeds button to the mobile app:

1. Tap the Menu button on the main Facebook screen.

2. Tap Settings & privacy.

3. Tap Settings.

4. Scroll down to the Preferences section and tap Tab Bar.

   

5. Tap Customize the bar.

   

6. Tap the button to the right of Feeds and select Pinned. (You might want to pin other frequently used functions while you’re at it, as you can pin up to three icons. I also pinned Events and Profile.)

   

Now Feeds are one tap away when you open Facebook!

(Note that these instructions were created using the iOS version of Facebook, so Android users might see slightly different options.)

Finding the Feed (Desktop Browser)

If you primarily read Facebook on a desktop web browser as I do, we have you covered. (Also, don’t forget to schedule your colonoscopy.) If you only use Facebook on your phone, you can skip this section.

To access your Friends feed:

1. In the menu on the left side of the browser windows, tap Feeds. (Don’t tap Friends, that’s the friends-management page.)

   

   On the Feeds menu on the left side of the browser window, click Friends.

   

If you skipped the “Mobile” section, look above to see what the other feeds, such as All and Favorites, are for.

If you’re an advanced user (that is, you actually use bookmarks instead of using Google to navigate the web, not to call my girlfriend out or anything), you can also bookmark the Friends feed and open directly to that.

Bookmark the following URL in your favorite browser:

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

I had mixed success using the bookmark with mobile and tablet browsers. Adding the Friends feed page to Home Screen on my iPad still opens the main Facebook feed. I was able to add a functional Friends feed link to my Mobile Bookmarks on the iPad version of Chrome, however.

Desktop browser users can also use apps like F.B. Purity to completely remove ads, suggested posts, etc. from your feed, but that’s another article. My focus here is to just quickly show you how to use Facebook’s own tools to reduce the growing enshittification of the social network.

Coming Up: More Ways to Make Facebook Tolerable

I put this article together quickly because I had many friends who were concerned about Facebook’s recent disappointing changes in policy about fact checking and moderating hate speech. In addition to limiting your feed to friends you’ve chosen to follow, there are other ways to make your reading experience better, such as utilizing Favorites, unfollowing people you want to remain friends with but who post too much (or who post things that might make it hard to remain friends with them), and so on. If there are specific things you’d like to see, let me know in the comments!

Click here to view the presentation full-screen.

Horizon Central

As the Senior Content Designer for Horizon Central, I helped build this new world that serves as a central hub for both newcomers and frequent visitors to the metaverse.

Horizon Central aims to act as a central location where you can meet up with friends and strangers, and as a showcase for some of the best content in Horizon Worlds.

I collaborated with a talented team made up of product and game designers, 3D visual artist, and audio engineers to define, refine, and built this central hub for Horizon Worlds that significantly increased retention, repeat visits, and exploration of Horizon Worlds.

Among the features and goals of Horizon Central:

• Highlight compelling worlds and video events

• Teach users how to perform social interactions, such as adding followers and creating parties

• Educate about the core loop quest-and-reward system, which awards avatar items, emotes, and stickers to those who complete quests

• Support seasonal refreshes to introduce new features and highlighted events, such as updated rewards systems and concerts by artists like Sabrina Carpenter

Among the areas where I played a key role as the content designer for the space are:

• Naming: Not just the world, but coming up with evocative and fun names for locations such as "Cosplay Cabana" (avatar clothing accessories shop) and Triumphs and Treasures (quests and rewards center). Horizon Central needs to feel like a real, fun place.

• Quests and Rewards: Designed core-loop activities that serve both educational and retention purposes

• Seasonal Events: Collaborating with game design to develop, evaluate, and enhance interactive elements and quests that promote exploration and encourage repeated engagement.

• Designing Virtual Spaces: The creation of our inaugural shop, where items can be purchased with virtual currency, necessitated not only experimentation with novel labeling techniques and item previews but also an analysis of how users would navigate the space—mirroring the considerations designers make for brick-and-mortar stores.

Horizon Central stands out as the sole world in Horizon Worlds with a dedicated link in the user interface, making it the most prominent world in the platform. It was a privilege to contribute to its design and launch, as well as to its ongoing enhancements that continue to make it more engaging.

Meta Connect 2023: Setting the Stage for Mark Zuckerberg

Meta Connect is an annual event that serves as both a developer's conference and a platform for introducing new products. With 2023's introduction of the Quest 3 headset and Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, this was a significant year, and to make a splash we created a virtual replica of the Meta campus within Horizon Worlds.

Visitors could explore the Events building to see models of the new Quest 3 and Ray-Ban products and read their specs, but we aimed to make the experience more engaging. We designed the world to highlight the latest features of Horizon Worlds, including a quest-and-rewards system, new graphic meshes, and portals to the metaverse's most impressive gaming destinations.

Drawing on my experience with the Core Loop team's engagement strategies, I collaborated with gameplay and graphics designers to develop a series of quests. These quests rewarded attendees with unique prizes, such as an avatar shirt featuring a Meta Connect attendee badge.

Taking advantage of the immersive, embodied environment, we minimized text and instructions, opting instead for quests indicated by symbols, interactive objects, and other intuitive cues.

We not only had record attendance for the live keynote by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Reality Labs leadership, but also an unprecedented completion rate for the reward quests, with many attendees proudly displaying their hard-won custom Connect swag throughout Horizon Worlds.

