Democrats will continue to give sternly worded remarks all the way up to their appointment with the gallows, so brave!

When They Go Low, We Go Die

Chapter 3

Marjorie smiled with great satisfaction as she looked at the crowd and began to check the rifle in her arms to make sure there was a round in the chamber.

2 men with giant beer guts - who each wore different flavors of Punisher-style skull masks and were covered head to toe in pointlessly elaborate tactical surplus gear as if they were cosplaying their favorite Call of Duty characters - began dragging another elderly man up to the makeshift platform.

The white-haired old man was dressed in a finely tailored dark blue suit with a little American flag lapel pin next to his tie. It looked so similar to the one that so many others in his cohort had adorned for probably the last 20 or so years, but he had been blindfolded by the men before being brought before the stage so he couldn’t see how many others still wore it or who had switched to the golden lion that… “the others…” now wore exclusively.

The octogenarian ghost of a man feebly began to speak (not shout) loudly in protest as if trying to reason with whomever might be in charge, but the 2 pig-like men grinned and said nothing. They began tying his hands behind him against a wooden pole covered with small holes, indentations and spatters of red. As the grinning pigs both stepped away from the geriatric man secured to the pole, the mob just below him roared with wild bloodlust over his inaudible words drowning them out over and over again with : “USA! USA! USA! USA!”

Marjorie laughed and took one hand away from the rifle to quiet the crowd so they could hear the old man’s words :

“Point of order, Mr. Chairman! Point of order! I’m reclaiming my time! I’d like the gentle-lady to put down the firearm she just picked up, Mr. Ch-”

…he was cut off with a loud and sudden BANG as he slumped into a dark puddle of red slowly expanding across the stage floor.

The crowd roared and resumed its repeated chant…

…and another blindfolded well-dressed elderly figure was walked up to the pole.

I hate MS Teams so much.

Oh, right. 🤣 WAIT HE updated it with a longer one!

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Why has Apple not come out with an e-ink display in any of its watches? Or really anything for that matter…? Seems like a no brainer for massively increasing battery life.

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The biggest issue with GIMP is its weird UX choices. They should just make it more like Adobe’s UX. I know there’s tools that bring it closer, but the fact still is that they do some really dumb shit when it comes to experience decisions. Like if I want to change the font of what I’m typing, it works like this…

I have to TYPE in the font I want, no dropdown, and the font selection toolbar off to the side just straight up doesn’t apply to what I’ve typed or selected… and this is AFTER I ran one of those GIMP retrofit tools that tries to make it more in line with Photoshop.

Seriously, I’ve used Photoshop since 5.5 (not CS 5.5… FIVE POINT FIVE in 1999), and I STILL have to watch a tutorial for almost every single action I could intuit in 5 seconds from Adobe’s garbage malware tool.

That being said… the one important thing that GIMP is not… is Adobe garbage malware… GIMP just has a janky UX that no one’s going to bother fixing b/c the tool is free so no complaining!

And in any case, just like with Blender coming on to the scene in earnest like a decade ago to end Autodesk’s defacto monopoly with its $$$$ per year licensing scheme for proprietary 3D modelling tools… with Adobe rapidly getting worse, and just like with Unity’s “pay us per install” debacle made people jump ship to Godot - never to look back… I’d bet that GIMP is going to begin accelerating its improvement… or that Krita will do the same and overtake it in popularity.

…And once that happens, Adobe is cooked. And it can’t happen soon enough.

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But without even just the cool space station to just stare at longingly…

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Here’s a video showing everything iD worked on related to what was referred to as “DOOM 4” from like 2007 to 2013 before scrapping a huge part of it and coming out with the critically acclaimed 2016 version (which was only shown starting around 2015 at QuakeCon and E3).

Note that not EVERYTHING was scrapped, as you can see things like the super-shotgun model are close to the final release - as well as what you can tell were early slower iterations of the execution-style animations the game became famous for doing, but a lot of what is shown in that trailer was never to be seen again outside of these old videos people have attempted to archive.

I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…

Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?

This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.

“Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”

The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.

Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.

Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.

Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.

Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.

I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.

Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.

And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…

They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.

And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.