What On Earth is Bethesda Softworks Up To? : An Addendum

Armed with somewhat more knowledge and the time, experience, and distance to not just be astonished at what I feel was a weird lack of business savvy from a multi-million if not billion dollar company, and some news stories that help explain things I can perhaps offer a guess at what was going on at Bethesda that they released a Fallout show without a single hint even of a game from the same IP capitalizing on the hotness that only a streaming series can deliver in this day and age.

I think it can be traced back, given all the news stories about studio closures, to Microsoft itself. With the recent studio closures being the talk of the gaming world this past week, a new vista opened up that suggested extreme pressure, duress, and managerial issues probably responsible IN PART for the boring space game and the lack of any project 'on deck' for launch or reveal with the show's debut.  

(I myself have always had ideas for a more rogue-like Fallout game where you set out from the same town or vault, your character can die permanently and is randomly chosen, you can play as mutants or ghouls or robots in addition to humans, and levelling up and character builds are fast and fun. It could be modded onto Fallout 4, by the skillful and talented professionals who made that game, in about 8 months granted effective organzation and leadership and vision.) - [I am available for creative direction at frankly irresponsibly low prices, if anyone from Bethesday is reading this, leave a comment with your email let's make a hit]

As BSG is part of Microsoft XBox Games Studio (?) now, and was probably being banked on to quickly drop a genre-defining game in support of the console, the recent releases start to make more sense and their shift into more lucrative attempts (Fallout 76, real money shop stuff) at software can be explained as being tied to the balance sheet that investors froth at the mouth about. 

That same dedication to the financial aspect of making games has pretty much cratered the entire industry in the past 10 years and has also led to a lot of sloppy behaviour from big companies that should know better but have a fiduciary responsibility (yes this is a reference to real life, but also the game streaming series Fallout!) to make poor decisions that pay the maximum posssible return to investors and shareholders. 

It's why EA became a piece of shit, it's why Activision Blizzard lost all the goodwill either non-agglomerated company ever had, and it's part of the drawing of blood from the stone of reality that delusional capitalism excels at. EVs are greenwashing writ large, cap and trade was a noxious scam to steal from the public while polluting at an equal pace, NFTs were such a baldfaced scheme they sunk without a whimper, eCommerce is designed to empoverish all communities more rapidly than even Reagan's most based neoconservatism, and AI is mostly an orobourous generative scam built on the promise of esoteric, exploitative technologies of the future that is specifically designed to appeal to the sci-fi fantasies of computer understanders, but if you want to see the deleterious effects of capitalism, the bona fide premium examples have always been in video game entertainment, since E.T. in the 80s at least.

Still, let's not suggest it's all just due to the meandering will of a division of a 3 trillion dollar company, Bethesda have their own issues. In my opinion they've been making straight up pabulum since Oblivion, and as a Morrowind head (who first played Oblivion in 2010) I didn't find that game particularly  compelling. Skyrim had typoes, broken quests, and dozens of other design issues and bugs that put me off of it. Plus it was gorgeous but utterly boring, and I had played Mount and Blade by that time, a game with bugs, design issues, and actually interesting gameplay.

The Bethesda-era Fallout series started Oblivionesquely with Fallout 3, which was outstanding and stunning if you played it right then. I found it janky and kind of boring, and beat it one time and never went back. New Vegas was broken and buggy but an absolute treat to play and explore. Even the shitty DLCs each had something interesting to offer or examine (including, and I shudder, Old World Blues—the lowest of the low).

Fallout 4 was really a step forward in so many ways, from the presentation to the moment to moment gameplay. The first 10 hours with that game were revelatory and so compelling I just couldn't stay away. And yet FO4 was also a step backwards in terms of narrative, writing, systems, and long term appeal. Everything was there for a good game and then they had to smash their dumbass railroaded storytelling and quests into it, while making it a more open-ended experience could have made it an all time great. I don't understand how the masters of open world games fail to understand the premise and make players start each playthrough in a 15 to 45 minute tutorial. By the 11th hour doubts crept in, and by the end of the game the shitty conclusions of the quests and frustrations had me feeling not just crestfallen but really bitterly disappointed. The game world seemed like the hollow place it was, with no reason to return.

I can justify a New Vegas playthrough and I think about doing one—the build I'd try, the new perk to examine, the factions to align with, the quests or companions to pursue—about once or twice a year. I haven't gone back to that game in a bit over a decade but I still think about it and then the idea of modding it into stability and figuring out my Nexus password again just kills my desire, but the game itself draws me back... wait it's not time for an unarmed explosives survivalist run! I'm getting distracted.

What does this have to do with what's currently going on at Bethesda? Well, good question. It seems I got carried away doing some sloppy blogging. But it's only possible to see some cultural shifts in terms of one's own experience of it, and use that perspective as the guide. What happened to the company that led to less interesting titles was its success and growth. Larger teams were making larger and more technically impressive games that with each iteration strayed from the very open-world principles that (with Morrowind specifically) launched their success and gained them the interest, admiration, and money of a large audience.

Then they released Fallout 76, which was a Games as a Service product and also horrifically and well-documentedly a terrible release. The product was yanked out of the oven like the Fire Giant in Nausicaa and forced to do battle only to melt sadly after one big belch of radioactive sales. Since, I'm told that the game has been improved and fixed, and it works more or less properly, and some people even like it. I'm like I'm good, though, I played FO4 and I don't need more of the same. 