Horizon Central Core Loop

One way to keep users returning to an app or game is by engaging them with an appealing "core loop," a reward system that motivates them to complete tasks to earn and upgrade items. In Horizon Worlds, we developed a series of quests that unlock new items, such as avatar outfits and interactive emojis.

The quests encouraged users to interact with others, aligning with the metaverse’s role as a synchronous social network. Users were rewarded for gaining new followers, giving gifts, and exploring Horizon Central and other key worlds.

The initial quest/reward loops led to a significant increase in engagement and return visits, prompting us to expand the scope for even greater appeal and retention. We introduced seasonal events with limited-time quests, drawing users into Spring- and Summer-themed worlds and rewarding them for attending events like concerts by Sabrina Carpenter and Alesso.

Originally, rewards were tied to specific quests. However, with the launch of the Summer Carnival, we began testing a virtual currency system. This system awarded time-limited tickets for completing quests, which could be exchanged for rewards of the user’s choice. This approach allows users to focus on the quests they find most enjoyable and choose the prizes that appeal to them, rather than completing less appealing quests just to unlock a coveted reward. There hasn't been a metaverse-wide virtual currency available in Horizon Worlds, so if this initial test is a success it could become the foundation for a virtual economy that world creators can participate in.

As the senior content designer on the project, I've been involved in every aspect of our quest/reward core loop: setting standards for quest titles and content, crafting specific quests, designing rewards, and incorporating A/B test results and user feedback to update the user interface to reduce friction.

Applying VR/AR/MR Content Design to Traditional Content

My earlier work on digital retailing and entertainment for the Xbox console required a different approach than traditional web design. The audience interacts using a controller, views the content from 10 feet away, and desires simple, one-click interactions. The fewer steps between a decision and the ability to purchase a game or view content, the higher the customer satisfaction, and the greater the percentage of users who follow through to task completion.

Creating compelling content for VR (virtual reality), MR (mixed reality), and AR (augmented reality) demands a new approach as well. When wearing VR or MR goggles, users interact with a three-dimensional, immersive world. Whether they’re in a fantastical realm or their own living room, there’s no reason to present them with a wall of text and a series of buttons. Instead, you can make real-world objects glow, add switches and physical buttons, or even have an adorable AI cat or puppy mascot accompany them to answer questions. By guiding and training visitors with a combination of visuals, 3D audio cues, and voice, you can bring a new level of delight and simplicity to the experience.

Horizon Worlds is what they call a "zero to one" product: It's a brand new kind of experience, and because of this, there are few established design standards to follow. It's not a matter of asking "how do designers do this thing?" Instead, a content designer considers the goal, the experience, and the space it's taking place in, and looks for the best way to do it. Is that a traditional, easily dismissed dialog, or something in the virtual room? Text, audio, video, AI characters, visual path wayfinding guidance, highlighting real-world objects... There are so many ways to convey a message, and the goal is to find a balance of delight, simplicity, efficiency, and localizability.

The metaverse doesn't exist yet, but Horizon Worlds is a toolkit that introduces the concept and gives creators a toolkit they can user to explore it. To those experienced with cutting-edge games, Horizon Worlds can feel shockingly rudimentary, but behind the often retro-feeling visuals are some delightful and fascinating new approaches to interacting with users. Having explored Horizon Worlds and competing products and seen the kind of MR and AR technologies that are just a few years down the road, I'm convinced that metaversal technology has the potential to completely redefine how content designers communicate with customers.

For now, though, products like web pages, streaming media service browsers, and voice assistants lack the three-dimensional advantages of embodied technologies like VR, MR, and AR. But designing for a zero-to-one product, where users explore a three-dimensional space, opens up new possibilities for content design. It challenges designers to rethink traditional mental models, find new, intuitive ways to solve problems, and reject “that’s how it’s done” as a guideline.

My Xbox

I worked with the Xbox.com engineering team to design the My Xbox feature from the ground up. The concept was to make all your key communication and information as an Xbox gamer accessible no matter where you are, from messaging and viewing achievements to seeing what your friends are playing. I helped to design the text, the customer flow, and prioritize My Xbox's launch features. Over a decade later, this feature still lives on as the Xbox Profile, and it continues to grow in popularity.

Collections

When the Xbox One launched, presenting a collection of related items to a customer was labor intensive, and the customer experience was poor, requiring them to click a game's image to see the price and description. I worked with the engineering team to implement and evangelize collections. This feature provides an easily updated, catalog-based method for presenting collections of items for sales, events, and other promotions. Collections dramatically increased revenue by enabling larger and more frequent sale events on the Xbox One dashboard. The more efficient build and localization process of the catalog-based design let us present sales and other collections worldwide, instead of just in the highest priority regions. Collections also make for a much better experience by letting customers see a game's price, discount, and details without forcing them to click through to each individual title.

