Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve’s percentage and then some. Yeah, that’s a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.
the use of language as a means of control […] well may have been his most prescient point.
While I think Orwell’s “newspeak” was contrived, it did illustrate the point in strong relief as something unfamiliar… at least at first. But I don’t think he was predicting the future. Instead, I think he was warning the reader of what dangers are already with us.
Honestly, I think this has always been a thing. The spoken word is often inexact as a form of communication efficiency; if the other party has the same ideas in their head as you, pronouns, idioms, recalling past events, are all powerful ways to compress dialogue. However, that same inexactness leaves the door open for doublespeak, dogwhistles, and suggestion in place of fact. Language as a means of control is just in how you use it; the underlying mechanisms were always there.
I’m with you on Voyager. A big problem with the story was it’s premise: it’s kind of hard to run into the same people more than once when you’re bee-lining for home every chance you get. So they should have focused more on every last stinking crew member onboard that little ship. Or start a small fleet and do it BSG style. Lots of options, but they’re all outside the usual Trek box.
Lower Decks is easily the most entertainment for my time I’ve had out of Trek in a while. I’m conflicted, since calling this my favorite feels like cheating: it doesn’t entirely stand on its own since it riffs on everything else Trek.
In that case, SNW takes the top spot on my list. It’s an incredibly well-oiled production and it shows at every level.
Bottom of the list is Enterprise, but that’s only because I personally feel the writers squandered a fantastic setting. Star Trek at a lower technology tier just begs for more edge-of-your-seat stakes and problem solving. At the start, it had grit: the ship had no shields, puny weapons, limited warp, a janky universal translator, and everyone was terrified of the transporter. Add to that operating under interplanetary tensions and a fledgling federation that is a relative unknown in the galaxy. Much of this got thrown out in record time, and for what? A temporal causality loop hundreds of years wide, thereby eradicating any agency the crew had, and by extension, our disbelief that they may pull through the next encounter.
I’m with you there on Picard. Season one was… okay, but it had some very interesting worldbuilding that was just thrown away at the end. Season two had all kinds of problems: the story was writier’s-strike-levels of half-baked, and the forced time-travel plot just stunk of budget slashing. Season three was fun, but it was wall-to-wall fanservice and that’s why we like it; this too also ignored a lot of plot points from seasons one and two.
I would have loved to see a more genuine attempt to establish a Next(er) Generation with the support of so much established star power. IMO, there should have been an entire new crew at the end of season three that has us clamoring for season four. Instead, we got that out of Prodigy of all things.
The thing that baffles me about Wing Commander is that Mark Hamill was right there and already had an established character in the game’s canon. But even with a different story and cast, I don’t understand how anyone could have screwed up a bog-standard space opera that badly.
Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat deserve their respective paydays. They’re both stupid and fun. That’s what the source material is after all. But Mortal Kombat might do well with a little love: just throw a few million at Corridor Digital and update the CGI effects and re-release it.
It’s worse than that. They think that toeing the line and refusing to deviate is the strong position to take here. Always has been.
It’s also worth noting that the launch PS3 also had a whole PS2 inside of it, which partially explains the inflated price point. I say partially since I’m prrety sure that a PS2 slim cost a lot less than $330 in 2006 dollars; they could have just bundled both consoles or offered a rebate on a PS2 purchase and called it a day.
I just want to echo your sentiment with something I’ve been saying here for a while now:
Do not confuse information technology use for computer literacy.
Yup. Nobody else gets those cookies.
Thanks, I hate it.
But seriously, I just held a credit card for a solid minute. This is sobering. Bio-accumulation is a bitch.
Yup. This goes back to the Southern strategy which was brought to the fore by the Nixon campaign (although it was in play since before then). From that era we also get this chilling warning from Barry Goldwater:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
Pretty sure you just triggered every developer and/or person who had to sit through a product meeting.
NGL, I was feeling very uncomfortable myself by the end of typing said list. Is it hot in here? I need to lie down.
Common language used to dismiss bad decisions like this:
1 - Oh, did you turn off cookies or clear your cache? Sorry about that.
Oh, we’re on the same page there. I’m complaining about that too. Things are shifting from “make the environment easier for some people” to “painstakingly chisel out an expert mode like you’re escaping from Shawshank.” and I do not like it.
It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.
From my exposure to supporting said folks with PC related problems, its easy to see the reality here. Phones provide a streamlined experience with zero frills. They don’t want super flexible computing devices, they want appliances. More to the point, the level of care and maintenance needed to have a top-shelf PC experience is time and effort most people would rather not expend. Doing this right was inconvenient to begin with, and left the field wide open for anything that would be easier.
It’s one of the classic blunders. Right up there with starting a land war in Asia.
Oh, it’s petty cash to be sure. If you have $100-ish bucks to throw around, you probably aren’t going to miss much by not doing this. Unless, of course, letting someone else take even one dollar from you in this way is against your religion or something (i.e. the principle of the thing). Conversely, if you need the handful of dollars this makes, you probably don’t have that kind of walking-around money in the first place.