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Joined 5 months ago
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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.




  • Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.

    Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI

    And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8

    Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…

    So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?

    Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?

    What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?

    To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:

    You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.

    All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.

    Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.

    Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.



  • Well, I’d say 100k to 300k qualifies as more money than I’ve ever made in a single year of my life, more than I’ve made in my entire life if we go closer to 300k…

    But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding members of society. The top execs, the board.

    And that the society created, and largely owned, by their policies is essentially gaslighting us every day.

    Have you ever spent an entire year applying to jobs… as a full time job? After having had a career, losing it to a disability, then trying to go back after years of recovery?

    With maybe one reply every few months, despite being qualified for everything you are applying to?

    Becoming depressed as everyone around you spends the first month giving you mindless cheery platitudes, then forgetting you exist, then becoming angry when you tell them you can’t afford to do anything that involves money?

    Then when you finally cave and go work some bullshit job you are immensely overqualified for, everyone blames you for not living up to your potential?

    They made it, it worked out for them, why didn’t it work out for you?

    Even though it never once occured to them to maybe help you out monetarily and avoid going into massive debt, or by putting in a good word for you with their network of contacts.





  • Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

    No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

    There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

    To attempt to add a few:

    Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

    He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

    Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

    Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

    The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

    Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.




  • 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.





  • I mean yes, initially it is risky, but perhaps a contract was signed, or perhaps the oyster owner owns so many that he sells to local restaurants or market vendors that he figures worst that happens is i lose 2% of my regular oyster haul, best that happens i make a bit more money off of that 2%.

    If I am not mistaken the actual episode(s?) where Arya does the oyster selling show a relationship between her and whoever she’s getting the oysters from.

    As far as real world examples: anyone who has ever been hired to drive a cart or wagon or car could just attempt to make off with the vehicle and/or its belongings…


  • Except even more practical and simple to produce/distribute in that … its a coastal town with a good deal of fishing and aquaculture and whatnot going on.

    Arya would just have to go to the docks, find somebody with a huge bag of oysters and say hey, gimme a cart, i’ll go roam around and sell these before they spoil, you keep 80 or 90% of the money when i come back with the empty cart.

    In that sense its basically a farmers market: extremely local goods.

    Modern hot dogs have to be manufactured in a factory and then sold to a hot dog stand operator, shipped halfway across the country or world.