Media Experiences

When the Xbox One brought HD displays and smooth framerates to console gaming, our team felt like we could use those capabilities to really show off AAA game launches. Working with an amazing team of artists, designers, and coders on the Xbox Dash team, including Bruce Warren, Todd Bohanna, and Jana Sheehan, we created full-on multiple-page multimedia promotions to promote the launches of AAA titles like Ryse: Son of Rome, Halo 4, and Battlefield 4. Called Media Experiences (MEs), these modules included animated backgrounds; detailed explorations of game features, lore, and characters; videos, photos and music; and they allowed gamers to share excitement for the games via console messaging. MEs not only had significantly higher customer engagement than typical game detail page promotions, but they also provided a significant lift in preorders.

(Imagine this with animated rain and flashing fire, and the Battlefield theme playing.)

Xbox App

Building off the success of the web-based My Xbox, Microsoft decided to build a dedicated Windows Xbox app for Xbox One players, allowing customers to see and preorder/purchase new and upcoming games, communicate with friends, stream Xbox games to the PC, and more. As the gaming lead on the Xbox dash team, I ensured that the user experience followed best customer practices and I prioritized the functionality that our metrics indicated was top priority in the initial launch. After the application was relaunched to support the highly successful Game Pass subscription programming, I worked with the engineering team to refine the UX and prioritize the functionality for the Store section in the app.

Windows

Of all the UX work I've done, redefining the Windows UX, Help system, and troubleshooter process has likely had the most positive impact on customer experiences. Teaming with Windows engineers on areas such as audio devices, driver installation, and user access control, my team and I worked to make Help text more accessible (and we were the first team to use real-time customer feedback to further refine help information), to improve user interface text, and to make flows for processes more logical and streamlined. From significant changes like completely rewriting help files into a friendlier voice, to small but helpful details like adding illustrations of audio jack functionality, our team significantly increased customer satisfaction with the Windows UX in comparison to the legacy Windows XP/95 content we replaced.

The Future of User Experience

Improving the user experience has always been a passion. When the Xbox engineering team was trying to get approval to do an unprecedented total revamp of the Xbox 360 user interface, I interviewed Marc Whitten, then the head of Xbox development, and created a faux Wired article fictionally describing the proposed "New Xbox Experience" a year after it launched. That article helped Marc get the greenlight from execs for a costly, risky revamp that continues to evolve today in the Xbox user interface. It's awesome to power-on an Xbox 360 console and still see the fruits of the efforts my team and I made, and to see those improvements still reflected in the latest Xbox Series X|S.

Having started my technology enthusiasm in the days of typing LOAD ":*",8,1 to start a game, and now loving an era of being able to just say  "Alexa, let's play Star Trek trivia" anywhere in my house, it's exciting to see how much the user experience has improved.

As we move forward into new frontiers like virtual and augmented reality, the continued improvement of digital assistants, and more, I'm psyched to see where the user experience will go, and excited to be a part of helping make these awesome, entertaining, life-improving technologies even more accessible to future audiences.

Feature Articles

The Science of Star Trek
This was written for the late, great OMNI Magazine. I was able to interview science fiction production luminaries like Andre Bormanis and Mike Okuda while they were working on series like Star Trek: The Next Generation. This assignment also landed me a chance to visit the Deep Space Nine sets.

Virtual Blue Yonder: Fightertown Takes Off
Another OMNI article. The tour of Fightertown, a virtual air combat facility, was a blast, but the best part of this one was getting to fly in the back seat of a real USAF F-15D. I wish I’d had about four more pages to write about that part of the experience.

VR Headset Head-to-Head
A comparison of the Oculus Rift and HP Vive for Computer Shopper. I think the headline pun was just fortuitous.

Reviews

Cloud 9 C989 ergonomic keyboard (Tom’s Hardware)

Fnatic REACT+ headphones (Tom’s Hardware)

Oculus Rift VR headset (Computer Shopper)

Oculus Touch VR controllers (Computer Shopper)

HP Elite Slice PC (Computer Shopper)

Digital Storm Eclipse PC (Computer Shopper)

JVC Everio GZ-MG37 camcorder (c|net)

Books

Sony CLIE for Dummies (Wiley Publishing)
One of four technology tutorial books that I wrote or co-wrote, this one in the popular “…for Dummies” series. This is a PDF containing a few sample chapters to give you an idea of my accessible style when writing tutorials for novice and casual readers.

User Experience

UX Examples: Over the years I’ve helped make Xbox.com, the Xbox console, and even Windows easier to use and more accessible. Here’s a look at some of the work I’ve done,.

Manuals

BackupBuddy 2.0 (Blue Nomad Software)

Tutorials

Build a VR Powerhouse
I was given a $2,000 budget to design and build a fast PC for VR gaming. Part of Computer Shopper’s “Build It” series, the idea was to show not just what I chose, but explain why I chose those parts, and then talk about the process of putting it all together.

Video Scripting and Voiceover

I codesigned, cowrote, and cohosted Xbox LIVE’s Insider Moves game tips show along with Ryan Treit. This pioneering tips show, created when YouTube was still in its infancy, would often get over a million views each week on the Xbox 360 console. We aimed to provide content for novices and hardcore gamers alike, and incorporated humor and running jokes to keep people coming back even if they weren’t stuck in that particular game.

I’ve also appeared as a guest expert covering computer hardware and gaming on broadcast shows such as The Screen Savers and CNN Headline News.

Photography

Denny Atkin Photography on Facebook
A small sample of my photography. I’m a big aviation and space buff so you’ll find an emphasis on airshow pictures and drone panoramas, but there’s a bit more variety in my Samples Album. I’ve also taken hundreds of product photos to accompany reviews and feature articles; you’ll find some of those accompanying many of the articles above.