The grand freedom which allowed a new player to jump over the entire island of Vvardenfell and die on the landing is gone, it's flown the damn coop even. You can't abuse crafting or spellcasting or potionmaking to briefly become a demigod anymore in any game of Bethesda's. You can't even levitate anymore. 

The freedom is over. But that's not just for the player at one end, it's also true for the designer, the programmer, the maker on the other end, and that's not just a capitalism problem, or a sickness of success, or a super uncritical audience of gamers (who are so easily parted from their money that it's sad and also why institutional money moved in on games so predatorily),  it's a problem of management, of seeing easy money and guaranteed fat paycheque or bonus, of company culture trending towards a flat plateau, of being risk-averse, uncreative, uncritical, bloated, and too big and confident to switch tack on anything.

And the audience has rewarded it every time. This is why they got a boring space game rushed out the door, because when they sold a slightly more expensive version so they could do final beta testing and play three days early, they bought it and forgot about the game a week or two later. The business moves according to the cardinal rule of any over-financialized industry: risk not the investor's dividend and ye shall be rewarded. The only problem is, that was never true at all. 

Massive layoffs seem to happen whether or not games are successful and seem to have more to do with labyrinthine internal politics. Profits have skyrocketed, the industry is worth more than it ever was in the past, and those profits are funnelled ever more aggressively into the hands of people who did none of the work. (And they say capital gains taxes put innovation at RISK, one could cry from laughter if it wasn't so sad). And in the case of Arkane Studios, they were sabotaged by upper management and lost a lot of their more senior and talented people which led to the collapse of a recent project not even worth a vampirically circumspect mention. 

Senior and talented people are more costly because they have earned the right to ask for more, having experience, and having built success and generated profits for their employers. In traditional work-capital relations, these people are afforded more responsibility by an upper management that values loyalty, and then rewarded by increased salaries for their efforts and successes. In the hypercapitalism of today, where accountants run pretty much everything, the price of talent and experience are unconscionable. 

Replace them with idealistic and youthful people who can be ground down through overwork, poor management, and synthetic crises and thrown out before they get senior enough to affect the bottom line—or when they burn out. This isn't just true in games studios, it's true in every sector from advertising to zebra husbandry. 

So while I can certainly scoff at Bethesda and speciously ask why they make pabulum, it's probably healthier and more realistic to see them as a victim of the free market, one who will probably become yet more bloated, and release less remarkable games, until the original core of people are shuffled out and replaced and it too collapses and is scrapped for IP value, because outside of independent or private companies, that is the only future now.

What on Earth is Bethesda Softworks Up To?

Fresh off a hit streaming show on Amazon Prime Video (paid with ads much???) based on the venerable Fallout series, you'd think Bethesda Softworks was about to hit a their stride in an absolutely titanic way, but instead they seem to be foundering aroundering and chilling and vibing.

It's insane they didn't have a game (or at least trailer) in the chamber for when the show dropped. Oh, they had a patch for Fallout 4? Inexcusable. Plus it broke all previous modding attempts? Par for the course. Fallout 76 integration at least? Oh, no? Ok. It's like they don't want to do any of the things to capitalize on a hugely lucrative opportunity that most companies could only dream of, and they have almost unlimited resources too. 

They could've sold a million copies of Fallout 5, or a spinoff set in the show, and it would have been successful even if they half assed it, and instead they sunk a decade into a janky boring space game and released a small next-gen patch. 

Shows take a while to plan, produce, and release, at least enough time to produce (and asking for too much: fine tune) the first chapter in an episodic reboot of the Fallout series based wherever they'd like. They can use the old engine even. It wouldn't take a huge amount of resources and would build up goodwill and excitement again. An independent team of modders has created and nearly finished a FO4 total conversion set in London (there's one slated for Miami as well), meanwhile, and what exactly is the copyright holder doing? Releasing one patch with a couple of new assets and some 'next gen' stuff that's opaque and questionable at best.

This guy gulps.

Maybe they're waiting till next week to announce they've actually been doing something but it boggles my mind how they're operating. Stodgy, clumsy, and way too big to do anything quickly. I guess once there's been 18 meetings about the show's success they'll greenlight some kind of exploratory committee to discuss the possibility of a spinoff game? And we'll get it a few years after the show is done? 

At some point even the dullest dullard on Earth is going to realize that Bethesda have been resting on their laurels. But to lack business sense, to let things slide as they have done, really does puzzle this humble blogger. Bethesda are lucky people still consume their pabulum so eagerly, but that could change if they don't do what any sane company would do and capitalize on their opportunities. Many of us regular people would be slapped and insulted if we had a golden goose and just let it walk away.

Is this the endpoint of capitalism? Success so pure it turns you into a burned out failure who prints money anyway? That's quite the indictment of hustle culture when the world's strivers labour in obscurity on passion projects and the biggest brands and companies just ooze around pointlessly like vast amoeboids, consuming everything in their path and taking up all the air.

Canada's 2021 COVID-19 Special Edition Snap Election

It's the big day in Canada this September 20th, 2021, as voters decide who will govern the nation through whatever the next years have in store. Oh yeah, and there's a big pandemic. And literally everyone is going crazy. There's anger, bitterness, and increasingly unhinged people all over the streets, the internet comment sections, the sidewalks outside of hospitals and the sidewalks outside of restaurants. Trudeau got gravel thrown at him, and a lot of abuse, at several campaign stops. Libraries aren't even safe. People are getting run over on the side of the road, like animals. The stakes have never been higher, and yet nobody knows what the hell, and even the smart money's confused.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for an election mere weeks (was it weeks? really?) ago there was a collective late-summer sigh in the air, as Canadians of all political stripes wondered why the hell he couldn't wait until after the global pandemic had subsided a bit more. The last election was only two years ago, in October 2019, which feels like a million years ago, so there's strategies at play here that most won't be able to grasp until the dust settles. The reason Trudeau called the election? To cement a legacy that his backers hope will keep Canada on the path forward... to the future! For everyone! (We have our doubts, too.)

