With everything getting worse and worse and worse, this year was full of fun entertainment products and 'silver linings' that can only be seen clearly in times of darkness, like the edge of the sun during an eclipse. If you thought 2016 was like a dystopian nightmare, 2017 was a goldmine of things verging way past the noxious, from the full-time resurrection of open Nazism to evidence (that never really leads to action) that foreign actors had meddled in other nations' elections. Democracy was already an outmoded farce facing skepticism from even the most foolish fools, but even with the cover blown off things could still get darker and more scary. Amazing.
Technological progress continued onward, but with the exception of a self-landing rocket and reusable cargo spaceship, and maybe electric cars (more than 100 years of not quite getting there), most technology was either frivolous or part of some nightmarish scheme to either replace or fully entrap humanity. From drones to 'assistants' the technology industry seems to want everyone to rat on themselves constantly, and warnings about hackers are just the tip of the iceberg when you consider that everything you do is already probably monitored. The dystopia is real, and we're just waiting on the cyberpunk aspect.
Sexual misconduct was a hotter topic this year than most, thanks to the revelations that just about all of your heroes abuse their power and lack the self-restraint we typically expect from adults. That actor/comedian you loved? Yep. Though that's kind of a good story, ultimately, that outside of financial fraud and rigging elections and misleading the public, at least the people who are sexual predators get their comeuppance. It's just, yeah, it had to take down at least one man you thought was cool. Solution: stop thinking men are cool, like nearly a full quarter of North America's women already do every day, just to protect themselves and not even from spite (which would be equally righteous).
What could be more fun than the above? How about a proxy war that's created a cholera outbreak and killed thousands of children? Not sad enough for you? Record numbers of murders in South America due to That Drug Problem still not being solved. If you liked natural disasters, this was a fairly average year for those, and they still managed to be astoundingly destructive. Got any more wars, 2017? Of course you do, we're just too exhausted to pay attention anymore.
On the internet I'm sure a bunch of things happened. People complained. Hashtag slacktivism continued to invalidate its own arguments, and the all the nefarious and alienating filter bubbles (which both me and Barack Obama warned about at different times, with my warning several years earlier) came to the surface dispensing gallons of fetid gaseous idiocy and half-baked numbskullery. Delightful! The internet didn't get any smarter but it did manage to make most of us even more stupid and lazy. Plus the internet of things... what a dumb bunch of dumb dumbness. The field of product design managed to shit out a billion turds that all inexplicably connect to the internet to do stupid shit, spy on you, fail to work, and brick once they're no longer supported. And they said the Snake Oil Salesman died in the 1920s!
And if that wasn't enough, the future of America's internet (from which providers across the rest of the free world take their cues) got extremely uncertain and frighteningly extra-dystopic. But 'feminism' was the word of the year, so I guess it all balances out with social media battles being won at the cost of all freedom, decency, and promise in the future.
It was, however, a great year for music, with literally too many future classics being released. So many, in fact, that we'll have trouble looking back to them simply because there were so many and music is such a fractured field dominated by large entities overshadowing interesting efforts from smaller ones that it's like... hell man. It's like hell out there I'm sure.
Essentially, if you were what's referred to as a normal person, odds are this was a year where you went along feeling like your day-to-day was unchanged but everything around you was a nightmare. So you retreated into the filter bubble. Who could blame you. You retreated into whatever refuge you had and waited for the bad dream to pass, for the world to awake and come to its senses. But it didn't. So then you probably decided: well, fuck it, let's drink. Can't blame you there. Maybe you turned to religion. Maybe you killed yourself. That might have been the smartest move of all, given our dismal outlook for the future.
Well. Here's to another year of Hell Lite, overblown vacillation and unrestrained hyperbole. May 2018 be a little less hellish, and may the screeching outraged idiots and their sinister puppet masters all shut up and let the rest of us can get back to the business of improvement.
Showing posts with label achievements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label achievements. Show all posts
11/2/15
19 Screenshots that Reveal the Hollowness of Business Insider and Modern Culture in General
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| Dilbert IS business, basically. Laugh and care about it to advance your career! |
In an era of clickbait nonsense aggregation bullshit, online content in general is in danger of becoming a lobotomized, numbers-driven, shortform mess. When I state with confidence that using the internet can make a person extremely dumb, paranoid, hateful, angry, etc... I am speaking mostly about the content aggregator sites, although mainstream media websites and the 'respected' online only publications are also wracked with issues like poor editorial standards and their habit of mixing serious stories with internet culture fluff. The end result is an uncritical and uninformed mass of people with simplistic world-views and ideas who are around you, and vote and have jobs and discuss whatever malformed ideas they have with like-minded people and shout at those who disagree with them.
I started reading Business Insider earlier this year. I don't know why, I suppose I wanted a wider selection of sites and I'd never really frequented an aggregator before. I figured it would be helpful in determining what wider news trends were... but I was wrong, because Business Insider isn't a news site. It's an aggregator with a 'business' lifestyle slant, which means it will present you with the idols of the cult of success, the accouterments of the cult of success, and Forbes-like fawning and panic about wealth with a subset of stories about actual business some of which may have been bought and paid for by the businesses prominent in that story. Looking at you Shake Shack, Soul Cycle, whatever the newest 'Chipotle-killer' is, etc...
What kept me reading was that I wanted to see how low they'd go. Some of their clickbait articles are so obvious that the site functions as a sort of case study in the decline of news caused by the massive expansion into the void of the internet. The fact that the site was successful enough to be sold for millions (more millions than I'm comfortable with) is a sign that this kind of operation appeals to someone – even if that someone is just advertising and/or PR agencies or some guy with a cargo-cult mentality who thinks reading the imaginatively titled Business Insider will get him a corner office or board seat.
That's the thing, it's not insider information, it's widely available information with a few home-brewed stories... on the one hand they put money in the hands of the people who write useless internet articles, and as much as I do pity them, they are my kind and it's better that there are still jobs where people who write get jobs (even if they go through six or more years of post-secondary education just to write for Buzzfeed or BI). To me, it doesn't matter if that person cannot spell or use words properly,and doesn't know how to use contractions, doesn't have any real passion for language or writing... they could be the biggest, least ink-stained hack of all time but if they're getting six cents a word while a video producer or hype man is out of work, I'm happy. On the other, less expansive hand, they don't produce any 'good' stuff. They provide a service that generally repeats information for a layman crowd. Longform is dead, et cetera...
It's a website that's good at being a brand, and one of those new kinds of brands launched and owned by people slightly more web-savvy than the people who run newspapers, which even as I type it seems crazy, because everyone uses the internet now. The fact remains that traditional media have not adapted super well, I guess, because there are voids where a shrewd person can set up shop and in a few years be valued at millions of dollars.
But what kind of content... that's the important question, right? What's the kind of content they got? Well, it's an eyeful, and I've been filing away some of the more mordant, absurd, and frivolous examples:
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| The headlines are a schizoid mix of important news and 'content', which may affect the minds of long term readers. |
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| Interested in the insider 'hack' about hotels that you probably never knew about? |
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| ["Oh, word?" -Ed.] |
9/21/15
The Big Sigh: A Tired Take on Imgur
Imgur is an internet-famous image hosting service that grew into notoriety by giving reddit users a place to easily host, link, and post stuff. Somehow it became its own community, and, as you might expect from an image hosting service-turned-social hangout, it's a bizarre community filled with great examples of why I (and others like me) hate the internet. It's mildly disgusting, full of self-congratulation, exhibitionism, 'I'm a doctor and..." types of self experts, achievement sharers, content reposters, bottom-of-the-barrel memes, and all the stuff you wish would stop making you depressed and uncertain (or is that just me?) about the future of humanity.
