bonerpill-deactivated20230602
no no, I know what you're thinking but it's actually amazingly great, keep watching.
Oh wow did not see that coming
Having a sidebar about gender and pronouns in your indie RPG is de rigueur these days, but I have to confess I wouldn't know where to begin. The supported player character types in my most recently published games have variously included sapient jellyfish, sinister hovering orbs, and creatures so abstract that their human players aren't allowed to know what the words on their character sheets mean when play begins. Forthcoming titles I'm currently working on will add "two-inch-tall frog wizards", "the sapient reproductive apparatus of a fungal hive mind", and "a deep space bounty hunter who is secretly a person-size mech suit operated by fugitive space gerbils" to the list. I feel like unpacking enough assumptions to drill down to the level of pronouns is one of those beyond-the-scope-of-this-text propositions.
Make a d6 (or d66!) lookup table of non-sequitur ways to answer or avoid the question "what are your genders/pronouns?"
Gender (d66)
11. To whom it may concern
12. Making it work
13. Now more than ever
14. If I told you, I'd have to kill you
15. Subtly hairy
16. A little to the left
21. A selection of fine cheeses
22. Fury, and then silence
23. Somebody else's problem
24. Exit pursued by a bear
25. Wizard
26. On an intercept course
31. Man with a plan
32. Forklift certified
33. [REDACTED]
34. Demi-princess
35. Up, up and away
36. Getting better
41. $37.99
42. Gender? I hardly know 'er!
43. A pebble upon the mountainside
44. Project manager
45. A-flat major
46. It's pretty obscure, you've probably never heard of it
51. Eight out of ten
52. Wouldn't you like to know
53. Were-guy
54. *deafening foghorn noise*
55. Banned by the Geneva Conventions
56. Anarcho-catgirlist
61. I seem to have misplaced my astrolabe
62. The gender that dare not speak its name
63. Smiling on the inside
64. Are you a cop? You have to tell me if you're a cop
65. Under construction
66. Yes
Tag yourself I’m Forklift certified
The Smurfs
Mission: Vile as Fuck
I’m a little annoyed with myself because somehow - I’m not sure WHY - this would have been funnier with two stars and I’m mad I didn’t realize that in time.
Moving my daughter into college is going GREAT.
On Game Mess Mornings just now, Jeff Grubb and another host/guest had the following to say about the recent BioWare layoffs and the future of Dragon Age & Mass Effect [transcript of relevant quotes]:
(During their conversation, they mentioned this article from VentureBeat and read out quotes from the recent BioWare blog post)
Grubb: "So this is about one fifth of their staff, and this is not related to the movement of SW:TOR to that new studio that's outside of EA, this is completely unrelated to that. This is directly affecting all the games that people might be concerned about with the future of BioWare."
Grubb: "They said they are looking to provide opportunities for all of these employees to apply for other jobs that are open at other EA studios, although they expect that not everyone will land on their feet within EA - they could go, they're probably gonna have to go elsewhere, not everyone is gonna be able to get a job within EA."
Host/Guest: "Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is going to, now, especially, be a lot of work, with these layoffs. I thought the 'corpo' tech word I hated the most [in the blog post] was 'disrupt', [but] I think my new word that [I hate] whenever I see it in announcements like this is 'agile'".
Grubb: "Because 'agile' never means, the people at the top need to be thinking more quickly or need to take a pay cut or need to come up with ideas of their own. It always means, we need to pay fewer people less money. It's always an excuse to make these job cuts."
Host/Guest: "I feel like, excuse my naivety, but like, hey, if I'm at the top, and I'm already making millions, I'm like, alright, cool, I'll take a pay cut so these other people below me that I've maybe built a relationship with, have maybe seen on a day to day basis, if not like, at least online, exchanged emails with online, been in a Zoom call with, seen faces - maybe so they don't have to effing lose their jobs and then I am overworking and burning bridges with my current existing employees that are staying."
