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.

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.]

The Arrogance, It's Killing Bees

Neonicotinoids are a great type of chemical that would be irreplaceable if we were under attack from a deadly insect scourge. However, 'neonics' (as they're often named to avoid confusing the majority) are actually not even used to destroy mosquito and botfly populations, and instead do a great job of accumulating in the environment and killing the real terrors of the insect world: bees. Yeah those bastards won't be pollinating any harvests any time soon, as if their decimations at the hands of mites and disease weren't enough, we added a chemical that makes them even weaker and more susceptible to death. Why? To protect the most vulnerable among us: the hard-working farmer (read: multinational incorporated agribusiness).

From now on, I guess, every keystone species we destroy by our extremely clever ignorance will be replaced with some kind of robot substitute. That's a pretty fantastic way to provide public welfare for anyone who majored in mechatronics. Furthermore I think it's a great way to cover up our culpability, our wastefulness, and our immense capacity for destruction and self-destruction and wounded innocence (check out the screeds from defenders of neonics for the latter). I always thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was implausible but with each passing year certain background elements of the story get more and more realistic. Soon, maybe even next year, some multinational will build an emotion-controlling app and the crowd will go absolutely wild, then very calm, then really happy, then annoyed for a millisecond, then wild again with rapturous applause.

I mean, with that device/app we won't even need to feel bad about where all our mistakes have led us, and we can finally accept the tone-deaf happiness of being a casually murderous and purely scientific species, we won't need to feel aghast at the inefficiency of our lifestyles or the mountains of redundant waste they create, the genocides playing out in the natural world will no longer be a cause for concern, the seas will die but we will go on. We will simply use our abilities in the scientific realm to stitch together nigh-forgotten lengths of DNA and voila - a salmon mixed with a mackerel that can spawn anywhere! A cow mixed with an elephant that produces eleven or more tons of flesh and over a hundred gallons of milk a day. What's that? You want wings? 1.8 million dollars and a few rounds of painful and dangerous gene therapy/surgery and you will have an haphazard pair.

First, obviously, we'll need to do the robot thing to ensure that our food supply doesn't collapse in flames, and also to keep honey on store shelves (Who doesn't love honey?  Maybe only the chemical mastermind who invented neonicotinoids). As usual, when the story dawned that neonics were killing bees, it took roughly until the first report that profits may be affected and businesses ruined for anyone to give a fuck. Listen, I like honey more than anyone and always have, but I won't accept robo-made honey. That's weak. For millions of years there's been an animal making honey, we didn't have to make it, we could even co-operate with them for other benefits, and that's still cool to me. I kind of wonder what other cool animals might have arisen in the absence of homo sapiens industrialis: vast cuttlefish capable of spaceflight, a naturally three-legged dog, an ant species that writes novels.

But fuck all that. We're gonna finish what we started when we exterminated the neanderthal, except this time it's not even personal. This time it's even worse: it's business as usual.

And I get it. Nature is resilient and our survival is paramount - life will go on either way. Only hippies will get worried about this. Farmer Joe needs neonics to ensure he gets to harvest 85%+ of his crops. It's not like we're the stupid ones for planting big fields of food and being annoyed that animals will eat them. Poisoning them for their arrogance is exactly the ticket. Despite what the left-wing, envirofascist hippies say, this is good. There are no links or chains in nature - it's fight or flight, survival of the fittest, each to his own. Pesticides keep wildlife from becoming addicted, welfare-like, to what's rightfully ours. Nevermind how it all kept going without us, or what's going on now, this is how it must be. God. Law. Money. Private property. Et cetera, bitch, and this isn't an ongoing disaster or a sign of anything pathological - so don't even start with that. Plus robots are cool and drones will never become problematic.

Why I am Fucking Tired of Things

A bunch of people in conflict are dying and the first, most natural response is to pick your side and demonize the other. That was cool in World War II when there was a 'right' side to pick, but World War II and the weird days that followed set the world up for a lot of misery. It's pretty surprising to me as well, but one of the big takeaways from studying history is that humanity is great at holding grievances and using them as twisted and sick raison d'etre. So I'm pretty fucking tired, not of the people who see themselves as wronged and want to find the most violent and counterproductive solutions (though they are as exasperating as crying children on a flight, or schoolyard bullies, or Jihadis, or Zionists - what's the diff, really?), but of the commentators for whom it is a sport to make one side seem more wronged and the other more evil. Ignorant people step into this and even the wisest among us can only look on sadly and wish for a speedy return to normalcy, where only 50-90 people die every year from this particular shitshow.

