Michael Hassall

This is a previously unpublished article from 2024. I pitched to a half dozen local and non-endemics but was ultimately declined. With ESL Birmingham 2026 just around the corner, I unburied this piece and thought I’d share it here. @mikehasswriting_48994/looking-back-at-esl-one-birmingham-2024-42c96351758a" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@mikehasswriti…

Legendary player s1mple has played more Dota 2 than CS2 this year 🤯 According to his FACEIT and Dotabuff profiles, he's played 40 Dota 2 matches (with exactly 50% winrate!) for 36 on CS2. s1mple and his team are expected to play at PGL Bucharest 2026 in 13 days.

waiting patiently for my inevitable downfall

As we're about to start ESL Birmingham, please Welcome @Davai_Dota, our final member of the team🌟

🚨Breaking: Someone patched GIMP to look and feel exactly like Adobe Photoshop. Same keyboard shortcuts. Same tool layout. Same everything. It's called PhotoGIMP and it's free. Here's exactly what it changes: → Every keyboard shortcut mapped to match Adobe's official Photoshop layout → Tools reorganized to match the Photoshop panel positions you already know → Canvas space maximized -- same default workspace as Photoshop → Custom splash screen and app icon so it feels like a real product → Pre-defined canvas templates matching Photoshop defaults → Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux -- installs in under a minute Here's the wildest part: Adobe Photoshop costs $600/year. GIMP is free. PhotoGIMP makes it feel like Photoshop. The only reason most designers don't switch is muscle memory every shortcut is in a different place and it feels wrong from the first click. This patch fixes that entirely. Ctrl+Z undo. Ctrl+J duplicate layer. Ctrl+T transform. All of it. Download a zip. Extract to your home folder. Done. 6.7K GitHub stars. Works with GIMP 3.0+. 100% Open Source. GPL-3.0 License. (Link in the comments)

I'm aiming to be a bit proactive with coverage, so will likely be out and around both the expo and event, but shoot me a DM if you want to sit down and chat or a hold more formal meeting.

I will be at ESL One Birmingham and DreamHack next weekend! Although my schedule is starting to fill up, feel free to reach out if you're looking to promo anything or fancy talking shop!

Like I said in a previous post on the topic of ID/Age Verification - I started digging into the topic quite a bit, especially after that Meta lobbying exposed news dropped. What I have (and more of others) found is something that is so stupid, but also makes a whole lot of sense...in fact imo its the perfect piece of the puzzle. I will lay out my digging through a series of events: 1. Advertisers (ie Corporations with products or services to sell), contract with big Social media platforms, paying boatloads of money for adspace. The logic is that even if 10% of the tens of millions of users buy into their ads, its worth the investment. 2. The onset of botting, has led to ads being viewers by more bots than they do humans. No matter how many bots watch your ads, they never need your products or services. So they will never give advertisers' money and business. 3. This essentially means that, Advertisers are proverbially throwing money into the drain. Paying the price with practically no ROI. Many reports indicate that this botting problem resulted in multi-billion dollar wastage on ad spending. 4. Advertisers have started grilling social media companies, especially Meta which was one of the biggest sources of the issue. This resulted in many advertisers basically threatening to pull ad money until the botting situation is controlled. 5. The botting situation became even WORSE around 2023-2025 with the Ai-Bros and Ai Companies hard pushing Ai development. The past anti-bot systems and measures lose effectiveness as Ai makes bots more sophisticated. 6. Then late 2025/2026, you can see the SNAP. The nuclear solution - Age/ID verification being pushed or implemented across multiple countries at around the same timing (within months). 7. Then now all the news about Socmed and big tech corps lobbying politicians and governments for mass ID/Age Verification on an OS/Appstore level. 8. Why? Since you pick your poison to "age verify"...a selfie, submit your ID, or Ping your credit card. Sure your age will be "verified", but it also comes with the useful byproduct of confirming you are HUMAN. So as a takeaway, what does this mean? Well to me at least, this quite neatly explains why BOTH Governments and large Corporations have collaborated and colluded to push for ID Verification at an alarming pace Globally. In the end, it really was about money. It also means quite simply in my opinion - these Corporations and Governments, NEVER really cared about "the children". "Think of the Children" imo, has always been, and will continue to be the convenient excuse for these corporations and politicians to implement this privacy-invasive system. Because if only PROVEN humans can use social media, or other similar sites/services - Advertisers will be mollified and continue to throw money at these Big Tech corporations for continued ad space. This ALSO means - that the so-called parents and people like the Riceman who run defence of ID Verification, are either very stupid, or complicit in this. Either way, the only winners are the Advertisers, the Big Tech Corpos, and the Politicians. We all however, lose.