NASA Social Reporting

The Final Space Shuttle Launch
Day 1, Part 1:The Twent
Day 1, Part 2: Visiting the Launch Pad
Day 2, Part 1: Ground Control to @Astro_Ron
Day 2, Part 2: Go for Launch? Really?
I was lucky enough to be selected as one of about 100 social media representatives to view and report on the final Space Shuttle launch, STS-135, as part of the NASA Social program. Since then, I’ve also reported on the first test launch of the Orion capsule that will be used in NASA’s Artemis program, and on a visit to the NASA Armstrong center at Edwards AFB to report on aerospace research.

This was written in 2018 immediately after seeing Les Miserables at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. Because I had a lot more fun writing this than I did actually seeing the production, I'm sharing it here.

LES MISERABLES: THE DENNY'S NOTES SYNOPSIS

PART I: Recapping the First 90 Minutes in 5 Learnings

Revolutionary France death sentence

1. All but a rare few French people are serious jerks.

2. Inspectors will NEVER forgive stealing a lousy loaf of bread.

3. Two people can fall in true, mutual love by merely seeing each other on the street.

4. Jean Val Jean is kind of a moron for not realizing until now that he really should consider moving away from the one town where everyone knows he has a criminal past.

5. Oh, and the French are revolting.

PART II: A Few Issues with the Script

Empanada, the girl raised with Croquet, spends 15 minutes singing of her love for Guy.*

She is then immediately fatally shot.

She tells Guy of her love. He cradles her and says he loves her and will always be there for her in her life.

Then she dies.

Then a full minute of combat or talking or something else unmemorable happens. A minute having passed, Guy then feels distant enough from Empanada to sing of his undying love for Croquet.

(* We call him Guy because it’s a French name and I can't hear clearly enough to catch his name. Also, it is fitting, because though he is instantly lovable, he is also amazingly generic.)

Then he passes out and Jean Val Jean sings of something that was unintelligible with the acoustics of the corner I was sitting in, but whatever it was, he holds this sustained high note at the end of the song for like 45 seconds, which gets a huge round of applause and makes the ghost of Whitney Houston rise briefly from the grave.

Then a little boy sings of the glory of child soldiers and is immediately shot dead.

When Empanada was the first to die, Fabio said the battle would be won in her name. 10 minutes later, everyone is shot dead except Guy and Jean.

First, Guy sings of Croquet, and now this. Empanada gets no respect.

Oh, and at some point Jean lets the captured Inspector escape. The Inspector finds good in Jean Val Jean, and he cannot reconcile a world where he can see good in a bread thief, so he jumps off a bridge and kills himself. Seriously. This happens.

Jean Val Jean carries Guy’s body through the sewers, beneath Arkham Asylum. (I think; it gets a little unclear here.) He passes out and is robbed by Croquet’s former foster dad, because if you think it’s a small world where you live, you obviously haven’t been to France.

The Penguin from Gotham, added in 2022 in case you're reading this on the Internet Archive in 2144 or something.

Jean wakes up, carries Guy home, and with her love still strong even though Guy has somehow become the Penguin from the Gotham TV show (seriously: outfit, cane, hair, limp, all of it), Croquet nurses him back to handsomeness.

Then they get married, Guy punches foster dad (because small world) at the wedding, and finds out Jean Val Jean was the one who saved him.
Knowing Croquet is safely in the hands of our generic hero, Jean goes off to die of shame for having stolen bread to feed a child 35 years before.

The ghost of Croquet’s hot mom appears and thanks Jean for raising her daughter, and says "come to heaven and I’ll show you some real thanks."

Croquet and Guy show up and say Jean must live and stay with them. Jean looks at Croquet’s mom, who is now, creepily, joined in beckoning him to the afterlife by Empanada's ghost. (Don’t do it, Jean! Empanada may be dead, but she’s still jailbait. Jeez, dude!)

Jean Val Jean decides eternity with Hot Ghost Mom is somehow preferable to sitting around and cramping Croquet and Guy’s generic passion, and immediately dies.

In Heaven, Jean joins the Choir of Dead Ineffective Barricade Revolutionaries, who apparently know how bad the acoustics are in my corner, because they start singing about whether I can hear the people sing.

No, I actually can't hear the people sing. Not clearly, anyway.

Guy and Croquet are apparently concerned as well, because they sing along despite not being ghosts.

Then everyone bows and I run to beat the crowd to the bathroom.

fini

Despite the lukewarm reviews and the minor upgrades in specs, Matt Wagner's commentary on the Rift S's clarity in DCS made me order it from Amazon (where I could return it easily if not impressed).

I'm *not* returning it. Spent the evening flying flight sims in it and it's clearly a worthwhile upgrade for sim fans. You would think it had much higher resolution than the original (CV1) Oculus Rift, given the additional clarity. The screen door effect (visible pixels) is just *gone*. (At least, for my eyes.)

Some impressions trying various flight simulators:

• Prepar3D v4.51 probably sees the most significant improvement, with instruments just dramatically easier to read. Everything looks sharper as well.

• Matt Wagner wasn't kidding about DCS. The view from the F-86 Sabre cockpit was just amazingly sharp.