The Overdue Watch_Dogs 2 Review Nobody Asked For

Capturing the zeitgeist of the mid 2010s is a tough prospect. The indy music revolution was dying, dubstep was a joke, EDM had finished merging with top 40 pop, the problems of the 2000s were almost far enough the past that you couldn't reasonably get angry about them anymore, and data was the biggest business there was. 

Computers were interwoven into everything so that everyone was finally using them, generating reams of data that could either save us from ourselves or sell us deeper into consumerist bondage, and moreover, the biggest developing narrative was how computer companies were controlling and selling user data.

That ongoing story, by now, sometimes seems so old as to be quaint. Occasionally the embers of resentment are fanned back into flame by documentaries or particular revelations, but the terms of service are often a trifling speedbump in using anything digital. The majority of us have welcomed the digital world with a weird blend of weary mistrust and gee-whiz enthusiasm.

We pay our personal data sacrifice so we can access the bonanza of the digital frontier, and mountains of e-waste are the new burgeoning concern. Each electric car that's saving the world's atmosphere has other steep environmental and social costs which it's profitable to downplay... and all those chips put into disposable products end up in landfills.

2016 was a busy year, with many alarming events, during which I still posted on this blog (but with a decreasing semi-regularity), but it also brought the world the underappreciated open world hacking game Watch_Dogs 2, which was almost immediately (and if you consider No Man's Sky, unfairly) overshadowed by pretty much every other title from 2016.

It was the sequel to a much-maligned game I never played. In 2020, I got a free copy from the Epic Games Store, which wouldn't install through that launcher, so I had to delete the package from my pitifully overcrowded SSD, then install it through Ubisoft Connect. I wasn't off to a good start, but I was in the mood for some open-world hacking excitement. 

Watch_Dogs 2 mostly delivered on the excitement and the hacking, with some interesting and welcome surprises, and some expected shortcomings. Want to read a big ass review that nobody asked for about one of the least-talked-about games of 2016? Then you've come to the right blog!

The Real Thematic Core of Indie Gaming Darling Outer Wilds

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

Outer Wilds is a game that respects your time and your curiosity. Though I’m going to argue the theme is letting go, you should hold on to the experience of playing it yourself before knowing anything and spoiling it! Stumble around blindly like a cool 4 eyed space amphibian, then come back for some thematic discussion.

 

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

All Your Favorite Social Media Channels Are Going To Hell

This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.

Stalker: COP, Fallout 4 and Philosophical Divergences in Design

I've been able to get back into playing computer games after a fairly lengthy absence where I only had Terraria, Starcraft & Brood War (which were/are free), and a great little game called Dungeon Warfare to distract me from professional and other pressures. Of course the first thing I did after a 3+ year absence is get a cheap computer together to play fairly modern games. Of course I started with Fallout 4, because I had only played a few hours on a friend's PS4 and enjoyed it enough to want to give it a full go. Then the Stalker series went on sale, and since I'd been meaning to play a Stalker game since the original was released, I grabbed Call of Pripyat.

Playing both more or less side by side when time allowed has been interesting. There is a real divide in development philosophies between each that is kind of useful for examining the differences in Western and Post-Bloc thought. The differences in narrative style and game mechanics tell a wider story that's kind of interesting to me, and since I almost never blog anymore, and nobody reads this blog anyway, I thought I'd put my thoughts into the internet right now. Plus both games are post apocalyptic in a sense: Fallout in the global sense, and Stalker in the more local sense (already food for thought). There are significant differences between these two 'shoot a gun at a mutant'-type games.

The Borderlands Series in Retrospect: Actually Mostly Bullshit

Borderlands is a computer game series that is in many ways symptomatic of the 'malaise of modern gaming' (which is not 100% true and therefore a theory) especially considering how style has trumped substance (which is a problem modern gaming shares with many other modern things). The gist of a Borderlands game is:

It is a first person shooter set on a richy detailed, busted cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic wasteland/junkyard alien planet with cool monsters and villainous humans and it's also a bit of an RPG (because those are hot right now) in that you have experience points, skills, and criticals (and also a vast, grim, and forboding numerical grind). All weapons and equipment are randomly generated with varying stats, there are multiple protagonists with different powers, persistent account wide bonuses, and a variety of challenges and accomplishments. Also the series likes to use hit songs in advertising as well as in-game!

All of this, and it's arguably less fun than even Doom 1 or 2, which are a million times less complex or intricate. To my mind the Borderlands series is a perfect example of the pretty, lifeless, grindy, downright boring and chore-like video games proliferating in 'serious' gaming. I finished the first game a couple of times (to my eternal discredit) and only played around 8 hours of Borderlands 2 (so far I haven't gotten a single interesting weapon and the fights haven't been fun). So the most important things in FPS games, the guns, are randomized. Generally the randomized guns are excessively useless. The inventory system is yet another terrible console/PC crossover abortion, so good luck selling the random loot guns the game is stingy about dropping.

Hell and Death and Hell in 2017

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.

The Miss: Is 'The Mist' This Summer's 'Under the Dome'?

