New and Old #256

Video games and memories, third places and remote offices, new cassette players, and discontinued Blu-ray players

An Internet of Checkpoints, Longreads, Bijan Stephen, February 26, 2026

For seemingly no reason at all, thousands of people were telling stories about themselves, unguarded even against the background toxicity of internet comment sections. Many of them used the word “checkpoint.” In video games, a checkpoint is a safe space: a place to save your game, wh…