Grubb: "You could tell, how what all of what you just said, that is encompassed in that word 'agile'. Works backwards from, 'we are now in a relationship with an outside firm that is unionized, and that means they are gonna, make demands upon us, and that will ruin our agility. Boy, we need to be agile, and working with unions means we can't be agile'. And it's like, that's not exactly what it means, it's just the kind of thing you get grumpy about having to listen to what other people might need to make the job work to them and you don't ever wanna consider that you are only worried about your bottom line. And everyone sees through this, everyone listening to this show knows that, we know that, they know that, it is this song and dance they put on, and here we are."
Grubb: "Obviously the people losing their jobs is front and foremost the thing that people are concerned about here. Other people also are worried about, hey, what does this mean for the games that BioWare was working on? They commented on that [in the blogpost]." I did a little bit of looking into this, to see kind've, what's the status, because in the past on this show, on Grubb Snacks [another show or podcast], we've talked about Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. People are very thirsty for information coming out of BioWare. For a while there it was like, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf could have come out this year. In fact, internally at one point, the date that they were looking at was next month, September 2023. But internally, Dreadwolf keeps getting pushed back. They moved the internal expectations to March 2024 a while ago. March 2024 is pretty soon right? Well guess what, it's not coming out then either, they pushed it back again. It is not coming out until Summer 2024 at the earliest at this point. And this is not them talking publicly, this is just from my reporting, so, y'know, if it moves again, don't be surprised in any way because it's, I think it's very likely it moves back even further. I expect this game probably to launch by the end of next year, but [wincing], like, why launch at the end of next year when you can get out before the end of fiscal in March 2025? This thing could keep moving [further back]. Right now though, again, summer 2024 is what they're looking at at the earliest."
Grubb: "How are they gonna do that with fewer people? Well, guess what? They're bringing people in from the Mass Effect team. The Mass Effect team is being drained a little bit so that more people can come work on Dreadwolf, and that naturally means the next Mass Effect is getting pushed further down the line as well. So don't expect that any time soon. Most people weren't, but push it back even further in your heads, because the next Mass Effect is definitely being affected by this, it's gonna come out later."
Grubb: "Now about the 'why??' of all this. I think most people can figure out like, you know, BioWare's had a string of not-hits, at the very least, and some of them were kind've, bad pumpkins, rotten pumpkins - you open it up and look inside and no-one wanted to deal with this. So, like, okay, that's one thing. That's been true for a long time, so why's it happened suddenly? There's been some changes. For one, Apex Legends is on the decline. They've talked about this publicly a little bit. They had high expectations for the latest season of Apex Legends, and then they told investors that they were too aggressive and too optimistic with those expectations, and then internally they are now looking at it like, Apex Legends is on the decline, we do not necessarily expect it to reach the heights it once was at, and we're kinda looking at a long-term end-of-life for that game. Not like it's suddenly gonna go away, but not that it's gonna be this driver of growth for EA. It probably isn't going to be and they're no longer looking at that. So that's got them tightening their belts a little bit.
Then there's the change to EA's corporate structure, this is another major thing that's kind've causing people to look at BioWare a little bit more, you know, with a little bit more skepticism. And that is, there used to be 'EA', and it was everything, and now there's 'EA Entertainment', and 'EA Sports', and these things are operating separately. There was a time when FIFA Ultimate Team and Madden Ultimate Team, that money was covering everybody. And now, when they look at the books, the FIFA/Madden Ultimate Team money is over there, and BioWare is over here with all these other studios. Apex Legends was in there, but Apex Legends - no longer covering everybody either. So it's like, okay, we're looking at BioWare, they're not bringing in a lot of money, and we're spending a lot of money. So what do we do in there, and that leads to them cutting jobs. And now it's, okay, they're gonna try to put out Dreadwolf, does that turn things around? That's the hope, but right now they're operating on the expectations that, or the reality that, the studio is costing money, its costs have racked up over the last several years, last four, five years especially, the costs have been racked up without a lot of big game releases, other than Mass Effect Legendary Edition. So they're trying to cut somewhere, and here we are."
Host/Guest: "These folks that [didn't get laid off] are going to have to crunch for what might be like one and a half years [on Dreadwolf], right?"
Grubb: "Yeah".