IT was such a big movie that I haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. I've seen the memes. The memes are OK, and I watched the 80s movie which is frankly a pretty effective if silly horror movie. Stephen King is doing alright lately. But for every good media product, there is a subpar product created as reaction. Stephen King has provided society with a fair amount of media products as his bestselling books regularly get reconfigured into television and film, and that makes sense: King is a prolific writer with a huge audience. Sadly, his admirers often fail to elevate the material, and a recent case is all the example we need.

Today, we are gathered at this sloppy blog to discuss and explore The Mist - the 2017 Netflix special. Apparently it started its sad life as a new series for Spike TV. Spike TV's last major show was MXC and that was over a decade ago. You're going to ask something about why I would watch a show made for Spike TV. Because, let's face it: I should've known better, right? Let me answer for my actions: sometimes you know the trainwreck is coming and you just have to make sure you see it happen. I saw it on Netflix (where it had been dumped fairly quickly for an American exclusive), knew it would be pretty bad without any research, and dove right in.

I vaguely recall a movie of The Mist released in 2007, based on Stephen King's novel by the same name (at this point I won't read it anytime soon). The movie had weird bugs that the protagonists had to shoot when they were in a supermarket. Big things loomed in the dark. Were they dinosaurs? Then, at the apportioned time, the mist blew out of town, and everyone had endured personal struggles, survived, and grown as people. I assume this TV series is aiming to do the same, but since it was written by committee with little regard for coherence or impact, I also assume it will kind of spin around in annoying circles for 10 episodes.

All you need is a coping mechanism, and you can watch this show.

It opens, kind of like Under the Dome did, with the destruction of an animal. In Under the Dome it's a cow that gets split into two steak-like halves, in The Mist it's a dog that gets eviscerated. And a soldier wakes up without any memory of what's going on... oh yes, friends, you've entered a zone of mass entertainment you've probably stumbled over before. The dead dog looks a lot more realistic than the dead cow, though. If you have Netflix, you can see for yourself. Actually I'll spare you the trouble:

Big mystery: who did the dog piss off to get done like this? Also: nice one, SFX people.

The same team is responsible for The Mist as made Under the Dome. I'm sure that the key people are unchanged. There's a deep connection between the shows. I can sense these strange coincidences... the casting seems similar. The locations seemed to have been scouted the same ways. The special effects: again I'm getting some deja vu. The writing is what really seals its fate. Something about the situations and the handling of characters and the bizarre missteps they have to take in order to make plot lines viable just reminds me of the 8 or so episodes of Under the Dome I watched.

Alt Nerd Rap Dispatch

"I went to school to become a philosopher 

but dropped out to be a sober Kid Cudi imposter."

Milo is a rapper, notorious by his nerdity, and nearly absurd by the fact he has rapped about the time he (might have, allegedly) cried on an internet message board due to real world awkwardness. He exists somewhere in the altstream of rap, in the neighbourhood of Open Mike Eagle, Billy Woods, and Busdriver (there's a strange proximity to Kool A.D. with less psychedelia).

Milo's verses are accomplishments in multisyllabic delivery, and if his vocabulary isn't as large as Aesop Rock's, he's closing the gap at an alarming rate. He may well represent the pinnacle of that most critical subgenre, Nerd Rap. He might also represent alt rap's great hope – a sublime counterpoint to everything that ever buried intelligence in favor of style.

Not to say that Milo is the answer, that an answer is needed, or that mainstream rap are necessarily unwoke. Milo is a rap moniker or nom de rap for Rory Ferriera, born in Chicago, raised in Maine, and lately an L.A. [un]based vegetarian, touring at the time of this writing. Seems to like Vonnegut, definitely read his philosophical tracts at some point, and pointedly represents the defiant vanguard of rap. Nerd territory stuff.

Why My Attitude to Emoji Did a 180

💩

I mean, the above is basically the essence of my turnaround. For many years I was of a much different opinion about emoji – I thought they were pointless, stupid, and I would have never used one even in a T9 text. On the internet I used the voraciously, though, but they were known as 'smilies' and seemed a totally different thing – plus most of them depicted smilies electrocuting each other or shooting guns or humping or spilling beer instead of : ) or ; ) like weirdos and dummies in chats might use. I suppose it's a pointless digression, but to me smilies and emoji are conceptually different things that share a similar purpose.

I didn't think about smilies/emoji much from 2005 (when the last forum I enjoyed browsing shut down) to 2013. In that time I still considered them childish things undeserving of a serious mind, fripperies that only made the appearance of communicating anything, creating a muted shorthand for the illiterate to toy with.

Then I picked up a relatively more modern phone and starting using apps and stuff (I am a very late and reluctant adopter of social media) and I found myself using them more and more. The famous emoji 'Face with Tears of Joy' rose like a monolith, and the rest is history. Now I catch myself wanting to use emoji in Facebook, texting emoji to friends who never abandoned a distaste of them (mostly to annoy them and amuse myself), and doing wicked Snaps with emoji making half the point.

I gave in. I joined the merciless social media march. I sold my credibility and the security of being a Skeptical Person, and dove begrudgingly in. Being simultaneously out of touch and trying to decide what 'in touch enough' was for me made for some strange years, which are ongoing. There is a surreal quality to using five different apps and platforms regularly to communicate with friends. It's bizarre to me. To the old me it would have been unthinkable, a grave and simultaneously frivolous mistake, to waste my time in such a way or even to care.

