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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The news certainly isn’t new, but there’s a difference between knowing something that is 99% likely to be true and having hard, factual evidence, and just having a formal report on it.

    We all know that Epstein didn’t kill himself. It was the most blatant political murder of the century. But there’s a difference between knowing Epstein didn’t kill himself, and a major investigatory body releasing a report that analyses all available information and confirms accurately and without bias, that Epstein didn’t kill himself.




  • Oh yeah Bethesda’s actual valuable talents just straight up don’t exist anymore.

    Basically it’s a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I’m aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn’t have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda’s games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on ‘permanent hire’ wages instead of ‘shitty short contract’ wages).

    But it gets worse. A lot worse.

    See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don’t have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part

    Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it’s also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren’t talking to each other… well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.

    I’m sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.








  • Violins are traditional instruments of cinematic mourning, either as background melody or very famously used literally in Titanic where the orchestra kept playing right up until the ship went down (historically accurate).

    Spongebob Squarepants later had a one-off gag where Mr. Krabs wanted to express insincere mourning, so he pulled out a finger-size violin and said something to the effect of “Oh boo hoo. Let me play you a sad song on the world’s tiniest violin”

    Of course, being Spongebob Squarepants, the gag was executed so flawlessly that it was immediately seamlessly integrated into internet culture.


  • That’s great for the workers, but… is Boeing as a company just too far gone anyways? Even a gesture like this doesn’t seem like it could reverse the spiral they’ve fallen into…

    Brazenly assassinating whistleblowers, a notorious focus on moneymaking over public safety, rushing production in order to meet deadlines, self-certifications that are being found not to be up to industry standards, quality rejection by NASA, more whistleblowers citing safety violations on the new 777 that are so severe that it might be more cost-effective to just scrap all the planes than to totally disassemble them to fix the issues, and a complete exodus of talented workers who can pass on essential technical knowledge because driving them away was necessary in order to make all the Speed Over Safety stuff feasible…

    I certainly don’t envy anyone who’s been tasked with saving the rotten zombie husk of Boeing that’s shambling along only by the momentum it accrued while it was alive.