Nobody's right, everyone's a goddamn asshole, and if I had any power at all I would salt the more contested parts of the Levant so liberally that everybody had to get the hell out, and napalm would discourage the hardier dissenters, followed by low flybys with extremely dilute chlorine gas until every living thing had caught the idea. Then I would build a wall around it and keep everyone out, and if I caught people sneaking back in I would irradiate the whole thing so that it would have to be abandoned, and people would have to give up their crazy, outdated, offensively made up shit which tells them it's okay to pitch fits, murder others, and basically act like it's 1359 B.C.

If we can't have nice things like myths, and big old useless cities filled with the bloody residue of bible stories and twisted histories that turn us into murderous savages, then it is time to destroy the myths. If Millenialists get angry, so much the better. If it's considered anti-Zionist than I don't know what to tell you except oy-fucking-vey. If it's anti-Muslim I am going to pretend it's not ludicrous for THAT to be the breaking point in the struggle. Maybe I'm a zionihadi for peace and there is no better option than to take away the toy the kids are fighting over and getting hurt about. It's time that this species grows the fuck up, and lately we've been very extremely fucking ignorant about a lot of important things, and very greedy, and very uncooperative, and extremely self-centered (unless we're unthinkingly demonizing whole groups of people on others' behalf). If you think this is O.K. then I have a whole world of misery and hatred and slavery to show you. Selling the dumbest possible reactionary narratives is the new game, but it's actually the old game, and whether you're lib or con (believing in these arbitrary and distracting dramas, ignoring truth to feel self-fulfillment - I really hate that) there should be a certain level of decency so that we don't all degrade into shouting matches and talking over each other with factoids and anecdotes.

I really hate the commentators. Not all of them, but the worst of the bunch are so malicious and so invested in explaining the situation as if they were there, are omniscient, and really understand what's going on. We all understand WHY but we do not know HOW/WHAT quite as well, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either a senior Hamas or Israeli official, or a fucking goddamned piece of shit who ought to shut the fuck up and go back to commentating on why an effective tax rate is a burden on capitalism, or why factory farming is excusable, or why exceptionalism is healthy for national character. While we're at it: fuck nationalism of all kinds, that has literally never ended well and if we don't learn from that... we'll have to learn that expensive and wasteful and stupid lesson again, I guess, because we're not good students of anything that doesn't make us rich or respected. Well leave me out of it. Go back to hell and let this world slip into doom without your misleading bullshit turning friend against friend, turning me against almost everyone with an opinion who doesn't have family in the game, and making me want to commit felony level libel on everyone with a big & ignorant mouth. Shut up and stay shut up, because nothing you do is even trying to be helpful.

You can't even call it news anymore. Just shut the fuck up. Let them ruin it further... after all what the fuck did anyone ever do for Syria? Fuck.

RIP: Winamp

December 20th 2013 was supposed to be the last day of Winamp (as a subsidiary/protectorate/whatever of AOL) and possibly of the whole thing altogether – I don't know how it could ever become abandonware, I was startled by the announcement. I still don't know what exactly will happen and it is causing me some mild anxiety. I got the latest release, though, and I plan to hold onto it and use it until I die or audio formats change too radically for Winamp to keep playing them.

I will forever remember Winamp as the definitive .mp3 player – I highly doubt the format will outlive the association in my mind.  I've been using the program for as long as it has existed. For anyone not using iTunes, I assume it is the de facto media player, though I have seen the unironic use of Windows Media Player. Mp3 players and phones have also sort of reduced the need for a great audio player program, but I'll have the classic Winamp setup on a computer, because it's fantastic and not at all bullshitty and I like music enough to care.

Winamp is what I want in an audio player - low impact, versatile, plays all the usual formats without shitting itself or making a big deal about what it's doing. It is simple and basic in all the best ways. The playlist format is what I'm used to and I think it's fantastic, the newer and more modern Winamp is nowhere near as simple or painless to use. I hate browser style players, I don't need album art, and as long as I can use a keyboard shortcut to search I don't really need anything else, ever. It really whips the llama's ass even after more than a decade.