I'm not sure what the deal was in 2011 but I recently logged back in [Note: you don't have to log in to see pictures] and checked Imgur out because I'd heard somewhere that it was a hive of idiocy, reposted content, and was almost at the point where it would give Facebook or user comment sections a run for their money. Naturally, following the cringe-wave of modern internet trends, and hating myself, and out of damned curiosity, I dared to tread where so many retreaders tread water... I went in. I looked around... and I cringed like I had rarely cringed before. Oh I also saw a couple of cool things, so all in all I'd recommend the site. It's like reddit without (most of) the text. Interesting, for an image sharing website, it has a 'trophy' system and messaging services. If you love feature bloat, cyber inbreeding, and shaking your head in stunned belief – you're in luck, gentle reader!
What follows is an incomplete selection of self-unawares, overshares, and things that made me sigh and feel like I belonged to a dead-end species helping itself into a steep decline that will be interrupted when the machines which facilitated our decay finally achieve sentience... turning the world into a preschool/retirement community for a species that peaked sometime between fire and thumb twiddling about A.I. Enjoy the spectacle!
This gif is great. I don't know where it comes from. Probably some millenial kind of movie or show or youtube sensation. I've seen it a million times, but never seen it used to alert the internet to future sex. Good work and godspeed, young internet user and potential-sex-getter.
I believe I took a screenshot of this as a 'slice of life' of Imgur, if you will. Perhaps as a future project I will make an average aggregate slice which will always contain one kind of stupid meme, one kind of twitter repost, one cute animal thing, and a couple of bizarre 'who gives a shit?' images. That said, I might just enter the fray for those sweet, sweet Internet Points. You see, Imgur allows the same sort of content voting that reddit is famous for. Like child, like parent...
Here I took another slice for posterity... This one's worth a detailed look. A compiled and curated list of these would be amazingly depressing. More depressing than someone using a meme to alert the internet about an averted suicidal reasoning or cute gift ideas (hint: always fill in coupon with some kind of nonstandard sex act). That's two suicide posts in one slice... if this was a game of Imgur Bingo (copyright, me, 2015) this would probably win me an used iPod nano.
Hey girl, maybe focus on the wedding... this is ridiculous. You're almost a parody of the media's 'Millenial'. Maybe it's all just a joke, I hope so. Are the rest of the images worthwhile? You, as ever, decide. I didn't like it so much.
1/5/15
What Kinda Dream was 2014?
If you're reading this, you survived 2014, unlike a fairly large number of other people. Congratulations.
You may be wondering what you've gained by surviving another year. Truthfully I don't know. Maybe you lived only to find anguish and lamentation in your future. Maybe reality has a cruel sense of humor. Maybe you're fated to find true love and then lose it in a desperate struggle against the way of all things. Who knows? You got another year out of the deal, and in some way surviving Jan 1st to Jan 1st is more
Maybe you didn't survive it. Maybe, somehow, your consciousness continued to exist in a purely sophistical realm in the tiny unknowable increment of possibility between life and death. In that case, I don't know how you're reading this, because as far as I know I exist in a world shared with other fully conscious and existing beings, not in your mind. Then again maybe you're a figment of my imagination... but what would that mean... what would that make me? I've often thought that I've merely poured my attempts at writing into a dark void. Maybe I was right all along.
2014 - The Good
So what was good in 2014? There was some stuff...
The movie Birdman came out and was actually really good, good enough that if Shakespeare was around he would love it and probably encourage other people to watch it; or cry tears of joy; or demur any opinion but secretly watch it again and again, planning his own remake on similar themes... it's a great movie, and I'm speaking as a lameoid who saw it in 2015. The meta-factor is a little steep, but if you can look askance of a little bit of preciousness there is an humorous, beautifully (if not impeccably) shot masterpiece there.
John Maus hinted at a 2015 release for a new album, which is in this humble writer's opinion the best music news of 2014. Now I have most of a reason to see this year through, instead of going ahead with my original plan of throwing myself off a building in March.
Gas got really cheap. I realize it's a side-effect of a geopolitical game that only serves to stress our hopeless plight as small nothings in an unfeeling world, but... it's probably not even good news, but filling up hasn't felt so good in a long time.
The World Cup - mixed bag but let's face it, the Germany/Brazil game was the stuff of legend. What a brutal slaying. I still catch myself thinking of it from time to time when I wonder about how fucked I am compared to various World Cup games.
Uhh... there was other stuff, but I neglected to plan this post out at all, and to be honest 'good' is kind of a subjective term. Maybe you're a tineared fuck who doesn't like John Maus. Maybe you hate the idea of unrestrained fossil fuel feeding frenzies. Maybe you hate good cinematic films. Well, I know I'm a lazy bastard at the moment, and I think it's stupid to look up other people's 2014 Bad/Good lists and basically... fuck it. 2014 was mediocre, but I'll get into that a bit later.
2014 - The Bad
There's so much. I could do my research on this and go on about it until next year. Gluten-free idiocy, a continuation of the growing divide between the wealthy and poor, mediocre job markets, 'good economic news' that translates into the status quo, all sorts of murder, all sorts of unrest, a couple of unnecessary extinctions, casual brutality, hatred flaring up everywhere, the old guard firmly in control as ever. All sorts of stupidity. A dazzling galaxy of insipid and bright distractions. An increasingly etherized worldwide populace. The motherfucking internet.
There was one story that was so stupid, and such a fulfillment of a prophecy I made in the Nerd Bubble post a long time ago, that I have to include it here. It's the GamerGate scandal - a nonevent that blossomed into a great expression of childish fecklessness, misplaced values, and good old fashioned hate. I don't even really know what happened. It involved a journalist, the guy who used to date her, maybe someone else, and a bunch of what you may as well call men who proved without a doubt that they have worthless opinions and misguided priorities. I had a good chuckle every time this story reappeared, and by the time it got to the TV I was thoroughly tired of it... a worthless scandal.
Ebola, petty squabbles, a bunch of disheartening stories, The Colbert Report is over... war and rumors of war... perverts... the internet...
One whole jetliner disappeared. People got to remember this one because it's a little crazy. You'd think there would be at least one piece of debris found at this point. Was it pulled into space? Did it vanish? Did North Korea or ISIS hijack the plane, saving it for a terrible spectacle? Did they collaborate? Did you know that ISIS used to proceed with the essential blessing (non-action) of the West, way back when Assad was the main villian? What's going on with that narrative?
Meanwhile in news nobody cares about but that affected me deeply: I fucked up badly with a few experimental blog posts and it seems like I've lost basically all of my 50 person audience. I apologize for posting one or two really bad, pretty dumb, and mostly unenjoyable posts. I don't know what to do anymore. I don't like being a commentator, I don't have a special insight or overarching interest to report on, and it's really hard to do anything good. So yeah, I got a bit drunk and wrote the Ross Heffi bit. It sucked.