But it did change. And now, instead of wondering whether to write anything at all or which word to delete, I spend actual time to throw an emoji into a text. It's both weird and funny to me. I guess it's more fun to use them, even if only in a sneering way, but they are useful to provide connotations - they can even make sarcasm fly in text form, which is actually quite an elegant solution to a real problem.

😎

Notes on Being the Worst Person I Know

I suppose it wouldn't surprise many people to know that I, a sloppy blogger,  consider myself, by a wide margin, the worst person I know. I guess I could take the optimist's way out and say that I'm blessed to know a lot of good people and fortunate enough to not be surrounded by shitty people, which is why I'm the worst. I guess that's a way I could take this.

Millennials For Bernie and Other News From The Modern Gutter

Wow 2016 has certainly been a year, between celebrity deaths, political chicanery, imminent race war with shooting-a-day news, terrorists wilding out everywhere, a surprise coup in Turkey, and the grand return of Pokemon combined with augmented reality, the Age of Indifference seems poised at the cusp of its Golden Age. It's almost possible to forget the insanity of the first four months of the year based on the last three months of the year. It's almost possible, even tempting, to think that we are at an all time high of crazy happenings


But things have been shitty for a very long time, haven't they? And it's probably our fault. In fact it is certainly our fault. We've done this. Some of us try to do better, some of us try to fuck things up, and the majority don't care. I like to think I fall outside of all these groups. I don't care; but I do. I want to do better; but I don't. I never really considered the option of making things worse... it seems there are plenty people on each side of every confrontation who can do that better than I could ever hope to.

So I was trying to come up with a good overview of the past ten months or so but there are so many squawking heads yakking about it that it doesn't matter. Plus, I'm a piece of shit idiot with nothing new to add or a redeeming perspective. Suffice it to say I get it: everything looks pretty grim. Things looked bad in 2003, and they look roughly as bad now, except there is more bad stuff? (I'll look into this after I kill myself, because fuck making that graph.) But there's also good stuff: like consumerism! So I'm going to recommend some pretty good stuff that'll help you get through July without killing yourself or fantasizing about killing every last human in an insane laser drug apocalypse in a doomed attempt to fix Earth and right all the wrongs.

4 Media Products Recommended by the Sloppy Blogger in Lieu of Depressing Screed About Modern World

Addendum to 2013 Death Grips Article

In the article to which I allude in the title I made certain comparisons to Rage Against the Machine - the high energy, non-mainstream yet mainstream, politically and emotionally charged with the caveat that Death Grips does not give a damn about anything approaching meaning or protest. Their protest is of sanity, an interesting type of protest in a world that's arguably getting more insane by the year, where it would no longer matter if, say, most of its inhabitants were exterminated (by their own complicity, appetite for violence, and indifference) in some kind of terrifying schizophrenic drug apocalypse. In a sense the apocalyptic vision is much more compelling to the apathetic drop-outs of the post 90s than 'fighting the man' since that fight doesn't seem fair or winnable, especially when its old champions were themselves arguably under the thumb of the same corporate America they claimed to despise.

But I digress. In the post I didn't write so much about my personal approach to Death Grip's music, which I felt had to be remedied in an addendum. I do so not only because the other post got a decent amount of hits (which is rare for me), but that I didn't examine the music so well, and I have always had contrasting opinions on it. It was incredibly interesting in 2012, and kind of dicked around with half-baked albums and moments of glory since then.

On the one hand there is something laughable in the balls-to-walls insanity of any Death Grips album. MC Ride screams unintelligible lyrics with the odd half-yelled statement (some of which hints at greatness, most of which was too cringey for non-headphone listening) while on the other hand the track parallels his delivery with high energy percussion, warped samples and effects, and breakneck pace and, at its best, compelling inventiveness. On Exmilitary (in my opinion  their most interesting album) the energy was pushed as far as it could be and the very good use of a sample ('Rumble', a song with an interesting history which was clearly being channeled for a purpose) really caught my attention. I loved the production because it was insane and very intriguing with samples and effects and at their best the lyrics matched that.

So I got the instrumental version of Exmilitary (then titled: Black Google) and finally I got to listen to the production and was very enamored of it. 'Spread Eagle Cross the Block' was the song that first really caught my attention but, for me, the lyrics only rarely improved it - stripping out the insane vocals made it easier to admire the production. Since that time I've loosely followed the band and they've had a couple of good moments where lyrics and production were briefly perfectly in sync, but by and large I've been disappointed. The instrumental album Fashion Week brought me in to take a closer listen but failed to hold any attention. It was interesting and at times pretty good but lengthy and kind of derivative and exhausting to listen to, especially as it seemed to confirm my view of the band as one that worked simply because it was a mainstream breakthrough for more aggressive sounds in a time just before bigger acts broke the seal.

It's hard for me to keep caring about most groups and artists if they release the same album a dozen times and disband (Linkin Park with their eternal cycle of remixes, late Wu Tang where its importance was only because it was Wu Tang and we were empathetic to their plight of never releasing a relevant album again, RATM which I loved when I was young and now find kind of funny [though the ROCK is still primo], and so forth). I will keep listening if I like the original idea enough that it doesn't bore me later on (Drum and Bass when I was younger, chamber pop like Prefab Sprout now) or that is flawlessly executed or completed by its flaws. Most of the time I am not overwhelmed, which is why I've always been on the skeptical side regarding Death Grips. Being transgressive, outrageous, and loud has value but kinda pales if used to ring the same note time and time again. Eh.