• IL-2 Battle of Moscow/Bodenplatte/etc is by far the best looking of them all. With no screen door effect and the efficient VR engine, the visuals are just stunning. Flew the P-47D around and was blown away.

• Also tried FlyInside Flight Simulator, and while that one's in very early access, it worked and looked great.

• I haven't tried X-Plane 11 or AeroFly FS2 yet, but I have no doubt they'll be awesome given all the other sims.

A quick game of Beat Sabre showed the controller tracking to be as good in that game as with the OG Rift with three sensors spread around the room -- it never lost tracking.

Random notes:

• The 80Hz vs 90Hz refresh rate difference from the original Rift isn't noticeable

• I was thinking I’d need to use headphones since they dropped the earphones and added tiny speakers near your ear. But the audio is surprisingly clear from these, and it’s nice to be able to hear sounds in the room if someone comes in. This was maybe the biggest pleasant surprise. I wouldn’t use them for music (no bass) or watching movies, but it’s fine for flight sims.

• The internal tracking on the controllers works well

• Soooo much easier to set up than the original Rift or the Vive without all the tracking stations

• You now define the room by laser-drawing the border with the controllers instead of having to walk around in view of cameras, much easier

• Even with three cameras, the original Rift would sometimes lose track of tracking and I'd find my head sticking out the top of a cockpit, down by the rudder pedals, or on a wing, and have to re-set the VR view. Didn't happen once with the Rift S.

• Unlike some of the professional reviewers, I actually like the new headband better than the original Rift’s. Easier to adjust for different users.

• My one negative so far? There isn’t the big gap around your nose that I used to peek down through on the OG Rift to view the keyboard when playing sims. I’ve had to lift the headset a few times to find a key.

Answering Some Questions

I posted an earlier version of this on a couple of simulation and gaming forums, and some questions came up. Here are the answers:

• Field of view is supposed to be slightly better than the original Rift, but I couldn't see a difference.

• Because the new screen is LCD based instead of OLED, the blacks aren't going to be as... black. But flying around in Prepar3D and IL-2 at night, the night sky and scenery looked about the same as it does on a monitor -- it's not washed out or gray.

• Oculus Tray Tool (and everything else I tried) works fine. I used it to set P3D to a supersampling rate of 1.5 and it looked super-sharp.

If you're playing action-based VR games, games with cartoony graphics, or really anything outside of vehicle simulations, I'm not sure the improvements in the Rift S would justify an upgrade from the original Oculus Rift CV1. But for flight sims, the Rift S awesome and I have zero regrets on the money spent.

I had an HP Reverb on order as well, thinking the increased resolution would be a big benefit in sims. But I just cancelled that order, because the Rift S is so sharp I'm quite satisfied, and the Oculus solution is going to have much better frame rates than the Reverb's higher resolution will afford.

I don't know what the cancelled "Rift 2" was going to be, but the S might as well stand for "Sim edition" and it's a nice upgrade for my usage scenario.

(If you decide to buy one and use this Amazon link, I'll get a couple of bucks in Amazon credit, which would be cool and appreciated.)

BRITISH AIRCRAFT IN ROYAL AIR FORCE SERVICE, 1939-1945: VICKERS WELLINGTON. (ME(RAF) 3703) Two Wellington Mark ICs, Z8797 ?A? and Z9095 ?D?, of No. 38 Squadron RAF, in flight over the Western Desert, probably while based at Shallufa, Egypt. These aircraft were specially converted for use as torpedo bomber/minelayers by the Squadron. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205208831

My great uncle was recently recognized by the city of London for his service in WW2 by having a new street, Morgan Ave., in the west end named after him.

Franklin Benedict Morgan was an RCAF Pilot Officer who flew for 99 Squadron RAF on both bombing and mine-laying missions.

While flying Wellington LC Z8891 of 99 Sqn. on their return from Bremen he and his crew were forced to ditch off Lowestoft and were picked up by a trawler.

He was flying for the RAF's 38th Squadron in Egypt in 1942 when his plane was hit while returning from a mission. A couple of his crew were able to bail out and he attempted to nurse his badly damaged Vickers Wellington bomber back to base. Unfortunately, the bomber ran out of fuel and crashed just four miles short of his home station near Cairo. He's buried in the Heliopolis Military Cemetery in Egypt.

Due to a 1940s-era divorce I never got to know the Morgan side of my family well, but I'm honored by the service of my great uncle in helping win the war.

Both of my grandfathers -- Donald Thorburn, who I was very close to and who helped raise me and build my interest in science, and my genetic grandfather Donald Morgan -- also served in WW2. Opa (Don Thorburn) was an X-ray technician on the front lines, helping wounded soldiers as the allies advanced north into Italy. Don Morgan was a Canadian adviser to Winston Churchill, among other duties.

I’ll be focusing on resurrecting my space posts for now. My guide to building a Windows 7 Media Center PC/DVR probably isn’t going to be that useful in 2019.

Once the old content’s back, I’m looking forward to chronicling upcoming missions to the ISS and beyond, as well as musings about technology, comedy, and more.

I live-tweeted the social, including the Kennedy Space Center tour, the first day excitedly waiting for the eventually-scrubbed launch, and the final launch. Click here to read the Tweets and see the images I posted during the NASA Social event.