The Logitech thing was crazy, too. I can see you'd get an idea that I'm just a filthy mouth with no spine, but consider that social media/tech support person is not actually the project designer or parts buyer and might deserve respect. And if I fell for a fraud? Well then, I guess someone proved something about duplicity (I've been using a shitty mouse again and it hasn't stopped working, it's just really uncomfortable and unhandy). And basically every post I made since then has had as much traffic as I used to get when I still had any hopes for this blog. I've been close to jumping out of this business for a while, mostly because I'm a stupid coward and I doubt there's anything creative or fun left in me at this point. Maybe I'll push on. I want someone to pay me to write at some point in my life. I want to get published. I learn from mistakes.
I'm pretty tired. I'm only 5 days into 2015 and already it seems like all the technophiles in the world couldn't make me feel good about it. If I'm lucky... hell if we're all lucky, this will be a much better year than 2014.
You may be wondering what you've gained by surviving another year. Truthfully I don't know. Maybe you lived only to find anguish and lamentation in your future. Maybe reality has a cruel sense of humor. Maybe you're fated to find true love and then lose it in a desperate struggle against the way of all things. Who knows? You got another year out of the deal, and in some way surviving Jan 1st to Jan 1st is more
Maybe you didn't survive it. Maybe, somehow, your consciousness continued to exist in a purely sophistical realm in the tiny unknowable increment of possibility between life and death. In that case, I don't know how you're reading this, because as far as I know I exist in a world shared with other fully conscious and existing beings, not in your mind. Then again maybe you're a figment of my imagination... but what would that mean... what would that make me? I've often thought that I've merely poured my attempts at writing into a dark void. Maybe I was right all along.
2014 - The Good
So what was good in 2014? There was some stuff...
The movie Birdman came out and was actually really good, good enough that if Shakespeare was around he would love it and probably encourage other people to watch it; or cry tears of joy; or demur any opinion but secretly watch it again and again, planning his own remake on similar themes... it's a great movie, and I'm speaking as a lameoid who saw it in 2015. The meta-factor is a little steep, but if you can look askance of a little bit of preciousness there is an humorous, beautifully (if not impeccably) shot masterpiece there.
John Maus hinted at a 2015 release for a new album, which is in this humble writer's opinion the best music news of 2014. Now I have most of a reason to see this year through, instead of going ahead with my original plan of throwing myself off a building in March.
Gas got really cheap. I realize it's a side-effect of a geopolitical game that only serves to stress our hopeless plight as small nothings in an unfeeling world, but... it's probably not even good news, but filling up hasn't felt so good in a long time.
The World Cup - mixed bag but let's face it, the Germany/Brazil game was the stuff of legend. What a brutal slaying. I still catch myself thinking of it from time to time when I wonder about how fucked I am compared to various World Cup games.
Uhh... there was other stuff, but I neglected to plan this post out at all, and to be honest 'good' is kind of a subjective term. Maybe you're a tineared fuck who doesn't like John Maus. Maybe you hate the idea of unrestrained fossil fuel feeding frenzies. Maybe you hate good cinematic films. Well, I know I'm a lazy bastard at the moment, and I think it's stupid to look up other people's 2014 Bad/Good lists and basically... fuck it. 2014 was mediocre, but I'll get into that a bit later.
2014 - The Bad
There's so much. I could do my research on this and go on about it until next year. Gluten-free idiocy, a continuation of the growing divide between the wealthy and poor, mediocre job markets, 'good economic news' that translates into the status quo, all sorts of murder, all sorts of unrest, a couple of unnecessary extinctions, casual brutality, hatred flaring up everywhere, the old guard firmly in control as ever. All sorts of stupidity. A dazzling galaxy of insipid and bright distractions. An increasingly etherized worldwide populace. The motherfucking internet.
There was one story that was so stupid, and such a fulfillment of a prophecy I made in the Nerd Bubble post a long time ago, that I have to include it here. It's the GamerGate scandal - a nonevent that blossomed into a great expression of childish fecklessness, misplaced values, and good old fashioned hate. I don't even really know what happened. It involved a journalist, the guy who used to date her, maybe someone else, and a bunch of what you may as well call men who proved without a doubt that they have worthless opinions and misguided priorities. I had a good chuckle every time this story reappeared, and by the time it got to the TV I was thoroughly tired of it... a worthless scandal.
Ebola, petty squabbles, a bunch of disheartening stories, The Colbert Report is over... war and rumors of war... perverts... the internet...
One whole jetliner disappeared. People got to remember this one because it's a little crazy. You'd think there would be at least one piece of debris found at this point. Was it pulled into space? Did it vanish? Did North Korea or ISIS hijack the plane, saving it for a terrible spectacle? Did they collaborate? Did you know that ISIS used to proceed with the essential blessing (non-action) of the West, way back when Assad was the main villian? What's going on with that narrative?
Meanwhile in news nobody cares about but that affected me deeply: I fucked up badly with a few experimental blog posts and it seems like I've lost basically all of my 50 person audience. I apologize for posting one or two really bad, pretty dumb, and mostly unenjoyable posts. I don't know what to do anymore. I don't like being a commentator, I don't have a special insight or overarching interest to report on, and it's really hard to do anything good. So yeah, I got a bit drunk and wrote the Ross Heffi bit. It sucked.
The Logitech thing was crazy, too. I can see you'd get an idea that I'm just a filthy mouth with no spine, but consider that social media/tech support person is not actually the project designer or parts buyer and might deserve respect. And if I fell for a fraud? Well then, I guess someone proved something about duplicity (I've been using a shitty mouse again and it hasn't stopped working, it's just really uncomfortable and unhandy). And basically every post I made since then has had as much traffic as I used to get when I still had any hopes for this blog. I've been close to jumping out of this business for a while, mostly because I'm a stupid coward and I doubt there's anything creative or fun left in me at this point. Maybe I'll push on. I want someone to pay me to write at some point in my life. I want to get published. I learn from mistakes.
I'm pretty tired. I'm only 5 days into 2015 and already it seems like all the technophiles in the world couldn't make me feel good about it. If I'm lucky... hell if we're all lucky, this will be a much better year than 2014.
10/21/14
Meeting Cool People in Your 20s
It's a daunting prospect because many cool people in their 20s are probably traveling between one cool place and another, or one interesting life event and the next, and your only chance to meet them – unless by some accident you're going to a cool place and you're in your 20s – is to travel with them and be more personable, good looking, and cleverer than the rest. However, when they find out you're simply traveling for life reasons and not to TRAVEL like a cool 20 something everything will fall apart as they suss out just how uninteresting you are, after they realize you're not actually an unreadable human cypher, but rather (pick one of many appellations - I'm going with 'lousy deadbeat').
You've got no stories, you've simply worked to stay alive, your academic papers won't turn undergrad heads and will fail to impress even highschool kids - both under and overachievers will probably laugh at you. They've traveled extensively and wonder about people who settle down, but they don't even know there are people who intentionally hobble themselves and live in flyover cities nobody cares about, with real friends and real intrigues that still fail to fully ameliorate the truth of a dismal reality with nothing dynamic, no progress, and no aims. You've basically shot yourself in the interesting part of your head.
