I’m gonna go ahead and point out that I haven’t watched the season 2 finale of Fringe yet, but I mostly see where things are headed, and I’ve noticed a lot of parallels between that show and BioShock Infinite. Allow me to explain.

Walter Bishop is Booker DeWitt / Zachary Comstock

Walter is a father who lost his son. Comstock is a man who never had a daughter. Both of them create (or commission) machines that allow them to cross into a parallel universe and kidnap their own child from an alternate version of themelves.

The fathers of the kidnapped children, “Walternate” (as Walter calls him) and Booker, are both pulled into the other universe by allies seeking to help them reclaim their children and defeat the evil kidnapping alternate.

Basically, by rooting for the Walter who appears in most of the series, you’re rooting for Comstock. The alternate Walter who comes over on the bridge, who we percieve as the villain, is actually the Booker of this story.

Peter Bishop is Elizabeth Comstock / Anna DeWitt

For the first season and a half, we see Peter as a native of the main universe, much like anyone living in Columbia would have viewed Elizabeth. In the second half of season 2, we finally learn (after much foreshadowing) that this is not the case, and that Peter was actually born in another world to another version of the same man. That makes him special.

The Observers are the Lutce “Twins”

Interested third-parties able to move between time and space freely? Check. The Observers and the Luteces both take action when needed but for the most part are content to simply watch the action play out in front of them, dropping occassional hints to the main players about what needs to be done to solve a problem.

“Tears” look identical in both stories

The openings between worlds (whatever you want to call them) actually look the same between BioShock Infinite and Fringe. The flickering-glimmering-hologram look is nearly identical in both cases.

Bonus: A female character loses part of her body in a closing portal

When Elizabeth is kidnapped by Comstock, part of her finger is cut off by the portal as it closes. When Walter is initially travelling to the alternatve universe to take Peter, Nina Sharp’s arm is caught in the portal and eventually amputated (though she explains to Olivia in the first season that she lost the arm to cancer).

Double bonus: Walter’s wife was named Elizabeth

Do I even need to say more than that?

So there you go

A father who wants a child creates a machine that allows him to travel to another universe, kidnaps his own child from the other world, someone loses a body part in the closing portal, and the father of the missing child comes looking for his kid. All of this sets a series of events in motion in which flickering objects from another world precede an all-out war between universes, which is observed and sometimes aided by mysterious individuals with the ability to pass through time and space at will, and who may or may not somehow be related to each other.

Did I just describe BioShock Infinite or Fringe?

(Answer: both. It’s all about perception. Heads, tails. Life, death. BioShock, Fringe. Two sides of the same coin, and all that jazz.)

Looks like someone didn’t get the message.

Discover keeps sending me junk mail trying to get me to sign up for a credit card. I got sick of it. If they want to hear from me so badly, they’re going to get their wish.

Update: they continued to mail me.

I’m writing this post to help those who have completed BioShock Infinite make sense of the confusing series of events that takes place at the end of the game. I’m going to try to make this as simple as possible, but we’re dealing with some very complex ideas, and that may not be entirely plausible.

Let’s start at the beginning. Where is the beginning? If you’ve played the game, you’ll understand the question. Where exactly does the story actually begin? For the purpose of this post, we’re going to start with the events that take place at and following the branching point that spawned the various universes the game covers. Yes, the game spans multiple universes, in case you hadn’t already figured that out. All of these possible universes have a starting point.

Every choice warrants a decision. That decision has consequences, and those consequences can change everything. BioShock Infinite is the story of how one of these choices branched out into two theoretical universes, and how those two universes are brought together.

Zero Hour

Booker DeWitt has done a lot of wrong in his life. He’s plagued by guilt. Having reached a point of desperation, he finds himself at a lake waiting to be baptized. We see this scene play out early in the final revelation. Booker has a choice. He can accept or decline to be baptized. In the version we see, he initially accepts, but then changes his mind. In another possible universe, he is baptized and becomes a new man. This is the point that splits the future. This single choice is the linchpin that the entire game pivots on. This is zero hour.

Many players may find themselves wondering which choice is the “real” choice. Which decision did Booker “really” make? The answer is that he really made both choices. This is the point of parallel universes. Booker’s choice created two very different men in two very different versions of the future.