The Twitter stream is a good recap of the actual event. The flight was a resounding success. After the launch most of us went to the KSC tour to watch the recovery in the theater there. You can see my video of the launch, and NASA's video of the recovery, at the bottom of the post.

For more background on the planned test, see NASA's data sheet on Orion EFT-1. For a full recap of the timetable of the flight, the Orion EFT-1 Wikipedia article has some good info.

See my pics below. It was an honor to be invited by NASA to be a part of this historic event in our move to send humans past earth orbit again. Looking forward to visiting KSC to see astronauts launching from American soil again soon!

Final prep, the day before the first launch attempt.

Elmo likes space.

One of the SRB segments being prepared for the SLS.

Orbital ATK's Brian Duffy, a former Space Shuttle Astronaut.

The Apollo-era countdown clock has been replaced by a "jumbotron" style screen.

First launch attempt, which was unfortunately scrubbed due to systems issues.

One of my photos of the successful launch on Dec. 5!

 EST we’ll be the audience for a NASA TV broadcast about the upcoming launch. We’ll hear from scientists and engineers supporting the Orion program, and hopefully get a chance to see it on the launch pad. Then, on Thursday, we’ll be up during the pre-dawn hours to head out to the NASA Causeway, where if all goes well we’ll be able to witness the launch from the press area just a couple of miles away. I’ll be covering the launch on this blog, and tweeting live at @dennya on Twitter.

What is Orion?

Orion is a new space capsule that’s a component in NASA’s upcoming Space Launch System, the crewed successor to the Space Shuttle program that will be used to travel to the moon, asteroids, or even Mars. Orion resembles the Apollo Command Modules of the 60s and 70s, but with room for four to six astronauts, and modern 21^st century technology inside. Like the Apollo capsules, Orion will return to Earth via parachutes, and will splash down in the ocean for recovery.

Orion will be protected during reentry by a huge 16.5-foot diameter heat shield on the bottom of the capsule, as well as 970 Space Shuttle-style tiles surrounding the upper portion. As with Apollo, an escape rocket will be mounted above Orion to pull the astronauts to safety should something go wrong during launch.

Though NASA is promoting Orion as the first step towards Mars, the capsule isn’t roomy enough to support a trip of that length. By itself, it can support a crew of four for up to 21 days in space, so it would be paired with a habitat module that could allow for longer trips, and possibly a crew of up to six. (And hopefully a lander as well, if they’re going that far!) Current proposed initial crewed flights for Orion include a possible test flight around the moon (with no landing) and an asteroid recovery mission. The asteroid mission is particularly ambitious: a robotic tug will fly out to the asteroid belt, snag a small asteroid, and bring it back into orbit around the Moon. Then astronauts will fly to the asteroid on Orion to do scientific investigation.

This Week’s Flight

The launch I’m attending, Exploration Flight Test-1, is an uncrewed first test of Orion’s systems, designed to ensure that everything works as planned before the first flights with astronauts aboard. The 4.5 hour flight will include two orbits of Earth, reaching a peak altitude of 3,609 miles in order to simulate a re-entry speed similar to what will be experienced returning from the moon.

This flight will test the capsule’s systems and shielding, making sure that Orion can safely protect human passengers from the heavy radiation it will encounter passing through the Van Allen Belt around the Earth. The capsule is heavily instrumented to measure heat, radiation, and other criteria throughout the flight.

During re-entry, the Orion capsule will face temperatures of up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 80% of the 5,000-degree temperatures expected during a return from lunar orbit. A series of 11 drogue and main parachutes will slow the capsule down, culminating in the deployment of three 116-foot-diameter main chutes that lower the capsule’s speed to less than 20 mph for splashdown. As with the Apollo capsules, US Navy ships will be standing by to recover Orion from the ocean.

Because the Space Launch System rocket – a monstrously huge craft, bigger than a Saturn V, which uses updated Space Shuttle main engines and stretched versions of the Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters – isn’t yet ready to test fly, Orion will be lofted to orbit by a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket. It will be interesting to compare the power and noise from the last launch I attended: STS-135, the final flight of the Space Shuttle program.

Next Steps

There’s some criticism that Orion doesn’t have a clear mission. But by the time Orion is ready to fly with a crew, we’ll have a new administration in office, so its first destination will likely be determined by whoever is President then. It’s an unfortunate reality of our system that, as governments change, long-term programs like Orion often get re-tasked or reset. In fact, the Orion capsule was originally designed as part of NASA’s Constellation rocket program, which President Obama canceled after taking office. We’d likely be much closer to flying to an actual destination had there not been a political reset of the Shuttle successor, and hopefully the next administration will support this existing effort to reach out past our planet’s orbit and not force similar delays and resets. Orion alone is not an interplanetary craft, but it’s the first step in developing a craft that can take humans past the moon and into a future where we’re not fully dependent upon one planet for our continued survival.

— Denny Atkin

Now, I probably shouldn’t post this, but I just got hold of a secret document outlining EA’s 2015 gaming lineup, and I had to share the excitement!

• Battlefield: Hoth

• The Sims 5: Tatooine

• Jane’s Combat Simulations: Incom T-65 X-Wing

• Need for Landspeeder

• Sarlacc Age: Origins

• Blasterstorm

• Kingdoms of Alderaan: Reckoning

• B.A.N.T.H.A.

