… Its’s Big Whale Day!

Amazing.

I have despised twitter since basically its inception.

1. The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.

It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.

2. Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.

3. Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.

Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.

The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.

It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.

Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

Back when all that existed for online voicecomms was ventrilo, i took one of those boom mics and taped it to one of the ear muffs of an analog headset meant for cd players, as I could not actually afford a mic+headset combo.

Worked for years rofl.

Even more financial fraud charges against her, and also her husband and niece.

The facial animations are somehow still wooden and lifeless as fuck, despite Half Life 2 doing significantly better fucking 20 years ago…

… so, acting wise, you don’t even need a mod for Tommy Wiseau levels of quality.

A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.

Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.

Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI

And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8

Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…

So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?

Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?

What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?

To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:

You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.

All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.

Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.

Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.

I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…

…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.

These people have literally zero self awareness.

They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.

Ah.

I am not aware of any games/sims that do that.

It might be possible to heavily mod such things into Cities Skylines 1 or 2, but it would be a ton of work and basically no fun to play for everyone other than masochistic uber nerds (I am counting myself as one).

It would be comparable to the percentage of players that play Kerbal Space Program vs the percentage that play KSP with the full suite of Realism Overhaul, Realistic Solar System, and all that.

SimCity 2000 had scenarios of pre existing cities with specific goals, and though it did not have as many or as elaborate mass transit systems as later city builders, I think a few of them required you to both grow and reduce traffic, basically requiring you to build a working mass transit system.

In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240506163714/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724/

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them – so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots – but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.

Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

…

If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

Yes, whether or not you are immersed in still, motionless water, being showered by a … shower, or rainfall, or hose, being swept along by a river or undertow, or covered in snow…

The primary thing that triggers a human response to sweat is just your internal body temperature.

It doesn’t matter how or what is transmitting heat to you, so long as your body is generally above a certain temperature threshold, you will sweat. Go below a certain general threshold and you will begin to shiver.

Exactly what those temperature thresholds are vary from person to person, based on your genetics, the climate you are used to living in, what kind of fitness level you have, whether or not you are currently sick and fighting off an infection… etc.

Generally speaking, I am seeing that humans begin to sweat when their immediate surroundings are 32C or about 90F, but again, different kinds of people used to different environments will have somewhat different thresholds.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1966.21.3.967

So, perhaps thats a rough approximation of how hot the water of shower or bathtub would have to be for a roughly average person to begin sweating while bathing.

Because we are imperfect animals with imperfect survival mechanisms, and sometimes water is actually hot enough to heat your body above what it considers to be its threshold for thermostatic equillibrium.

Problem: Body Temp Too Hot.

Solution: Emit Salt Water Tears from basically all of your skin so that the heat can transfer into Salty Tears and then evaporate. Works very well in low humidity situations.

But also problem: Humidity and temperature in ambient environment is so high that evaporation either does not work at all or is ineffective at dissipating internal body temp to the outside environment.

Same Solution: Keep sweating even though it doesn’t work, enjoy heat exhaustion/stroke.

This is the whole problem of a ‘wet bulb’ temperature causing mass heat exhaustion, stroke or death: If the humidity and temperature are high enough, long enough, its literally impossible for a human body to naturally cool down.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

I disagree.

Amazon still owns and operates New World.

All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

The servers will be shut down in a few days.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.