Let’s pick a path and follow it. It’s important that you don’t presume to know anything about either of these paths. The first path we’ll look at is the one we see in-game.

The First Path

Booker takes the preacher’s hand, but then changes his mind, flees the lake, and lives with his guilt. He turns to the bottle and gambling. He ends up in debt to some very undesirable people.

The year is now 1893 (possibly ’94). When he is unable to pay his debts, a man shows up at his door and offers a way out: “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” The girl here is his daugther, Anna DeWitt. She is an infant. He has no other choice, so he agrees. He hands the child over and the man leaves.

Booker immediately realizes what a stupid thing he has done and goes after the man and Anna. He catches up to them in an alley. A portal is open on the wall in front of them. An unknown second man stands beside them. A voice comes through the portal instructing the men to come through. As Booker charges toward them, they climb through the wall into another universe. Booker grabs onto Anna and tries to pull her back, but he is overpowered. As she slips through the portal, it closes, severing her pinky finger at the middle knuckle. Booker is filled with more guilt than ever. He returns to his apartment, which doubles as his private investigator’s office, and drowns his sorrows for nearly two decades. He brands the back of his hand with his daughter’s initials as an act of penance, but nothing can take away the guilt.

One day, a portal opens inside his apartment. A man on the other side beckons him. As he steps through, he is pushed to the ground. Two people hold him halfway through the portal. He has entered a parallel universe. His mind struggles to remember anything, but because he now has two memories spanning two universes, he can’t keep anything straight. Parts of the world he came from bleed into his understanding of the world he has been pulled into.

Booker becomes convinced that the offer to “wipe away the debt” is related to his quest to find Elizabeth. His corrupted memory recalls the man who took Anna not as a debt collector, but as a client. As the man tells his co-conspirator, “He’s manufacturing new memories from his old ones.” He now believes that this man has hired him to find a girl named Elizabeth and return her to New York. He is briefed on the boat, dropped on the dock, enters the lighthouse, and begins the series of events seen in the game.

The Second Path

Booker takes the preacher’s hand and is baptized. He takes on a new name to reflect his new life: Zachary Hale Comstock. He becomes a man of God. He dreams up a city in the sky. He builds Columbia.

A Columbian scientist named Rosalind Lutece builds a machine that can open holes, or “tears,” in space and time. Comstock takes an interest in the machine, which is kept a secret from the public, and spends an unusual amount of time at the Lutece lab. His wife, Lady Comstock, believes that he is having an affair with Rosalind, but determines to forgive him because he forgave her for her wrongdoings.

What Comstock is really up to is perhaps far more sinister. He is using the machine to peer into future worlds, and using his knowledge of these future world’s to pose as an all-knowing prophet. He predicts that “the seed of the prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flames the mountains of man.”

Zachary also sees that Booker will one day enter his world searching for his daughter. To counter this, he predicts the rise of a “false prophet” who will attempt to mislead “the Lamb of Columbia” and take her off of this predetermined path. The “false prophet” bears a mark on his hand: the letters “AD.” He instructs the people of Columbia to watch for this mark and destroy the “false prophet” so that the “Lamb of Columbia,” Elizabeth, can take his place and destroy the evil outside world, which he refers to as “the Sodom below.”

Comstock wishes to have a child, but his overexposure to Lutece’s machine has rendered him sterile. However, he is aware of a parallel universe in which he has a daughter. He commissions Rosalind to create a tear that can take him back to 1893 to get his own child and bring her back to Columbia. She opens a tear for Comstock to pass through, and he tracks down her other-worldly counterpart. In this universe, Rosalind was not born a girl, but rather a boy named Robert. Robert Lutece goes to Booker’s door and makes him an offer: “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” Booker, a broken man, hands over his daughter to this stranger.

Lutece and Comstock return to the alley where Rosalind is waiting with a tear open for them to return to Columbia. Suddenly, Booker appears in the alley. Comstock and Robert Lutece climb through the hole and back into their own world. The child is nearly taken from them, but they manage to pull her through. The portal closes on her finger and severs it.