• Command & Conquer 27: Corellian Dawn

• Force Effect

• Medal of Honor Spaceborne

• American McGee’s Leia

• Madden NFL 16

• Archon IV: The Light and the Dark Sides

• Plants vs. Wookies

• Trash Compactor Keeper

• MySims Podrace

• Privateer 3: Millenium Falcon

• Rock Band Cantina

With less than half an hour to go before the scheduled launch, @MituK and I headed outside to set up our cameras on our tripods. I got mine set up and started working on figuring out the exposure when Mitu reminded me that I was going to loan her my extra zoom lens. “Oh, sure, I’ll go back and grab it,” I said out loud, while thinking “But what if I trip on the way back to the tent? What if a baby alligator crawls up to my tripod and I’m not there to scare it away? What if…” But I steeled myself to step away from my carefully secured vantage point and headed back to grab the lens.

I walked in the Twent just in time to hear the end of the launch status check, as the mission controllers asking the various groups for their go/no-go calls. Not believing my ears after steeling myself for disappointment all day, I asked a guy standing near me, “Did he just say we’re go for launch?” “Yes, he did!”

I grabbed my lens and once again floated, rather than ran, back out to the camera line. I handed @MituK the lens and told her “Go for launch!” I can’t think of many things I’ve ever said to anyone that have elicited a smile that big. I looked around for the rest of the #NerdForceOne crew, but @CelticFeminist and @lartist were elsewhere in the crowd.

We were behind and to the right of the countdown clock, so we couldn’t see it and we were dependent on the folks behind us for updates. “Two minutes!” Holy Moly, they really were going to launch this thing! My camera all set, remote shutter in my hand (so I could watch the launch directly instead of through the eyepiece), I let the excitement build. It’s going up!

“Thirty seconds!” someone called. I pressed the shutter release on the Canon SD4000 pocket camera that I’d MacGuyvered to the top of my T2i DSLR to capture launch video. I grabbed a couple more shots of the last time a Space Shuttle would ever sit on Pad 39A.

And then… nothing. Soon it became clear that more than 30 seconds had passed. What was happening? Were the astronauts in danger? Was this a pad abort? Did we get that close and scrub? A wave of intense disappointment crushed down on me. I figured if anything went wrong this close to launch, we’d be in for a few days of investigation and we’d miss the launch.

Then, out of a crowd that had grown deadly quiet, someone says “The clock is moving again! Thirty seconds!” Disappointment instantly replaced by a staggering level of excitement! Just 30 seconds? Restarted the video (forgot to zoom this time, darnit), finger on the DLSR shutter release, and ready for launch!

“Ten.. Nine…Eight…” I joined in the count. After the crazy storms of Thursday, the bleak prediction for Friday weather, and the unexpected hold, getting to this point in the countdown seemed an impossible goal. But then the white smoke began to billow out from below the shuttle, and the group erupted into a roar of excitement. Atlantis began to slowly and silently rise from the behind the launchpad, riding on a pillar of fire that seemed as bright as the sun. Then, an earthquake-like vibration passed across the ground below us, and suddenly we heard and felt the roar and crackle of the engines. It’s difficult to describe the sensation that close to the pad. It’s not as if sound starts growing, it as if the sound waves are a very strong, very loud wind that rushes to and through you.

Atlantis gained speed, heading towards the cloud deck. As it passed through, for a fraction of a second the clouds around Atlantis looked to be on fire as the Shuttle passed through them.

The applause and cheers, which hadn’t abated since launch, reached a new crescendo as the Shuttle passed out of sight. We took some pictures around the exhaust pillar, the only indication remaining that a Space Shuttle had left the launch pad for the very last time, and then started heading inside to watch NASA TV to confirm SRB separation and a successful orbit.

Seeing a launch from such a close distance, literally feeling the ship leave our planet, and experiencing it with the people who make it happen was truly a moving experience. I felt energized, proud, and just gobsmacked by what the what NASA’s accomplishment. A Space Shuttle launch has never been “routine,” and seeing the people, equipment, and professionalism necessary to make this enormous rocket leave the planet drives that home even further.

As I headed back to the Twent to take a look at my launch pictures and reflect on what I’d seen, I saw my new friends reacting in every possible way. Some were talking at a million miles an hour about what they’d just seen. Some were reflecting quietly. More than a few were moved to tears. I think it’s impossible to see something like that and not be affected by it.

A few of us took post-launch pics with Elmo.

And as Atlantis heads into its final 12-day mission, over 150 people who were already space enthusiasts were moved to become space activists. You can’t watch that amazing space ship head into orbit and imagine that it’s the last time we’ll accomplish something so significant. You can’t see the wonder of a crewed, winged ship that can launch an enormous space station into orbit and be satisfied with a future that limits us to 1960s earth-orbiting space capsules. You can’t look at the accomplishments of the Space Shuttle, the ISS, Hubble, and the other amazing orbiting and planetary satellites and sit back silently while Congress throws away billions of dollars already invested, and universe-changing scientific potential, for short-term saving by canceling the Webb Space Telescope.