Then I chanced upon Interview 2016, which is all instrumental, way more focused than Fashion Week, and actually piqued my interest again. On first listen it was lively, a bit chaotic, but controlled enough to remain coherent enough to demand a second listen (and be pleasurable to the ear). And so, I suppose, my final judgment is that it's alright, what do I know? Basically nothing. I'm a sloppy blogger and Death Grips has at least ten thousand fans and probably they make a good amount of money and get to play big shows and fuck around with the media by releasing free albums and making incredibly dense aggressive music as a counterpoint to mainstream, sort-of-depressing, flaccid shit like new Kanye and even new Chance where twelve years of gospel stylings and samplings are recycled into deep nonsense that is praised for reasons I will never comprehend. I can't go on in this wasteland without making people angry at me, and that querulousness is why it doesn't matter how I feel, but I'll be damned if I won't write something after all this silence.

Steam Marketplace and Authenticator: The End of Fast Steambucks

In the past, I had written a little about the decline of the Steam Sale as related (at least in part) to the availability of 'free money' (more of a working discount system) via the Steam Marketplace, where users of the service could sell digital tchotchkes for pennies or dollars (as market forces would dictate). Very low-priced games stopped appearing in sales, prizes stopped appearing, and discounts became pretty shallow, predictable, and unexciting. The high point of the 2011 Christmas Sale would never again be seen, and the blame is mostly on predatory users that couldn't leave a nice thing alone without trying to break it. This attitude, unsurprisingly, caused a lot of problems in the marketplace. Time passed. Inundated with security breaches, lost accounts, trading skullduggery, and service tickets, Valve decided to make their product's product marketplace more secure. Ok...

But it's so god damn annoying. Let me explain. I'll do my best. In the old days of Steam Marketplace, you logged into the service, checked your inventory, and listed an item at a value you set, and it was instantly put up for trade. If your price was a bit lower than the average asking price a bot would buy it almost as soon as you listed it, you would have your 6 cents or 15 cents or 10 dollars. You could trade immediately and use the money immediately - good for making quick money for a sale item when you didn't want to use your credit card. It was pretty simple. It worked. And I made almost a dozen dollars from it, which I used to buy several games, and I liked it. I didn't use it often, but every now and then I checked into the marketplace, and if I saw a good margin on an item I would sell it, and during sales I would buy a cheap game, get the cards, and make a tidy 1 cent profit or whatever, and realized that it didn't matter much. Basically the scheme worked because the gains made from trading went into your Steam Wallet as actual currency. I like to call it Steambucks.  [ I have used Steam for nearly 12 years and I have never put actual money into my Steam Wallet, because that's so insane that I can't understand why someone would do it. It's essentially a feature to give money to your kids, because no other sane person would take real money and let it sit on Steam. The crux of this problem is because accounts with Fat Steam Wallets were getting ganked like crazy. ]

As anybody who has even a remote understanding of the internet will understand: this simple and effective system turned into a huge problem and led to many unfortunate people getting ripped off and targeted by scammers and the whole fucking thing became such a nightmare for Valve that they introduced a phone app and multiple layers of security so that people would stop bothering them and stop (Valve hoped) being so goddamn stupid. Well that was all fine and good. You could use the mobile app or not, and trading went on as usual for a while.

The whole thing came to a head earlier this week? Last week? I don't trade much, but sometime in the last two months it became essentially mandatory to use the Steam Mobile App to authenticate the trade or else suffer a 15 day hold on any item you list. Plus you get boned if you delist an item (which you want to do if the market surges or collapses in order to get your value for it) by having your trading account frozen. All of this is because of hacked accounts and all of those are because people with little to no knowledge of the internet, computing, and basic online security got phished, scammed, and hacked and lost all their precious internet shit. Oh, and people who complained about legitimate trades and demanded returns. So much for the marketplace, and therefore Steambucks. I get it, Valve, but I want to belong to a different tier of uses: the ones who don't fuck up and who never gave you a problem, who didn't expect the world, and just wanted things to stay mostly the same.

The whole thing is dumb anyway, and it's more of an annoyance than anything, but the userbase has been up in arms about it. Pro and contra camps have created a 2000 page thread in the Steam discussions forums that is filled with seething rage and skunk-like defensiveness. Smells like millennial spirit. It's true that downloading one free app is a not a vast and cruel cost, in order to have normal access to your free money. It's true that Valve HAD to do something to protect the credulous and simpleminded and give pause to the over complaining elements of their userbase. Steam users got the solution they deserved. It still rankles me a bit.

I hate apps, and I hate having to register for additional services on top of a service that used to work. I hate having to verify a million things through email, too – it's not just apps. I also hate having to jump through hoops, and I hate when a simple and effective thing that works gets screwed up by people who are predatory and the people who always fall for shenanigans. I hate 'security features' because I keep my computing simple and anonymous for a reason - to be unnoticed, to go unmolested, and to not be bothered or have to bother anyone else. Simple. Never got hacked. I hated two factor security when Blizzard did it for their notoriously noobish, unworldly, immature, and credulous WoW userbase (the cutesy security video forced on everyone as the security features spilled over brought me to the realization that the company I had grown up with had been functionally dead for a while) and seeing Steam go the same way is just depressing. And so very, very annoying, and so very rigidly authoritarian.

