I’m not Canadian and I don’t know the details of the situation, so excuse me if I’m wrong on this, but I think MP pay is a complex issue. It’s easy to say “they get paid way more than the average person, of course they don’t need a pay rise” but I think it’s important to find a balance between that and paying enough that becoming an MP is an appealing option for intelligent, driven people. If they have a choice between an median salary as an MP and 15x the pay in the private sector, the most brilliant people are going to be drawn towards the private sector purely for financial reasons.

It’s also important that they’re given enough financial security that there’s no risk of their finances being used as leverage against them. Some politicians will always just be corrupt and open to bribery or “lobbying”, of course, but you don’t want politicians that don’t have their own money from other sources being put in compromised positions because of their finances. And you don’t want politicians looking for other sources of income rather than focusing on their primary job.

Like I said, I don’t know the details. Maybe Canada has already found a good balance - where it’s already appealing to the best and brightest, and where their no risk of financial issues for MPs - and MP pay rises would be unnecessary. I just thought it was worth mentioning the fact that there can be some nuance to the situation!

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don’t really think it’s necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It’s probably the most representative demo I’ve ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There’s no narrative to screw up. There’s no “oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess”. It’s the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you “win”.

… and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist…

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

“Landed gentry” was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn’t have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I’m not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn’t vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he’s profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.

“That means that you won.”

All they do is hallucinate

I read an article a couple of months ago about AI usage in geolocation (link because it’s interesting, even though it’s not necessarily relevant). In it, they brought up a quote from a computer scientist / AI specialist who said he preferred the word “confabulate” to describe what happens with AI, rather than “hallucinate”

Confabulation: a type of memory error in which gaps in a person’s memory are unconsciously filled with fabricated, misinterpreted, or distorted information.

I agree with the guy that it’s a slightly better term for it, but I also just think it’s such a fun word that it’s too good not to share!

The factory must grow!

Don’t apologise for digging it up, it’s a really good comment! Barbie being an accessory to other people’s growth is a brilliant way of framing it that I hadn’t considered - I love that!

I also like framing it that, at the beginning of the film, everyone’s identity is somewhat defined by Barbie (as a concept - not the character):

• Barbie is obvious - she is just living the “dream” Barbie life and doesn’t know anything outside of that. She struggles when she starts to gain humanity because she feels inferior to the other, more accomplished Barbies (doctor Barbie, president Barbie, astronaut Barbie, etc);
• Ken - his entire life revolves around being “and Ken”; He exists to be Barbie’s mild love interest, and is basically irrelevant when Barbie’s not around;
• The mother is basically clinging onto childhood optimism and better times by playing with Barbie. She’s using Barbie as an escape, but she’s also warping the concept of Barbie with her depression;
• The daughter is wholly and actively rejecting Barbie (and her and her friends are also references to Bratz - the “anti-Barbie”), to the point where she’s overly cynical, tough, bitter, and not empathetic enough.

By the end of the film, I think everyone ends up empowering and being empowered by the ideals of Barbie (the concept) while also rejecting the relationship they had with the concept at the start of the film:

• Barbie learns to be human. She gains empathy. She sees the value in women having roles like doctor, president, astronaut, etc, but realises it shouldn’t be an expectation for every woman and that she’s not inferior for not having one of those jobs;
• Ken starts his journey of discovering his own identity, rather than just being an extension of/accessory to Barbie;
• The mother and daughter repair their relationship and the mother (we can assume) stops her “depressed Barbie” creations as her life improves.
• The daughter realises some parts of Barbie’s message are positives - that it’s meant for empowerment rather than to set unrealistic expectations. So in some ways, she embraces the concept of Barbie, which is a rejection of her previous relationship with the concept.

Like I said, I’ve been actively boycotting Blizzard for years now; I’m not sure why you think I’d want to “slop on their dick”. But yes, if a game is fine on a technical level and mediocre in every other sense, why wouldn’t it be a 5/10? A game that runs properly and is otherwise unnoteworthy is probably already better than the average game out there. There’s a lot of shovelware.