LEC Commissioner after charging Ibai & Kameto €20–30M for a slot just to run the league on Discord while players play from their bedrooms

#DreamHack Birmingham is stacking up to be the UK’s biggest esports & gaming fest yet. It will feature ESL One Birmingham, Call of Duty League Major II, Warzone Resurgence finals, Halo Open, plus Road to EWC 2026 qualifiers for Street Fighter 6 & more. jaxon.gg/dreamhack-birm…

Yesterday @DMdota17 won PGL Wallachia, standin in for Yandex. A Tier 1 - one million dollar dota tournament. Tomorrow we start a new journey together, after being together at PARI (3rd place TI 2025) and Cloud9 (6th place TI 2024) We are looking for a serious organization to represent and build a long term project. Aiming for good placements at EWC/The International. My DMs are open. RTs are appreciated.

HOLY F: Workday just lost the argument that matters most. A federal judge said their AI hiring tools can be challenged for filtering out applicants over 40. “The algorithm did it” is NOT a defense. If this holds… every company using automated hiring just stepped into legal risk. You’re not crazy... if you’ve applied to 50, 100, 200 jobs and heard nothing… The system itself may be filtering you out. The decision means the plaintiffs may continue pursuing claims that Workday’s technology had a disparate impact on applicants age 40 and older. - SHRM Judge Lin dismissed some California claims and one disability claim, but gave plaintiffs until March 27 to revise and refile.

@Strawhatdad_ I mean absolutely, but ignoring correlation is equally, if not more misguided. The most uncynical thing I can do now is to wait and see, and be genuinely pleased if I am proved wrong.

@hoffasaurusx Being skeptical doesn’t mean assuming negative intent that comes off more as being cynical. Correlation does not imply causation.

Lots of countries will be announcing organizations like this in the run up to the Esports Nations Cup. I wonder if other ones will be more transparent in the reasoning (to extract money from the ENC) rather than 'advancing esports' spiel.

"Oh we didn't mention DLSS 5 only runs on 2 RTX 5090? Oh no, nobody can afford it?? But anyway, here's our service called Geforce Now which allows you to stream your games remotely from our massive datacenters for a small subscription fee" Don't tell me it isn't fucking obvious.

We are finally finding out - at high velocity - who believes that Games are Art, and who does not.

@Strawhatdad_ I'll admit I didn't know it was in the works pre-ENC (although ENC is older than its announcement as well, back to 2024). But there now exists a financial incentive to set up and maintain national esports governing bodies to tap into millions of dollars of PIF money.

@Strawhatdad_ I think it's healthy to be sceptical of organizations like this given examples in the past in other nations which have either used their position to hold undue influence (KeSPA, etc.) or lobby investment from dubious sources (BEF).

I'm going to see it, and will inevitably enjoy it, but it's so funny to have big posters that say "epic" in the middle of them in 2026.

@MothmanMoore esportsnationscup.com/en/application…

Maaaan the itch to ask for an interview. Excited to see who can get one and really dig into the purpose.

@Kevin_Hitt The email they sent to the Esports Nation's Cup, of course

Who gave you the authority to declare yourself the governing body of USA Esports?