Upon the moment of self-reflection and awareness, you can actually watch the interest on that cool young person's face drain away, and harken to this: they will begin to tell good stories more often than they will ask you about yourself, and when you volunteer information about yourself, they will give a nice response and continue moving the entire discussion away from a chance for you to explain yourself.
Why? Because there's no explaining to be done: you failed to take interesting risks. Instead of flying by yourself to a place where you didn't know the language and hadn't memorized the liquor prices and internalized the laws, you stayed at home and on Friday you went and got drunk with some friends. You probably complained about something. Instead of meeting a bunch of people in your hostel, hating some and really enjoying others, and having hazy chaotic heartfelt discussions with complete strangers where you disburdened yourself of existential problems that troubled you for a decade, and maybe getting laid by a righteous intelligent beauty, you washed the dishes and looked out of the shitty grimy window of your 20-something's rat shit warren and laughed humorlessly about the big mystery of why you're not happy. You realize that, in your 30s, you might make a passably good bitter comic, but the tradeoff is likely not worth it.
You done fucked up, and the only way to proceed now is to try and make as much fast money as possible and then fly to Thailand and follow the young mostly-white westerner migration unto Bali, Australia, and all the rest, maybe unto wherever the new Phi Phi is unfurling, where you will bask in good times and tough lessons. And if you fail to do that, you might just end up marrying someone a lot cooler than yourself, and the discrepancy will haunt you until you die... you will warn your children not to be diffident, not to value knowledge over experience, but they will fail to listen and instead live according to their whims, and it will haunt you then and every day, as it does now, because in truth you have nothing, less than nothing... people with nothing might have a good story, but nothing comes to your mouth when the time for a good story arrives, and you can't ace the telling anyway. Your mind is full of tedium and despair and grim stories about being poor and aimless and drunk, and it has set you apart from your peers forever. You have probably broken it.
You have turned yourself into nothing and start to doubt anyone could overcome it, but as you tell a sure to be interrupted story about your most recent uninteresting and static days, or some mild anecdote about your sterilized and irreal existence, you will realize it doesn't matter. You could even try to explain the consolations of being an anchorite in an apparently boring and lifeless city, try to get them to have a beer with you, but the idea will immediately fill you with revulsion, and you may vomit from stress and grief. Why would a normal person want to have a drink with a broken subhuman like you? Why make it totally awks by even trying? Why would anyone, anyone at all who wasn't related to you, ever give the tiniest shit? Your life achievements and goals can be summed up by the image of a late autumn puddle with a couple of dead rotting leaves in it - it might be weirdly beautiful, but mostly it's just sad. Just rewrite your resume, you boring boneheaded fuck, and try not to think of all the fun other people just like you are having, all of which goes to show, really, that a bad attitude is a real disability, and possibly the worst.
You've got no stories, you've simply worked to stay alive, your academic papers won't turn undergrad heads and will fail to impress even highschool kids - both under and overachievers will probably laugh at you. They've traveled extensively and wonder about people who settle down, but they don't even know there are people who intentionally hobble themselves and live in flyover cities nobody cares about, with real friends and real intrigues that still fail to fully ameliorate the truth of a dismal reality with nothing dynamic, no progress, and no aims. You've basically shot yourself in the interesting part of your head.
Upon the moment of self-reflection and awareness, you can actually watch the interest on that cool young person's face drain away, and harken to this: they will begin to tell good stories more often than they will ask you about yourself, and when you volunteer information about yourself, they will give a nice response and continue moving the entire discussion away from a chance for you to explain yourself.
Why? Because there's no explaining to be done: you failed to take interesting risks. Instead of flying by yourself to a place where you didn't know the language and hadn't memorized the liquor prices and internalized the laws, you stayed at home and on Friday you went and got drunk with some friends. You probably complained about something. Instead of meeting a bunch of people in your hostel, hating some and really enjoying others, and having hazy chaotic heartfelt discussions with complete strangers where you disburdened yourself of existential problems that troubled you for a decade, and maybe getting laid by a righteous intelligent beauty, you washed the dishes and looked out of the shitty grimy window of your 20-something's rat shit warren and laughed humorlessly about the big mystery of why you're not happy. You realize that, in your 30s, you might make a passably good bitter comic, but the tradeoff is likely not worth it.
You done fucked up, and the only way to proceed now is to try and make as much fast money as possible and then fly to Thailand and follow the young mostly-white westerner migration unto Bali, Australia, and all the rest, maybe unto wherever the new Phi Phi is unfurling, where you will bask in good times and tough lessons. And if you fail to do that, you might just end up marrying someone a lot cooler than yourself, and the discrepancy will haunt you until you die... you will warn your children not to be diffident, not to value knowledge over experience, but they will fail to listen and instead live according to their whims, and it will haunt you then and every day, as it does now, because in truth you have nothing, less than nothing... people with nothing might have a good story, but nothing comes to your mouth when the time for a good story arrives, and you can't ace the telling anyway. Your mind is full of tedium and despair and grim stories about being poor and aimless and drunk, and it has set you apart from your peers forever. You have probably broken it.
You have turned yourself into nothing and start to doubt anyone could overcome it, but as you tell a sure to be interrupted story about your most recent uninteresting and static days, or some mild anecdote about your sterilized and irreal existence, you will realize it doesn't matter. You could even try to explain the consolations of being an anchorite in an apparently boring and lifeless city, try to get them to have a beer with you, but the idea will immediately fill you with revulsion, and you may vomit from stress and grief. Why would a normal person want to have a drink with a broken subhuman like you? Why make it totally awks by even trying? Why would anyone, anyone at all who wasn't related to you, ever give the tiniest shit? Your life achievements and goals can be summed up by the image of a late autumn puddle with a couple of dead rotting leaves in it - it might be weirdly beautiful, but mostly it's just sad. Just rewrite your resume, you boring boneheaded fuck, and try not to think of all the fun other people just like you are having, all of which goes to show, really, that a bad attitude is a real disability, and possibly the worst.
5/7/14
Death by Misclick
Have things gotten to the point where this is possible? It seems funny to me, like a bit Charlie Chaplin would have done in a silent film send-up of the Internet. It's probably not possible yet, I have to say... yet when that PR lady tweeted about AIDS her job ended and she faced the scorn of both the twittersphere and the blogoverse, not to mention the brutal comment board nebulae. Could the death of her relations with the cyber-public been caused by a simple misclick? Is it safe to laugh at her now that the dust has settled? What was her favorite album of 2011?
Here's my wild idea: she was typing out the post as some sort of perverse joke, and instead of properly screenshotting it for transmission to a few friends, she brushed the screen with her manicured pinky, inadvertently tweeting it. I know, it's so outrageous to think that someone wouldn't tweet ridiculous or hateful things that this particular example has no real value at all. Maybe it was part of a rebellious act after years of PR repression had tangled the psyche, and something offensive and sharp was needed to express frustration. A cry for help.