Robert Lutece is now trapped in Columbia, where is mind is forced to cope with all of the changes that go along with trans-dimensional travel. (We see evidence of this in the game’s finale. When Booker is dragged into the alternate world, Rosalind comments that “the brain adapts.” Robert replies, “I should know… I lived it.”) The Luteces, who are actually two parallel versions of the same person from different timelines, live as siblings and tell people in Columbia that they are twins.

Zachary, however, does not have such a clean excuse for the sudden appearance of a new member in his own family. He must now explain to the public why he suddenly has a baby. His wife believes the child is the result of his affair with Rosalind Lutece. Rosalind denies this allegation, and Zachary tells the people that this girl is a miracle child. He explains to them that his wife was only pregnant for a single week, and that this miracle baby is the foretold “seed of the prophet” who will take his place when he dies. The people, who have worshiped Comstock for years, readily accept this explanation.

His wife and the Lutece “twins,” however, know that the child, now called Elizabeth, is not truly Zachary Comstock’s child. Comstock murders his wife and places the blame on a rebel group called the Vox Populi (Latin for “Voice of the People”). He also murders the Luteces, but they have already mastered the art of trans-universal travel and are able to travel from a universe in which they are still alive, track down Booker DeWitt in his own universe, and bring him into Columbia to assassinate Comstock.

It is soon discovered that Elizabeth possesses the ability to open tears of her own between worlds at will. While the source of her power is never explained in the game, I hypothesize that the portal closing on her finger is what imbued her with the ability to create new tears. Somehow, the barrier of time and space was embedded in her hand during the accident, giving her unprecedented control over it without the aid of machines like Rosalind’s.

She is locked away in the Tower of Columbia on Monument Island, where she is observed in secret and kept in solitude for nineteen years. A machine called the Siphon is built in the base of the tower, presumably by Rosalind Lutece. This device drains Elizabeth’s powers so that she cannot create new tears, only open existing ones. She is not kept in a jail cell, but provided full living quarters, new clothes, books, and more to entertain herself. She is protected by the mysterious mechanical Songbird, whose origin is never actually explained (at least, as far as I can tell).

In the “clean” version of this timeline, Elizabeth takes over her father’s role at his passing. We witness her as an old woman in the 1980s, leading Columbia as they bomb New York. Prior to this, Booker mentioned that he had dreamed of New York burning. This was likely not a real dream, but a fabricated memory based on things he had witnessed as Zachary Comstock. The false memory would have been created by the mental distress he suffered during his transposition from one world to another.

This timeline can also be achieved through a different set of events, in which Booker does come for Elizabeth but is pushed through a tear into the 1980s and fails to save her from her father (as seen in the game). Elizabeth is then brainwashed by her father to hate the world and takes up his mission to destroy it, fulfilling his “prophecy” that she (“the seed of the prophet”) would “drown in fire the mountains of men.”

Convergence

One day the ceiling collapses and a man falls into Elizabeth’s library. This man is Booker DeWitt, and this is our introduction to Elizabeth in the game. This is the second crucial point in time that cements the direction of the events in the game. If Booker had never made it to this point, it is likely nothing would have changed in Zachary Comstock’s world. In fact, until this point, Comstock didn’t even know that Booker had been brought into this world. Once Zachary recognized the man as a younger version of himself, he knew why he was there and that he must stop him from taking back Elizabeth.

Breaking the Chain

Near the end of the game, Booker kills Comstock and destroys the Siphon, allowing Elizabeth to return to her full power and create new tears to any universe she desires. She opens a tear and transports herself and Booker to a world most players are already familiar with: Rapture, the undersea city from the first two BioShock games. Specifically, they are standing in the room where the main character in the first game finds his very first Plasmid.

They backtrack through the map, going down the stairs and out to the dock where the bathyspheres are located. They take one of the submersibles out of the city the same way Andrew Ryan’s son initially came to the city. They find themselves standing at the lighthouse where the events of the first game started in a scene that played out much like the opening to their own story.