Fittingly enough, the Winamp community promises that plugin support will never die and that Winamp will continue to be functionally updated into the indefinite future. What would be best, of course, is if it was given to a not-for-profit developer (or back to its creators) and version 5.7 or 6 were to come out in a year or so. Personally I didn't like the AOL takeover and I wasn't at ease with how the installer was suddenly offering toolbars, paid versions, and free songs, but the program itself remained excellent, possibly without peer.

Frankly, I just hope it doesn't die. This is a sad day, regardless of the fact it wouldn't have happened if Winamp stayed purely independent. I don't think it will, to be honest, because it still has a sizable following. Its heartening to see that others feel the same way. Worst case scenario: it is over and everyone keeps using it for years before it inspires a modern remake. Best case scenario: it returns better than ever without corporate ties.

The Coup & Assorted Criticism, Hypery, Links

I feel like the world is generally ignorant of legendary marxist rap crew The Coup, or even worse, is actively skeptical or unreceptive to mentions of that group. I understand perfectly how people can be political, but I personally hold music to be much more honorable than politics, so the general lack of knowledge or enthusiasm about The Coup is baffling. It's understandable. I'm sure smug white people aren't The Coup's ideal audience, so lots of the people I most often deal with have nothing to say when I bring up The Coup.

Shamefully, I never really bring up The Coup at all when people ask me what I like to listen to. The near mythical production of Pam the Funkstress and Boots Riley's cutting rhymes. There was an awareness of the wrongness of things that should speak to anyone, at times. It's not particularly comfortable music, I suppose. It's a little incendiary, even. Revolutionary talk, whether posturing or not, is completely out of favor right now. It's seen something for teenagers, for the mentally unfit, or Russians,  terrorists and other people we disagree with and distrust. Anywhere you look in the world, people will call revolutionaries dangerous, misguided, lazy, out-of-touch – generally before revealing their own lack of comprehension about the basic concepts of socialism or Marxism, whenever socialism is brought up. If you can't revolt and can't hold government to account, why pretend to be happy or enfranchised?

So, if you'd ask me, I'd say The Coup is important, brutally honest, unique, and unabashedly political. Music with a message is nothing new, but it is the nature of popular music to be inherently pro-capitalist or at least ignore the issue or posture about it. The status quo is referenced to establish a lack of privilege and it's on to fun verses about partying, women, crime, or drugs. Hip hop and rap are often maligned for being empty-headed and consumerist by the very people who understand or identify with it the least, and The Coup in particular would serve as an amazing rejoinder. For those reasons and more, I want to pay homage, and celebrate the release of a new album!

Twitter Strategies for Journalists: An Existential User Comment Rodeo

CJR posted a great bit about getting Twitter followers that almost makes me want to dust off my twitter account and make it live. I used to try to follow twitter. Now I mostly blog lackadaisically in order to tell myself I am doing productive writing. I see people tweeting and they repost their tweets to facebook and I think, "Goddamn that's insane." but on the other hand they sometimes get 100 or so impressions. Which is generally still pretty insane. They are engaging with the imaginary yet somehow relevant aimless messaging system. Some people who have encouraged me to join actually have audiences and purposes for tweeting – which, in a fast-moving, egalitarian telegraph machine, are the most difficult things to achieve and understand.

I might be biased. I see every twitter account as the equivalent of a Minecraft video on YouTube. It does not inspire me. I see tweets in various news media and have to restrain myself. Jimmy Fallon uses twitter in cool ways, though, and the service has been used for all kinds of mischief so it can't be all bad. But on the other hand, the volume of tweets alone is a barrier to entry. The slavishness of hashtag culture, the ruthless advertising. Twitter has as much of a mercenary heart as facebook. But who cares what I have to think or say. I still have to think or say it if it's not broadcast.

Still, I do my best, despite having posted legitimately cringe-worthy abominations, to say interesting or informative things in a neutral language which does not rest on lazy assumptions, fallacies, or promote negative patterns of thinking. I try to do my best, on the internet or at least this blog, at least sometimes but it can be so hopeless and tiring. The internet, used anonymously, has a tendency to communicate the worst aspects of individuals and their cultures. There are heartbreaking stories about these kinds of problems and what their fallout is. Unless you're not paying attention, you have probably heard one.