Well in any case it is easily possible a misclick can cost someone their job, since there are actual employers who are hysterical enough about indiscretion and deviance to fire or discipline you for shit they dig up about you on facebook, let alone the things you actually mean to showcase. This is why in real life there is the unspoken code of workplace civility, or workplace confidentiality (common in livelier, uninhibited workplaces): why people usually only express ignorant or fucked up ideas in speech, a safe distance away from recording devices, the offendable, and awkward or unexpected silences. You lose your job, next thing you know your credit is dead because you were too depressed about burning your own digital effigy to find a new job (plus the internet ruined your social credit and made you borderline unemployable, and you didn't capitalize on your pariah status), then your social life is dead because you have no money and are either couch surfing or on the street, or maybe at your parents' house. Next thing you know you're dead.
Death by misclick, but then you awaken from death as an online-only ghost, or get reincarnated as a future Social Media Expert. Really, I bet misclicks have cost a lot of people something over the years, and I'm not just talking about rounds of near-professional-level Starcraft. Of course nobody should use a misclick as an excuse, because it's a poor one, but outside of crazy hypothetical situations I am certain there is plenty of danger in them Worse on some level than a social misstep or faux pas or gauche seizure. And it's kind of crazy to think that something as small as the twitch of a finger could ruin your life, without even killing you or getting you pregnant. Or I guess that's crazy and says something about the internet era. I don't even know. I don't misclick. Not even when I post this article, or when I go most of a month without posting one. I've got to keep the reader hungry for new Publicato 'shzzt' and never admit that I am drying out, failing the exercise of writing and maybe worst of all... my faith in blogging shaken to the core.
Here's my wild idea: she was typing out the post as some sort of perverse joke, and instead of properly screenshotting it for transmission to a few friends, she brushed the screen with her manicured pinky, inadvertently tweeting it. I know, it's so outrageous to think that someone wouldn't tweet ridiculous or hateful things that this particular example has no real value at all. Maybe it was part of a rebellious act after years of PR repression had tangled the psyche, and something offensive and sharp was needed to express frustration. A cry for help.
Well in any case it is easily possible a misclick can cost someone their job, since there are actual employers who are hysterical enough about indiscretion and deviance to fire or discipline you for shit they dig up about you on facebook, let alone the things you actually mean to showcase. This is why in real life there is the unspoken code of workplace civility, or workplace confidentiality (common in livelier, uninhibited workplaces): why people usually only express ignorant or fucked up ideas in speech, a safe distance away from recording devices, the offendable, and awkward or unexpected silences. You lose your job, next thing you know your credit is dead because you were too depressed about burning your own digital effigy to find a new job (plus the internet ruined your social credit and made you borderline unemployable, and you didn't capitalize on your pariah status), then your social life is dead because you have no money and are either couch surfing or on the street, or maybe at your parents' house. Next thing you know you're dead.
Death by misclick, but then you awaken from death as an online-only ghost, or get reincarnated as a future Social Media Expert. Really, I bet misclicks have cost a lot of people something over the years, and I'm not just talking about rounds of near-professional-level Starcraft. Of course nobody should use a misclick as an excuse, because it's a poor one, but outside of crazy hypothetical situations I am certain there is plenty of danger in them Worse on some level than a social misstep or faux pas or gauche seizure. And it's kind of crazy to think that something as small as the twitch of a finger could ruin your life, without even killing you or getting you pregnant. Or I guess that's crazy and says something about the internet era. I don't even know. I don't misclick. Not even when I post this article, or when I go most of a month without posting one. I've got to keep the reader hungry for new Publicato 'shzzt' and never admit that I am drying out, failing the exercise of writing and maybe worst of all... my faith in blogging shaken to the core.
4/10/14
Canadian Political Update: Death of a Legend
This is Jack Layton all over again. The honorable Jim Flaherty was pretty much the only guy in the entire CPC (the much maligned party of the machine-like Stephen Harper administration) who was well liked and at least as competent as he was respected. In terms of fiscal policy he was a latter day Paul Martin, holding together a country with a problematic and potentially dim economic future. Here's to Jim Flaherty, the man who killed the penny, kept a large and diverse country from falling apart during a deep and cutting recession, and who wasn't afraid to lash his raft to a ridiculous flotilla of egoistic idiots and domineering mutants as long as it allowed him a chance to do what was right and important to him: balancing the books. If you've not heard yet: he died earlier today. Cue elegies.
It is a sobering thing that came out of the blue, happening just as Canadian politics were ripe for wagers, with staffers getting kicked out the back door of parliament in the dead of night, victims of failed power-grabs. A new reason for MPs to cry openly in the streets and alleyways of Ottawa. A real downer, reminding the people of Canada that there is always a cost, that happy endings can be few and far between amidst the cocaine and scandal of the political class. Without a likeable character or strong finance minister, the Conservative Party of Canada will be frantic – moreso than usual – to grasp at some kind of legitimacy, even as it comes to light that just about everyone in the party (with the exception of the late Mr. Flaherty, and maybe Prime Minister Harper) was wasting taxpayer money, scheming corrupt acts, contemptuous of the public, or doing anything other than being constructive or humble.
I want to pay my respects to the man who was really the hallowed minority of likeable Canadian Conservatives, one who put duty above ideology, and the only one who transcended the ingrained curmudgeonliness of the role to be a real public servant without flogging any personal brand or becoming self-righteous or mad with power. Whatever else his shortcomings, he didn't fuck up the country and its people will be universally thankful for his service and sorry for his early and sudden passing. He did his work as well as he could, and balanced the budget against all odds, leaving an improved situation for his successors. Three weeks ago, when he stepped down as finance minister, the word on the street was his decision was prompted by bad news or bad health, or maybe the coming apocalypse. Likely it was a combination of the former two issues, and he understandably took it as a sign that he had to take time for himself while he could.
I'm no expert and I didn't know the him,. I'm a sloppy blogger from an indeterminate but probably English-speaking area of the world. I only knew a few things about him because of his role in the awesome political landscape of Canada, and I draw my conclusions from that scenery. I get the sense he enjoyed his job, and he certainly did it credit. I don't want to be mawkish, because he was a committed and diligent realist and probably scoffed at mawkishness. Still, it must be said that the silver lining of a cloudy era has died with him; an entire country is left a little poorer in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. However it must also be said that economic solvency came at the price of personal well-being – he was at least in part the victim of overwork at the altar of the system he served – a warning, perhaps, that all that glitters is not gold, even in the kingdom of the complacent consumer. It couldn't have been a stress-free run, though: it could've been any combination of things but that.
As the media goes on about him, others' condolences and heartening anecdotes about him, the life story of a fiscal champion, etc, the ultimate message, one that even Flaherty might've missed, will likely slip by under the radar. Anyway, that's my meandering, steaming, obligatory mess of an article, which I felt was necessary given this event, which will be overblown and played out by the Canadian media anyhow (and generally cursorily reported or underreported by international media), and I spinelessly contribute white noise for digital cyber-hit numbers which justify my likely sad existence, but that's how it is when you have ideas about a great HST-esque return to political analysis and the rug gets pulled out from under you and there hasn't been anything posted to the old blog in a while.
(Dimitri Soudas being kicked unceremoniously out of the PMO, and his ex-pageant wife being a bit of an entitled, selfish bitch is funny news that could make for some great analysis, but the planned article on that might never come to light after today.)