Host/Guest: "Who knows, even after it comes out, if it's going to be in a good state, or an instance where a publisher is like, we just need to get this out the door."
Grubb: "I mean that happened to Mass Effect: Andromeda, it happened with Anthem."
Host/Guest: "I wanna say, unionize."
Grubb: "Right."
Guest: "But it seems like the publishers, straight from the top, will be like, yeah, we don't wanna work with you."
Grubb: "Yeah. 'You unionize, and we'll walk away'. I think internally, if you unionized at a publisher, maybe you have a little bit more protection from that sort of thing happening, but not necessarily. You could just as easily find yourself in a situation where the studio finds a creative way to not have to deal with a union."
Host/Guest: "Lets eliminate yachts."
Grubb: "Yep. Man, super yachts? Whenever, I'm like, man..."
Grubb: "The writing was on the wall here, back when the split happened with EA, and them becoming EA Sports and EA Entertainment. Andrew Wilson said, 'We're doing this restructuring to empower our studio leaders with more creative ownership and financial accountability.' It was right there, they said it, right? 'Each studio is gonna have to be accountable for itself and its own money'."
Host/Guest: "What about, 'the people at the top have the financial accountability?'"
Grubb: "Yeah, and it's... whenever, 'financial accountability' to them always looks like, it's not finished, who cares, put the game out. Like that's what they think accountability looks like."
Host/Guest: "Once this game launches, and if it does poorly, who are they gonna blame? They aren't gonna blame the people at the top, they're going to blame these individual studio leaders who they have 'empowered with their creative ownership'."
Grubb: "Exactly. And I've seen responses to that, to this, because Mike Gamble is in charge of the next Mass Effect. He was one of the leaders on Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda. And so people are like, now I'm not excited for the next Mass Effect. And it's like, I don't really think it was his fault. It was clearly the leadership above him pushing those games out before they were ready."
Host/Guest: "Makes you wanna shake people."
Grubb: "Find someone in an alley..."
Grubb: "So, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, maybe next year. Next Mass Effect, after that. EA has had some success with its singleplayer games recently. Dead Space did pretty well, I think both the Star Wars Jedi games did very well. They started working on Star Wars Jedi, the third one, immediately after the second one, because they were like - that was the thing, if Jedi Survivor does well, then we'll do a third one. And they immediately started working on it because everyone internally was like, this did well. But if you look at EA as a whole, like, their financials do look a little bit grim, and it all goes back to Apex Legends over-stating, that, and the fact that for years now Battlefield has been lost in the woods. And so Apex Legends was already covering, it was like, we're gonna make money for ourselves, and we're gonna cover the missing money from Battlefield. They had already done the creative accounting there. 'Creative accounting' might sound illegal, it wasn't illegal, they were just like, leaving out Battlefield when they were talking to investors, and being like, look how good Apex Legends is doing, and saying don't look at the man behind the curtain which was Battlefield just floundering. So that worked, that worked for a while, and now it's, and now they have to - Apex Legends is covering for every freaking thing here, and it's like, it no longer is, it's on the decline, so that, live-service games continue to be a meal ticket and it kind of continues to be a little bit of an albatross, where, as goes these one or two big games these publishers have, so goes everything, and then the studios at the bottom - you know, BioWare, studio at the bottom of EA now, it feels like, you know, 250 employees, it's kind've relatively smaller, it's gonna pay the price, and here we are."
Grubb: "I know from covering this stuff how many people are so, so passionate about everything BioWare, and it feels like, you know, that's why the studio continues to be around it seems like, but um. I dunno, coming out of this, I can only imagine this team, morale is gonna take a big hit, and what does that do to the future of those games?"
[source]
I am once again saying: this is less likely about 'agile' being the new magical corpo buzzword that can be anything its speakers mean, than it is about the adaptation of agile IT methodologies that make iterations of work faster over shorter periods of assessment, with the leading slogan of "fulfilling changeable client requirements more flexibly".
In my experience in very small mobile projects (less than 10 people), agile development implies nearly simultaneous work of developers, QA and other workers requested on demand (designers, graphics artists) over each release candidate. The pipeline usually goes like: Client gets Idea, Idea is estimated and planned out, then Implemented over 2-3 weeks, and my final sanity checks are the front line before release... And the cycle can repeat like that each month. Because my projects are live ops, ongoing live service things without a clear release/ maintenance deadline.