They pass through the door, but instead of the lighthouse interior, we find a realm that exists outside of space and time. There are millions of lighthouses here, all leading to different universes. Elizabeth tells Booker that although Comstock is dead in one universe, he is alive in many others. DeWitt determines to find and kill Comstock as a baby, ensuring that he never has a chance to hurt anyone. Instead, Elizabeth uses the lighthouses to jump to different points in Booker’s past, ultimately returning him to the baptism site and allowing him to see what would happen if he accepts his new life.

He finally comes to understand that he is both Booker DeWitt and Zachary Comstock. Elizabeth does the only thing she can do: she drowns Booker in the lake in the world where he normally would have accepted the baptism, thus negating both timelines and destroying the Comstock timeline.

Booker never accepts the offer of baptism. He never takes on the name Zachary Comstock. He never builds Columbia. He never meets Rosalind and never kidnaps Anna. By extension, in his own world he never sells his daughter to pay his gambling debts. He never lives for two decades with his guilt.

The various parallel versions of Elizabeth that have gathered at the lake slowly disappear as their futures and lives are erased from the realm of possibility. Only one remains, but she isn’t Elizabeth. She is Anna, and as the post-credits scene reveals, she is still alive and well with Booker in his own timeline.

In the video above, IGN demonstrates a new feature in the fifth Splinter Cell game. The feature, called Mark and Execute, allows you quickly take out up to four enemies at once with a guaranteed kill. It looks like a great new addition to Sam Fisher’s arsenal of hand-to-hand and firearms tactics, but it’s actually one of the worst single features added to the entire franchise. In fact, I’d say Mark and Execute could be even worse for the franchise than Splinter Cell: Double Agent. If you’ve ever played Double Agent, you know that’s a strong accusation. Obviously I plan to explain myself, so let me go ahead and do that.

In the original Splinter Cell, and the two games that followed it, if you were in a room with two enemies that you intended to kill, you had to be careful. If you landed a headshot on one of them, but he was standing where his partner could see him, the partner would either open fire on you or hit an alarm, often costing you the mission. If the first guy fell in the shadows, but made noise on the way down, his buddy might come over and investigate the source of the sound. That would provide you an opportunity to sneak up on the second guy and take him down. If you screwed that up, he’d either shoot and kill you before you even had time to draw your weapon or he would hit an alarm. The safest thing to do was usually to try to sneak up behind the first guy, grab him, drag him into the dark where he couldn’t be seen, wait for his partner to be far enough away that he wouldn’t hear anything, and then knock him unconscious. Then you had to repeat the process with the second guy, third guy, and every other guy in the room. These stealthy takedowns were a hallmark of the Splinter Cell series.

Mark and Execute changed that. Starting with Conviction, the fifth game in the series, you could take out a room of four guys just by looking at them. There was no skill involved. You just look at each guy, push a button to mark him, then wait for everyone to be within firing range, press another button and let the bodies hit the floor (sorry). Sure, you have to do a hand-to-hand kill to earn back the ability to mark more enemies, but that’s not hard, especially in Conviction. When playing through the game, I felt like the developers had intentionally placed a single enemy facing away from me in a perfect position to be taken down by hand just before every room full of enemies that I needed to Mark and Execute. A guy standing over a computer, a guy standing with his back to a window, a guy guarding a door. Every time I used Mark and Execute, I had regained the marks within the next three minutes.

Many people will argue that the “infiltration” missions in Double Agent were one of the worst things to ever be added to this series. I would say that’s debatable. Ubisoft learned their lesson with Double Agent. People said they hated the infiltration missions and we never saw them again. The impact on the remainder of the series is negligible because Ubisoft realized it was a mistake and decided against that path for future games.

But no one seems to be complaining about Mark and Execute. Most people think it’s a cool feature that makes the game easier. They’re correct. It definitely is a cool feature that makes the game easier. But that’s the problem. The game isn’t supposed to be easy. You’re not supposed to be able to take out a room in under a second with the push of a single button. You’re supposed to have to work for those kills. You’re supposed to stay hidden, creep around, drop from ledges, pop out of the shadows, grab bad guys, fire headshots and Sticky Shockers, and actually do something for those kills (or K.O.s, if you prefer those).