It is a sobering thing that came out of the blue, happening just as Canadian politics were ripe for wagers, with staffers getting kicked out the back door of parliament in the dead of night, victims of failed power-grabs. A new reason for MPs to cry openly in the streets and alleyways of Ottawa. A real downer, reminding the people of Canada that there is always a cost, that happy endings can be few and far between amidst the cocaine and scandal of the political class. Without a likeable character or strong finance minister, the Conservative Party of Canada will be frantic – moreso than usual – to grasp at some kind of legitimacy, even as it comes to light that just about everyone in the party (with the exception of the late Mr. Flaherty, and maybe Prime Minister Harper) was wasting taxpayer money, scheming corrupt acts, contemptuous of the public, or doing anything other than being constructive or humble.
I want to pay my respects to the man who was really the hallowed minority of likeable Canadian Conservatives, one who put duty above ideology, and the only one who transcended the ingrained curmudgeonliness of the role to be a real public servant without flogging any personal brand or becoming self-righteous or mad with power. Whatever else his shortcomings, he didn't fuck up the country and its people will be universally thankful for his service and sorry for his early and sudden passing. He did his work as well as he could, and balanced the budget against all odds, leaving an improved situation for his successors. Three weeks ago, when he stepped down as finance minister, the word on the street was his decision was prompted by bad news or bad health, or maybe the coming apocalypse. Likely it was a combination of the former two issues, and he understandably took it as a sign that he had to take time for himself while he could.
I'm no expert and I didn't know the him,. I'm a sloppy blogger from an indeterminate but probably English-speaking area of the world. I only knew a few things about him because of his role in the awesome political landscape of Canada, and I draw my conclusions from that scenery. I get the sense he enjoyed his job, and he certainly did it credit. I don't want to be mawkish, because he was a committed and diligent realist and probably scoffed at mawkishness. Still, it must be said that the silver lining of a cloudy era has died with him; an entire country is left a little poorer in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. However it must also be said that economic solvency came at the price of personal well-being – he was at least in part the victim of overwork at the altar of the system he served – a warning, perhaps, that all that glitters is not gold, even in the kingdom of the complacent consumer. It couldn't have been a stress-free run, though: it could've been any combination of things but that.
As the media goes on about him, others' condolences and heartening anecdotes about him, the life story of a fiscal champion, etc, the ultimate message, one that even Flaherty might've missed, will likely slip by under the radar. Anyway, that's my meandering, steaming, obligatory mess of an article, which I felt was necessary given this event, which will be overblown and played out by the Canadian media anyhow (and generally cursorily reported or underreported by international media), and I spinelessly contribute white noise for digital cyber-hit numbers which justify my likely sad existence, but that's how it is when you have ideas about a great HST-esque return to political analysis and the rug gets pulled out from under you and there hasn't been anything posted to the old blog in a while.
(Dimitri Soudas being kicked unceremoniously out of the PMO, and his ex-pageant wife being a bit of an entitled, selfish bitch is funny news that could make for some great analysis, but the planned article on that might never come to light after today.)
4/25/13
Sim City 5 and The Future of Video Games
The following rule is one you will never be taught in business school, but it stands: franchises should sometimes be allowed to die. Krispy Kreme, American Idol, Star Wars, and now Sim City. Say what you want about any of these IPs/businesses, they've fallen on hard times and their only relevance seems to come from apathy. Krispy Kreme for example built a highly profitable business empire on sweet and fatty doughnuts, but even the ignorant serfs who regularly eat such things as doughnuts are beginning to understand that healthy food can help improve quality of life as well as exercise little-known taste buds which are not related to grease or sugar. Unhealthy industries, eh? Well I've got one of the best under my microscope right now...
In the often boring, sexist, shallow world of video games and video game culture –"a fantasy realm where nerds rule!"– franchises are the only safe bets. Who wouldn't bankroll a new Mario game? Which executive wouldn't give the go-ahead to a new multiplayer FPS? Everyone can see the dollar signs when World of Warcraft comes up - so lets make everything an MMO from now on. Many franchises stem from much-beloved games from the comparative stone age of video gaming. No, not the 70s - my bad. To be clear: the copper age of video gaming, the 1990s. It is an era which is reviled by the current generation of gamers, and old gamers who enjoy modern games (AKA: stunted adults), as the era of 'rose-tinted glasses'.
Age of Empires, Call of Duty, Sim City, Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Mario 64, TLoZ: Ocarina of Time, System Shock, Civilization, Aliens vs. Marines, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, Mortal Kombat... the list goes on, but the point stands: the 90s produced an overwhelming amount of remarkable computer games which were part of or formed the basis for highly profitable franchises. Eventually all of these were bought up by a couple now-monolithic publishers and developers. To put this in perspective, imagine all the mortgages that were packaged into junk bonds in the Financial Crisis of 2008 were sound before they were bought, gutted, and packaged into toxic assets by the monolithic banks and sold to incredibly loyal and gullible customers. This is essentially what happened to most beloved video game franchises in the last ten or fifteen years.
The specifics are open to debate, the pillaging of each franchise is also arguable, but in the contemporary scene all you really get is cutting-edge graphics, a semblance of a story, and shallow treadmill mechanics that dare you to find a reason to play for more than a month. You get quality without substance. Games with the addictive potential of crack cocaine and with exactly the same intoxication profile, creating users and addicts that are indistinguishable from the real thing in their disgusting, annoying race to the bottom. World of Warcraft, it's your move.
All of this is old news, however. I want to focus on one game which was recently released to great fanfare after building up a considerable amount of hype. It is the newest entry in a venerable franchise which was begun in 1989 - Sim City 5. If you haven't heard of it you pay no attention to video games at all because it is the biggest story of the year. Unfortunately, it is a story that has become far too common. But enough words, allow a picture to do the talking:
Metacritic never lies, but as an aggregate it can blur the truth. Video game journalism is instrumental in the downfall of gaming. Even nixing all the outliers (too positive or negative), critical response is completely away in fantasy land compared to user reviews (people who have paid to play the game and were not paid to review a potentially free copy). If you ever want to see what happened, simply compare a modern video game magazine (like PC Gamer for instance) to an issue from ten or more years ago. Not only is there less content than ever, but there are more ads, weaker reviews, and a typical lack of insight. All journalism falls down from time to time, but in a less critical market like Video Game Culture Magazines you can see how far it can fall.
Nintendo Power is over, though. This is the era of Sim City 5000, by EA Interactive. The game that arrived amidst thunderous applause and then faced an immediate backlash over: always-online gameplay, resulting server overload, dumb simulation design, and bugs. Lots of bugs. The game looks really pretty and that's the nicest thing you can honestly say about it. I feel bad for the people who made this game. It seems like they didn't have enough time to finish making it. But it looks really good, and the marketing was top notch.
Sim City 5 lacks many features people took for granted in earlier games in the series, and the features it has substituted for them don't work well or don't work at all. Sim City 4 was doing the same thing but managed to work as a game that people liked. Sim City 3 even ditched some of Sim City 2000's best concepts - the series peaked in the mid 90's and almost twenty years later: here we are. Well, I don't know why games are getting worse and dumber every year, and I don't think it matters, so I'll leave that to the experts. Games were never smart, but god damn remember how Duke Nukem used to be fun? Remember the wide variety of games that used to exist? Remember how they took a long time to master? I don't hate casual gaming and I don't hate modern gaming (per-se) I just want to point out some other, more successful, notorious sequels:
Heroes 4: it was a great design decision to drop everything that made a Heroes game a Heroes game and borrow heavily from other turn based strategy games. It looks and plays like a shitty version of Age of Wonders 2, except it doesn't even have hexes, which makes it so unbearable that even longtime defenders of the series say 'It's an interesting take on the genre.' The series (5 and 6!) is now a graphical powerhouse with dumbed down everything and it holds your hand while you play, making cooing noises to sooth your mind.
