it_wasnt_arson

joined 1 year ago

There's actually plenty of material to compare to, with a swath of Pal designs that are clearly original, in a similar style with similar inspirations. Then there are models with almost precisely the same silhouette and proportions as iconic Pokemon, which are frankly just worse designs for it, since the altered colors and markings clash with the original concept and result in a generally forgettable whole. They clearly had the skill and motivation to innovate more within their niche, but instead the game is half-full of what feel like hastily painted over placeholders.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
  • Segways
  • 3D TVs
  • steam-powered automobiles
  • Lisp machines
  • hovercraft
  • supersonic airliners
[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

A kitchen sink monster taming survival sandbox game with Pokemon-like cute creatures, a handful of reaaaaally familiar designs, edgy shock factor marketing featuring gun violence and animal abuse, and enough obviously Pokemon-inspired gameplay elements that Nintendo decided to bring out all the IP big guns, from copyright infringement down to bullshit mechanics patents and claims that mods don't count as prior art. (if a modder invents something, no they didn't, and a developer that puts the same feature in a game years later can sue anyone who imitates the mod, according to Nintendo.)

The USPS just got done ordering a custom-designed vehicle built from the ground up for efficient, safe, and comfortable package delivery. It doesn't look like this.

Reread what I said.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don't know, someone said the manufacturing industry would "vaporize" if Elon stopped juggling his financial instruments. Wasn't me.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn't expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.

Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The factories, offices, computing hardware, and construction equipment? He's not the sole owner, but the point of all this is to cut out the money-juggling fluff of passing around ownership between different entities and make actual use of the real-world capital.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Vaporize? The land and equipment aren't going anywhere. Reorganize the parts of the parts of the business that are actually, physically real and let the workers decide how best to put them to use instead of an egomaniacal Twitter addict.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 3 points 2 weeks ago

I don't think the people who do things like that actually pay attention to what they're doing. It's like a subconscious reflex for small-time Christian singers, or something.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries "for free" (even though they already chip in).

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Maybe they listened to one of the covers that seemingly obliviously changes the line to "the shrine of your light"

 
 

A couple months old by now, but I still find this a fascinating case study. A good old-fashioned NFT grift, unmoored from time and washed ashore as a sad, solitary UZDoom pull request in the year of the Common Era two thousand twenty six. The honorable representative of "Next Gen Software UK" seems to have taken the rejection in stride and without comment, seemingly only attempting to upstream the NFT features to promote their own fork, ODOOM.

What's the "O" stand for? Open Advanced Secure Interoperable Scalable-System obviously. That's right, they're not just making a Metaverse like in Snow Crash, they're making the OASIS like in Ready Player One, by putting a shitty social overlay into some FOSS game engines. I'm too tired to come up with a clever torment nexus joke to put here. Anyway, web3 is passé now. Their interoperability layer is web4. Their social layer is web5. Loading a WAD presumably makes it web6, and from there we'll be on pace to hit the web* singularity by 2027. That's right, AI is here too!

Now, as someone astutely pointed out, you might think that tying the ability to mint NFTs to killing enemies in a notoriously moddable game would be bad for the whole artificial scarcity thing, but our friends at Next Gen have a solution: enterprise blockchain holonic braid AI! From what I can tell, this is a delicate prompt caressing technique to write out a bunch of GOFAI symbolic logic in markdown and then get an LLM to pretty please evaluate the fuzzy logic. That's right, the cyberdemons are going to prompt so hard they'll beat you at deathmatch. In a game famous for being played at the pace of an LLM API endpoint. Blockchain-based anticheat is left as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. One look at their generically titled landing page makes the unimaginative grift clear. You buy a token to play, the tier of token you buy determines how many loot and "quest" reward NFTs you can mint in a week so you can corner the hypothetical market by preordering, and not only are they promising a roadmap, they're so gracious that if you pay for the top tier, they'll let you write the roadmap for them! Only 20 slots left! Buy now!

I know the standard NFT project like this is supposed to prey on people who want to join a fun discord server and/or know they're looking for the next bag holder to cash out, but it still surprises me that these devs think they can get something out of it this late to the party. Did their AI blockchain compliance automation thing fall through in the wake of the Delve scandal? Did they really spend a decade in the mines preparing their get-rich-quick scheme for launch and miss the boat? …Come to think of it, "10+ years" ago is around when the Ready Player One movie was announced. Are they just really, really genuine fans of Ernest Cline's Torment Nexus?

I don't know why I felt the need to write all this, but the economic, social, epistemological, and game design failures of this horseshit, and the amount of work people are willing to put into a Potemkin software project like this never fail to astound me. Twenty-twenty-six, everyone. The best part is, for anyone actually interested in alternating back and forth between playing Doom, Quake, and a bunch of other games connected by a social layer to complete shared tasks, Archipelago already exists and doesn't want you to buy their AI-extruded membership cards. Peace on Earth, gamers.

 
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