The only thing Ubisoft learned from Conviction is that Mark and Execute is, you guessed it, a cool feature that made the game easier. So they brought it back for the upcoming Spinter Cell Blacklist, and they made it even “better.” Previously you had to remain still while executing your enemies. Now you can run across the room, shoot three guys, immediately transition to a hand-to-hand kill, mark a few more people, execute all of them, and never press more than maybe four buttons. That’s not fun. That’s easy. Splinter Cell isn’t supposed to be that easy.

The new “killing in motion” take on Mark and Execute seems to be one of the big new features in Blacklist. That’s disappointing. Apparently Ubisoft realized that some people felt this way, because they included a mode called “Perfectionist Mode” that handicaps the player in several ways, including the removal of Mark and Execute.

I’m not saying Mark and Execute was the biggest flaw in Conviction, but I will say that it seems to be the one with the most prominent effect on the next game. Double Agent was a huge misstep, but didn’t influence its successor as much as Conviction apparently did. Another new “feature” in Conviction that felt like a complete dud was the weapons locker system that allowed you to swap out your current weapon for any other weapon you had previously picked up off of a downed enemy. I had hoped that “feature” would be removed in later games in favor of the classic SC-20K rifle and 5.7mm pistol, but some of Blacklist’s trailers seem to point to a system like that of its predecessor. Even so, the silencer-free firearms found in these lockers only prove to add an additional challenge to the game as you attempt to take down enemies without being heard. Mark and Execute once again spoils the challenge by making it easy to take out an entire room at once, essentially negating your weapon choice entirely.

Splinter Cell Blacklist is being hailed as a return to the roots of the franchise. I can see that, but I can also see a lot of Conviction in it, and I’m not sure I like that. Conviction was a fun game, and I enjoyed playing it, but it didn’t feel like a Splinter Cell game to me.

In the coming months we’ll see whether Blacklist can live up to its classic roots. Fortunately, there seems to be no trace of the incredibly bad Double Agent in this game, and hopefully Conviction‘s influence will remain minimal.

Tim Cook published an apology on Apple’s website today addressing widespread criticism of the iPhone’s lack of Daylight Savings-related bugs.

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to create amazing products that integrate so deeply into the lives of those who use them that a simple timekeeping error could lead to riots in the streets of San Francisco (not that it takes much to do that).

I believe that we failed to do so with our latest iOS update, and I would like to apologize.

I awoke this morning to reports that iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad had failed to function improperly following the Daylight Savings time change that took place last night. This is outside of the behavior that most users have come to expect from our products.

To address this issue, we will be releasing an update to iOS shortly which will re-enable these problems.

Once again, on behalf of everyone at Apple, I apologize for this significant oversight. I sincerely hope that we can regain some of the trust that we lost today.

Tim Cook
Apple’s CEO

The iOS update mentioned in the letter is already available for all iOS 6 devices. The change log is below.

iOS 6.1.3 addresses the follow issues:

- Corrects an issue where iPhone could handle Daylight Savings without any problems

- Introduces several new bugs for the end of Daylight Savings

iOS 6.1.3 is recommended for all users.

The release means that Apple will once again have to rename the current iOS beta. It had previously been called “iOS 6.1.2,” but following an emergency bug fix release, it was renamed “iOS 6.1.3.” It seems that Apple will once again be forced to bump the version number if this beta to 6.1.4.

A few months ago, Taco Bell announced that they would be following up their unbelievably successful (and unbelievably delicious) Doritos Locos taco with a Cool Ranch variation. Across this great nation, people cried tears of pure happiness.

Today, we tasted the happy. And for once, it doesn’t taste like sad. It tastes like Cool Ranch Doritos. It tastes good.

Although the official launch of the new flavor isn’t until tomorrow, fans have a chance to get their hands on one early by simply walking into any Taco Bell and asking for it. Yep, it’s that simple. So today, I did just that.

Setback

I was disappointed when the girl taking my order told me that the Cool Ranch tacos would not be available until tomorrow. Apparently no one else had ordered these yet at this location, so I explained to her about the pre-launch campaign. She went to check with her manager. After a minute she returned and apologized, telling me that the manager was usually the first one to know about things like that and sometimes didn’t mention it to other employees. This delay wasn’t so bad, and I understood how the employee felt since that had often happened to me when I worked in retail.