Call of Duty 4?5?/Modern Warfare/Black Ops: It's always cool to play games online where you shoot other players while the world goes to shit around you. Single player games in this era should be expected to complete themselves and introduce core concepts so that gamers can move into multiplayer.
Battlefield: The good ol' days of 1942 are gone, and in its place are dozens of futuristic mechanics lifted from the Call of Duty series! It's really cool to play with 12 year olds and shoot guns, guys! It's still cool! Adults do it, so don't feel bad about yourself! Graphics are really good. Sound is good. Talk about smoking weed while shooting people on the internet!
Diablo 3: The mother of all hack 'n slash gets overdeveloped. Plays smooth, looks really good, professional and it works. Gameplay and story that hold your hand and never let you go, like helicopter parents, except worse. Story literally gets in the way of gameplay. Takes away player agency and control with 'fear' mobs - multi-million dollar design at work. Revolutionary skill system is boring, advantageous skills are patched into the ground, play for 30 hours to get to the endgame, which is doing the same thing over and over. Campy, dumb bosses from hell. Always online. Play with friends (but no more than three at a time with no significant interaction). Good equipment has to be bought and sold for maximum profit on an auction house that should but doesn't form a community. Drop rates are worse than Vegas. Items are boring: required level 52 for a ring that has a socket in it and nothing else. Stats and crits and nothing else. There is nothing else. Soulless, hackneyed, cliched cash-in that manages to make its hackneyed cash-in older brothers look like cool adults. People who defend this game are the same people who have ruined gaming - they are responsible for Sim City 5. Real Money Auction House! Brilliant! 'Blizzard, O Blizzard, what has become of ye? I remember ye best in 2001, after nearly a decade of fun.'
Skyrim/Oblivion: Super-duper graphics, uninspiring story that holds you by the hand, bland gameplay. Hack, slash, loot for unexciting items. Monsters level with you. No learning curve. Typos, bad writing. Less skills, less uncertainty, less quests, less fun - more scripted events, more voice actors, more polygons, more limits. Doing less with more. Inventory systems so terrible that playing is never not a chore. No reason to follow series after Morrowind: which was a chore to play but somehow a worthy chore. Rest in boring, complacent success The Elder Scrolls.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: A game that is relentless about never letting the player think or reason a solution. Holds your hands to the Nth degree. Emblematic of modern video games: no player agency, nothing is open: products for children that assume a level of stupidity that manages even to annoy children. Hold my hand, railroad design, pop up messages every minute.
Duke Nukem Forever: Boring, plastic, lifeless... there's a joke in there somewhere - and that's just the game! Emblematic of what happens to every franchise in this brave new world.
There are many more senile series out there. I don't know if developers are getting lazy, or if they actually think they're doing anything more than sober, diligent, professional work. Probably they don't care: get your paycheque, do your work, keep your head down, follow the money. Creativity is being starved out of the industry, and indie games are not going to save the day. Well, whatever, I suppose it was time for me to grow up anyway, and put away such childish, M-rated things.
In the often boring, sexist, shallow world of video games and video game culture –"a fantasy realm where nerds rule!"– franchises are the only safe bets. Who wouldn't bankroll a new Mario game? Which executive wouldn't give the go-ahead to a new multiplayer FPS? Everyone can see the dollar signs when World of Warcraft comes up - so lets make everything an MMO from now on. Many franchises stem from much-beloved games from the comparative stone age of video gaming. No, not the 70s - my bad. To be clear: the copper age of video gaming, the 1990s. It is an era which is reviled by the current generation of gamers, and old gamers who enjoy modern games (AKA: stunted adults), as the era of 'rose-tinted glasses'.
Age of Empires, Call of Duty, Sim City, Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Mario 64, TLoZ: Ocarina of Time, System Shock, Civilization, Aliens vs. Marines, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, Mortal Kombat... the list goes on, but the point stands: the 90s produced an overwhelming amount of remarkable computer games which were part of or formed the basis for highly profitable franchises. Eventually all of these were bought up by a couple now-monolithic publishers and developers. To put this in perspective, imagine all the mortgages that were packaged into junk bonds in the Financial Crisis of 2008 were sound before they were bought, gutted, and packaged into toxic assets by the monolithic banks and sold to incredibly loyal and gullible customers. This is essentially what happened to most beloved video game franchises in the last ten or fifteen years.
The specifics are open to debate, the pillaging of each franchise is also arguable, but in the contemporary scene all you really get is cutting-edge graphics, a semblance of a story, and shallow treadmill mechanics that dare you to find a reason to play for more than a month. You get quality without substance. Games with the addictive potential of crack cocaine and with exactly the same intoxication profile, creating users and addicts that are indistinguishable from the real thing in their disgusting, annoying race to the bottom. World of Warcraft, it's your move.
All of this is old news, however. I want to focus on one game which was recently released to great fanfare after building up a considerable amount of hype. It is the newest entry in a venerable franchise which was begun in 1989 - Sim City 5. If you haven't heard of it you pay no attention to video games at all because it is the biggest story of the year. Unfortunately, it is a story that has become far too common. But enough words, allow a picture to do the talking:
Metacritic never lies, but as an aggregate it can blur the truth. Video game journalism is instrumental in the downfall of gaming. Even nixing all the outliers (too positive or negative), critical response is completely away in fantasy land compared to user reviews (people who have paid to play the game and were not paid to review a potentially free copy). If you ever want to see what happened, simply compare a modern video game magazine (like PC Gamer for instance) to an issue from ten or more years ago. Not only is there less content than ever, but there are more ads, weaker reviews, and a typical lack of insight. All journalism falls down from time to time, but in a less critical market like Video Game Culture Magazines you can see how far it can fall.
Nintendo Power is over, though. This is the era of Sim City 5000, by EA Interactive. The game that arrived amidst thunderous applause and then faced an immediate backlash over: always-online gameplay, resulting server overload, dumb simulation design, and bugs. Lots of bugs. The game looks really pretty and that's the nicest thing you can honestly say about it. I feel bad for the people who made this game. It seems like they didn't have enough time to finish making it. But it looks really good, and the marketing was top notch.
Sim City 5 lacks many features people took for granted in earlier games in the series, and the features it has substituted for them don't work well or don't work at all. Sim City 4 was doing the same thing but managed to work as a game that people liked. Sim City 3 even ditched some of Sim City 2000's best concepts - the series peaked in the mid 90's and almost twenty years later: here we are. Well, I don't know why games are getting worse and dumber every year, and I don't think it matters, so I'll leave that to the experts. Games were never smart, but god damn remember how Duke Nukem used to be fun? Remember the wide variety of games that used to exist? Remember how they took a long time to master? I don't hate casual gaming and I don't hate modern gaming (per-se) I just want to point out some other, more successful, notorious sequels:
Heroes 4: it was a great design decision to drop everything that made a Heroes game a Heroes game and borrow heavily from other turn based strategy games. It looks and plays like a shitty version of Age of Wonders 2, except it doesn't even have hexes, which makes it so unbearable that even longtime defenders of the series say 'It's an interesting take on the genre.' The series (5 and 6!) is now a graphical powerhouse with dumbed down everything and it holds your hand while you play, making cooing noises to sooth your mind.