Therefore, being forced to wait two weeks to sell an item I used to sell just as safely in two seconds, on a service where I've never caused problems or suffered them, is kind of a kick in the teeth. I used Steam for 12 years and never got hijacked. I never used the Steam Wallet because any sane and reasonable person saw that keeping 'real' money in it was a bad idea and did nothing to make purchases easier or safer. Now the whole thing is getting so complex that even I, a most casual and disengaged user, am actually slightly worried. I mean I knew that Valve could legally shut down and completely deny me any access to the products I've bought through Steam, but I never thought they'd become the type of company that would even think about the possibility. In a sense all these restrictions and half-steps and annoyances are a sign that Valve is being serious and trying its best, but I don't know. It doesn't put my mind at ease either. So I guess I'm selling everything in two weeks, taking the money, and forgetting that Steambucks were ever a thing. Goodbye to an OK era.

Well, Valve is allowed to protect itself from legal action and the Steambucks belonged to them from the start, so it's their call. It's just very disappointing to see it happen like this. Every company is trying so hard to get my phone number or sell me extra apps these days, and I sit here waiting until the day Facebook defriends me for not giving it up (or Google, etc) but Valve is my videogame dealer, and I thought we had an understanding that this was a no-phone arrangement, casual but secure, and that was the strength of it. The internet ruins all things, yea, even itself, and that is known and has been known...

... but still. Damn. Shaking my damn head... it seems there is nowhere to hide, and that indifference is the only thing separating me from insanity. But it seems even I am not immune to writing about the thing and responding to it. It's just another case of dumb people getting fucked by bad people, with the majority caught in the middle wondering sadly why these things never change, why you can't protect the digital dumbasses from the hard knocks everyone has to take. The whole thing is stupid, and it's stupid of me to step into it, but the annoyance and disgust need a way out. Thank you for reading, and good luck.

The View from the Other Side: Political Reversals in Canadian Politics Since Oct. 19, 2015

The groups who enjoy criticizing the new Liberals for their supposed 'style over substance' approach (proven by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's youth, hair, and handsomeness) to political posturing might be foaming at the mouth with suppressed rage at the appointment of a defense minister who happens to have both substance and a generous dollop of swag. Harjit Sajjan is a military and police veteran and the media (both social and traditional) are already swooning over him.

It's an interesting case study: if the Harper government were to appoint a Sikh to a prominent cabinet location it would be seen, by some observers, as a rather baldfaced ploy to appeal to immigrants. But then, any rational person always saw some kind of Machiavellian undertone to anything done by the Harper Administration. It's the people widely considered paranoid (AKA not employed as a political analysts) who are seen as paranoiac when they attribute Machiavellianist tendencies to all parties. Either way, Minister Sajjan seems an excellent choice and the media is head over ass in love with the dude, and it makes Canada seem much more cool and culturally open than the United States of America, where the most prominent 'brown politicians' have 'white names' (Bobby Jindal et. al.) – but that's a cultural thing...

Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau is turning heads all over the place, as his looks and relative youth (which invited the criticism and mockery of the Conservative Party of Canada) draw the admiration of many, and the media did not hesitate to point out his effects on women. I don't know... all senior bureaucrats and political figures are more the inventions of their parties, in the contemporary system, than self-reliant actors. The wave of positivity is going to break at some point, and it will probably just lead to more of the same for Canada (either political apathy or another Conservative government, depending on the number and severity of scandals).

Also please note: the Niqab debate, a completely different issue from Sikhs in Government, managed to fail spectacularly and further sunk its inventors, but that is all ancient history according to the Gods of The News Cycles, who have decreed that ISIS, after being on the backburner until they attacked a European city, are Big News again. Islamophobia, which was also a backburner topic for a number of years, is now a household name to be invoked in hopeless arguments between idealistic youth and their racist parents. In Canada, Hindu temples were attacked, one mosque was firebombed, and a small segment of the population basically confirmed the idea of Racist Canada being alive and well in 2015.

The Paris Attacks of November 2015 are already the biggest news story of the month, whether deservedly or not, and are going to tinge all political discourse in the West and beyond for a year or more, and are having interesting effects. The United States is toying with the idea of isolationism as well as a final solution to its Muslim population (via special ID and blatant surveillance and oppression). Canada, meanwhile, announced via its global mouthpiece, Justin Trudeau, that it would allow refugees – a feel-good story in a week marred with tragedy and soapbox speeches about the world. Besides the 'rock star image' [via Lamesteam Media] , what else has this change in governance changed, in governance?

Fuck It - Just This Once Since This Blog is Dying Anyway

[The 'yous' in this article are hypothetical and not directed at the reader, or even at any one person, and merely symbolize a 'you' the writer has grown tired of - Ed.]

It's been long enough to say maybe three things about recent events and then hold my peace about it again. I don't like to pontificate over tragedy, but in the wake of the Paris attacks one sees the double standards of tragedy reportage in the West. Syria is war-torn for something like a thousand days and it's all old news, there are refugees drowning by the dozens in the Aegean sea, and in Africa, the usual business is struggling onward, but really - who is giving much of a shit about that? Who is putting a God damned filter on their social media in memoriam for the victims of Ebola? For the dead in Syria? For the ongoing war in Ukraine? For that reason I see the reporting about Paris as overblown. Maybe I'm cynical (I am in fact cynical) but the whole response seems highly sensationalistic, and it is being defended. The people who are trying to put it in perspective are being demonized and mocked. There is, no doubt, a 9-11ing going on. And there is such transparent bias from the media and so many people are actually getting upset that this is being pointed out.

Make no mistake - what you will see in the coming months will not undo the conditions that created the terror attacks. The coming years will likely only see those conditions reinforced, and it will only create more blind hatred. As much as I severely dislike people who commit unspeakable acts of violence, I really dislike the people who use crises as a means of control or who profit from it. I may be seen as blowhard cynic for my perspective, but there are many people who see a tragedy whose first thought is 'what will this mean for the financial markets tomorrow?' or 'how can I spin this to fit my agenda of making people crazy and fearful?'

