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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Since Ubisoft introduced us to the term AAAA game with Skull and Bones, my attempt at giving an actual, solid definition to differentiate a AAA game from a AAAA game has had this as a fundamental aspect:

    The game gets stuck in development hell, analagous to a movie that keeps needing reshoots and rewrites, and ends up requiring so much money thrown at chasing the sunk cost fallacy that it negatively impacts not only its own development, but impacts the development of other games by the same studio/publisher, and/or the overall financial solvency / employment headcount of the overarching parent company.

    Basically, what a AAAA game actually is, is analagous to a bank or large corporation that is Too Big To Fail… but video game companies largely are not going to be bailed out by the government.

    So, by that metric, we’ve got:

    Skull and Bones

    Concord

    Suicide Squad

    If you go back further in gaming history, you could probably find more games that fit typical AAA criteria (Large-Huge numbers of actual developers, aiming at a high level of graphical fidelity, financed by a large corporate publisher that controls a plethora of studios, all these measured relative to the timeframe of development)…

    … and then also hits the AAAA criteria, that the development drags on forever, a sunk cost fallacy mindset sets in amongst management, management then gets high on its own supply, and the game draws in so many manpower and financial resources that it endangers entire other projects and teams not directly connected to this particular game’s development if this Too Big To Fail game does actually fail.


  • Had Zelensky an unreasonably good grasp of American culture, he could have retorted with half the lyrics from Johnny Cash’s ‘The Man in Black.’

    It was a protest song against the Vietnam War, the mistreatment of the poor and imprisoned.

    selected lyrics

    Well, you wonder why

    I always dress in black

    Why you never see

    Bright colors on my back

    And why does my appearance

    Seem to have a somber tone?

    Well, there’s a reason for the things

    That I have on

    I wear the black in mournin’

    For the lives that could have been

    Each week we lose

    A hundred fine young men

    I wear it for another

    Hundred thousand who have died

    Believin’ that we all

    Were on their side

    Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow

    Every day

    And tell the world

    That everything’s okay

    But I’ll try to carry off

    A little darkness on my back

    Till things are brighter

    I’m the man in black




  • Currently, each generation of executives doesn’t come from within the company.

    This in particular I find to be just the most astonishingly duplicitous, completely full of shit thing about American Tech Corps.

    They are masters of lying to you and telling you that if you work hard, perform well, blah blah, you’ll adcance through the ranks.

    All outward oriented ‘how to be a good employee’ type media propaganda says you need to be loyal and stop job hopping.

    All these motherfuckers job hop all the fucking time and they know they do!

    EDIT: After a decade in the tech industry, I got assaulted and just give off of disability now, basically in poverty.

    There is literally no amount of money you could pay me (lets be real, promise to pay me and then not actually pay me that much) to get back into the tech industry.

    My QoL is 100,000x improved not having to deal with the constant deceptive office politics, utterly incompetent managers and useless projects.

    You’re 100% right about ‘what even is a career path’.

    They don’t exist.

    Barring super basic stuff like an A* or whatever to be a basic network techy, certs are required or desired certs are constantly changing, as are required skillsets and experience in general.

    None of the HR people that write job descriptions have any clue what the words theyre using mean.

    They kept inflating ‘required years working with X program or language’, and everyone just started lying on all their resumes.

    The hiring process is a theatre of the absurd.




  • Kinda sorta.

    The actual accent itself doesn’t sound the same, but I think you’re getting at how it came to be.

    The PNW dialect/accent is basically a subset of the Californian dialect/accent, with a few differences.

    It arose as being very close to ‘General American’ because it was the last, or latest part of the US to be settled by significant numbers of English speakers, and is an amalgamation of the accents of English speakers from many different pre-exsting American dialect regions.

    People from the PNW often do not even realize that they have an accent, as it is so close to a sort of normalized middle ground of other US American English accents.

    TransAtlantic accent/dialect specifically arose because of the technology, as you say… and also I think a bit from social circles of basicslly upper class NorthEasterners who had enough money to regulalry interact with actual UK English speakers themselves, whereas PNW accent/dialect seems to not have arisen intentionally, and isn’t as strongly tied to the upper social class of the region.

    Seattle and Portland’s first major population booms were the result of the Alaska goldrush near the end of the 1800’s, with basically lower class people coming from all across American (and other parts of the world) either using them as a last port to stock up and buy supplies before heading north, or setting up a business to sell those supplies to those people… and a whole lot of them returned to Seattle or Portland after the Alaska gold rush.

    https://pacificupperleft.com/does-the-pacific-northwest-have-an-accent/