Following this minor setback, I was given a bag filled to the brim with tasty Americanized versions of food you can’t actually get in Mexico and set out on my way home.

More than meets the eye

Upon opening the wrapper of my first ever Cool Ranch Doritos Locos taco, I realized how boring it looks. I mean, imagine a regular crunchy taco, and then add nothing, and that’s basically it. Unlike its cheesy cousin, you couldn’t just look at this thing and tell that it was going to taste amazing.

One thing that I did notice was that the first one I unwrapped didn’t have one of those sleeves like they put on the Nacho Cheese-flavored taco. I assumed this was because the Cool Ranch shell wasn’t going to cover your hands in orange powder, but apparently it was just an oversight by the guy who put my order together. The second taco did in fact sport a fancy blue sleeve.

Taste test

I knew what I had to do. I bit it. I also documented my first foray into this brave new world on Vine. As you can hear in the video, I concluded that the taco was pretty good. I followed this with two of the original Doritos tacos for comparison, and then finished off my meal with one more Cool Ranch taco just to make sure that it was still as tasty as my initial impression. It definitely was. (Full disclosure: I had also eaten a Crunchwrap Supreme before the four tacos because Taco Bell is the best, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.)

A sequel better than the original?

It’s not very often that someone is able to create something amazing and then proceed to trump it with a follow-up. I’m not going to lie: Taco Bell is no exception to this rule. The original Doritos Locos taco remains the king of tacos, at least in my opinion. While it is noticeable, the Cool Ranch flavor is too mild to make much of an impact on the overall taste of the taco.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, though. It’s very good, and you can taste the Cool Ranch. It’s just not as overpowering as the Nacho Cheese flavor that we’ve been getting used to for the past year. I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think the Cool Ranch flavor will be as big of a hit as the original.

Will people turn out in droves to try it tomorrow? Yes. Will they love it? More than likely. Will they keep buying it? Of course. But whether they’ll love it more than the original is the real question in my mind. And to that, I’m going to have to say no.

Pricing and availabilty

The Cool Ranch Doritos Locos taco will officially be added to the Taco Bell menu tomorrow (March 7th, 2013), but as noted here, fans can simply walk in and order one today without a problem (provided your location knows about the pre-launch deal).

If you’re serious about trying this tomorrow, I’d advise you to be cautious of the potential long lines and sell-outs. It may not be an Apple product launch, but you might still be better off to wait a few days and try it later (as I did with the original a year ago).

The Cool Ranch version matches its cheese-powered counterpart in price, starting at $1.39. The supreme version (adds sour cream and tomatoes) is $1.69.

One last note about the price: If you want one of the “supreme” ingredients, but not the other, a Taco Bell employee advised me recently that it’s actually cheaper to just order the supreme version and ask them to hold whatever you don’t want (tomatoes, in my case) than it is to ask them to add sour cream or tomatoes to the regular version. I haven’t done the math myself, but the employee did it both ways on the register to be sure, so I believe this may be the case. If you don’t want one of the extra toppings, that might be a clever way to save a little bit of money.

Guys, bad new, the Token limit has been reached sooner than expected. Getting reports that new users can't login... Thanks @twitter.

Expect to see a lot more tweets like the one above in the near future as popular Twitter clients across a variety of platforms reach the 100,000 API token limit imposed by Twitter, forcing them to stop accepting new users.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of API tokens and Twitter’s arbitrarily-set limit, I’ll attempt to explain this very quickly. Essentially, every user that logs into any given Twitter app requires a special string of text (a token) in order to use that app. Due to recent changes, Twitter only allows apps to hand out 100,000 of these tokens. What that means is that 100,000 people are allowed to login to any given Twitter app ever. Now, it’s possible for users to revoke their token for an app if they don’t use that app anymore, but the majority of users won’t do that. If the token is revoked, someone else can take that user’s spot in the 100,000. If not, that user will be counted as one of those 100,000 tokens forever, even if they aren’t using the app. So if you buy a Twitter app, login, decide it sucks, then delete it, you have taken up one of those limited slots and wasted it.

When a Twitter app runs out of tokens, people will no longer be able to login through it. Twitter simply blocks all new logins. App developers can request more tokens from Twitter, but Twitter is not obligated to comply.