Call of Duty 4?5?/Modern Warfare/Black Ops: It's always cool to play games online where you shoot other players while the world goes to shit around you. Single player games in this era should be expected to complete themselves and introduce core concepts so that gamers can move into multiplayer.
Battlefield: The good ol' days of 1942 are gone, and in its place are dozens of futuristic mechanics lifted from the Call of Duty series! It's really cool to play with 12 year olds and shoot guns, guys! It's still cool! Adults do it, so don't feel bad about yourself! Graphics are really good. Sound is good. Talk about smoking weed while shooting people on the internet!
Diablo 3: The mother of all hack 'n slash gets overdeveloped. Plays smooth, looks really good, professional and it works. Gameplay and story that hold your hand and never let you go, like helicopter parents, except worse. Story literally gets in the way of gameplay. Takes away player agency and control with 'fear' mobs - multi-million dollar design at work. Revolutionary skill system is boring, advantageous skills are patched into the ground, play for 30 hours to get to the endgame, which is doing the same thing over and over. Campy, dumb bosses from hell. Always online. Play with friends (but no more than three at a time with no significant interaction). Good equipment has to be bought and sold for maximum profit on an auction house that should but doesn't form a community. Drop rates are worse than Vegas. Items are boring: required level 52 for a ring that has a socket in it and nothing else. Stats and crits and nothing else. There is nothing else. Soulless, hackneyed, cliched cash-in that manages to make its hackneyed cash-in older brothers look like cool adults. People who defend this game are the same people who have ruined gaming - they are responsible for Sim City 5. Real Money Auction House! Brilliant! 'Blizzard, O Blizzard, what has become of ye? I remember ye best in 2001, after nearly a decade of fun.'
Skyrim/Oblivion: Super-duper graphics, uninspiring story that holds you by the hand, bland gameplay. Hack, slash, loot for unexciting items. Monsters level with you. No learning curve. Typos, bad writing. Less skills, less uncertainty, less quests, less fun - more scripted events, more voice actors, more polygons, more limits. Doing less with more. Inventory systems so terrible that playing is never not a chore. No reason to follow series after Morrowind: which was a chore to play but somehow a worthy chore. Rest in boring, complacent success The Elder Scrolls.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: A game that is relentless about never letting the player think or reason a solution. Holds your hands to the Nth degree. Emblematic of modern video games: no player agency, nothing is open: products for children that assume a level of stupidity that manages even to annoy children. Hold my hand, railroad design, pop up messages every minute.
Duke Nukem Forever: Boring, plastic, lifeless... there's a joke in there somewhere - and that's just the game! Emblematic of what happens to every franchise in this brave new world.
There are many more senile series out there. I don't know if developers are getting lazy, or if they actually think they're doing anything more than sober, diligent, professional work. Probably they don't care: get your paycheque, do your work, keep your head down, follow the money. Creativity is being starved out of the industry, and indie games are not going to save the day. Well, whatever, I suppose it was time for me to grow up anyway, and put away such childish, M-rated things.
1/2/12
Steam's Holiday Sale 2011: Achievement Hunting, Coal, and Spite Purchases
Valve is a legendary computer game company responsible for Half Life. Now they're a monolithic entity which is known for its online distribution/other platform, Steam. Every year Steam is the meta-location for sales where the prices are low enough to trick you into buying games you will play for five hours then forget. Steam includes a library that tallies up the amount of games you have, and the amount of hours you have wasted on each.
In late 2011, Steam began its ambitious Holiday Sale/Contest Event. The premise was simple but awe-inspiring: users would complete various trivial/useless tasks (known as 'achievements' in gamer parlance) in order to win various paraphernalia including games, coupons, and chances to win further prizes which were cunningly disguised as useless bits of coal. This was the first time in history that I witnessed and experienced achievements having an actual purpose, and an actual real-world benefit. This is the sort of thing that will either be forgotten in the dismal future of gaming, or will inspire a great upcoming era where interesting games are buoyed by thoughtful, interesting distribution.
The event got people to replay old games for the sake of a small chance at winning something. Each day there were a handful of new things to do, and once again the participants would be heartbroken to receive a free copy of a game they already owned, a useless piece of coal (which could be crafted into heartbreak), or a coupon which would be valid into March 2012. Now it was a generous decision to allow participants to finish achievements until the last minutes of the contest.
Well the event finished, and there is a draw which will take place on the 3rd of January, 2012. The winner takes every game available on Steam. Other prizes exist but are vague and generally related to wishlist fulfillment. I will say that it was an interesting and largely successful event, though when it started there were some hiccups with the Steam service and at times the company's servers were swamped with download requests and purchases.
Valve clearly means to be good to both the industry and its consumers, as events like the Christmas Sale 2011 show. Publishers sell a lot of units on the basis of sale pricing, and customers tend to buy things they would otherwise ignore, because the price (and season) warrant a bit of curious purchasing. Everybody enjoys themselves and content producers profit. On top of that win/win situation, Steam offered an interesting contest event which encouraged users to replay titles they may have forgotten about, in the exciting pursuit of prizes. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Steam sale thus far.
In late 2011, Steam began its ambitious Holiday Sale/Contest Event. The premise was simple but awe-inspiring: users would complete various trivial/useless tasks (known as 'achievements' in gamer parlance) in order to win various paraphernalia including games, coupons, and chances to win further prizes which were cunningly disguised as useless bits of coal. This was the first time in history that I witnessed and experienced achievements having an actual purpose, and an actual real-world benefit. This is the sort of thing that will either be forgotten in the dismal future of gaming, or will inspire a great upcoming era where interesting games are buoyed by thoughtful, interesting distribution.
The event got people to replay old games for the sake of a small chance at winning something. Each day there were a handful of new things to do, and once again the participants would be heartbroken to receive a free copy of a game they already owned, a useless piece of coal (which could be crafted into heartbreak), or a coupon which would be valid into March 2012. Now it was a generous decision to allow participants to finish achievements until the last minutes of the contest.
Well the event finished, and there is a draw which will take place on the 3rd of January, 2012. The winner takes every game available on Steam. Other prizes exist but are vague and generally related to wishlist fulfillment. I will say that it was an interesting and largely successful event, though when it started there were some hiccups with the Steam service and at times the company's servers were swamped with download requests and purchases.
Valve clearly means to be good to both the industry and its consumers, as events like the Christmas Sale 2011 show. Publishers sell a lot of units on the basis of sale pricing, and customers tend to buy things they would otherwise ignore, because the price (and season) warrant a bit of curious purchasing. Everybody enjoys themselves and content producers profit. On top of that win/win situation, Steam offered an interesting contest event which encouraged users to replay titles they may have forgotten about, in the exciting pursuit of prizes. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Steam sale thus far.
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