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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

    They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

    Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.



  • According to a recent FD Signifier video, they have already purged him and a whole ton of other people (cough probably black people cough) from voter rolls in Georgia, he said that hadn’t happened to him in nearly a decade, gotta re register, and of course they don’t tell you if you’ve been purged, that onus lies on you to figure out.

    Its already illegal to hand out water to people in line for polls.

    I would be entirely unsurprised if say I dunno maybe your scenario happens… or maybe they just call in a bunch of bomb threats to polling locations in blue areas, seems to be doing a good job of shutting down Ohio at the moment.


  • Judging from what I’ve seen so far from reports which are early and incomplete, I would eduguess that Mossad basically intercepted a particular brand of these ‘pagers’ known to be used by Hezbollah, put small bombs in them and wired them in such that they could be activated by a broadcast signal, and probably a lot of non Hezbollah people who just happened to buy this model of ‘pager’ in the target areas and timeframe for introduction of these tampered device onto the market also got an exploding hot pocket.


  • May I suggest you take up learning a martial art?

    Not sure what they’re like in your area, but when I learned Karate as a kid in the 90s/00s, everyone was treated according to their skill level and discipline, gender/sex is irrelevant (beyond cups for guys and thick sports bras for gals).

    Its not likely to make you bullet proof, but it does stand a decent chance at bettering your physical and mental health, give you more options when a gun is not part of the scenario.

    Also, I would second the notion of going to a range and signing up for basic pistol and rifle familiarization, as well as basic medical training, unless you legitimately are totally terrified of firearms or have some kind of trauma or PTSD related to them.

    Such courses usually provide you with firearms for the course, you don’t own them or take them home, they stay at the range. You just learn the basic principles of operation and safety and shooting technique, under hopefully an extremely serious couple of range masters who will hopefully teach you to treat all guns as if they are loaded until you have personally verified they are not, and to never, not even accidentally, point the barrel of a gun at something you do not intend to destroy.

    You don’t need to go buy a gun first and not trust yourself with it.

    In fact usually a novice shooter is going to want to experiment a bit with different calibers and guns with differing grip styles and weight distributions untill you find something comfortable to shoot.


  • Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

    Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

    As far as actual tech competency goes?

    Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.




  • No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

    If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

    If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

    If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

    Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

    That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

    It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.




  • Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

    Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

    Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

    Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.


  • I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.


  • I disagree.

    Amazon still owns and operates New World.

    All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

    They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

    The servers will be shut down in a few days.

    There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

    Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

    Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

    I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

    It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

    It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.


  • I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

    Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.



  • I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.

    If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?

    At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.

    I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.

    This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.

    As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.

    https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/08/23/concord-dev-writes-off-critics-why-would-i-care-about-a-bunch-of-talentless-freaks-hating-on-it/

    The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.



  • The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.

    47 playable days.

    All time steam peak player count: 38,104.

    Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.

    Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.

    15 playable days.

    All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.

    Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.

    Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.


  • And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

    … because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

    They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.