The Tweeps are already writing and calling reps about the Webb Telescope. Whether or not we can save it, we have to try. And we’re discussing getting together again, not just because we had a fantastic time with a bunch of like-minded people who feel that humanity has to continue to reach past the sky to achieve its full potential, but also because our geographically diverse group, with experience ranging from planetary science to marketing to construction to beer company social media, can spread our enthusiasm to an an enormous and varied audience. We’re organizing, and while some Tweeps will return to their day-to-day lives with a vivid memory of the end of an era of amazing accomplishment, others are going to do what we can to help make sure that, whatever our problems are at home, we don’t let those stop us from continuing to expand our knowledge and reach for the skies.

An enormous thanks to @schierholz, @bethbeck, @nasatweetup, and the rest of the #NASATweetup crew. I’ve never seen a team so perfectly harness social media, and create such a smooth-running event. I’m still amazed it’s not even their primary job responsibility. Like every NASA employee we met, you can sense the passion in what they do. As the space program enters a time of transition, it’s heartening to know that folks like this are helping keep the excitement and wonder in the public eye.

When we arrived at KSC, I remembered seeing a row of tripods already lined up along the water the day before, so @MituK and I decided we should hurry straight to the countdown clock and grab a spot first thing. When we got to the waterline, we were greeted by a beautiful view of Atlantis poised for launch.

The morning program started at 6:30 am with a demonstration of the robotic refueling experiment planned to take place during the Atlantis mission, as well as a talk by Bob Crippen, who flew on STS-1, the very first Space Shuttle launch. I got a chance to ask Crippen about the ejection seats on the initial Shuttle test flights. It turns out that they would have only been useful had there been a problem during landing. An ejection during launch would likely have resulted in the astronauts passing through the solid rocket booster exhaust, which wouldn’t have been… pleasant. (Trivia: Two of the reusable SRB segments on the final Space Shuttle launch were actually used on STS-1.)

What I thought would be the pre-launch highlight was the chance to go out to the road near the VAB and wave at the astronauts as the passed by in the Astrovan on the way to the launch pad. It was awesome to wave at people who would be in space a few hours later, but little did I know an even bigger pre-launch thrill was coming up soon.

The morning fun continued with @SethGreen introducing a music theme for Atlantis created by Battlestar Galactica composer @BearMcCreary. We also got a chance to listen to astronaut Tony Antonelli, pilot of Atlantis’ previous flight, STS-132. A stark reminder of the next few years of America’s manned space program: Antonelli is currently learning Russian in hopes of being able to return to the ISS on a Soyuz rocket.

Around two hours before launch, there was a break in the program and they announced that they’d be escorting groups to the NASA cafeteria. I headed outside and ran into NASA’s @bethbeck and asked if the group milling around outside of the Twent was waiting to go to the cafeteria. “No,” she said, “they’re talking to @Astro_Ron.”

“Ron Garan?” I said, noticing folks standing in a circle across from me passing around a typical everyday iPhone 3GS in a flower-covered case, “but, isn’t he on the Space Station?” Beth smiled. “Yes.”

I immediately and enthusiastically stepped into the circle as fellow tweeps excitedly talked to Ron. As the phone started heading my direction, the person handing it off said “He said he’s got about one more minute.” Panic! Will I come thisclose to talking to space? Just before the phone reached him, I grabbed the camera from the guy standing next to me and said “I’ll take a picture of you talking to space, but make it quick!” Being awesome like every person I met this week, he said “sure.” He talked for about 25 seconds, I took his pic, and he handed me the phone.

Having spent a couple of decades as a journalist, I don’t typically get starstruck. I’ve interviewed some of the very best game designers, well-known actors, talented special effects artists, and respected scientists. I have great respect for what they do, but when you talk with them, you realize that even folks who’ve made great accomplishments are people like you and me, so no need to be nervous.

But this time, I had to really focus not to stammer or drop into raving fanboy mode. Astronauts are already the folks who are most likely to make me starstruck. But this astronaut was about to talk to me from the bleeding International Space Station. Over 200 miles up. And it wasn’t just any astronaut (like you can use the phrase “just any astronaut”), this was Ron Garan. Ron is one of the founders of fragileoasis.org, an awesome web site that uses the experience of viewing Earth from space to promote actively working to protect the future of the planet below.

An absolutely terrible picture of me, but I don't care, because I'm talking on the phone to an astronaut on the International Space Station!

I gathered my remaining wit as as the phone was passed to me and said quickly, “Hi Ron, this is Denny Atkin, @dennya on Twitter. Just wanted to say it’s an honor to talk to you up there, and that I’m a huge fan of fragileoasis.org.” Garan said hello, and told me he appreciated that, and how important it is to get the site’s message across. “Absolutely,” I said, “and I’ll continue to promote it whenever I can.” I than thanked him and passed the phone on to the next tweep so she’d have a chance to talk to him.

At that point, I was positively, ridiculously giddy with excitement. I’d talked to one of my astronaut heroes, and he was in space when I did it. That’s a pretty damned rare and special treat for any space fan.

As I floated on air over towards the cafeteria, someone joked to our escort that she hoped Garan didn’t have roaming charges up there. She said the call was done via Voice Over IP, and that the ISS shows up on the call as a Houston exchange.

It was surely the most “long-distance” call I’ll ever be on, and definitely the most memorable.