Probably you came here to add followers to facebook and increase your clout score or whatever. I already linked to it at the top.  The specifics of the linked article are great and all, but there was one user comment that was essentially critical of Twitter, but also probably uncomfortably accurate:

The flood of user-generated everything, from literature to the internet to economics, is an incredible problem that is both happening and waiting-to-happen. An unthinkable volume of information is kind of awesome, but also kind of terrifying. This brave new world is, after all, the kind of world that spawned the hollow 'expert culture' – an institution that is essentially quackery in all but name. The fact that the article shows at least one case of people forced to contribute to twitter against their will is equal parts hilarious and sad.

Pay Before You Pump

About a week ago there was a fairly big story about a malicious death (essentially a murder, technically a hit-and-run) in Toronto, caused by $112 worth of gas. The victim was the clerk, fearful about having a day's wages garnished because of theft. The manager of the location, and the industry itself, which likely institutes and enforces pay-for-theft measures (like many service industries – remember, if you don't want to tip, at least pay), criticized the entire incident but itself did little. I am no customer-service scientist, but I have a feeling that franchise owners and employers weren't ever truly warned against garnishing wages for fees.

Just ask a bartender or, especially, a waiter at your next time out. They'll tell you that for dine-and-dashers, or drink-and-stumblers, they are held responsible for the lost money. They buy it. They pay for theft. It's a stupid, malicious business, but it is rational in that it makes sense. That's business – if an employee can't keep profits then the employee is punished for that. Fine.

However, the scene of this crime is far more complex even than a simple theft of food and service at a restaurant or bar. Gas prices are rising like thermometers around the globe. Record summer heat means more cars on the roads, burning gas to maintain their spots in traffic jams, and operate A/C for the frustrated, overheated drives. Let's face it: when you're a privileged North American in a car, in dense traffic, it gets slow and it gets lonely. Carpooling doesn't figure at all in the story of gas theft and murder, but I figured I'd give it a moment, since passengers can be made to pay for their passage – and they should, with gas prices as they are.

The worst part of the story was a story about a teenage pump attendant (I forget where or if he was even a teen) who was dragged to his death for something like fourteen dollars and change. It's pretty damn despicable, but potentially the worst part is how many times it took before some politician realized there was exposure in acting on it.  It only took a loose bunch of lives before the righteous opportunists of the political sphere even took notice of a looming problem. Gas won't get cheaper. People won't suddenly begin to treat low-paid service staff as legitimate humans deserving of life, as worthy and valuable others – as they won't in any of dozens of arenas around the world. Anyone who's worked retail will tell you about it, if you were wondering.

Meanwhile, angst continues to pile up in Canada. Gas costs $1.25 a litre (that's like three something a gallon) and we have something like the third-largest oil reserves proven in the dirty, shitty oilsands. Meanwhile we sell it away, part and parcel, to foreign interests and continue to pay unreasonable prices at the pump when we buy it back from those foreign interests. Instead of refineries, profits are used in a pathetic attempt to greenwash the original extraction operations. Somewhere in this nest of wasteful fallacies lies a sensible route to well-priced gas or an achievable alternative. Politics, though. You gotta have politics. Opposition to oil sands development must be the exclusive domain of malicious idiots and borderline eco-terrorists – you know: 99 percenters, Occupiers, and other idealist trash who don't know anything about business, the economy, or why the status quo is set as it is.

So it's only a matter of time until Nexen is sold to Chinese investors. I'm not even of the opinion it's a mistake. The oilsands are a mistake, what is done with them now – and if it gains certain people in this country billions of dollars, and improves trade relations with China: so much the better – hardly matters. Sovereignty has not been anything more than a byword by which the Harper administration rustles up support among the smug and hopeless of Canada. Under such circumstances, the sale of Nexen Inc is a no-brainer, and any turn-around likely to harm Canadian prospects in international trade, making it seem as reactionary and uncompetitive, as well as uncooperative and dishonest.

Looking at what Canadians will do for gas, down to the cowardly killings of attendants, some good publicity will be a windfall. So long as the oil and money continue to flow, little else matters. The big companies (NHL and NFL are currently great examples of this, as well) don't care about the lives of their most-ubiquitous employees, or pollution, or who owns what bit of oilsands. Politicians will only act if it fits in with their specific brand, and if their mandarins have seen fit for action, or if the public applause will overpower the private censure. Nobody cares, and, seemingly, neither do the people – and who can blame them? They've got to get to work, and the highways are full of inept, asshole drivers in practically empty cars, just gumming up the works.