Monuments around the world weren't lit up in solidarity with Pakistan when there was flooding, or when there was an earthquake - in either case hundreds died, and not all of them just from the natural disaster. We didn't even see much of a response when the Fukushima incident happened - there was lots of worried reportage about the reactor but I don't remember candlelight vigils or tearful celebrities. Why on Earth should I take your prayers and thoughts seriously if you only bestow them on the world's people who are most like you, from whom you and your culture most likely descended?

To me, at this point, your concerns seems too biased, and therefore I imagine they are worth nothing to the people of Paris, or to the men who attacked them – fellow humans who you no doubt blindly hate, who if they had anything to say would have been ignored and shouted down, reinforcing their nihilistic and desperate attitudes. Your concerns demonstrate what your true values are, and I don't know anything but I can see that you don't really care about 'humanity' you care about the parts of it you feel are right, and don't bother to learn about the rest. Humanity is like a sport to you.

Yes, I might well be a stupid fuck, but you behave worse, think less, and are proud about it. It's not wrong to point out how internalized the biases of our mainstream media are. It's actually important, so that all of us can move away from ignorance and arrogance, so that this little piece of shit species can become better. So I hate the politics of this whole thing, and even as my heart sank at the news, I felt worse knowing the kind of response I'd have to witness.

Nobody is right in this situation, and even though both parties are aggrieved, only one will gain the support or counsel of the world. Think about that, before you do the laziest possible thing and apply a filter to your facebook profile picture 'in support and solidarity'. You would do better to make peace with your neighbors, to call your parents, to show tangible love to the people who could immediately benefit from it. France will graciously accept, but does not at all need, your concern. And France, where liberty was oft reclaimed, will be less free from now on. So not only are you venting your useless concerns like so many stale farts, but the terrorists, again, have won.

Every time this happens, the predictable response of the majority is so rehearsed, and so insincere and so antiquated. The most honest thing I've seen so far is various states in the US refusing to take in refugees, ostensibly because they want to be evil or stupid or something. This is why I believe nobody is learning anything from tragedy except to make lots of noise and act stupidly. I saw that old 'not all Muslims' rhetoric come out, via meme picture, which isn't going to convince anyone of anything, thanks for trying, maybe try not saying or posting anything for a few months. Only idiots think that all Muslims harbor terrorist thoughts, and only idiots think that the internet will fix idiots. And idiots are going to attack Hindus and Sikhs, just like before, because idiots are idiots and we do not keep them on a short enough leash.

I am tired of the pontification I am hearing from the ignorant about this matter. If you do not truly care about humanity as a whole, please don't bother those around you with your ideas. You are half of why this problem will never be solved, and you will never think to examine yourself or your position. You will never have to examine your life, and that is why a Muslim in a poor country doesn't like you and thinks you're part of an evil culture.

I am going to log off now, drink a coffee, and gratefully take a deep breath. Thanks for reading, hopefully this insane screed of mine somehow betters you, or offers you anything.

Shitty Month Showdown: November vs. February

In the northern latitudes there are four months that are dreaded, that can chill a man's soul even as he sits in the warmth of the summer sun, and they are known as November, December, January, February. These four horsemen of the freezocalypse are merciless, grim, dark, bitter months – which is why Northern cultures since prehistory have organized big excessive festivals and holidays in them, because otherwise too many people would hibernate, go insane, and/or commit suicide.

Hence December with its put-on Christmas cheer, its casual holiday alcoholism, and its cozy nights with the family you have avoided most of the year even though you all love each other, supposedly. Hence... uh... Christmas, and the reason it's so big is because the corporate society we belong to has to keep us 'goal oriented' so that we don't drop out of their nonsense and discover actual meanings to life and think critically about the system we were born into and if any of it is actually right. But also, it keeps the shadows away, and turns darkness at 4:30 P.M. into 'coziness' as opposed to 'I viciously hate Daylight Savings Time'. And there's the religious significance, and the butt-hurt War on Christmas style rants from bigoted ignoramuses who think the LIBERAL LIBERATION FORCE are going to force them into sensitivity camps.

In December, the remembrance of the people we have to grudgingly buy gifts for (because they give us gifts and WILL judge us if we don't do the adult thing) will at some point cause us to enter that holy tabernacle of consumerism - the Christmastime store. It doesn't matter if it's a mall, a boutique shop, or even a corner store: get ready to hear some jingly, jangly Christmas cacophony that will probably make you feel worse even if you are mentally damaged enough to find joy in a season peoples from all over the southern world associate solely with the word 'forbearance'.

But that's all beside the point. Today I would like to compare the dreary cousins of December, two months that are important solely because they are months that people have to live through in order to get to classically 'good' months. November is proudly mediocre and even in a good year it's the month where the dying plants have mostly all died, the skies are grey and get a darker a bit more quickly each day, and any good weather is The Last Good Weather of the Year. February is colder, bleaker, and generally worse in every way, but it's also closer to the redemption of Late March, where the weather starts to feel amazingly fresh and the promise of life is in the air.

19 Screenshots that Reveal the Hollowness of Business Insider and Modern Culture in General

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:

The headlines are a schizoid mix of important news and 'content', which may affect the minds of long term readers.

Interested in the insider 'hack' about hotels that you probably never knew about?

["Oh, word?" -Ed.]