There’s a reason review outlets like IGN rarely give scores below 5/10 - it’s that almost any AA or AAA studio is going to be competent enough to get their game to run and have something to it. Even Redfall is a 5/10 on Metacritic. 5/10 games aren’t generally worth your time, but that’s only because there are so many 7+/10 games competing for your time/attention.

Even though I have no love for Blizzard as a company, and have never played Overwatch 2, I refuse to believe it’s in the bottom half of all games ever. A lot of the grievances I’ve seen about it seem completely justified, but it’s not a game that’s truly awful. It’s good on a technical level. It has good art direction. The characters are unique and identifiable, even to people who’ve never played Overwatch. I get that people don’t like the balance, they don’t like Blizzard’s money-grabbing, they don’t like the change to 5v5(?), and they don’t like whatever else people are complaining about. But that doesn’t make it the worst game on Steam, and it doesn’t make every single aspect of it bad.

This is stupid. I have no love for Overwatch or Blizzard - I’ve been boycotting them for years, in fact. But there are far, far worse games on Steam than OW2. The fact that, to my knowledge, it runs properly, doesn’t have crypto miners built into it, and isn’t just made from stolen assets already puts it at like a 5/10 at minimum.

I’m all for consumers standing up for themselves and being critical or poor products, but I really wish people wouldn’t get caught up in these hate bandwagons.

Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!

Also they’re not tweeting anymore, they’re . . .

Spewing xcrement

It’d make for a good anti-spam measure if there was a limit to the number of DMs users could send to other people who don’t follow them back. It’d mean people can still use Twitter DMs like a normal messaging service (which isn’t something I care for, but I know some people use it like that).

As it is, it just feels similar to the whole “rate limiting the number of tweets people can view per day” thing, where they’re taking the most obvious route to reducing bandwidth usage by restricting users.

I saw it this afternoon, I had a great time! It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, although I can’t say I know exactly what I was expecting going into it… It was a lot more political than I expected, and a lot more thoughtful.

It certainly lacks subtlety, and beats you around the head with its themes (feminism, toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, empowerment, finding and accepting yourself). To be clear, I don’t think it lacking subtlety is a bad thing at all; it makes it very clear what points it’s addressing, and doesn’t leave anything down to personal experiences, or interpretations of nuanced lines. And it has a lot of fun with it!

Apparently right-wing people are upset with it, though. Because of course they are. It’s about Barbie being a strong, independent woman. It’s got a lot of diversity, and it’s not shy about the fact that its diversity is because Barbie dolls themselves have a lot of diversity, so yes, it’s very deliberately forced diversity. It has a trans actress in - I didn’t even realise she was trans until a few minutes ago when I was looking up why right-wing people are upset, but apparently it’s a terrible thing. It doesn’t peddle any propaganda about traditional family values either, if you can believe such a thing (which is particularly upsetting to Matt Gaetz’ wife for some reason).

It’s fun. It’s funny. It’s thoughtful. And Ryan Gosling is fantastic in it. (Margot Robbie is very good, too, but her character is a little less colourful). It won’t be something that will change your entire outlook on life, or that you’ll be thinking about every day for the next six months, but it’s a solid ~8/10, and unless you froth at the mouth at the idea of women having shudder aGeNcY, you’ll probably have a good time with it!

I definitely shared that opinion a few years ago. I found Fallout 4 disappointing, Fallout 76 was a disaster (I’ve heard people say it’s better now, but I still feel like a lot of the design decisions are at odds with Fallout as an IP) and they were making a lot of poor decisions.

But I can’t help but be optimistic for Starfield. It’s not just the recent presentation that gives me hope; everything I’ve seen about their approach to it and their design philosophies seems promising to me. I’m sure it’ll still have some of that traditional Bethesda jank to it, but I’m more than happy to accept some jank if I get a proper RPG with some good player agency.