The more traditional waterfall methodologies require that design and system prototyping be finished first, then the production cycles in each respective department, putting everything together, then alpha and beta testing. Even when my studio makes a mobile game from scratch, sprint deadlines are more symbolic and there's a clear divide between the periods of design, production, client review & adjustment.
And here, Jeff Grubb is right insofar this shift from traditional to agile work flow means that executives want to put their greasy fingers on the labor of people who might seem a little useless during periods of time when their specialized work isn't as urgent. Because another thing that agile methodologies push for is obtaining generalist skill sets within a single project and keeping the people as busy as possible in tightly limited teams.
look if chiropractics have helped you then i think that's great but i do think every chiropractor should be legally required to disclose the fact that the guy who invented it said he learned it from a ghost
the chiropractor fandom did NOT like this post
No they should just be required to get a real medical degree and a real medical license since they claim to be doctors while really just being scammers who disable people on a regular basis and they often discourage against real medical care like vaccines, blood transfusions, medication, CT scans or other imaging, ect.
They also have the highest rate of sexual assault and sexual harassment complaints of any position in the medical field, and the most sexual assault and harassment cases that were made by children. Maybe we should check on that, too.
To be fair, this isn't the first time that Star Wars has been fucking omnipresent. There was a time back in the 1980s when there were Star Wars comics on every newsstand and a bunch of weird spin-off movies about Ewoks and two separate, concurrently airing Saturday morning cartoons and a licensed tabletop RPG you could buy in mainstream bookstores (which incidentally ended up accidentally creating like two thirds of the Expanded Universe because George Lucas couldn't be arsed to produce a setting bible and just gave writers copies of the RPG instead, and the RPG didn't distinguish between the bits that had actual sources and the bits it made up to pad its sourcebooks). The difference is that there was no real centralised oversight and most people involved had very little idea of what they were doing, and as a result, nearly all of the Star Wars material that emerged from this era was deeply, deeply stupid. I think that's what the present state of affairs is missing.
“average book sentence has 3 meanings” factoid actually just statistical error. average book sentence has 1 meaning. Foreshadows TLT, who is written by madwoman & contains over 10,000 meanings per sentence, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
it’s so annoying seeing comments like this under videos of gay men talking or just walking around bc it’s like. do u think he doesnt know he sounds gay? do u think he doesnt know his mannerism’s make him appear feminine ? “his guns pink” “ur girly pop” “somebody’s fruity” like it’s not even jokes anymore it’s just homophobia he isnt stupid he knows that others will know hes gay that isn’t the point of his video omfg
“speculation” is not the issue or point here the people i see this happen to are openly gay or very visibly queer, the people leaving these comments arent speculating, they know the op is gay and are commenting these things to belittle them, it’s not the fact that they know or suspect he’s gay it’s the fact that they point it out in attempt to shame him in a “joking” manner when they clearly have bias against gay men, they know he’s gay as a fact, they are pointing it out in the comment section to mock him for existing as openly gay
it's literally old-fashioned schoolyard level homophobia.
unfortunately some people (particularly on tiktok) seem to be prone to repeating these shitty comment memes without considering what they're saying. so i'd add: even if you don't mean to be homophobic, even if you ID as gay or queer, saying shit like this to people you don't personally know has exactly the same effect as it does when a homophobe says it.
even if you don’t mean to be homophobic,
even if you ID as gay or queer,
saying shit like this
to people you don’t personally know
has exactly the same effect
as it does when a homophobe says it.
Sorry, dice goblins - but Lou Wilson has come down firmly on the side of “you only actually need one set of dice.”
"In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves. 'The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. The terrors that homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn't want to admit.'
As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it, but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual. One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery; a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture."
-Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
hmm. ublock origin no longer seems to reliably work on youtube for me. unfortunate!
manage extensions> ublock origin> meatball menu> options> my filters> paste the following:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
then hit "apply changes"