Twitter emailed me. They refuse to extend the token limit because Falcon doesn't provide any features that their app doesn't have already...

— Falcon for Android (@falcon_android) February 26, 2013

Because of this, developers are forced to charge absurd amounts of money to ensure that only truly dedicated users will buy their apps, and that people who simply buy a cheap app and then stop using it won’t waste a token.

But what if there was a way around that limit? As it turns out, there kind of is, and it’s kind of a bad idea.

This will probably be a bit more technical than some people are comfortable with, but I’m going to try to explain this like you’re five.

Several versions ago, a hidden settings panel was discovered in Tweetbot that allowed the user to add any set of custom API keys he wanted. Basically that let you change the “via” tag on your tweets to say that you had tweeted from anything you wanted. There was a side effect of this, though. Those keys are what determines what “app” you’re using. You aren’t supposed to be able to change them in a normal app. That was just a hidden development feature that the creators used to mask beta versions of the app.

But here’s the thing: when you change those tokens, Twitter no longer sees you as using “Tweetbot for iPhone.” Instead, it sees you as using “Mike Beasley’s iPhone” or whatever you setup. That means you could revoke your Tweetbot token and still continue using Tweetbot, because both Twitter and Tweetbot thought you were using a different app.

What that means is you’re no longer using one of Tweetbot’s limited number of tokens. You could now login 100,000 users to “Mike Beasley’s iPhone” or whatever custom app name you created. Twitter sees this as a whole separate app.

So think about this: what if an existing developer went rogue and came out with an app that asked you for your own keys right at the beginning. Instead of using its own keys, it used yours. Your keys have a 100,000 user limit, but you’re likely the only person that would be using them.

Imagine what that would do. Twitter wouldn’t be able to stop this app, because there’s nothing on their end to shut down. They can’t revoke the keys that power the app because there are no keys. The users bring their own. It would be foolish and impossible for Twitter to try to track down each set of custom keys and revoke them all manually, and there’s no way to detect which ones are being used in this app and revoke them automatically.

Twitter would be completely helpless. For a while, at least.

I’ve seen a few people suggesting this on Twitter, and I have to say, it’s a pretty good idea if you don’t stop and think about what it could mean for developers.

Now let me explain why this is a terrible idea:

If Twitter saw this kind of thing happening, all they would have to do is update their API to require a different kind of key, then closely monitor the usage of each pair of keys. Each key would have to be approved by them, and considering their recent Display Guideline changes, they might even want screenshots of the app to make sure it fits their guidelines before issuing the developer a key.

This would be a very bad thing for the Twitter developer community. If you think they have it bad now, imagine if they had to go through something similar to the App Store review process on Twitter’s end just to get API access.

Twitter does not care about developers. I believe they’d sooner shut down third-party access to the API than go through the trouble of setting up something like that. That would be incredibly bad news for everyone currently using, building, or selling a Twitter client on any platform.

While “going rogue” may seem like a good way to flip the bird at Twitter (PUN FULLY INTENDED, THANK YOU), it can only end in the death of the entire Twitter client ecosystem.

I can’t describe to you how great this is.

Bacon ice cream. That’s a real thing. But it shouldn’t be. Let me explain why.

Today I was eating some ice cream. I thought to myself, There is no such thing as ‘enough ice cream.’  I immediately thought of bacon-flavored ice cream. Two of the best things on earth in one package. Bacon and ice cream. Could there be a better combination? Yes. There could definitely be a better combination.

You see, bacon is essentially the greatest food known to man. It is physically impossible to improve on bacon. It simply cannot be done. Ice cream is one of the greatest desserts known to man. It is nearly impossible to improve on ice cream. So why bother trying?

Consider this: if you eat ice cream and bacon separately, you will take twice as much time to consume two flavors that cannot be improved on. If you combine them, you aren’t really improving anything, since it is physically impossible to improve on the flavor of bacon. Combining it with ice cream does nothing but allow you to consume two delicious foods in half the time normally required.

Why would you deprive yourself of the time you could spend eating bacon and ice cream separately by combining the two and rushing through it? That’s just sloppy. And that’s why bacon ice cream should not exist.